درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This investigation aimed to examine the impact of spaced and massed education on the reading comprehension and vocabulary gain of Iranian EFL students. The researcher selected 150 Iranian participants out of 300 based on their enactment in the Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT). The selected medium participants were unsystematically assigned into two empirical groupings (spacing and massed) and one control group. The participants' reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge in English were estimated using a pre-test. Three groups were provided with instruction on reading skills by English texts and new words from American English File 3. The massed group received a 90-minute session for each text, whereas the spaced group received three 30-minute sessions; the first session lasted 30 minutes, followed by two more sessions, each lasting 30 minutes, scheduled two days apart. Behind the teaching, a reading and vocabulary post-test post-test were distributed to the three classes. The results of data analysis utilizing independent samples t-tests and one-way ANOVA showed a considerable distinction between the post-tests of the spaced and massed groups compared to the control group. The findings demonstrate that the spaced grouping, which followed the specific recommended steps in their community, outperformed the massed and control groups (p < .05). This has consequential implications for English instructors, learners, and curriculum developers.

Objective: The involvement load hypothesis posits that the higher the involvement load of a task, the more effective it will be in improving students’ lexical learning. It does not differentiate between the different components of involvement load (need, search, and evaluation). Nor does it assume that the type of words to be learnt has any role in the effectiveness of tasks with different involvement load indices. This study compared the effect of the components of task involvement load on the comprehension, production, and retention of concrete and abstract words. Methods: Sixty upper-intermediate students were assigned to two groups. One group received a task in which the search component was dominant, the other group received a task (with the same overall involvement index) in which search was not present, and the evaluation component was the determining factor of task difficulty. A pretest, posttest, control group design (quasi-experimental method of research) was used to address the research questions. Results: One-way MANOVA results on the immediate posttest were in line with ILH predictions, showing no significant differences between tasks with equal involvement indices. On the other hand, the delayed posttest results showed that in case of receptive knowledge, there was a meaningful difference between abstract and concrete vocabulary, and the search group outperformed the evaluation group. However, the results of the productive posttest showed that the evaluation group outperformed the search group in abstract words. Conclusions: The findings can have significant implications for language learners, teachers, materials designers, and researchers.

Although dyadic collaborations (DC) are sensitive to individual differences, the role of levels of equality (LoE) and gender disparity as potential mediators are largely unexplored. To address the research gap, this case study investigated whether symmetrical (equal and gender-matched) and asymmetrical (unequal and gender-mixed) peer interactions differ in terms of efficacy for morpho-syntactic development and learners’ retrospective reflections. Forty-three young learners were randomly assigned into symmetrical (equal) and asymmetrical (unequal) pairs and into dyads of various gender dispersal (matched and mixed). The learners’ behaviors and perceptions during and following the paired tasks were recorded via observation, field notes, focused-group discussion, and member-checking meetings. The results of the Mann-Whitney U-test and Friedman Test were as follows: DC was more effective than non-collaborative learning for both short-term and long-term structure and vocabulary learning. It was helpful for expert-expert and gender-matched dyads in both domains alike and for experts and novices in unequal pairs in the structure area only. It was ineffective, however, for novice-novice and cross-gender dyads. Among the recurrent themes in observation and interviews were overall preference to pair up with female partners, consensus on the advantage of DC for grammar judgment (structure) over fill-in-the-blank (vocabulary) tasks, the realization of DC as effective for promoting rapport and responsibility, experts’ willingness to pair with novices or work alone, novices’ tendency to work with experts, and role of personality traits as a substantial mediator. Based on the findings, several implications for research and practice are offered.

The present study explored the effects of voicing and place of articulation on voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) of onset of Persian oral plosives uttered by normal hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) children. Twenty-one NH children and twenty-one HI children matched for age and gender took part in this study. The participants were asked to repeat 36 CV words including all eight Persian plosives (/p/, /t/, /k/, /c/, /b/, /d/, /g/, /Ɉ/) in combination with the vowel /æ/. All syllables were recorded in a nearly sound-proof room using PRAAT Software. Independent samples t-test was used to compare the groups across gender. The results revealed: (a) HI children had higher VOT and F0 of onset values in nearly all aspects except for VOT and F0 onset of voiced plosives and F0 onset of alveolar and velar plosives; (b) both groups of girls had higher VOT values than boys did; (c) VOT is affected by the place of articulation and F0 is related to voiced-voiceless classification of plosives. Overall, NH children were able to distinguish and produce sounds more correctly, implying that HI children need further training. The study has implications for speech therapists, clinical linguists, and application designers to focus on speech sounds which are challenging for HI children to produce.  

Given the significant role of corrective feedback and individual differences in the process of foreign language acquisition, in the present study we set out to investigate the effect of direct and indirect corrective feedback on impulsive and reflective EFL learners’ writing accuracy. Sixty learners were selected and randomly assigned to three groups including two experimental groups and one control group. The first experimental group received indirect feedback, the second experimental group received direct feedback, and the control group received no feedback. The instrument employed in this study to determine the impulsivity or reflectivity of the participants was Barratt's impulsiveness scale. Writing accuracy was scored by the scale provided by Karim and Nassaji. The results revealed that both direct and indirect corrective feedbacks were effective in reducing the written errors of all the earners. Moreover, no significant difference was found between direct and indirect corrective feedbacks in terms of increasing writing accuracy. Although there was no significant difference between the impulsive and reflective learners’ performance, the mean scores showed that the latter seemed to benefit more from indirect type of the feedback while their counterparts showed better performance after receiving direct feedback. The findings have implications for EFL teachers and learners.

Much of the research on the comprehension of passive sentences has targeted healthy adults, L1 acquirers and people with aphasia. However, a topic that lacks evidence is the comprehension challenges of EFL learners facing different passive structure types. Consequently, this study investigated the comprehension difficulty of different passive structures by 186 intermediate EFL learners. The participants’ task was to read a sentence and choose a corresponding answer in a multiple-choice format via a software application designed for this study. The answers were analyzed in terms of the comprehension accuracy and the reaction time. Compared with the passive sentences, the participants needed less time comprehending active sentences and had a higher success rate. The results suggested that different passive verb types (i.e., regular/irregular, action/state, double-object/single-object, negative/affirmative, and question/statement) imposed different degrees of comprehension challenge to EFL learners; passives with regular verbs (PR) were the least challenging and passives with double-object verbs (PDO) were the most demanding structures. It was also revealed that the participants’ comprehension of different passive structures was significantly different based on their reaction times. The study’s findings may be of insight for EFL instructors and material developers to possibly invest more time for the more challenging passive structures.

It is becoming an established strategy to add humor in Persian subtitles even often when the original dialogue does not include the created or any other humor. This study measures the impact of this strategy on viewers’ attention allocation while reading subtitles. The eye movements of 32 participants were recorded while watching a humorous and non-humorous version of the same scene extracted from Superchondriac (Boon, 2014), a French comedy. The results show that there is a significant difference between attention allocation in the two versions, and the viewers’ attention to the subtitles with added humor is significantly larger than non-humorous subtitles. The interviews showed that some viewers liked the added humor because they thought it is funny and close to their cultural and ideological views. On the other hand, some of the participants opted for the non-humorous subtitles because they thought the added humor was distracting, confusing, at times offensive, and detached from the original culture.