درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Teaching practices are believed to be a determining factor in educational systems. For over two decades, the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Iran has been organizing Top Model Teaching Festivals to address the changes required to promote English teachers' professional development. Considering the high amounts of investment in such programs and their impacts on teaching and sustainable learning, this study probed into how the award-winning teachers critically view and evaluate the efficacy of such nationwide festivals. To this end, ten award-winning EFL teachers in the festivals were interviewed using a semi-structured interview protocol to qualitatively elicit their attitudes towards the program. The results obtained from the content analysis of the interview transcripts revealed that such festivals have not adequately fulfilled their main objective, which is to improve the teaching quality and potential of teachers and promote their professional development. Thus, the study calls for a reassessment of the effectiveness of such programs to find alternative ways for empowering teachers.       

The demand for learning English as a foreign language has significantly heightened the need to recruit efficient teachers. Related literature confirms the lack of studies on teacher characteristics that can affect their job satisfaction. This study aimed to study the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ professional development, job satisfaction, and reflective thinking. One-hundred and fifty-nine teachers from different universities, language institutes, and schools wer e requested to answer the professional development questionnaire, the Minnesota satisfaction questionnaire, and reflective thinking scale as the main data collection instruments. These questionnaires were given in three different ways: in person, email, and social networks. Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine the hypothesized model of associations. This model was confirmed following the application of the modification indices proposed by the software (Normal chi-square = 3.4; RMSEA =.03; RMR =.02; GFI =.94; AGFI =.91; NFI =.94; CFI =.94; IFI =.94). The findings showed that there were significant internal correlations between all the latent variables and their sub-scales. Furthermore, findings of multiple regression analysis revealed that professional development and reflective thinking positively predicted job satisfaction, with professional development exerting more predictive power compared to reflective thinking. Pedagogical implications of the results have been discussed.

Considering the great importance of speaking to EFL learners, teachers have tried to use different teaching techniques to help learners master this skill. One of these techniques is learner-based language teaching. The goal of this study was to investigate the effect of using selected class presentation on the speaking development of EFL learners.  To this purpose, a mixed-methods research was conducted, with both qualitative and quantitative data. The population of the study comprised 66 female EFL students of a language institute in Bandar Abbas. To homogenize them, Nelson Placement Test was administered and as a result, 50 students whose score were around the mean were selected as the pre-intermediate participants of the study. They were randomly assigned to two equal, experimental (EG) and control groups (CG). The experimental group was exposed to treatment by the teacher, while the control group was taught through traditional speaking method.  A standard speaking test was used as both pre-test and post-test. The results obtained from the statistical analysis of the participants’ scores in pre-test and post-test revealed that using selected class presentation in the class has considerable impact on the improvement of learners’ speaking performance. This finding shows that emphasizing on the role of the learners by involving them in suitable the speaking tasks can positivity affect their Oral language output.

Lexical inferencing has been recognized as an effective learning strategy in SLA. The present study investigated Iranian EFL learners’ development of reading comprehension as a result of exposure to lexical inferencing strategy instruction. To do so, 45 female participants studying in Simin Language Institute in Rasht, Iran were selected from among 60 students based on the results of a sample of Oxford quick Placement (OQP) test, who scored from 40 to 47. They were in two intact classes, assigned to one experimental (n=24) and one control group (n=21). The experimental group underwent the teaching of reading comprehension through lexical inferencing strategy to help learners infer the meaning of unknown words and promote their understanding of the text. However, the control group received the traditional instruction of reading comprehension concentrating on the translation of new words. The results of the pre- and post-tests of reading comprehension revealed the significant outperformance of the treatment group over the control group’s reading comprehension ability. It was concluded that lexical inferencing strategy teaching could develop the learners’ potential to improve their cognitive capacities in inferring the meaning of unknown words, which might be facilitative in their reading comprehension.

There is insufficient rigorous research examining which features of EFL/ESL learners’ writing can be improved through their awareness/knowledge of collocation. This study, therefore, addressed this issue and examined the effect of this awareness on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance with respect to the specific features of each writing sub-component (i.e., content, organization, vocabulary and language use) in the short and long term. The study was a quasi-experimental using a within- and between-group approach utilizing a pre-test/post-test design with a control group supplemented with the qualitative information obtained from the interviews with the writing raters. The results showed that developing knowledge/awareness of collocations effectively improved the participants’ quality of writing in terms of ‘vocabulary’, ‘organization’ and ‘language use’. A deeper analysis of the results revealed that the observed improvements in these sub-components were in terms of some particular features: the range of sophistication, lexical choice and usage; succinctness, fluency and clarity of the expressed ideas; and the accuracy of agreement, tense and prepositions. In addition, the sub-findings emerging from the results accentuated the significance of instructional intervention, in general, and first language-second language contrastive analysis, in particular, in helping L2 learners notice, note and incorporate collocations in their output.

This study compared the use of lexical bundles in authentic spoken language data with those of two English learning textbooks developed for IELTS preparation courses in Iran. The aim was to see if the language chunks available in the said textbooks were representative of the real-life language for which learners need to prepare. To achieve this aim, firstly, a list of lexical bundles was compiled based on Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and British Academic Spoken English (BASE). Further, the list was used as a reference tool to analyze the language data of two IELTS preparation books published and widely used in Iran. The results highlighted some considerable differences between MICASE and BASE with regard to the use of lexical bundles in terms of their frequency, structure, and function. Moreover, it was revealed that the books under investigation shared only a scarce number of similar lexical bundles with MICASE and BASE as a whole. Therefore, they failed to be representative of the authentic language that people use in real world. Finally, the implications of the study are discussed, and several practical suggestions are made in order to inform teachers, material developers, and syllabus designers of the importance of related corpus linguistic studies.

lexical diversity of argumentative and narrative writings of L2 learners, and the contribution of syntactic complexity and lexical diversity to the writing quality in the L2 argumentative and narrative writings of EFL learners. To this end, 46 pre-intermediate and intermediate Iranian EFL learners from four intact classes wrote one argumentative and one narrative essay in L2, and one argumentative and one narrative essay in L1 on different topics. Paired-samples t-tests revealed that lexical diversity surfaced more in the L1 writing of the learners. Multiple linear regressions indicated that among five measures of syntactic complexity, mean length of T-unit and clauses per T-unit better predict the quality of argumentative writing. In addition, complex nominals per clause are better predictors of narrative writing quality. Simple linear regressions showed that lexical diversity is a significant predictor of L2 writing in both genres. Based on the findings, writing instructors are advised to provide L2 learners with explicit instruction on the use of diverse vocabulary and different syntactic structures in order to help them improve the quality of their writing.

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between listening assessment task types, time on task, and the use of listening strategy by Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, a group of 44 Iranian EFL students (Males and Females; 14 to 25 years old) selected through convenience sampling from an English language institute in Sanandaj participated in this study. Then, they were randomly assigned into four experimental groups. In one group, note-taking was considered the listening assessment task, while in the second group oral reproduction was specified as the assessment task for assessing listening comprehension. After that, each group was further subdivided randomly into a shorter time-on-task group (20 minutes) and a longer time-on-task group (40 minutes). Next, all groups completed Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, and Tafaghodtari’s (2006) Meta-cognitive Awareness Listening Strategy Questionnaire. A two-way ANOVA was run to examine the effects of both listening assessment task type and time on task on listening strategy use among the four groups. The results revealed that the students in the oral reproduction task with high time on task group significantly showed higher preferences for choosing Planning-Evaluation, Mental Translation, and Problem-Solving strategies and those in the note-taking with low time on task group preferred the Directed-Attention strategy, while those in the note-taking with high time on task group preferred Person-Knowledge strategy.