درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

With the advancement of technology and its role in making life more convenient, some EFL teachers prefer to use it in their classrooms. In view of this, the current study aimed to explore the effect of Anki and WhatsApp on the vocabulary retention of Iranian EFL learners. The study’s design was quasi-experimental with three groups of WhatsApp-based vocabulary instruction, Anki-based vocabulary instruction and the traditional one. Sixty EFL learners studying English in a language institute participated in the study, and were divided into three groups of twenty. To ensure their homogeneity, a Solution Placement Test was given to them. After the treatment, the post-test was given to them to check their vocabulary retention. The results of the repeated measures ANOVA indicated that Anki-based and WhatsApp-based vocabulary instruction were effective in enhancing their vocabulary retention. The results of MANOVA showed that there were significant differences among the three groups in their vocabulary retention.

This study aimed at identifying the ethical challenges encountered when developing a language education virtual environment that acts as a smart platform for managing reading comprehension instruction for EFL/ESL learners. Since Reading Instruction Management System (RIMS) is going to observe, monitor, and supervise the learners' out-of-class activities and help teachers improve their teaching quality, it has to seriously handle humane elements which have not been seriously debated in the related literature on language education software development so far. To this end, this study has devised a qualitative study to further explore the aspects of ethical considerations that have to be considered when developing technological aid. Accordingly, 14 teachers and 14 students were selected based on the purposive sampling method concerning the condition that they will be among the teachers and learners who will use RIMS when it is officially launched in the institution. They were asked to take part in interviews which were held on a one-on-one basis and in Persian, the participants' mother tongue. The data were codded and the emerged ones were then classified under four themes including the challenges related to the teachers, learners, and institutions. Each of these has several aspects which are discussed, accordingly.

This study investigated the impact of interaction and output modality on vocabulary learning and retention of EFL learners. To investigate the impact of Interaction, solitary (n =69) and collaborative (n =62) groups served as experimental and No Interaction No Output (n =26) as control group. To address the effect of modality, spoken (n =39) and written (n =31) modalities served as experimental and No output modality (n =26) as control group. The study was done in 8 weeks. The groups read passages with target words highlighted. Solitary and collaborative groups reconstructed the passages individually or in dyads. The spoken and written modality groups reconstructed them in the respective modality. Then, pretest, immediate, and delayed posttests were administered. The ANOVA results showed that the collaborative group outperformed the other groups and spoken modality outperformed the written modality group focusing on interaction and modality separately. The 2×2×2 ANOVA results showed significant main effects for time, interaction, and output modality. An ‘interaction’ effect was found between time and interaction, time and modality, and modality and Interaction. The ‘interaction’ between time, Interaction, and modality was insignificant. The findings have implications for language teachers, syllabus designers, and language testing experts.

Since language is an integral part of a culture, inspecting linguistic expressions can unveil the hidden cultural memes of a society, conceptualized as cultuling (culture in language) analysis. The present study examined the cultuling of ‘making accreditation with English’ used by Persian native speakers from the upper, middle, and lower social classes. To this end, 623 pieces of natural utterances, embracing this cultuling, were extracted from people's conversations in public and private places and from Iranian movies. Then, 279 utterances were analyzed from linguistic, cultural, and psychological perspectives based on the cultuling analysis (CLA) model. Additionally, more data were acquired through semi-structured interviews with 198 participants aged 19 to 54. The results of the study revealed that Iranians use English for various purposes in their conversations, including accreditation, power, education, superior identity, and higher social class in public/ private and formal/ informal contexts. Moreover, the analysis of Iranians’ different reactions to hearing English words in conversations manifested their hidden cultural patterns, including indirectness, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, high context, collectivism, low trust, and overstating

The current study was conducted to discover the impact of the positive assessment on Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners speaking skill and their self-efficacy. To accomplish the research, 40 Iranian females (17 to 8 years old) were selected from Shokooh Andishe Language Institute in Mashhad. A KET test which administered to determine the participants’ level of proficiency. Then, they were divided into two groups, one control group and one experimental group (each included 20 participants). Two instruments, including KET speaking test and a self-efficacy questionnaire, were administrated to both groups as pretests. The experimental group received the treatment based on the principles of positive assessment i.e. using phrases such as very good, excellent, giving small gifts, using thrilling labels and so forth. At the end of the study, the same instruments (as post-tests) were conducted to collect the required data for the analysis. To measure the statistical differences between the means of two groups, some independent samples T-tests were calculated. The results of the analyses indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group both in the case of speaking skill and self-efficacy. The findings of this research might be useful for EFL teachers and EFL learners, also they can be helpful for training programmers, institutes, and course designers.

The present study aimed to study the relationship between teachers’ creativity, classroom management, age and gender. To achieve these goals, 70 Iranian EFL teachers participated in the study by filling out two questionnaires: Creativity Fostering Teacher Behavior Index developed by Soh (2000) ,and Behavior and Instructional Management Scale developed by Martin and Sass (2010). Analysis of the questionnaires revealed that there is a statistically positive significant relationship between teachers’ creativity and classroom management. In addition, the findings indicated that there is statistically significant difference across the three age groups regarding their attitudes towards creativity and classroom management. Likewise, it was revealed that there is significant difference between Iranian EFL male and female teachers concerning their attitudes towards creativity. However, the findings also indicated that there was not any statistically significant difference between Iranian EFL male and female teachers regarding their attitudes towards classroom management. The findings have implications for EFL teachers.

Teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses is highly demanding for EAP teachers as they are faced with diverse pedagogical and administrative challenges in such courses. This study addressed the level of burnout among EAP teachers and variations in relation to their demographic and organizational characteristics. To this aim, a demographic questionnaire along with the Persian version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) was administered to 276 EAP teachers from state universities in Iran. The results revealed that a considerable number of EAP teachers reported mid-levels of personal accomplishment. Moreover, variations in degree of burnout were found among EAP teachers in relation to marital status, age, years of experience in teaching EAP and content/general English courses, educational background, and the field and number of EAP courses taught. Also, EAP teachers with different demographic and organizational characteristics who were more susceptible to burnout were identified. Finally, implications for enhancing the working conditions of EAP teachers are presented.

This study aimed to shed light on young Iranian EFL students’ oral proficiency improvement through explicit instruction of formulaic sequences (FSs). This pretest-posttest quasi experimental study was conducted in a bilingual school in Shahrekord, Iran. Accordingly, based on ACTFL OPI test, two groups of low intermediate students with age range of 11 to 12 were chosen to be assigned as control and experimental groups. The control group with 20 participants continued its regular instruction focusing on analytic grammar rules and discrete vocabulary, while the experimental group with 40 participants received explicit FSs-based instruction through readings, by adopting a teaching procedure inspired by Lewis’ prescribed strategies for lexicon instruction. After 24 sessions of instruction, the participants were interviewed again, and their oral performance was recorded and transcribed to be scored by two experienced judges. Subsequently, ANOVA results revealed the significant oral proficiency improvement of experimental group in comparison to the control group, pointing to the effectiveness of FSs instruction.

The study aims at focusing on the relationship between motivation, culture, and success in foreign language learning in globalizing world. Many studies have been done to examine the relationship between them. The studies showed that culture can play a motivating role in language learning success. Considering Gardner's instrumental and integrative motivation, a learner with a high degree of integrative motivation is likely to make more efforts to form bonds with people of the target culture. To conduct the survey 48 students of Ardestan Azad University were chosen. Some activities and techniques were taken to promote their multicultural competence. In the first session a brief explanation was given to the students along with some questionnaires regarding cultural issues to answer. During 16 weeks of the semester students were taught and monitored through class discussions, essay writings etc. The goal of the activities was to encourage and estimate their respect, tolerance and empathy to people of different cultures. In the last session a questionnaire designed by the researcher was used to collect data. It was composed of three sections: 1) 11 statements about cultural issues to be rated with a likert scale of agreement (based on the Bennett's intercultural communicative model). 2) 10 rating questions (considering Byram& Risager's multidimensional model of ICC).  3) 5 open questions about their belief and behavior to elaborate on. The results showed that respect for others, adaptation and integration with people of target culture were the highest rated among others. An unexpected result was that there was no significant relationship between students' lesson scores and their attitude toward foreign language culture. This can be justified by globalization process by which "people of the world are incorporated into a single world society, global society". Therefore learners who belong to a global English-speaking culture are ready to suspend disbelief about others and adopt new cultural aspects while respecting and maintaining their own culture.

There is scarce systematic research on the role of genres and their associated discourse features in Information Structure and its syntactic representations in Persian. The current descriptive, corpus-based study, therefore, aimed to investigate three different genres of Persian spoken language; that is, political, scientific and daily conversation, in terms of their Information Structure as realized through four syntactic devices of clefting, pseudo-clefting, passive and preposing. To this purpose, 1000 different utterances related to each of the mentioned genres, were extracted from the multi-media archive of IRNA (Iranian News Agency) website and daily conversations of the researchers’ family members and friends, based on Lambrecht’s theoretical framework in modeling the Information Structure. The collected data were then transcribed, the syntactic devices were identified, and descriptive statistics were used to see how the above syntactic devices are represented in each genre type. The results revealed that the devices are represented differently in the three genres of political, scientific, and daily conversations. This finding may be of interest to linguists and language theoreticians.

This qualitative study aims to investigate the sources of burnout from Iranian EFL teachers’ perspectives. To this end, thirty-four Iranian male and female EFL teachers participated in the semi-structured interview to comment on the burnout sources and then rank them in terms of priority. Also, one hundred teachers responded to an online open-ended questionnaire. The coding scheme revealed two external and internal nodes, five themes, and fifteen subthemes. Under the external node lay financial, organizational, and teacher training problems. The internal node involved teachers’ psycho-affective traits and personal life affairs. The results showed that external sources outweighed the internal ones. Among the external sources, teachers’ low pay, the supervisor’s maltreatment, and workload, and among the internal ones, teachers’ low problem-solving abilities, low motivation and self-efficacy held high ranks. No one attributed burnout to teachers’ gender and age, and almost all participants unanimously criticized the educational administration system of Iran for not providing teachers with the necessary means of burnout recognition and prevention. The study has implications for educational policymakers and practitioners.