درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study was conducted to identify self-directed and external professional development obstacles facing primary school EFL teachers in Southern Zone of Tigray Region in Ethiopia. The participants of the study were 63 primary school EFL teachers, 10 school principals and 2 clusters of supervisors. School teachers were selected using random sampling technique whereas school principals and cluster supervisors were selected by using purposive sampling. To gather data for the study, questionnaires and semi-structured interview were used. The results of the study revealed that lack of interest, having dissatisfaction in their job, unattractive salary, lack of knowledge and skills in doing action research and misunderstanding of the concept of CPD and how to do it were the major self-directed obstacles of professional development activities. The study also revealed that in adequate in-service training, supervisors’ lack of knowledge, skills and expertise in teaching English as a foreign language, work load, and lack of support and recognition from stakeholders were the major external obstacles of professional development.

This classroom-based study sets out to study the relationships that EFL learners would form in peer responses in an EFL writing class. It examines Storch’s (2002a) patterns of peer interaction when intermediate learners are paired with partners of different L2 proficiency levels. To discover the factors that could affect the nature of peer interactions, at first a proficiency test of TOEFL was administered and thus the participants were distinguished based on their scores, into the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. Further, the participants were asked to choose a partner and review each other’s writing in pair while being audio recorded. To examine learners’ behaviors from the perspective of participants involved, they were interviewed individually after the recording session. As the focus was on intermediate partnership, the data of 12 intermediate students (i.e. 6 pairs) interacting with an advanced, intermediate or beginner partner were analyzed. The findings showed that although proficiency levels narrowly affected the participants’ performances in peer responses, they did not determine them. The study revealed that it is not just the actual proficiency levels but the relationships that learners form, the roles that they adopt, and their partner’s behaviors as the factors which shape the dyadic talk. It was further found that the partners’ roles are shaped by their positioning in relation to their peers and the issues on which learners focus during their engagement in the task. چکیده: این تحقیق بر آن بود تا چگونگی ایجاد رابطه بین افراد در پاسخگویی توسط  فراگیران خارجی زبان انگلیسی  را مورد بررسی قرار دهد. در واقع، این تحقیق بر اساس الگوی تعاملی استرچ (2002الف)، روابط فی مابین فراگیران سطح متوسط با طرفهای دارای توانش متفاوت زبانی را تحلیل می نماید. برای این منظور، ابتدا شرکت کنندگان در تحقیق، بر اساس آزمون توانش زبان به سه دسته مقدماتی، متوسط و پیشرفته تقسیم شدند. سپس از هرکدام از انها خواسته شد که با تعیین یک نفر نگارش های همدیگر را بررسی نمایند که در این مورد تعامل بین انها ضبط گردید.  پس از این مرحله، برای استخراج الگوهای تعاملی آنها، افراد شرکت کننده مورد مصاحبه قرار گرفتند. تحلیل اطلاعات گردآوری شده نشان داد که توانش زبان تاثیر جزیی و غیر تعیین کننده بر روی نوع تعاملات افراد دارد. به عبارت دیگر، عواملی دیگری به جر توانش زبان مثل رابطه شکل گرفته، نقش افراد، و رفتارهای افراد بر روی گفتار دو گانه تاثیر گذار      می باشد. از طرف دیگر، نتایج نشان داد نقش افراد تابع چگونگی رابطه بین افراد و موضوعات مورد توجه در بحث می باشد.  کلمات کلیدی: پاسخگویی هم گروهیان، الگوهای تعاملی، یادگیری مشارکتی، سطح توانش زبان، نگارش

The well-established affiliation of metadiscourse research tradition to the philosophy of ESP raises some inevitable expectations on how much and how well the concept has been geared to meet the practical necessities of academic writing pedagogy. In light of such an expectation, a corpus of 35 academic writing coursebooks published during the last three decades were evaluated in terms of the possible realizations of key resources of interaction in pedagogical tasks. Due to its theoretical rigor and analytically operationalized nature, Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2005a) was taken as the guiding framework for the current evaluation. The quantitative findings emerging from the analysis of the corpus did not sound sufficiently promising, suggesting that that theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e. the fifty five categories emerging from the evaluation of the corpus) suggest that the rigorous tradition of research in metadiscourse has contributed to the effective operationalization of the concept for pedagogical objectives. It has been argued that through the effective introduction of the concept of metadiscourse into pedagogical designs and its appropriate operationalization, novice participants of academic/scientific discourse communities would be enabled to redefine the nature of academic communication and get rid of a large number of misconceptions which have become fossilized through long years of the dominance of a positivistic thinking.

This study explores how professional and student writers manifest their authorial identities and project their gender voices in their academic texts. To this end, 38 male-authored and 38 female-authored articles published in seven leading international journals were selected. Moreover, 38 articles written by male students and 38 articles authored by female students were collected from two universities in Iran. Taking an academic writing course, these students handed in their papers as term projects. These academic writings were analyzed based on Hyland’s metadiscourse framework comprising two major resources: interactional and interactive metadiscourse resources. The findings indicated the male authors mainly attended to discourse organization using more interactive resources while the female authors mostly solicited solidarity by employing more interactional resources. The professional authors engaged in a more critical stance using self-mentions and attitude markers and the students focused on discourse organization. Attitude markers and self-mentions, as markers of stance-taking, were absent in the students’ writing. The professional authors made use of their gender identity to promote their authorial identity instead of suppressing it. These results suggest that EAP programs should inform students how to employ both metadiscourse resources and their gender-based discourse choices to express their authorial identity more effectively.

Visual literacy (VL), despite its significance, has not received deserved attention in EFL classes in Iran. Addressing this pedagogic and research lacuna, the researchers integrated VL practices into a General English course attended by female university learners, and examined the vision competencies developed by them. The analysis of the data collected through class observation, learner documents, and semi-structured interviews revealed that the learners developed the vision competencies regarding compositional, affective, and critical dimensions of visuals. It is hoped that the findings of this small-scale study encourage language planners, materials developers, and English teachers to pay heightened attention to the visuals’ potential and open more spaces for VL development in their curricula, materials, and language teaching practices. 

Structural equation modeling (SEM), as a flexible and versatile multivariate statistical technique, has been growingly used since its introduction in the 1970s. This article presents a methodological synthesis of the characteristics of the use of SEM in L2 research by examining the reporting practices in light of the current SEM literature to eventually provide some empirically grounded recommendations for future research. A total of 722 instances of SEM found in 145 empirical reports published in 16 leading L2 journals across two periods of 1981-2008 and 2009-2020 were systematically reviewed. Each study was coded for a wide range of analytic and reporting practices. The results indicate that despite the growing popularity of SEM in L2 research, there was a wide variation and inconsistency in its uses and reports within and across the two periods in regard to the underlying assumptions, variables and models, model specification and estimation, and fit statistics. Drawing on the current SEM literature, we will discuss the findings and research implications for future use and reporting of SEM in L2 research.

Research to date has commonly suggested that meaning inferencing through concordance lines can facilitate vocabulary learning. This facilitative role, however, may be subject to mediation by the expanded contexts of the target vocabulary item in concordance and accurate meaning inferencing. Of these plausible factors, the length of the co-text of vocabulary items in concordance context remains under researched. The present study investigated how inferencing in the context of three varying concordance lengths (i.e., two complete sentences, one complete sentence, and a truncated sentence) affect EFL learners' accurate inferencing and vocabulary gain. To this end, 66 upper intermediate learners were assigned randomly into three groups and were asked to infer the meaning of 63 unknown words over seven sessions (nine words each session). For each unknown word, three examples in three different lengths were selected. Results indicated that two complete sentence co-text led to more accurate inferencing and vocabulary gain. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed

Intralingual translation is mainly motivated by the intention to modify the text to facilitate the listener's understanding. The present study attempts to examine the differences between VOA Special English and Regular English due to intralingual translation at the levels of phonology, lexicon, and syntax. To this end, 36 samples of passages of varying lengths dealing with academic discourse from non-modified (Regular English) and VOA’s modified (Special English) corpora were randomly selected and analyzed. The comparative analysis showed a significant difference between the modified and non-modified corpora in speech rate, syntax, and lexicon. Further investigation revealed that Special English was characterized by slower readings, increased pauses and tone units, more frequent and limited words, no idioms, repetitive and unmarked nominal clauses, and impersonal subjects in active voice structures. The findings of the study have implications for English teachers and material developers.

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) assume different roles amongst which is leadership. To lead effectively, they need to possess some significant awareness of the language in order to adequately respond to learners’ needs. One domain of awareness is the ability to distinguish between structurally similar, yet semantically different structures. This study set out to assess ESL teachers’ level of semantic awareness in view of establishing their readiness to meet learners’ needs within their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The Follow-up Explanatory Research Design was used. Data on the cognitions of ESL teachers were elicited from a questionnaire survey while a test was used to quantify ESL teachers’ language awareness levels in the domain of semantics. The quantitative data from the test were analyzed using frequencies and simple percentages while the qualitative data were analyzed using the framework of Content Analyses. The findings reveal that though ESL teachers overestimate the level of their knowledge base in components that have a bearing on semantics awareness, a majority of them do not wield beyond a fundamental level of awareness as concerns applying that knowledge to differentiate the meanings of structurally similar pairs of sentences. It is therefore crucial for English language pre-service and in-service teacher training to seek ways of enhancing the professional knowledge base of ESL teachers especially in domains that are critical to establishing differences between pairs of sentences that tend to be similar.

: Peer review plays a vital and major role to determine the fate of manuscripts submitted to international academic journals. The present study analyzed the discourse structure and the language use of a corpus containing 43 peer review reports from journals from three disciplines (i.e., Applied Linguistics, Accounting, and Sociology). This study analyzed the most frequent discourse moves, negative, and positive expressions used in minor revisions, major revisions, and rejected manuscripts. The findings of this study showed that all discourse moves appeared in all peer review reports but two moves “Summarizing Judgment” and “Conclusion and Recommendation” were the most frequent discourse moves in all peer-review categories. The findings also revealed that the words “well”, “good”, and “original” were the most frequently-used positive words, while the words “unclear”, “inconsistent”, and “poor” were the most frequently-used negative words in the analyzed peer-review reports. The study recommends some points to be considered in future research on this topic.