درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Textbook evaluation serves as a useful tool at teachers‘ disposal to cope with uncertainty in opting for the proper material prior to embarking on their teaching career. This study aims at comparing two different ESP textbooks, one of them English for students of Mechanical Engineering, design of solids (SAMT publication), and the other one English in Mechanical Engineering (Oxford University Press). For the purpose of comparison and contrast, Textbook Evaluation Checklist (Miekley, 2005) was used against which the components of these two books were weighed to show what they have in common and where the point of departure from any commonality is. Although based on evaluative questions some inherent inefficiencies of these textbooks were revealed, it was generally concluded that both of them have tenable justification to be taught as an ESP course book.

This study addresses the acquisition of the morphological markers in Persian learners of English as a foreign language. To this end, the accuracy order of nine morphemes including plural –s, progressive –ing, copula be, auxiliary be, irregular past tense, regular past tense –ed, third person –s, possessive -ʼs and indefinite articles was studied in 60 teenage Persian EFL learners. Placement and proficiency tests and a demographic questionnaire were employed to collect the data. The total production of 2160 morphemes was manually checked, classified, and counted to rank their acquisition order. The learners’ accuracy order was ranked in a decreased order from 1 to 9 as follows: regular past tense, auxiliary be, copula be, present progressive tense, indefinite articles, plural –s, possessive -ʼs, irregular past tense and third-person singular –s. The Spearman correlation showed that Persian students’ accuracy order had a moderate and weak relationship with the accuracy order of ESL and EFL learners, respectively. This finding proves that Persian EFL learners do not learn English grammatical morphemes in a natural order. Moreover, the universal grammar does not remain fully in these learners. The minor role of UG in EFL acquisition also indicates the important role of transfer in foreign language learning.

This study investigates the effect of four types of oral corrective feedback, namely, explicit elicitation, implicit elicitation, explicit recast and implicit recast on the most commonly mispronounced phonological features among Iranian EFL learners through immediate uptake and retention. Five classes were randomly categorized into four experimental groups and one control group, each with 18 intermediate-level male learners. The treatment was conducted in the form of a retelling task in nine sessions. During the feedback sessions, the learners’ uptake was recorded. The learners’ retention was also perused in one immediate and one delayed post-test. The results revealed that those learners who received explicit recast obtained the highest score in terms of correct uptake, and that the groups performed differently across different time periods. The learners’ scores enhanced over time; however, the increase then leveled off and even dropped in the delayed post-test in all the experimental groups except for the group which received explicit elicitation, apparently leading to more retention of the target phonological features. The study offers insights to teachers regarding the effect of recast and elicitation in their explicit and implicit form on L2 pronunciation.

This research aims to investigate the contributions of KARDS (knowing, analyzing, recognizing, doing, and seeing) to Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) institute teachers’ professional identity reconstruction. The researchers employed purposive sampling to choose twenty teachers. A KARDS questionnaire (Hassani, Khatib, & Yazdani Moghaddam, 2019a, 2019b) was used to classify the teachers into a more KARDS-oriented group (n=10) and a less-KARDS oriented group (N=10) on the basis of their scores on the questionnaire through quartile-based visual binning technique. Pre-course interview, post-course interview, teacher educator and teachers’ reflective journals, and class discussions were employed to gather data. After the pre-course interview, there was an implementation phase during which all twenty teachers became familiar with KARDS. Then, Grounded Theory was applied to analyze the data. Findings showed that there were four big shifts from “uncertainty of practice to certainty of practice”, “the use of fewer macro-strategies to the use of more macro-strategies”, “linguistic and technical view of language teaching to critical, educational, and transformative view of language teaching”, and “conformity to nonconformity to dominant ideologies” in teachers’ professional identities in both groups. The changes were analogous and/or identical in nature but not in quantity, and they should be underscored and incorporated in teacher education programs.

This study describes the sequential pattern of “through-produced” multiple questions using Conversation Analysis that sets the agenda dimension of questions, and the academic conditions that advance its use during turns at talk from five faculty meetings. Results show that a. No first-pair of the “through-produced” questions has been answered; b. the answers to the second-pair questions are achieved through paraphrases, clarifications, keyword repetitions, and circuitous rephrasing until the hearer conforms with the agenda set; c. The subordinates frame their default identities with lower epistemic knowledge, and d. “Through-produced” multiple questions can be a manifestation of Chair’s power. Implications and recommendations for cross-linguistic comparisons are offered to generalize the findings beyond the specific domain of the meeting.

In this research, the teacher-researcher (henceforth, I) presents a chronological report over some life-long educational experiences in an EFL setting and during a long period—twenty - five years aimed at verifying/authenticating role conflicts. In so doing, I decided to carve my earlier educational paths to describe my diverse roles/realities. To this end, I recounted my past and presented experiences, including my three roles as (A) Language learner, (B) Language teacher, and (C) Language researcher. Using life-history narrative research designs and in line with auto-ethnography approaches, I initially embarked on critically describing my English language educational experiences from a recollection of past events in my memory through my first two roles—language learner and teacher—and mapped them onto my recently assigned role as a language researcher. The findings were self-revealing to me in that while recounting my experiences, I found out how specific intuited conflicts involving ‘impotency in using the English language for non-educational aims’, ‘the gap between theories and practice’, ‘the influence of essential others on my future decisions’, ‘the duality of exposures with people having more vs. fewer authorities’ among others had inflicted me to a great extent. Then and there, during such a long period for demonstrating my professional identity construction, I summarized my intuited conflicts. This was to designate how the unpredictability of affairs in ELT and maintaining intricate interactions with people in the community of practice, which resulted from numerous aims and led to unpredictable directions, might have influenced me as a language practitioner in my future attempts to experience a new being. The findings may promise implications for professional identity construction as mapped on recent narrative accounts for English language teachers.

The primary aim of this study was to shed light on the impact of a new instruction model, reflective reciprocal teaching (RRT), on English as a foreign language learners' (EFL) reading comprehension ability. Its mode of inquiry was a mixed-method, and it took on a quasi-experimental design, including a pretest, treatment, and posttest paradigm. The sampling techniques were both convenience and random sampling by which 100 EFL freshman learners were selected and assigned into three groups of reflective reciprocal teaching (RRT), reciprocal teaching (RT), and control. Two tests, namely Oxford Quick Placement Test and Michigan English Language Assessment Battery, were used to measure EFL learners' proficiency level and reading comprehension ability in its quantitative phase. ANOVA was utilized to analyze the collected data. Also, during the next step, which aimed to explore the learners' perceptions of RRT instruction, semi-structured interviews were used to collect qualitative data. The results indicated that the RRT group outperformed the control group regarding their reading comprehension ability; however, the RT instruction did not significantly impact this issue. Accordingly, the qualitative data analysis findings indicated that self-regulated learning, perceived competence, metacognitive awareness, confidence, and intrinsic motivation were the significant results of the RRT instruction model, contributing to the learners' reading comprehension ability.