درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

باورهای معلمان در طول زندگیشان تحت تأثیرعوامل مختلف شکل می گیرد. بنابراین،آگاهی از افکار و عقاید معلمان در خصوص زندگی وشرایط کاریشان کمک شایانی به درک صحیح ما از تعریف واقعی معلمان در یک محیط فرهنگی و اجتماعی بخصوص می کند. هدف این مطالعه موردی، بررسی زندگی شخصی و کاری شش معلم زبان انگلیسی در مدارس دولتی و مؤسسات خصوصی زبان به منظورارائه تصویر صحیحی از باورها و تجربیات معلمان بر فرآیند یادگیری زبان دومشان، تجربیات تدریس، انتظارات و شرایط کنونی آنها، و تلاشهایشان برای ایجاد نوآوری در روش هایتدریس شانمی باشد. بدین منظور هدف، مصاحبه ها و مشاهدات مکرر به مدت یک سال برای جمع آوری اطلاعات لازم انجام شده و سپس توسط شیوه مقوله بندی معنایی تجزیه و تحلیل شدند. نتایج حاکی از آن بود که بیشتر معلمان چه در مدارس دولتی ویا مؤسسات خصوصی زبان از شرایط کاری و زندگی خود راضی نبودند. همچنین آنها با عوامل ناامید و دلسردکننده بسیاری، همچون نداشتن امنیت شغلی، شغل دائمی، تعادل میان کار و زندگی، بیمه و در عین حال، داشتن حجم کاری بالا، حقوق کم، محیط کاری پر استرس، شغل یکنواختو راکد، محیط کاری خسته کننده، محدودیت در نوآوری، مشکلات در ادامه تحصیل،و دوره های آموزشی غیرعلمی، ناشی شده از سیاست های داخلی و خارجی مسئولان، روبرو بودند. امید است با بها دادن به صحبت های معلمان زبان انگلیسی، موقعیت و وضعیت حقیقی آنها در جامعه کنونی آشکار گشته و به دنبال آن شاهد برطرف شدن برخی از نیازها و انتظاراتشان باشیم.

M-learning is the enhanced form of e-learning that focuses on three common components i.e. place, time, and wireless device. The aim of this research is to identify the perceptions of the students regarding M-learning at Kandahar University. To this end, 191 male and female students responded to a questionnaire designed to ask their perceptions in this regard. The results from the study showed that students have positive attitudes towards M-learning and they are ready for M-learning approach in respect to using wireless devices, the Internet, and necessary applications. Additionally, they can also afford to buy the devices which support m-learning, however, half of the students ask for the providence of Internet through their respective university. Moreover, the Internet connection is also a big challenge especially for students who live in villages and areas far from cities. The study concludes with some issues for further research and some recommendations to authorities in higher education for better implementation of M-learning.

The aim of the current study was to investigate whether Podcasts would have an effect on Iranian autonomous and non-autonomous EFL learners’ listening comprehension ability at pre-intermediate level. For this purpose, 60 Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners at some Iranian institutes participated in the experiment of the study. Then they were divided into two groups based on an OPT and an autonomy questionnaire. The participants of each group were assigned randomly into two experimental groups (N=15) and two control groups (N=15). A pre-test was administered to the four groups of the study and then, the experimental groups received 5 sessions of teaching podcast. After the treatment, a posttest of L2 listening comprehension was administered to all groups of the study and finally the data were analyzed via a series of paired sample t-tests to see whether there is progress between the pretest and posttest scores of the groups, and a Two-way ANOVA was used to see the differences between posttests. The results revealed that Iranian autonomous and non-autonomous EFL learners’ listening comprehension ability got better after the treatment.

This study has aimed to compare the effects of two types of form-focused instruction, i.e. de-contextualized focus-on-forms instruction versus meaning-centered contextualized focus-on-form instruction, on the development of grammatical knowledge of Iranian high-school students. Two groups of male high-school first graders participated in this study.  One group was taught through de-contextualized deductive grammatical explanation, while the other group received enhanced input and contextualized grammar instruction embedded in meaning-centered activity based on dialogs. The results indicated that de-contextualized instruction as it is normally practiced in high-school contexts failed to promote successful use of the auxiliaries <em>do, does, </em>and<em> did</em> in a written production test. In contrast, adding the design features of meaning-based contextualization and enhanced input to instruction did result in better performance on a written production grammar test involving the use of the auxiliaries under study. In the delayed posttest, contextualized meaning-based instruction appeared to have a durable effect, but the effect was not significant enough to warrant any claim for the durable superiority of this form of instruction. 

Test washback is held to be complicated and multifaceted in that a host of cultural, social, individual, test, and institutional factors are involved in shaping it. Thus far, the majority of washback studies have had as their focus the role of teachers in test washback or washback to teachers. How educational environments or institutions might function in isolation or in interaction with other factors in shaping washback to the learners and test takers has not received adequate research attention. The current study examined the mediatory role of academic institutions in washback to learners' perceptions of test content and test preparation. To this aim, 86 senior English students from two universities, one a top tier and the other a low tier one, completed two questionnaires: one on test takers' preparation practices including test analysis, test taking skills, drilling target skills, and socio-affective strategies; and the other on test takers' construal of test demands and uses as well as their expectation of success on the test.  The data analyzed through partial least squares structural equation modeling revealed that a washback model based on expectancy-value theory explains a moderate amount of variance in test preparation. Further, for test takers from the low tier university, favorable perceptions of test content were associated with more value placed on test taking. However, Multi-group analysis pointed to group-invariance of the model across the two institutions, indicating a lack of strong evidence for the mediatory role of educational environments in washback to test takers’ perceptions and preparation.

Research on the effect of implicit and explicit instruction on developing learners’ explicit knowledge by the use of measures of explicit knowledge abounds in the literature. However, measuring learners’ implicit knowledge employing fine-grained measures has rarely been the concern of researchers in the field. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to scrutinize the effectiveness of implicit and explicit instruction through administering a Word Monitoring Task (WMT), as a more valid psycholinguistic measure of implicit knowledge. The necessary data were collected from 47 pre-intermediate participants in three different groups, i.e., (1) the implicit group received textually enhanced texts of verb complementation, (2) the explicit group was presented with metalinguistic explanations and examples of the target feature, and (3) the control group was deprived of any instruction. The results of the mixed between-within subjects ANOVA revealed that although both implicit and explicit instructions facilitated the development of the implicit knowledge of the target feature, the learners in the explicit group outperformed their counterparts in the implicit and the control groups in both the immediate and delayed post-tests. Moreover, the results indicated more durable effects of implicit instruction compared with those of explicit instruction. Overall, the findings provided evidence for the superiority of explicit instruction and the long-term effect of implicit instruction in developing relevant knowledge of verb complementation. The findings of the study can benefit both teachers and learners in developing teaching/learning strategies to improve and facilitate the grasp of both explicit and implicit knowledge.

The present study aimed to investigate the concept of “Teacher Education” from a hermeneutic point of view. This view was selected since there were rare cases in the whole literature related to teacher education. On the other hand, defining a hermeneutic model could be expected to provide a more objective and tangible of teacher education nature and its configuration in the minds of those who directly deal with or discuss it. The main question for which this study tried to find an answer was whether it was possible to present a hermeneutic model for giving an operational definition to teacher education. To answer the question, the study followed a survey-qualitative methodology: first the concept of teacher education was investigated through archival scrutiny and its definition deficiencies were determined. Next, the same procedure was followed for the hermeneutics concept. The data of the study were analyzed via non-statistical comparative analysis, and it was concluded that it was possible to define teacher education hermeneutically; however, the vastness of the issue needed more survey.

This study focuses on realizations and discourse functions of the organizational linkers in the writing of research article abstracts from four disciplines. To this end, 120 research article abstracts from four disciplines namely, Applied Linguistics, Economics, Agriculture, and Applied Physics (30 from each discipline) were selected. All research article abstracts were extracted from empirical research articles published in international high impact journals. The corpus was analyzed adopting Gosden (1992) taxonomy. The most striking result is that the realizations and discourse functions of the organizational linkers, to a large extent, are guided by the nature of research article and discipline. This result adds substantially to the comparative understanding of research article writing across disciplines and evidences the need to tailor writing according to English for specific needs.

در مقاله حاضر مسائل مربوط به اصول نظام مندی در زبان و نظام مندی در حوزه واژگان و دستور بررسی می شود. درک جنبه های مختلف ارتباط متقابل میان نظام زبانی و کارکرد عناصر آن یکی از مسائل روز در بررسی های زبان شناسی معاصر است. تعاریف نسبتاً زیادی از نظام زبانی و نظام مندی وجود دارد و از طریق تعاریف و روش های متعدد و مختلف به سختی می توان به ماهیت رویکرد نظام مند پی برد. در بسیاری از تعاریف، زبان، نظامی نشانه ای و کارکردی است که برای تبادل و حفظ اطلاعات در جامعه بشری و ذهن بشر به کار می رود و زبان نظامی است که در درون آن نظام های آوایی، صرفی، واژگانی، نحوی و دیگر نظام های فرعی متمایز می شوند. رویکرد نظام مند امکان بررسی چند بعدی در محتوای واقعیت زبانی را فراهم می کند. در علم فلسفه، نظام به عنوان مجموعه ای از عناصر که در ارتباط با یکدیگر قرار دارند و وحدت و یک پارچگی مشخصی را ایجاد می کنند، بررسی می شود. در زبان شناسی، نظام عبارت است از تعدد منظم واحدها، گروه ها، مقوله ها و دسته های زبانی که یک پارچگی و وحدت تام و ساختار مشخصی دارند و با بسیاری از عناصر بیان ظاهری مرتبط هستند

Examining the effect of high-stakes tests on learners’ perceptions has been one of the strands of washback-related research. The present study purported to investigate the washback effect of the English section of the Iranian National University Entrance Exam (henceforth INUEE) on the pre-university students’ perceptions about the high-stakes test. The participants of the study were 218 female students at two pre-university schools in the city of Ahwaz, Iran. The data were collected through a validated questionnaire. Responses and reactions to the questions were found to be mixed: a sizeable segment of the students were positive about the INUEE, considering it a valid evaluator of academic knowledge and viewing the test as a factor which at least 'forced' them to study English. However, those with negative perceptions criticized the test for mainly being an evaluator of rote-memorization ability (rather than academic knowledge) and a major source of anxiety, and its multiple-choice testing format etc. The findings could be of pedagogic help and significance to policy makers, language testing scholars and teachers.

Multiple conceptualizations of the interrelation between assessment and learning yield three notions of assessment: assessment of learning, assessment for learning, and assessment as learning. This paper aims at uncovering roles and obstacles of assessment for learning and assessment as learning in English language classrooms in Hong Kong. Grounded upon the theory of constructivism and the notion of learner autonomy, assessment for learning and assessment as learning play vital roles in supporting students’ learning and nurturing autonomous learners in English language classrooms in Hong Kong, respectively. In particular, assessment for learning provides students with achievement targets prior to assessments, communicates assessment results with students by means of descriptive feedback, and guides teachers’ future lesson planning whilst assessment as learning equips students with abilities to set personal learning goals, monitor their own learning process, and conduct self-assessment in the course of learning. For all their desirability and perceived pedagogical efficacy, seldom are these two assessment practices operationalized in the implemented curriculum in English language classrooms, where assessment of learning prevails; such actualities can largely be attributable to local teachers’ lack of motivation to modify their existing assessment practices out of their conservative conceptualization of assessments, low metacognitive awareness as well as level of English proficiency of local students, and large class sizes in local classrooms, which are construed as local contextual factors hindering implementation of the two assessment practices. The aforementioned obstacles ought to be overcome so that the two assessment practices can be promoted and implemented in local English classrooms in distinct year levels for the sake of students’ language learning.

This quasi-experimental research aimed at investigating the effects of two different modes of worksheets on the vocabulary learning of Iranian young EFL learners. Some 20 male and female learners enrolled in a language institute in Chabahar agreed to participate in this study. Then, they were randomly divided into two experimental groups, and a vocabulary test was administered before the treatment as the pre-test. This pre-test was administered to determine the learners’ vocabulary knowledge and check their homogeneity. During the treatment, learners in Paper Worksheet Group (PWG) learned new words via paper worksheets, while the learners in Online Worksheet Group (OWG) learned vocabulary items via online worksheets. At the end, all the participants took a vocabulary post-test, which was the same as the pre-test. A paired sample t-test and an independent sample t-test were run, the results of which revealed that the PWG outperformed the OWG. More precisely, paper worksheets had a significant impact on young EFL learners’ vocabulary learning. Using worksheets, teachers can create a relaxed, challenging, and fun atmosphere so that young EFL learners can learn complex vocabulary items through active and multi-dimensional learning.

The notion of teacher professional identity has become a regular fixture in numerous theoretical and empirical studies in both mainstream and L2 teacher education. Consequently, a number of scales have been designed and developed to quantify this construct. To be sure, the extant instruments are general with regard to both context and subject matter, and this line of inquiry has not addressed the quantification of the concept in the ELT profession. The present study was, therefore, an attempt to provide a (re)conceptualization of L2 teachers’ professional identity through exploring its underlying components. To this end, an initial 61-item, self-assessment questionnaire was developed using a comprehensive review of the related literature and experts’ opinion. The trial scale was then administered to a sample of 676 ELT teachers. Results of exploratory factor analysis reduced the instrument to 42 items, leading to a six-factor model which indicated that L2 teacher identity includes: researching and developing one’s own practice; language awareness; institutional and collective practice; engaging learners as whole persons; appraising one’s teacher self; and sociocultural and critical practice. Confirmatory factor analysis substantiated the resultant six-factor model as a robust and valid tool for measuring ELT teachers’ professional identity.