درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The objectives of the present study were threefold: First, it sought to investigate difficulties Iranian EFL high school learners face to understand English idioms. Second, it attempted to explore intermediate EFL learners’ language learning strategy preferences to comprehend idioms. Third, it aimed to examine whether there was a significant difference between successful and less successful students' strategy use in idiom comprehension. To this end, 200 Iranian male and female students of the three grades of different senior high schools in Qom, Iran, were selected through convenience sampling. They responded to a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire (Alhaysony, 2017), investigating the challenges of idiom comprehension. Afterwards, they took the Oxford Quick Placement Test. Ninety-eight of them were selected as intermediate learners. Third, they took a multiple-choice test on idiom comprehension, developed by the researcher, and responded to the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (Oxford, 1990). Descriptive statistics, frequencies and means, and a one-sample t-test were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that the participants complained that idioms were challenging mainly because they were not taught well in class and were not part of the course syllabi. They also revealed that successful learners in understanding idioms used all six categories of strategies in the high and medium levels. They employed metacognitive strategies the most (M= 3.88), but affective strategies the least (M= 2.84). The results of the t-test suggested significant differences between successful and less successful learners' strategy use. The results provide insights into the challenges and strategies of English idiom comprehension.

Issues related to bilingualism and the effects which might have on language learners’ cognitive and meta-cognitive variables have attracted the attention of a couple of researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA).Since a couple of decades ago, there has been a plethora of studies on cognitive and metacognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. However, the impact of bilingualism on EFL learners’ WMC and verbal intelligence has not be explored yet. The present study aimed at comparing the WMC and verbal intelligence of bilingual and monolingual language learners. In so doing, 30 Baluch EFL learners and 30 Persian speaker EFL learners were selected through convenience sampling. The data of the study were collected through running WMC measure and verbal intelligence test. The data of the study were analyzed through running descriptive and inferential statistics tests (independent samples-t-tests). Results showed that bilingual language learners outperformed the monolingual language learners in both WMC measures and verbal intelligence test. Therefore, it could be concluded that bilingualism affects EFL learners’ WMC and verbal intelligence. The findings have theoretical implications for applied linguists and psycholinguists and practical implications for teachers and syllabus designers.    

In regard to recent revolution in the education domain, English Language Teaching (ELT) assigns a sociopolitical dimension to itself in the light of Critical Pedagogy. The present study, in line with the recent educational revolution, aimed to investigate the effectiveness of critical thinking on improving EFL learners’ productive skills. The statistical population consisted of 164 pre-intermediate attendees of EFL in an English Language Institute in the city of Babol selected for taking an Oxford Placement Test (OPT). The participants were 80 Iranian pre-intermediate EFL students within 10-20-year range, enrolled in Shokouh English language institute in Babol, who were randomly divided into two experimental and two control groups of (N=20) for each group during summer 2018 through the non-probability sampling design. Then, IELTS pre-intermediate speaking and writing tests were taken as the pre-test to make sure that they have failed to have a previous knowledge of objective structures. Unlike the control group, the participants in the experimental group were told to apply critical thinking instructions in learning speaking and writing skills. After intervention, the same pretest was taken to the participants in both groups as the posttest to determine the result of gaining the medical aid. Independent and paired sample t-tests were run to answer the research questions. The results indicated that critical thinking is highly contributive in learning productive skills. The findings of this study can be applied in methodological issues.

Research on using project work in teaching various disciplines has pointed out a number of challenges facing teachers. Similar research in the EFL classroom, however, has been under-researched. This study aimed to fill the gap with a report on the Vietnamese high school teachers’ challenges in implementing project-based learning in the setting of curricular innovation in English instruction nationwide. The participants of the study were thirty-three EFL teachers from sixteen high schools in both rural and urban areas of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. With a questionnaire and an in-depth interview, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Data analysis indicated that the teachers faced major challenges in time management, adaptation of project activities, student support, and project assessment. These results provide useful implications for how innovative approaches can be successfully implemented, especially with respect to the kind of support EFL teachers need to make project-based learning more feasible in the Vietnamese educational context and similar ones.

The major objective of this experimental research was to assess the differences between two varieties of focus on form instruction, namely proactive and reactive across multimodal vs. traditional input settings in both comprehension and production of modal auxiliaries. The participants of the study were 75 Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) high school students at the elementary level in three classes. The students in each class took part in a pre-test including both comprehension and production items. Then, they were randomly exposed to one of the three types of grammar instruction, i.e. proactive focus on form in which students were exposed to multimodal input through preplanned techniques of input enhancement and input flood, reactive focus on form in which the tasks occurred in multimodal episodes including negotiation and correction by the instructor through recasts, clarification requests, and repetition techniques. Lastly, in the control group, the students were provided with a pamphlet and their teacher’s explanations. The post-test was then administered to the three groups, and the results were analyzed by conducting a one-way-analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) which revealed a significant difference among these three groups. The results showed that the proactive group outperformed the reactive and control groups both in the comprehension and production of modal auxiliaries. At the end of the experiment, a brief survey which was accomplished through an interview revealed that the majority of the students highly favored PowerPoint presentations, teacher's explanations, and video clips respectively.

With the increasing importance of Language Assessment Literacy in recent years, identifying the assessment literacy components in different contexts becomes essential to ensure that language teacher professional development is on the right path, thus providing students with proper evaluation. This paper describes a research project in which an adapted version of Fulcher's (2012) Language Assessment Literacy Survey was delivered via the Internet in an attempt to characterize the levels of assessment knowledge of English language teachers in Syria. Three hundred and thirty Syrian English language teachers participated in the study. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were applied to the data obtained from the constructed-response item, and qualitative data analysis procedures were applied to the open-response items. The results indicated that Language Assessment Literacy in the Syrian context mainly comprises four factors: social impact of tests; test prepping and administration; test design, development, and interpretation; and evaluating language tests. On the other hand, the content analysis applied to the responses given by Syrian English teachers to the open-response questions indicated failings in both theoretical and practical assessment literacy in Syria's education scene, particularly the former, calling for an immediate change in teachers' preparatory courses in Syria. It is hoped that the study results can help language teacher education programs specify EFL teachers' academic assessment goals and enhance the nature of future language assessment programs, particularly in Syria; it can further provide a basis for comparison with other contexts and countries, thus contributing to a cross-cultural understanding of language assessment literacy.

Many types of research are carried out in the field of ELT. Therefore, different types of studies are performed by post-graduate students, teachers, professors, and researchers. However, the main concern of the present article is that whether the post-graduate students, teachers, and professors have the necessary knowledge on three important research points: validity, reliability, and ethics. To this end, this article discusses these three issues and sheds some light on them. In fact, validity is concerned with the correctness of inferences according to the results and instruments. Meanwhile, reliability deals with the quality and consistency of the data collection procedures. In order to calculate the reliability of the data, Cohen Kappa’s inter-rater agreement is presented and explained by means of a vivid example. Finally, ethics is an area of moral philosophy concerning the rules by which behavior needs to be directed. Finally, some means and ways of increasing and enhancing the validity, reliability, and ethics of the research are introduced and elaborated on. By providing comprehensive details and vivid examples, this article can be useful and helpful to post-graduate students, teachers, professors, and researchers in carrying out research and ensuring and quarantining their data, data collection procedures, and instruments.

The present study investigated the effect of practicing domestic vs. foreign newspaper on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ reading comprehension ability. The main question this study tried to answer was whether or not practicing domestic vs. foreign newspaper has any effect on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ reading comprehension ability. To answer this question, 45 Iranian learners were selected via administering an OPT test with the criteria of at least 1 standard deviation below and above the mean of the Oral Proficiency Test (OPT). Reading section of Reading Practice Test was used as the OPT. It consists of 19 items. It takes approximately 25 minutes to complete the reading test. Learners were studying in three intermediate classes in Simin Institute of Ramsar, Iran. The participants were all female and ranged in age from 17 to 19. They were divided into three groups of 15 (N=15)ː two experimental groups and a control group. A pretest of reading comprehension was administered to the three groups. The first experimental group was treated by teaching reading comprehension plus domestic newspaper; the second experimental group was treated by teaching reading comprehension plus foreign newspaper and the control group was treated by a placebo. Finally; after 10 sessions, a posttest of reading comprehension was administered to three groups. One-Way ANOVA and Paired Sample were used to analyze the obtained data. The results of One-Way ANOVA and Paired Sample indicated that the participants’ practicing domestic vs. foreign newspaper had effect on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ reading comprehension ability.

Most popular models of narratives and narrative analyses have been drawn on native stories, yet EFL learners’ narratives have not received due narrative analysis. The present study then aims at scrutinizing the structure of personal English stories as told by EFL learners. To this aim, three hundred narratives were collected through classroom discussions and interviews. Qualitative analysis methods were utilized to find how narratives were recounted. The results of data analyses indicated that EFL learners’ narratives consisted of 4 parts with the abstract and coda sections absent from them. Besides, there were other differences between the collected narratives and those told by English native speakers.

Communicative language use largely entails regular patterns consisting of pre-constructed phrases or sequences. These sequences have been examined by many researchers to find the situation-based formulas which may help L2 learners follow a possibly more target-like speaking system. This study, therefore, explored two categories of formulaic expressions including speech formulas and situation-bound utterances used by EFL learners. The randomly selective participants included 30 intermediate and 30 advanced learners, who performed a total number of 120 role-play tasks focused on the situations which required the use of thanking, requesting, offering, and apology speech acts. Audio-recorded data from role-plays were transcribed and analyzed based on existing lists of speech formulas. Results showed that the participants produced more than 102 types of formulaic sequences that could be called “a list of pragmatic routines for thanking, requesting, offering, and apologizing speech acts in the EFL context”.  This list includes 44 and 58 speech formulas and situation-bound utterances, respectively. Results further indicated that advanced language learners used more diverse situation-bound utterances in terms of its internal and contextual complexity than their counterparts in the intermediate group due to expert judgments. Because these formulas can increase coherence in speaking, and enhance effective and natural communication, their instruction could be part of the language teaching curriculum.

The current study was an attempt to investigate the effect of performing Focus on Form (FoF), Focus on Meaning (FoM), and Focus on Forms (FoFs) instructions on the development of collocational knowledge among Iranian intermediate EFL learners, and to explore any significant difference on the achievement of the participants' collocational knowledge among three groups. In so doing, 107 female intermediate EFL learners were selected for this research. They all took the Nelson proficiency test and 90 students who had gotten the higher scores were randomly divided into three groups of FoF, FoM, and FoFs. Before the treatment they were pretested and the results of the three groups did not have any significant difference, thus all of the learners were at the same level of knowledge. After the treatment, they were posttested and their scores in FoM group were considerably higher than the learner' scores in FoF and FoFs groups but the learners' scores in FoF and FoFs groups did not have any significant difference with each other. The findings of this study offer beneficial implications for EFL teachers, learners, and materials developers which are finally discussed.