درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Considering the paucity of self-studies exploring English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' journeys into becoming a creative teacher, in this qualitative action research, a mainstream Iranian teacher-researcher narrates the changes and challenges she observed while planning her creative classroom practices, implementing, and reflecting on them. While she experienced changes like going beyond the textbook, becoming a caring observer, and becoming a moment catcher, she faced constraining challenges like overcoming inner fears, showing (non)-compliance with institutional rules, and coping with situations when things did not turn out as expected. Such an insider view of teacher creativity reiterates that creativity needs to be considered not just as a set of techniques and procedures to be mastered but as an ongoing passion for renovation which should be cultivated over time despite existing constraints.

This study intended to explore the perceptions of Iranian high-school English teachers and the perspectives of policymakers on success in teaching English. Data were collected through questionnaires and curriculum documents. To this end, one-hundred-twenty Iranian high-school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers contributed to the research. National Lesson Plan and Fundamental Reform Document of Education (FRDE) were used to explore policymakers’ perspectives on success in teaching English at the high school level. The data were analyzed using both the Constant Comparative Method (Charmaz, 2006) and template coding to realize similarities and differences between the answers. General themes and patterns were recognized and discussed. The results of this study showed that while the teachers tended to improve students’ communication skills, policymakers must also be aware of the fact that change is an all-inclusive phenomenon demanding full cooperation and commitment from a host of policy workers. In conclusion, teachers’ perceptions of success in teaching English and expectations of educational change should be modified in such a way that the teachers see the importance and relevance of educational change to their professional success. In this respect, most Iranian high school EFL teachers are needed to modernize, i.e., to provide them with valuable pre-service and in-service courses with communicative frameworks that they can operate in their classrooms. The findings can be helpful for EFL teachers to reflect on their perceptions and accord them with their practices, use communicative activities that are more constructive in their classrooms.

Researchers and scholars have been attracted by the idea of using integrated writing task along with independent writing task to best assess the EFL learners’ writing competence. This study was conducted to compare the writing performance of EFL students in integrated and independent writing tasks. It also aimed to find out if writing performance varies with task types. A number of thirty Iranian EFL students participated in this study, and each student wrote on two writing tasks of IELTS Academic module. The written essays were rated by three experienced raters using IELTS rubrics. Paired sample t-tests revealed that test takers performances did not differ significantly across these two tasks. Besides, two one-way ANOVAs indicated the difference between the raters in rating integrated writing task while they were not performed differently in rating independent task. The results are followed by a number of suggestions with the aim of improving the EFL students’ performance in writing skill.

New technologies can change everything in the world and people can have different reactions to them. Some people tend to use innovations but some people do not, due to the influence of different factors. Personality type can be considered as one of those factors that might have a relation with the feelings toward the innovations. Therefore, this paper explores the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ personality traits and their sense of technophobia and technophilia. Two hundred and ten Iranian EFL teachers participated in this study. The Big-Five Personality Traits Questionnaire (John & Strivastava, 1999) and Technophobia and Technophilia Questionnaire (Martínez-Córcoles, Teichmann, & Murdvee, 2017) were used in the current study. To find the answers to the research questions, Pearson correlation, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), and independent-sample t-test were used. The results showed that all subscales of personality traits were negative significant predictors of technophobia except Neuroticism. Moreover, the results indicated a positive significant relationship between overall technophilia and all constructs of personality traits.

Decision making and pedagogical reasoning are regarded as two of the important concepts underlying teaching skills. This study aimed to first identify the novice Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ initial decision making and pedagogical reasoning in terms of managerial mode. More importantly, it sought to inform the teachers’ decisions and reasoning through some one-to-one feedback sessions, which were interactively held between every novice teacher and an experienced teacher. The participants were one experienced (male) and five novice (four females and one male) teachers. To collect the data, a number of teaching scenarios, classroom observations, stimulated recalls, and the Self-Evaluation of Teacher Talk (SETT) framework were used. The analysis of the data using conversation analysis showed that the novice teachers benefited from their negotiated interactions with the experienced teacher and applied the points regarding all five pedagogic goals of managerial mode in the framework. After the feedback sessions, the teachers could confidently defend their decisions pedagogically when enquired for reasons. The findings showed that modifying the teachers’ decision would not be successfully ensured until they reached the “aha” of the moment or a new understanding, which is the last stage in reforming one’s pedagogical reasoning. One way to achieve this moment is through raising the teachers’ awareness of the essential metalanguage. It is thus suggested that officials in charge and institute managers provide such learning opportunities for teachers so that they take more serious steps toward their own professional development through such frameworks as SETT

This research was carried out to examine the effect of using careful online planning vs. pressured online planning on learning multi-word expressions among intermediate English learners. To this end, two samples of learners through an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) were selected as the careful online group and pressured online group. After the pretest, the researcher exposed the experimental group to all multi-word expressions, adapted from input text. The experimental group was supposed to listen to some audio files and learn the multi-word expressions and then they must have been able to produce those expressions while speaking. They were asked to watch a film of The Donkey and The Master , take notes, and retell the story in six minutes for pressured online planners and then the time for careful online planners. The first time was for pleasure; the second time, they were expected to retell the story using Multi-Words Expressions in the film. After three weeks of instruction, the posttest was given to the students of both groups to assess their achievement. After quantitative data analysis, an independent sample T-test was performed. The results indicate that pressured online planning was more effective. This study has implications for EFL teachers and instructors.

The present study investigated the use of lexical bundles (LBs) in research articles authored by English L1 and Persian L1 academic writers, with a special focus on the syntactic roles of LBs in a larger context of sentence level. Four-word bundles were retrieved and classified structurally. The use of identified LBs was compared in two writer groups. The syntactic roles and relative complexity of the bundles’ structures were analyzed in relation to Biber, Gray, and Poonpon’s (2011) hypothesized stages of writing development. The results indicated different patterns of reliance on LBs, with Persian writers making greater use of LBs at higher frequency. In addition, Persian academic writers tended to use high frequency bundles differently from native-speaker academic writers. The results of the syntactic analysis of LBs reflected more frequent use of LBs functioning as compressing lexico-grammatical structures in a native English-speaker corpus, which is indicative of a more complex academic register compared to that of a Persian L1 corpus. The pedagogical implications of the findings for the explicit instruction of syntactically complex corpus-driven LBs for discipline-specific genre writing and suggestions for future research are discussed.