درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In the educational setting of Iran, language assessment literacy (LAL) is still an underexplored issue. This paper investigated the development of LAL among EFL students taking language assessment course at state universities in Iran. The three components of LAL (i.e., knowledge, skills, and principles) were the focus of the inquiry. To collect the required data, a questionnaire, encompassing 83 Likert items and a set of open-ended questions, was developed, and responses from 92 course instructors were collected. Teaching and assessment practices of two course instructors were also observed throughout an educational semester. SPSS (26) was used to analyze the data. Findings revealed that these courses mainly focused on knowledge and skills, overlooking the principles of assessment. Adherence to traditional assessment approaches, use of inappropriate teaching materials, and lack of practical works in assessment also characterized the investigated courses. The paper concludes with suggestions to better design language assessment courses to increase the assessment literacy of English graduates who will probably enter the teaching contexts after graduation.

The present study sought to examine the linguistic and discoursal features in the language of the text messages created by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 400 text messages were collected from both genders. The contents of the collected data were analyzed in terms of linguistic features as well as discoursal features. The results highlighted the important role of gender in linguistic and discoursal features of text messages created by Iranian mobile phone users. More specifically, females’ use of complex sentences, formal opening and closing, and expression of thoughts, feelings, and emotions in their messages were much higher than men who created simple, short and to the point messages. The findings of this study highlight the role of text messages as a pedagogical tool since they are widely used to send or receive learning or information contents.

It is substantiated that particular features of pragmatics are teachable, and instruction is both necessary and effective. Determining what kind of intervention is most effectual for facilitating learners’ pragmatic development has been a central issue for researchers. To respond to the inconclusive findings in intervention studies and to extend the instructional studies in L2 pragmatics to less studied and more complex teaching targets, such as implicatures, the current study inquired into the effects of metapragmatic awareness, interactive translation, and discussion through video  vignettes on the comprehension of implicatures of 51 (15 male and 36 female) Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners, who were selected based on Oxford Quick Placement Test (2004) from students majoring English Literature and TEFL at Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran. Fifty-six video prompts containing implicatures from Friends sitcom series and Desperate Housewives TV series were taught to the participants who were randomly assigned to four groups (metapragmatic awareness, interactive translation, discussion, and control). The participants attended the classes twice a week for eight sessions. Results of multiple-choice implicature listening test revealed that all three intervention groups outperformed the control group. Results of Tukey’s Honest Significant Difference (HSD) test illustrated that the metapragmatic awareness group outperformed the interactive translation and discussion groups. No meaningful difference was found between the interactive translation group and the discussion group. The paper concludes that providing learners with contextually appropriate input through video using methods of pragmatic instruction (metapragmatic consciousness-raising, translation, and discussion) is effective to promote their ability to comprehend implicatures and signposts some avenues for future research.

The study aimed at examining the effects of scaffolding ESP readers, by using graphic markers and highlighting syntactic and emphatic prosody, on their Foreign Language Reading Anxiety (FLRA) and fluency. A mixed-methods research design was used for a deeper understanding of the obtained data. An experimental design was planned with a control and an experimental group including 38 students of two fields, museum studies, and conservation of historic buildings in Shiraz University of Arts. Participants of the experimental group were scaffolded to develop reading fluency with different graphic markers, while members of the control group had their usual ESP classes. The participants’ FLRA and reading fluency levels were assessed prior to the study and after it ended. Statistical analysis of the results proved that scaffolding the students with graphic markers had the potential to lower their FLRA. Also, the results of fluency assessment frameworks including Words Read Correctly per Minute (WCPM), Multidimensional Fluency Scale (MDFS) and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) confirmed the effectiveness of scaffolding the readers with graphic markers. For a deeper understanding, the data were explored using qualitative data classification and analysis by the NAEP framework. The qualitative analysis of the observations showed while graphic cues can scaffold the learners to notice their shortcomings toward an optimum level of fluency, they could not be the sufficient condition for achieving the goal. It was also concluded that online decoding, sight-word reading, and sensitivity to stress and intonation are pre-requisites of fluent and prosodic reading with expression.

این تحقیق سه نوع تفکر کلامی که در روش تدریس ادراکی جامع رایج است را مورد بررسی و مقایسه قرار داد تا تاثیر این سه شیوه به زبان آوری فکر را در فراگیری وجه مجهول در بین فراگیران زبان دوم مشخص کند. بنابراین چهار کلاس پایه دوازدهم از یک دبیرستان انتخاب شدند و به بطور تصادفی به سه گروه آزمایش و یک گروه گواه تقسیم شدند و به تمام دانش آموزان وجه مجهول آموزش داده شد. در واقع به هر کدام از سه گروه آزمایش به یکی از شیو ه های رایج آموزش ادراکی سیستمی: الف) تفکر کلامی درونی، ب) تفکر کلامی بیرونی، ج) تفکرکلامی درونی و بیرونی آموزش داده شد وبه گروه گواه به روش معمول استقرایی آموزش داده شد. نتایج تحقیق نشان داد که هر سه شیوه ادراکی سیستمی در یادگیری وجه مجهول توسط فراگیران موثربود. البته شایان ذکر است که از سه روش فوق دو روش تفکر کلام بیرونی و روش تفکر کلامی بیرونی و درونی از روش تفکر درونی موثرتر بودند. در حقیقت علت این برتری را می توان در ماهیت منحصر به فرد روش تفکربیرونی جست که همزمان به دو شکل باعث توسعه ذهنی می شود. شکل اول توسعه ذهنی از طریق مفاهیم می باشد که از ویژگی بارز آموزش ادراکی سیستمی است و شکل دوم حالت توسعه ذهنی از طریق تعامل می باشد که از ویژگی های بارز ارزیابی پویا است. به عبارتی دیگردر روش تفکر بیرونی بستری فراهم می شود تا دو مدل آموزش ادراکی سیستمی و ارزیابی پویا نمایان شوند.

The present study, adopting a mixed-methods design, aimed to compare three types of task instruction entailing translation-based, meaning-based, and hint-based instructions for vocabulary acquisition. In so doing, a pool of 45 male Iranian intermediate L2 learners, which were divided into three groups, participated in the study based on convenient sampling. The treatment phase lasted for 20 sessions, allocating the last 45 minutes of each class to teaching vocabulary. Each class was exposed to a different treatment taking the experimental condition it was assigned into account. The treatment consisted of two tasks. The results obtained from one-way ANOVA confirmed that there was a statistically significant difference in learners’ vocabulary scores for the three sets of scores. Moreover, following the coding reliability and agreement, 12 common themes emerged from the students’ responses to the semi-structured interview questions. At the end, the study offers some practical implications for L2 learners and teachers.

Today, the use of technology in teaching foreign language has become a matter of considerable interest to language teachers in all over the world. The current study tried to investigate the suitability of data-driven learning in flipped and blended classes vs the conventional ones on students’ grammar learning. To run this study, 48 homogenized students were selected and divided into three groups, including two experimental and one control group, 16 in each. Before the treatment, a grammar pre-test was administered. The two experimental groups received 12 sessions of data-driven instruction in the flipped and blended classes but the control group received grammar instruction based on the textbook. At the end, statistical analysis showed that the participants in both flipped and blended groups had better performance in the post-test. It also was concluded that the usage of data-driven learning had significant impact on both experimental groups. The results of this study can be beneficial for teachers, learners, syllabus designers, managers in learning environments, and policy makers to use data driven learning.