درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Many L2 teachers baffle when it comes to classroom participation scoring(CPS) of their students. Through a researcher-made questionnaire, this study explored EFL teachers' perceptions of classroom participation scoring(CPS) in Iranian private language schools. Moreover, it investigated the participants' views on a newly-developed objective and analytic rubric as part of this study for CPS. To this end, 120 EFL teachers completed the questionnaire on the typical CPS framework they used in English classrooms. Detailed analysis of teachers' perceptions of CPS  indicated that most Iranian EFL teachers used holistic and subjective CPS approach and had little knowledge of the objective methods of CPS. After having been introduced to the proposed analytic CPS rubric, the participating teachers showed a positive attitude to the rubric and reported the rubric's applicability and flexibility in assessing EFL learners' classroom participation. The findings suggest adopting more objective assessment rubrics for  CPS.

Translation can have long-term effects on all languages and cultures. It is not a mere linguistic act, but mostly a cultural act, since language is by nature one of the major carriers of cultural elements. Thus, the translator’s job is not just transferring the meaning of words and sentences from the source text to the target text. Culture-specific items often cause translation problems. Identifying such items in the source text and locate their rendering in the target text has been the focus of the present study. This study has attempted to spot culture-specific elements in the source text; i.e. Matilda, and to check the extent of the translator’s fidelity in rendering such elements and dealing with the concept of domain of discourse in Lefever’s (1992) words. To conduct the study, the researchers have applied a qualitative-descriptive (as well as a quantitative) method, focusing on the analysis of the text and classifying the cultural elements in the source text on the basis of Newmark’s (1988) taxonomy. The findings thereof revealed that universe/domain of discourse has changed in several cases, mostly when the translator has used domestication strategy.

This study attempted to investigate the level of EFL learners’ epistemological beliefs and learning strategy use as well as the contribution of epistemological beliefs to their learning strategy use in Bahir Dar University. Comprehensively selected 136 EFL students at the Faculty of Humanities of Bahir Dar University responded to modified versions of Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire and Motivated and Self Directed Learning Strategies Questionnaire. The descriptive statistics showed that the participants generally held a low level of epistemological beliefs (mean scores ranging from 2.49 to 3.09 on a five-point scale) and they moderately used cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies (mean scores ranging from 3.29 to 3.82 on a five-point scale). The results of multivariate analysis indicated there was a significant multivariate effect of epistemological beliefs on the various dimensions of learning strategies, contributing 15.8% of the variance. The follow-up univariate analyses also showed the difference in epistemological beliefs had a significant impact on their use of all dimensions of learning strategies except rehearsal strategy. This means that EFL students with sophisticated epistemological beliefs, compared to their counterparts with naïve beliefs, are more strategic in handling learning situations through deploying appropriate higher order cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies.

The present research tries to show how race, class, and gender and intersectionality in general, have their decisive impact on the black- American women; and how Alice Walker as a womanist, in her selected short stories, tries to show that black women in the U.S. suffer two-fold acts of oppression and discrimination, i.e. male violence affects all women in social life, irrespective of age or social standing, and at the same time being black has exacerbated the black American women’s situation. In the present study, the mentioned socio-political, socio-cultural and institutionalized intersectionality have been analyzed from the perspective of Alice Walker’s selected short stories. Full analysis have been carried out, from applied linguistic point of view,  in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” and “Roselily” while Alice Walker’s other short stories have been consulted for further analysis and discussion. The method used to analyze the data is descriptive research method.

Vocabulary and grammar are two significant components of English which learners often find challenging in their process of learning English as a foreign language (EFL). Therefore, finding the best way to teach grammar and vocabulary has always been a controversial issue among English teachers and researchers. The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of dictogloss (DG) task, as one of the focus on form techniques, on EFL learners’ vocabulary versus grammar development. To this end, a quasi-experimental design was utilized to examine the effectiveness of the treatment. In this design, two classes were chosen, one as the experimental group (n=20) and the other as the control group (n=20). The participants were 40 female learners of English as a foreign language at intermediate level. In the experimental group the selected grammatical structures and vocabulary were taught using the DG technique, while in the control group the traditional method of teaching, present-practice-produce was used. The results gained from comparing pretest and posttest scores indicate that, although the experimental group outperformed the control group in learning vocabulary, there was no statistically significant difference between the experimental and control group regarding grammar scores. Therefore, it can be concluded that using DG task was more effective on vocabulary learning of learners than grammar development. The findings of this study will be of help for both English teachers and learners regarding finding the best method of teaching and learning English grammar and vocabulary.

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.

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.

The focus of the present study was to explore the effect of self-directed learning method on Iranian EFL students’ writing achievement in two levels of language proficiency (pre-intermediate and intermediate). It also attempted to find out if there was any significant difference between two groups of learners, control and experimental, in each level regarding their development of writing skill. In order to reach this goal, 30 male EFL learners that were selected based on random sampling, participated in this study. After the treatment was over, both groups in each level were given the post-test, the results of which were compared with pre-test results. Then, an independent sample t -test was run to find the effectiveness of two approaches to detect the differences among the means of the two groups in each level. The results of the present research indicated that the self-directed learning method had significant effects on the pre-intermediate and intermediate students’ performance of English writing ability. The results also indicated that there was a significant difference between the two groups of learners in each level regarding their development of English writing ability.

This study sought to investigate the problems and challenges of the current state of teaching translation in post-graduate studies. In so doing, it used a content analysis design within a qualitative method. The participants consisted of 20 (10 males and ten females) translation teachers who were selected through purposive sampling. To collect the required data, a semi-structured interview was used in the form of individual and focus group interviews. To analyze interview data, the content of transcribed interviews was qualitatively analyzed by the researcher to identify the common themes and categories in them, based on an exploratory theme-based approach. The results of the thematic analysis of interview data led to the identification of some problems and challenges including students’ lack of willingness to learn translation, the emphasis on practical elements in teaching translation, lack of an effective teaching translation program, students’ demotivation, and so on. Moreover, a program consisting of five steps was suggested for using technology in teaching translation in post-graduate studies in Iran. The findings have some implications for translation teachers and students, and authorities.

Of the many dilemmas facing the assessment of literary competence, one is the extent to which language should constitute part of the target construct intended to be measured. Some argue for the construct-irrelevance of language and hence recommend that it be eliminated or minimized in favor of an exclusive focus on literary competence. In practice, this does not seem to be the case, as language proficiency considerations seem to creep into assessment, clouding assessment outcomes. The current study sought to examine students' perceptions of the degree to which knowledge of language constitutes part of the construct of literary competence in two departments of English and Persian literature. To this end, a total of seventy students in two poetry courses, one in the English department and the other in the Persian, responded to a questionnaire designed to gauge their perceptions of the extent to which language competence constitutes a component of the literary competence. Data were analyzed through one sample and independent samples t-tests. It was found that language competence is somehow construct-irrelevant in testing literary competence. Interestingly, measurement-invariance was observed regarding Persian and EFL students’ stance on the construct-irrelevance of language in tests of literary achievement and competence.