درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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 compared the effect of information gap and opinion gap tasks on introvert and extrovert EFL learners’ speaking. Accordingly, 138 learners out of 180 intermediate learners were chosen through their scores on a sample Preliminary English Test (PET). These learners further responded to the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) which categorized them into introverts and extroverts. Altogether, four subgroups were established: 32 introverts and 37 extroverts undergoing the opinion gap task instruction and 33 introverts and 36 extroverts experiencing the information gap task treatment. All groups received 10 sessions of treatment and at the end sat for another sample PET speaking section as the posttest. A two-way ANOVA was run to respond to all the four questions showing that while extrovert learners benefited more from opinion gap tasks, introverts outperformed extroverts as a result of information gap tasks. The findings support the notion of using appropriate tasks for different personalities.

In line with the technological advancement during the last few decades, virtual learning has been addressed more widely, which affected English language teaching and learning as well. Since Covid 19 pandemic, which has resulted in the long-lasting closure of educational settings worldwide, virtual learning as the alternative of traditional education has been developed unprecedentedly. An option for virtual learning specifically for language teaching is teaching on the phone which has been mostly neglected in educational research. The aim of this study was to analyse the lived experience of 16 adult English language learners who experienced learning English through one-to-one, audio call sessions. Due to the pandemic, semi-structured interviews were conducted on the phone, which were recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed with a phenomenological approach. Many times revisions of the statements driven from the transcriptions resulted in six themes namely: a) learning on-the-phone as a new, satisfying experience, b) advantages, and c) disadvantages of one-to-one audio sessions, d) the participants’ preferences, e) the requisites of on-the-phone-learning, and f) the expectations of on-the-phone teacher, According to the result of this study, some educational recommendations for improving on-the-phone teaching are: covering four language skills through developing individualised lesson plans based on each learner’s needs and English language proficiency level; holding group video sessions along with one-to-one audio sessions; and using the facilities of messengers like WhatsApp to send audio, video and textual files to learners based on their needs and learning objectives.

This study was an investigation of the washback impacts of task-based assessment on Iranian EFL learners’ vocabulary learning and grammatical ability at the intermediate level. For this purpose, 184 male and female students who were in their third year of school were chosen from 12 schools of (X) (X). This election was done via a multistage cluster random sampling technique using the Cambridge Placement Test (2010). All of the sessions were divided into two parts, 20 minutes were considered for teaching grammar and 20 minutes were for teaching vocabulary. The components of this study were Oxford Practice Grammar Intermediate Diagnostic Test and a standard vocabulary test extracted from TOEFL exams between 2017-2020. The researchers prepared a test for every two groups at the end of every three sessions. It was found that by removing the pre-test factor, the covariance, the task-based evaluation’s washback impact makes the grammatical and vocabulary learning of students better. Considering the reality that every academic endeavor contains planned testing and evaluation techniques to maximize academic achievement and progress, the findings hint that TBLA as an academic measurement device can nicely replace the traditional evaluation techniques.

Lexical bundles, frequent word combinations that commonly occur in different registers, have attracted researchers in corpus linguistics in the last decade. While most previous studies of bundles have been mainly concerned with variations in the use of these word sequences across different registers, very few studies have focused on their use across disciplines. To address possible disciplinary variations in the use of these word combinations in academic register, this quantitative and qualitative study chose to investigate, compare, and contrast range, frequency, and function of anticipatory it bundles as a sub-set of these word clusters with important metadiscursive functions in published writing. For this purpose, the study zoomed in research articles of applied linguistics and analytical chemistry as a soft and hard science, respectively. The results indicated that generally anticipatory it bundles could be regarded as a distinctive characteristic of academic writing in both disciplines. At the same time, each discipline was found to draw almost on a particular set of it bundles in the development of its discourse. However, analytical chemistry seemed to rely more on these bundles in the development of its discourse. Functional analysis also showed that it bundles served a wide variety of functions in both disciplinary areas. Therefore, this study called for a more robust pedagogical focus on different multi-word sequences like anticipatory it lexical bundles. The findings also highlighted the importance of a more genre-focused EAP (English for academic purposes).

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.

Despite growing interest in the studies on Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), its operation in the forms of individualized and group-wide has been controversial. To cast some empirical light on the issue, this study was designed to quantitatively and comparatively study the applicability of the two scenarios of ZPD-based instructions to the writing complexity of Iranian EFL learners in terms of learners' types (low vs. high scorers). To this end, 118 EFL learners identified as homogeneous based on the TOEFL ITP test were randomly assigned into two equal experimental groups (individualized ZPD- and group-wide ZPD-based groups) which respectively received compatible instructions utilizing conference writing (as an individual scaffolding technique) and low- and high-structured writing templates (as a whole-class scaffolding technique). The treatments were allocated to the groups in a random manner within homogeneous blocks. Prior to and after the treatments, three tests (two writing tests and one ZPD test) were administered to measure both groups’ writing complexity and their ZPD levels. A ZPD test was also administered in the mid of treatments. The non-parametric analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) revealed that the individualized-ZPD-based instruction is constructive to the writing complexity of the low scorers, while the group-wide ZPD-based instruction shows not much constructive to the writing complexity of the high scorers. The findings pointed to the use of ZPD-based instructions in TEFL writing in meaningful contexts and thereby showing impacts made on the writing complexity of learners. The study, indeed, yields support to the feasibility of group-wide ZPD measurement along with an individualized ZPD approach.

Literature review indicates that an effective and good teacher has an important role in students' performances and their success. Pivotal roles of teachers may affect students’ attitudes and motivations to language learning. Improving the field of foreign language teaching and learning without improving the qualities of EFL teachers seems impossible. This attempt, at first hand, requires recognizing and identifying the qualities of effective EFL teachers. The purpose of this study was to characterize and investigate qualities of an effective English language teacher (EELT) as perceived by Iranian English language learners. A questionnaire which was based on four categories including English proficiency, pedagogical knowledge, organization and communication skills, and socio-affective skills was administered to 60 foreign language learners at Azad University of Tabriz. The collected data were statistically analyzed. The results showed that students expect a good English teacher to have the ability to develop proper relationships with students, ability to build students’ confidence, ability to maintain discipline in the classroom as the most important points. The findings of the present study have some useful implications for language teachers to know more about the perceptions and opinion of the students about themselves. They can plan and implement behaviors and activities that would encourage learners to get involved more in the English language learning process.

Writing is thought as the most complicated skill in second language acquisition; therefore, L2 researchers have always been in pursuit of discovering an effective approach to improve it. One of the most debated ways is feedback which has a key role in improving the quality of writing. Much of the previous research on feedback has focused on analyzing different types of feedback and their effect on the learners’ writings and few studies have examined the effectiveness of computer feedback. Therefore, the present study was conducted to 1) determine what aspects of students’ writings receive computer feedback, 2) examine the difference in the effect of computer-generatedfeedback (CBF) and Teacher-based feedback (TBF) on improving the students’ writing quality and 3) compare the differences in Depth of Processing (DOP) in processing computer and teacher feedback. The results indicated that content, style and organization of their essays received feedback from the teacher and the computer. Teacher feedback was more effective in terms of its impact on improving the quality of the writing of the students than computer-generatedfeedback and it resulted in deeper processing of lexical items, whereas computer-generated feedback invoked medium processing on grammar.