درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Teacher professional development, as a burgeoning term, has attracted a surge of interest in English language teaching. In second language (L2) professional development, the common orthodoxy has been one which considers teachers as that of knowledge consumers. It is commonly argued that top-down approaches to teachers’ professional development has done little to maximize teachers’ professionalism. To unravel the above-mentioned dilemma, this study was an attempt to implement collaborative action research, as a viable means, to boost teachers’ professional development in a networked community of shared knowledge. To this end, thirteen male and female Iranian English teachers, within the age range of 22-35, were selected through convenience sampling. The selected participants were added to a group in WhatsApp. The online classes began with plenary debate, mostly in the form of workshops through problematizing a particular topic, which were directly linked to teachers’ actual teaching experience. Insights into the EFL teachers’ professional development were acquired through the triangulation of data from four main sources (i.e., teachers’ professional journals, reflective journals, action research projects, and semi-structured interviews). The findings revealed that engaging EFL teachers in a collaborative dialogue in a networked community of shared knowledge ultimately culminated in development of action research projects which resulted in sustained L2 professional development, whereby participating teachers developed a broader understanding of research and adopted reflective inquiry in their L2 teaching practices. The findings have important implications for language teachers in general, and EFL teachers, syllabus designers, and material developers, in particular.

There is controversy on the conditions under which cooperative learning methods can improve academic achievement. Group-specific motivational aspects might contribute to the effectiveness of cooperative learning among which classroom goal structures were focused on. More specifically, the study aimed at investigating the efficiency of cooperative writing technique through performance versus mastery-oriented classroom goal structures in improving academic writing of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, 83 intermediate EFL learners took part in this quasi-experimental pretest, post-test study. The participants were required to write a 5-paragraph essay for pretest and post-test. The collected data was analyzed based on an analytic writing rubric (Hedgcock & Leftkowitz, 1992). The results of one-way ANOVA tests indicated that the experimental group which practiced cooperative writing through performance goal orientation outperformed the individual and mastery-oriented classes. It was concluded that performance goal orientation, between-groups competition, and extrinsic motivation, can help EFL teachers in setting a more effective classroom structure for cooperative writing practices to improve the writing proficiency of L2 learners.

The present study was carried out to investigate the effect of short stories on students’ reading comprehension, vocabulary power and attitude towards the skill and the new instructional materials. The participants of the study were 120 grade 9 students of Dilla Secondary and preparatory school. In order to gather data for the study, pre- and posttest of reading comprehension, pre and post test for vocabulary power and questionnaire were used. The students were placed in experimental and control conditions for the purpose of comparing the mean difference between the two groups. The study followed a quasi experimental design, i.e. pretest/posttest control group experimental design. The study employed statistical techniques to analyze the data obtained from reading comprehension tests and vocabulary tests. To this effect, a 2-tailed independent samples t-test and repeated measures t-test were used respectively to examine if the reading tests and vocabulary tests mean differences between and within groups were statistically significant. The findings revealed that teaching reading skills through short stories is more effective than teaching through the passages prepared at the Ministry, and has a positive impact on students’ academic achievement in reading and vocabulary power.

Since its inception in 1949, over 1,500 studies have investigated the validity of the GRE General Test to predict its performance criteria in higher education (Klieger, Bridgeman, Tannenbaum, & Cline, 2016). The present review paper sought to examine the predictive validity of the GRE General Test. Factors affecting the predictive validity (e.g., range restriction, compensatory selection, criterion unreliability, substantive and artifactual moderators, bias in testing, coaching effects, socioeconomic status (SES), gender, and a host of other intervening factors such as motivation, communication skills, etc.) have been discussed. A brief overview of GRE revised General Test format is also presented. After an account of the related review of the literature, a critical commentary on the predictive validity of the GRE General Test has been discussed with an emphasis on the role of criterion unreliability and SES factor effects. Keywords: Predictive validity, Graduate Record Examination (GRE), criterion unreliability, range restriction, compensatory selection

The current research was an effort to study the interaction of gender with text enhancement and meta-cognitive grammar instruction on learning and recall of English grammar. To this end, two groups of students consisting of 51 learners from both genders were formed. The participants were 51 male and 51 female learners. The 51 participants of each gender were further divided into two groups. Then, an OPT was administered to ensure homogeneity of the participants in terms of grammatical performance as well. Following that, two of the groups received text enhancement method and the other two groups received metacognitive instruction for learning grammar. Finally, the groups sat for a grammar posttest as well as a delayed posttest. When looking within groups, it was found the in metacognitive groups, males performed better on grammar posttest and delayed posttest in comparison with females. Regarding text enhancement groups, males and females did not significantly differ from each other both on posttest and delayed posttest. Finally, it was concluded that gender has the potentiality to affect the outcome of instruction when the role of input is considered in grammar instruction.

This study is conducted under the domain of Vygotskian Socio-cultural Theory (SCT) of mind and the notion of dynamic assessment to elevate the linguistic accuracy of EFL learners’ writing skill. 40 homogenous intermediate EFL learners from four intact classes were divided into two dynamic assessment (DA) and non-dynamic assessment (NDA) groups. As a pre-test, the participants were given writing topics during a course to assess their writing linguistic abilities. After analyzing and scoring the compositions’ errors based on four consecutive stages to error analysis and a model of linguistic errors (grammatical, syntactic, substance, and lexical), the type and frequency of errors’ sub-categories related to each category (n=516) was detected. Afterwards, the DA group went through intervention/mediation (interventionist dynamic assessment) based on their pre-test errors in five sessions, while non-dynamic assessment group received no mediation and feedback. The pre-test-mediation-post-test design (sandwich model of dynamic assessment) was used in this study. After mediation, as a post-test, both groups entered the second course of language learning and like pre-test their compositions during the course were analyzed and scored to see the effect of dynamic assessment on learners’ writing ability. Analysis of data through descriptive statistics and statistical analysis showed that the experimental group who received mediations, unlike control group, solved their writing difficulties extensively and outperformed the control group with a significant difference. In other words, application of DA as an alternative procedure to standard testing has a positive effect on both test performance and writing linguistic accuracy of EFL learners.

در این مطالعه، محققان قصد داشتند تا دیدگاه های فراگیران زبان انگلیسی را براساس چهار زمینه ارتباطی از جمله اعضای خانواده، زبان آموزان انگلیسی، همکلاسی ها و بهترین دوستان شان به نمایش بگذارند. برای این منظور گروهی از نوجوانان ایرانی (38 نفر) با دامنه سنی 12 تا 16 سال (مرد 24، زن 24) به صورت تصادفی از سه موسسه آموزش زبان انگلیسی در شهرستان سبزوار، خراسان رضوی انتخاب شدند. محققان با استفاده از پرسشنامه معتبر تیلور (2010)، یک نسخه اصلاح شده از پرسشنامه تیلور رابا تاکید بر مدل های بررسی هویت جهت پی گیری اهداف تحقیق حاضر شامل 1) نواسانات ادراکی فراگیران ایرانی برای یادگیری زبان انگلیسی با توجه به چهار زمینه ارتباطی در فوق و 2) بینش آنها نسبت به دو نوع هویت درک شده ( عمومی و تحمیلی) در دو زیر شاخه ی "در حال حاضر و آینده" و3) جهت گیری ارتباط میان این دو نوع هویت و عملکرد کلی فراگیران در یادگیری زبان انگلیسی بررسی نمودند. یافته های اولیه نشان داد که در تعریف های متنوعی از انواع شخصیت در میان فراگیران، در خصوص ترجیحات مربوط به "اعضای خانواده" در فرایندهای یادگیری و عملکرد آینده، نقش اعضای خانواده در عملکرد یادگیری پررنگ بود. با توجه به ترجیحات پاسخ دهندگان نسبت به دستیابی به اهداف خود در یادگیری زبان انگلیسی بر اساس هویت (عمومی و تحمیلی)، مشخص شد که سطح اعمال "معلمان زبان" و "خانواده ها" بر فراگیری زبان آموزان تقریبا یکسان بود گرچه دسته بندی های مربوط به هویت تحمیلی در حال حاضر و آینده و در جامعه خود، اعضای خانواده دوباره امتیاز بیشتری داشتند. در نهایت، نتایج حاصل از تجزیه و تحلیل بعدی داده ها در مورد رابطه بین دو جنبه هویت (تحمیلی در مقابل عمومی) و شاخص خودگزارشی عملکرد در زبان انگلیسی نشان دهنده ارتباط معنی دار تنها با شاخص های هویت تحمیلی بود. در نهایت، تحلیل و تفسیر نتایج به منظور شناخت کلی افراد مرتبط با فرایند یادگیری زبان مورد بحث قرار گرفت.

The present study aimed at discovering the practices and strategies autonomous EFL learners pursue in their endeavor to master English. It thus set out in the Iranian context, with 60 EFL learners, both autonomous and non-autonomous, as participants. The gathered data through a questionnaire and an interview were subjected to content and descriptive analysis. The results showed that both autonomous and non-autonomous learners preferred to apply receptive activities rather than productive ones. However, autonomous learners practiced more productive activities such as composing emails, writing articles, chatting with native speakers and their friends, as compared with non-autonomous learners. Regarding the use of strategies, autonomous learners used more metacognitive strategies, while non-autonomous learners preferred social strategies.

This research chiefly focused on the application of mitigation strategies and traditional form of feedback in writing development of the fifth semester University students majoring in TEFL and English Translation fields based on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory in general and the notion of “Zone of Proximal Development” in particular. To that end, this study relied on a pre-posttest experimental design which was mediated by different written types of feedback such as mitigation strategies vs. error correction to find out if any gains in writing development of participants could be achieved. It is to be noted that participants of this inquiry were 125 fifth semester university students who were chosen and assigned to four experimental and one control groups. The materials of this study consisted of a textbook called Writing Power by Nancy White (2002) that the teacher taught during the course of instruction; a standard writing test of IELTS (2007) as a pretest; another standard writing test of IELTS (2007) as a posttest. The results showed that although homogeneity among the groups was observed on the pretest, writing scores of those groups which received corrective feedback and paired comments outscored those of the other groups. On the other hand, the interrogative forms and personal attributions had the least increase from the pretest to the posttest. Hence, it is recommended that some teacher training courses regarding the appropriate use of these strategies be held in educational settings in a way that teachers can apply these techniques in the best possible ways in their writing classes.

Knowing how to think about the language learning process is conducive to effective learning especially in the case of grammar structures. Metacognition, a concept derived from cognitive psychology, can assist learners in this case. With regard to young adolescents at lower proficiency levels, there is a long-standing debate on whether to use L1 for teaching metacognitive strategies since learners might not be efficient enough in terms of understanding the concept of metacognition. Therefore, this small-scale experimental study focused on the effect of grammar instruction through the metacognitive intervention delivered in L1 on the EFL pre-intermediate learners' grammatical performance in English and investigated their attitudes towards grammar instruction delivered in L1. To fulfill these purposes, a homogenous group of 20 language learners was randomly divided into an experimental group ( n =10 ), which received grammar instruction through the metacognitive intervention delivered in L1, and a control group ( n =10 ), which received the instruction only in English without grammar instruction through the metacognitive intervention delivered in L1. The results of the independent samples t -test indicated that the experimental group did not outperform the control group in terms of all four English grammar points, namely present perfect, simple past tense, comparative and superlative adjectives, and past progressive . In addition, the findings obtained from the five-point Likert scale questionnaire which was distributed among the learners suggested that they had positive attitudes towards the use of L1 (Persian) in teaching English grammar. We argue that low working memory capacity, overreliance on translation, and less-cognitively activated L2 processes may account for the low performance of the experimental group learners in the grammar tests. The implication is that the L1 use in an L2 classroom can be helpful in teaching L2 grammar through the metacognitive intervention, but future studies need to examine how and to what extent L1 should be used to yield more effective results in the case of lower-proficiency learners in an EFL context.

The aim of this investigation has been to predict Viewing Comprehension through Aural and Picture Vocabulary Size among Iranian EFL Learners . To this end, 110 intermediate students were selected from two institutes of a city in Khorasan Razavi province, Iran. Pictorial vocabulary knowledge of learners was tested by Picture Vocabulary Size Test, Aural vocabulary knowledge was measured by Aural vocabulary size test and viewing comprehension was tested by a multiple-choice question test. All analyses were carried out using SPSS for Microsoft windows 22. Pearson product moment correlation analysis was run to analyze the relationship among viewing comprehension, picture vocabulary size and aural vocabulary . After the correlation analysis, we did step-wise multiple regression analysis to predict an outcome variable from two predictors . Interestingly, it was found that both picture and aural vocabulary size have a significant positive correlation with viewing comprehension. It was also proved that only aural vocabulary size can be considered as a significant predictor of EFL learners' viewing comprehension ability.

This study set out to examine how stereotypes as social psychological phenomena are enacted in everyday discourse. Besides discussing how ingroups and outgroups are formed in mundane talk, it is argued that stereotypes are ideological constructs that are jointly achieved in social contexts. Moreover, it is assumed that the ways in which stereotypes are constructed and discussed in discourse are informed by a number of underlying moral conceptualizations which might justify the potential face-threatening acts and the impoliteness inherent in prejudiced talk targeted to a third party. The study is an ethnographic case study informed by an eclectic approach to the analysis of data so as to shed light on how the expression of thoughts and feelings are constructed as talk in ordinary social interactions unfolds and what these expressions achieve. The analyses revealed that the construction of outgroup stereotypes is a mutual accomplishment and possibly a face-threatening act moderated by mitigating discourse features