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The purpose of this research is to investigate Iranian English teachers’ perception of teaching reading comprehension and reading comprehension strategies and their use which can be influenced by individual factors such as gender and teachers’ teaching experience. To serve this purpose, 78 EFL teachers were selected in a stratified manner from West and East Azerbaijan’s language institutes and schools in the second semester of the academic year 2021. This sample included 54 females (=22 experienced, 17 developing, and 15 novices) and 24 males (=1 highly experienced, 6 developing, and 7 novice). To collect the research data, the first three sections of a five-point Likert scale standardized questionnaire was employed to tap teachers’ perception of reading comprehension and the importance of reading strategies. The obtained data were analyzed through Two-Way between Groups Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to investigate the significant main and interaction effects of teachers’ gender and their teaching experience on their perception of teaching reading comprehension and reading strategies. The results showed that the gender and teaching experience had no significant main or interaction effect on their understanding of the way reading comprehension should be taught or the paramount of reading comprehension strategies. Moreover, the findings unraveled some uncertainties in   teachers’ perceptions of reading comprehension skills and misconceptions regarding the significance of reading comprehension strategies. The findings are pedagogical significant and will be discussed in length.

Empirical studies examining the effects of language learning have largely focused on linguistic changes in learners. Regrettably, this has left the non-linguistic changes under-researched. To address this, the current study examined what self-identity changes Chinese university EFL learners experienced and how individual characteristics (i.e., gender, starting age of study, and university major) may have affected these changes. To do so, a self-identity change questionnaire was administered online to 416 Chinese university students using a convenience sampling strategy. Seven identity change variables were measured by the survey: changes in (1) positive self-confidence, (2) negative self-confidence, (3) productive identity change, (4) additive identity change, (5) zero change, (6) subtractive change, and (7) split change. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed that the items on the questionnaire measured their intended identity change variable. Descriptive statistics showed that participants experienced changes in self-confidence, additive identity, and productive identity, but did not experience subtractive or split change. The results also showed that the participants were unaware that they had experienced any changes. Multiple analysis of variance results showed that the individual characteristics contributed to some variation in the identity changes. The findings support theories suggesting that language learning contributes to non-linguistic changes within learners. متن کامل [PDF 731 kb] (101 دریافت) نوع مقاله: مقاله تحقیق | موضوع مقاله: زبان انگلیسی انتشار: 1400/9/10 ارسال نظر درباره این مقاله : نام کاربری یا پست الکترونیک شما: ارسال پیام به نویسنده مسئول بازنشر اطلاعات این مقاله تحت شرایط Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License قابل بازنشر است.

The objective was threefold: (a) to investigate the difference among online teaching performance of EFL student teachers at Iran University of Science and Technology who received peer feedback, expert feedback, and reflected on their own teaching practice; (b) to examine the difference between rating scores given by student teachers and those by instructor to online teaching; and (c) to determine student teachers’ best experiences, challenges, and lessons they learnt from expert feedback, peer observation, and reflection. The results of this mixed methods experimental research revealed no statistically significant difference in the three group’s scores on their second teaching practice; however, there was statistically significant difference between the scores of the first and second practices for all three groups. The results also showed that student teachers mostly underrated their first teaching, while they overrated their second teaching. The findings also indicated that their best experiences were related to using technological tools, working with Adobe Connect, making interesting materials, and using games and songs. Their challenges included lack of face-to-face communication, engaging all participants, and preparing suitable materials, whereas teaching new vocabulary in context, simplifying songs by pre-teaching their unknown words, and using online games and websites were the lessons they learnt.

Annually, researchers in various scientific fields publish their research results as technical reports or articles in proceedings or journals. The collocation of this type of data is used by search engines and digital libraries to search and access research publications, which usually retrieve related articles based on the query keywords instead of the article’s subjects. Consequently, accurate classification of scientific articles can increase the quality of users’ searches when seeking a scientific document in databases. The primary purpose of this paper is to provide a classification model to determine the scope of scientific articles. To this end, we proposed a model which uses the enriched contextualized knowledge of Persian articles through distributional semantics. Accordingly, identifying the specific field of each document and defining its domain by prominent enriched knowledge enhances the accuracy of scientific articles’ classification. To reach the goal, we enriched the contextualized embedding models, either ParsBERT or XLM-RoBERTa, with the latent topics to train a multilayer perceptron model. According to the experimental results, overall performance of the ParsBERT-NMF-1HT was 72.37% (macro) and 75.21% (micro) according to F-measure, with a statistical significance compared to the baseline (p<0.05).

Foreign language vocabulary learning is challenging and requires using an appropriate method. To this end, this study aimed to investigate the effect of listening and viewing BBC News lessons as a teaching and learning tool on high school EFL learners’ vocabulary learning. This quasi-experimental research was carried out in the twelfth grade of Shohada high school in Kalybar city in East-Azarbijan, Iran. Forty two high school EFL learners were chosen as participants from two intact classes. The homogeneity of the classes was checked through a KET test. Then, they were randomly assigned into the experimental (n=19) and control (n=23) groups. Target words were selected from the eight BBC News lessons for both groups. The unfamiliarity of these words to the learners was found through the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale. The experimental group experienced vocabulary learning through watching and listening to the BBC News lessons; while, the control group received the same target words through the traditional method. A vocabulary-based post-test was administrated after the treatment. The result of Independent-Samples t-test on the post-test scores of both groups revealed the significant outperformance of the experimental group compared to the control group. Practical implications are presented to teachers, researchers, and learners.

Much research has been done on semantics of the verbal element of complex predicates (CPr), usually referred to as light verb (LV). Most researchers have confined their studies to a few limited features of light verbs. After criticizing major views proposed by scholars on the semantics of light verbs, this article presents a hypothesis on the formation of complex predicates, arguing that all of which directly or indirectly have roots in incorporation process. This process starts with a complete sentence, incorporating two elements into it and ends in eliminating other elements. Formation of each complex predicate leads to the formation of the constructional schema X+LV0 which sanctions formation of new complex predicates with the same light verb and in the same semantic field. Accordingly, the meaning of light verb in direct incorporation case is the same meaning as its heavy verb, and in indirect incorporation case is dissolved in constructional meaning of the sanctioning schema. The meaning of light verb in each of these two cases could be different and each of them is taken or similar to one of its heavy meanings. There is a third case in which the light verb plays the role of verbalizing element and makes possible for a nonverbal predicate to inflect as a verb. Thus light verbs vary from having completely schematic and non-thematic meanings to their own primary heavy meanings.

This study strived to specify and particularize Iranian medical field specialists and EFL teachers’ predominant and overriding textual interventions, which fall within the ambit of convenience editing. To this end, we required 20 field specialists and 20 EFL instructors to edit the unedited versions of 80 published medical research articles in a way that rendered them apt for publication in quality medical journals. We categorized the obtained data of the edited articles using an editing strategy framework that distinguished four editing micro-strategies and five macro-strategies. The findings revealed that medical specialists and EFL teachers’ micro-editing strategies outnumbered their macro-editing ones. Furthermore, there were significant differences between the editing micro-strategy uses of the above-mentioned groups of the participants. The results highlighted the need for a synergic collaboration between the medical field specialists and the EFL teachers to ameliorate medical articles’ formal, stylistic, and genre-related features and to expedite their publication process. 

Interference or transfer from language learners’ first language (L1) is one of the significant variables that contributes to the complexity of SLA process and usually persists intensely at the initial stages of L2 acquisition and development. Drawing upon Meriläinen’s (2010) taxonomy of lexical transfer errors, the present study intended to explore Iranian EFL learners’ lexical transfer error caused by word form, word meaning, and word use. To this aim, a corpus of 189 compositions written by 89 male and 100 female students was investigated. The results revealed that females in general had more lexical transfer errors than males, and that a large amount of the errors stemmed from word use (54%) which was followed by word form (36%) and lastly word meaning (10%). The findings of the study suggest that shifting the students’ attention from vocabulary size to vocabulary depth and exposing them to a large number of authentic collocations and prefabricated patterns are advisable activities that might counteract negative lexical transfer.

Despite widespread coverage of language policy in the literature, there has been scant research probing into English language education policy at tertiary levels in general and the higher education context of Iraqi Kurdistan in particular. The present qualitative study investigated EFL students' perceptions of English language education policy, current educational policies, and the purposes for learning in Kurdish contexts across genders and study fields. To this end, a version of Yang's (2012) questionnaire was adapted and administered to university EFL students majoring in soft and hard sciences (N=300, male 34%, female 67%) at two private and state universities in Iraqi Kurdistan. The statistical analysis of the obtained data revealed students' positive attitudes toward learning English as an international language in both soft and hard sciences. Notably, students stressed that all Iraqi Kurdish students should learn the English language in English- and Kurdish-medium classes. They also considered English competence as a significant academic accomplishment. However, some of them felt dissatisfied with the status quo of English education in their institutions. The findings of this study offer insights and recommendations for English education policymakers, administrators, and instructors at tertiary levels.