درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate speech acts performed by Iranian EFL learners on the social network of Facebook in their interaction with their teacher and with their peers in response to divergent and evaluative questions. A page was constructed for the students in order to provide the opportunity for their answering divergent and evaluative questions posed by the researchers. A total of 240 comments including 1680 speech acts were collected from five EFL students during an academic semester. Content analysis of the collected data revealed that participants primarily used expressive speech acts in response to divergent questions and directive speech acts in response to evaluative questions. The results also revealed differences in using emoticons regarding the difference in power relations between the teacher and students. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper.

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

Nowadays, English language plays an important role in the job of engineers and it is necessary to become familiar with engineers’ objectives, attitudes, and expectations in order to have an appropriate course design. The purpose of this study was to explore the needs analysis of English learning of engineers in Esfahan Steel Company (ESCO). This study aimed at investigating the required level of language skills in performing their jobs effectively, the employees’ attitude towards their English professional courses, their professional needs, their language skills and tasks, and the difficulties they face while studying a language. A questionnaire consisting of 25 items was distributed among the engineers working at ten sections of ESCO. In addition, interviews and observations were done in order to increase the reliability of the research. Time, financial resources, and worker expectations ask for more reliable methods to provide a better situation in the workplace. Based on the findings obtained from this study, it can be concluded that receptive skills were perceived as a bit more important than the productive skills to perform the job effectively and the revision of the current professional training programs seems to be necessary to offer appropriate ESP course curriculum.

The purpose of the present study is to analyse abstracts related to Applied Linguistics, and more precisely the discourse functions of grammatical subjects and verbs. The corpus consisted of 50 PhD thesis abstracts written on the subject of Applied Linguistics. All of the abstracts were written from 2010 to 2014. The theses from which the abstracts were extracted are available in the ProQuest database. Based on the model put forth by Swales and Feak (2004), the elements of the abstracts were identified. In accordance with Ebrahimi (2014), frameworks were used to analyse discourse functions, while the realisation of grammatical subjects and verbs was analysed for tense types. The results revealed that the “introducing part of study” and “research-related objects” were the predominant types of grammatical subjects. Indeed, these performed more discourse functions in Applied Linguistics PhD thesis abstracts compared with other grammatical subject types. The results also indicated that simple past tense was predominant in aim, method, and results sections, while the simple present was predominant in the background and conclusion sections.