درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study aims to assess the effectiveness of remedial English courses in improving students’ English skills in terms of grammar, vocabulary, listening, and speaking. The study also aimed to identify the optimal number of contact hours spent in remedial courses to improve students’ post-test scores. The study utilized the pre and post-test scores of 37 students enrolled in the English remedial Programme at the University of Technology Bahrain during the second and third trimesters of the Academic Year 2020-2021. Using a non-parametric Wilcoxon Signed Ranked Test and Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, the study derived the following conclusions: Remedial courses significantly increased the post-test scores of the students for both grammar and vocabulary and speaking and listening. This would suggest that the conduct of remedial courses effectively improves the overall English-speaking skills of the students who completed the remedial course despite being fully delivered online. Contact hours spent in remedial courses, both in ENGL301 for Speaking and Listening and ENGL302 for Grammar and Vocabulary, can significantly determine the students’ success in passing the post-test. The effect of the number of contact hours in the remedial course on passing post-tests, both for Grammar and Vocabulary and Speaking and Listening, is not linear. The optimum numbers of hours to be spent per trimester on directed learning to improve students’ post-test scores in grammar and vocabulary, and speaking and listening are 86.25 and 88.5 hours, respectively. This threshold maximizes the chance of predicting the students who passed at the level of sensitivity and specificity.    

Language teacher factors have attracted attention in the field of language teaching in recent decades. This study sought to identify predictors of productive and maladaptive teacher immunity in British and Iranian English teachers. It also investigated the differences between British and Iranian teachers’ immunity. Accordingly, the researchers selected 283 British and 295 Iranian EFL teachers at language institutes as participants. In addition, they gave the participants seven reliable and valid questionnaires to assess their teacher immunity, age, income, emotion regulation, teacher reflection, professional identity, and grit. Finally, they analyzed the data using logistic regression analysis and a t-test. The results showed that British teachers’ emotion regulation, teacher reflection, and professional identity and Iranian teachers’ income, age, and emotion regulation were the most significant predictors of their teacher immunity. In addition, British teachers’ immunity was more productive than that of Iranian teachers. The results can provide specific guidelines for dealing with teacher factors in English classrooms.    

The Covid-19 pandemic revolutionized the world's status quo to transition from face-to-face into online E-learning. However, this unexpected transformation in teaching-learning approaches necessitates teachers to teach while frequently assessing students' performance through online assessment, which has been substantiated to expose teachers to an array of unanticipated challenges. To this end, the current study was a bid to unearth the Iranian EFL teachers' perceptions of online assessment and illustrate the challenges encountered through adopting a sequential mixed-methods design. For the quantitative phase of the study, one hundred EFL teachers submitted responses to an online questionnaire constructed in Google Forms. The researcher recruited twelve teachers for the qualitative phase of the study from a pool of one hundred participants who completed questionnaires to participate in a semi-structured interview protocol. The findings from the descriptive statistics of the questionnaire revealed that Iranian EFL teachers had either a negative or a neutral attitude toward online assessment. In addition, the results of the interview offered more insight into the challenges that teachers encounter during online assessment. In this light, the three most frequent challenges were the high risk of students cheating and plagiarism, the issue of internet connectivity, and poor technological infrastructures. The findings of this study bear witness to the voices of a group of Iranian EFL teachers about their perceptions and challenges of online assessment during the COVID-19 epidemic. In the spirit of the findings, the recommendations and suggestions for further investigations are discussed.

English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks play a significant role in these cultural exchanges. On the other hand, English is known as an international language and acquiring a good Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) in EFL classes is considered as one of the primary goals. The present research reports a qualitative study on firstly, the representation of the elements of intercultural competence in Iranian EFL high school textbooks (Prospect Series) and secondly, the potentiality of the textbooks to develop students’ ICC. To this end, an in-depth content analysis of Prospect 1, Prospect 2, and Prospect 3 was done based on Byram’s (1997) model. Next, a group of 300 Iranian high school students was provided with the AIC questionnaire (Fantini, 2009a, p. 196) to examine the extent to which EFL lessons in Iranian high-school English textbooks significantly develop learners’ intercultural competence. The results of the statistical analyses revealed that the cultural topics covered in Prospect Series have little emphasis on developing students’ ICC, and also the dimensions of ICC tasks in the textbooks are distributed unequally. Moreover, Iranian EFL textbooks could not significantly develop learners’ ICC to become aware of cultural differences by being a source of ICC experience.

Despite a currently proliferating interest in the second language (L2) willingness to communicate (WTC), much less has investigated Asian high school students’ beliefs about L2 teachers’ strategies to encourage WTC inside the classroom. This qualitative study explores the strategies employed by Vietnamese EFL teachers to encourage their students’ WTC inside the classroom and students’ beliefs about their teachers’ strategies. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with seven teachers and eight students. Results revealed that the teachers employed six main strategy groups, namely grouping, warm-up, topic choice, correction strategies, class atmosphere, and motivational strategies. Also, the students indicated their preferences for some strategies and suggested other strategies which they believed to be effective. They expressed expectations and suggested ways to improve their teachers’ strategies to encourage WTC inside the classroom. The students’ preferences and recommendations of strategies reflected contextual factors. As WTC is a context-sensitive construct, it might be necessary for L2 teachers to understand their students’ beliefs to foster L2 WTC effectively inside the classroom.

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to explore pre-service EFL teachers’ conceptions and self-efficacy for effective online teaching and (b) to determine their instructors’ conceptions of online teaching effectiveness and their approaches to preparing them for effective online teaching. The participants were 100 MA students of TEFL and 6 teacher educators at Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST). The data collection instrument was a questionnaire with 40 principles of effective online teaching classified into 7 categories of facilitating learning, interaction, deep learning, relationship, resources, engagement, and organization followed by two open-ended questions. A semi-structured interview was also conducted to examine teacher educators’ conceptions of online teaching effectiveness. The results revealed that pre-service teachers considered themselves more self-efficacious in fostering relationship while less in maintaining organization in online English language classes. To be an effective online teacher, they also held the view that teachers need to establish a friendly atmosphere and relationship, provide useful materials, have adequate technological knowledge, give prompt feedback, and engage learners in their learning process. For teacher educators, effective online teaching was having adequate technological knowledge, providing appropriate content, establishing an online presence, successful classroom management, and having positive perceptions of online teaching.

As the world evolves into more globalized, ethnically, and linguistically mixed societies, Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) stages itself as a crucial asset. This fact holds particularly true when it comes to increasingly globalized healthcare academic milieux, where cultivating ICC is crucial for healthcare professionals to interact effectively with patients from diverse cultural backgrounds. The present study, employing a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design, explored the development of ICC among nursing, as the control group (27 participants), and medical students (32), as the experimental one through explicit ICC training at Zanjan University of Medical Sciences in Zanjan, Iran. Hence, targeted ICC training effectiveness in enhancing the cultural empathy (CE), flexibility (F), social initiative (SI), open-mindedness (OM), and emotional stability (ES) of medical students was investigated employing the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) as a key tool to gauge learners' ICC before and after the training. The findings showed a significant improvement in the participants' all ICC sub-scales, indicating the positive impact of explicit training on the development of CE, F, SI, and OM.