درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Employing an explanatory sequential design, the present study investigated the effect of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) blog-mediated writing instruction on the students’ learner autonomy. A number of 46 learners who were the students of two intact classes were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. Over a 16-week semester, the control group students (n=21) were taught based on regular in-class writing instruction and the students in the experimental group (n=25) made use of blogs in addition to the traditional in-class writing instruction. The data were collected through administering a learner autonomy instrument, consisting of metacognitive, cognitive, social, and affective components, and conducting semi-structured interviews. The results of both quantitative and qualitative data revealed that the blog-mediated writing instruction contributed to enhancing learner autonomy of the participants. More specifically, the students who experienced blog-mediated writing activities showed improvement in metacognitive and cognitive components of learner autonomy. The findings offer significant implications for EFL teachers.

The present study sought to investigate the differential effect of using native-accent and non-native accent materials on the Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ listening comprehension. To this purpose, 60 primary EFL Iranian learners participated in the study. The participants were randomly divided into a control group (N=30) and an experimental group (N=30). First, a Quick Placement Test which consisted of vocabulary, grammar, and reading items was administered in order to ensure the homogeneity of participants. As the intervention of the study, the control group was provided with the listening materials accompanied by the use of their native-accent audio files, whereas the experimental group was exposed to the same listening tasks and materials which were pronounced by the non-native teacher. The experimental intervention lasted for six forty-minute sessions. To collect the data, the listening component of Pearson Test of English General (PTE General) was used as the pre-test and the post-test to measure listening comprehension of the participants. The results indicated that using non-native accent listening materials was more effective than using native-accent materials in enhancing listening comprehension of the EFL learners. These findings were discussed in the light of English as an International Language (EIL) debate and the theory of inter-language speech intelligibility benefit.

The present study is an attempt to discover the relationships among reflection, role stressors and resilience. To this end, a mixed-method approach was adopted. In the quantitative phase, 122 EFL teachers completed three questionnaires namely English Language Teaching Reflection Inventory, Teacher Role Stressors Scale and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. The results of correlation indicated that there is a significant positive relation between reflection and resilience. However, the correlation between reflection and role stressors was found to be negative. Multiple regression revealed that of the five components of reflection, metacognitive and critical reflection are significant predictors of role ambiguity while only critical reflection can predict role conflict. Metacognitive and practical reflection were also found to be significant predictors of teachers’ resilience. In the qualitative phase, fifteen face-to-face interviews were conducted with the participants who had also taken part in the first phase of the study. Data were transcribed, coded and thematically structured based on a grounded theoretical perspective. The two main themes which emerged out of the interviews confirmed that reflection leads to resilience through strengthening teachers’ professional identity while it also leads to resilience or stress through making teachers prepared and knowledgeable. The possible justifications of the obtained results as well as the implications of this study for teaching English and teacher education in EFL context are discussed.

Reviewing the literature indicated that no validated model was found that examine the extent to which teachers support their students emotionally in EFL classrooms. Therefore the present study elaborated on this issue through developing and validating a teacher emotional support scale in an Iranian English foreign language context. Main components of the scale have been specified based on Hamre and Pianta's (2007)theoretical framework. A large number of items were created primarily based on operational definitions of each component. After reviewing the items by a group of experts, the questionnaire was piloted and tested on a sample of 324 EFL teachers. Finally, the researchers evaluated the validity of the questionnaire through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.The results of the reliability of the questionnaire estimated through Cronbach’s alpha were 0.833. 17 items have been removed from analysis resulting in identifying 4 factors in exploratory factor analysis. The model was evaluated using AMOS 22 also indicated that the model was fit the data.the current study contributes to the field of English language education through designing and validating new instrument to assess teacher emotional support in EFL classrooms. Researchers and other practitioners who are involved in teaching English language can assess the extent to which teachers support students emotionally in similar pedagogical EFL context using this instrument. They also need to encourage teachers to improve their emotional skills by participating in teacher training courses.

This study aimed to investigate how English language teaching textbooks portrayed male and female social actors according to their social roles and gender identities. To examine the linguistic representation of male and female social actors and construction of gender identities in ELT textbooks, Top Notch series was selected. To do so, attempts were made to analyze the series in terms of the features introduced in two analytical models: Van Leeuwen’s (1996) framework and Halliday's transitivity model (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). All of the sentences in reading passages and conversations were counted and analyzed critically through discursive features of these two models. The findings of this study revealed significant differences in representation of male and female social actors in some discursive features. Male social actors were described as more autonomous, successful, and active compared to female social actors.

Using evaluative language has been considered as the significant predictor of academic writing success in second and foreign language research. Such an importance paved the way for the current study to investigate the use of the APPRAISAL tool, namely ATTITUDE resources, in the research articles (RAs) written by native (N) and non-native (NN) writers, focusing on the discussion sections. A qualitative corpus selection resulted in choosing 30 RAs written by American writers and 30 authored by Iranian writers. Two coding schemes were used: one for discussion boundaries based on Kanoksilapatham’s (2005) discussion move structure, and the modified version of APPRAISAL theory (Xu, 2017) for identifying attitudinal resources. The corpus analysis revealed that academic writers preferred to use a great number of inscribed ATTITUDE resources, that is, APPRECIATION tools compared to JUDGMENT. There was also a significant difference between N and NN sub-corpora in using attitudinal resources, highlighting that the language of N RAs contained more authorial stance of ATTITUDE compared to NN sub-corpus. However, the use of idioms as evoked ATTITUDE was found to be frequently applied by NN authors. The findings of the study contributed to the significance of using evaluative language in academic writing through which the writers can make a dialogic interaction with readers and enhance their critical stance by involving them in the argument.

Emotion and cognition are both considered influential factors in language learning. In this study, the role of "emotioncy" (which is a combination of emotion and frequency) in the cognitive load and sentence comprehension of a group of language learners was examined. Emotioncy includes emotions that are evoked by the senses. To this aim, 200 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners were asked to fill out the NASA Task Load Test, a sentence comprehension test, and an emotioncy scale. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was run to measure the construct validity of the emotioncy scale. Subsequently, Pearson Product-Moment correlation coefficient and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data. The results showed that emotioncy has a significantly negative and positive relationship with cognitive load and sentence comprehension, respectively (p

The present article aims to provide a synchronic study of the inflectional or morpho-syntactic categories of noun in Sistani dialect. These categories comprise person, number, gender or noun class, definiteness, case, and possession. Linguistic data was collected via recording free speech, and interviewing with 30 (15 females, 15 males) illiterate Sistani language consultants of age 40–102 years, living in central (Markazi) district of Zabol city in Sistan and Baluchestan province of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The research results indicate that nouns are inflected in three distinct persons i.e. first, second, and third persons with either singular or plural in number. Grammatical gender of nouns takes no specific morphological marker. As to the category of definiteness, this dialect makes use of syntactic devices (like demonstrative adjectives), and/or morphological devices (such as the use of /=ak/ and /=e/ clitics) to display the definite and indefinite nouns. Its case system is nominative-accusative system. In this regard, only the accusative or objective case marking is morphologically realized by the object marker /=a/. In addition, possession is expressed through the use of the word /mAl=e/ ‘belonging to’ or the preposition /az/ ‘from, of’ along with nouns/noun phrases/personal pronouns and also applying ezɑfe - construction in the form of genitive structure.

The present study intends to probe the impediments for the practicality of Critical language pedagogy (CLP) in higher education system of Iran. To do this, 20 Iranian university instructors, holding Ph.D. degrees in TEFL, were asked to read a passage reflecting the main characteristics of transformative pedagogy. To explore the main obstacles, they were invited for a semi-structured interview. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The data were analyzed using Thomas (2006) inductive approach including frequent, dominant, or significant themes. The results revealed a number of themes that illustrate macro and micro inhibiting factors Iranian EFL instructors encounter toward implementing the principles of CLP. The findings are discussed and suggestions are provided for teachers to transform transmission approaches into transformative and dialogic ones.