درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Procrastination pervades the long and taxing process of foreign language learning and working against it is crucial. This study attempted to elicit and investigate the strategies and solutions from English teachers and learners which can help in dealing with procrastination over weekly assignments, term projects, and preparing for exams. To achieve this aim, suggestions were sought from 46 English teachers who had at least three years of teaching experience. Out of a total of 384 suggestions, higher-frequency ones were listed and solutions and strategies in related literature were sifted through to draw up a 21-item Likert-type questionnaire, which sought the reaction of English learners to the teacher-suggested strategies. A revised version was distributed among 97 English learners comprising 65 females and 32 males, whose ages ranged from 17 to 29 years. The English language teachers believed that to help students abandon their procrastination, they should encourage them with extra points for duly completed assignments, check the progress of projects, and give quizzes and exams during the term atop of other strategies. The most frequently endorsed strategies by the English learners included: adjusting the quantity of assignments to learner’s ability, selecting attractive and diverse assignments, teacher’s proper guidance and providing sample projects to reduce anxiety; and identifying the most important topics and disregarding unnecessary contents.

Given the vital role that vocabulary plays in learning a language along with the fact that sense-induced emotions are noteworthy due to their influence on cognition, this study examined the impact of emotioncy-based language instruction on the long-term memory (LTM) vocabulary retention of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 32 participants were selected based on their level of trait/state anxiety, working memory span, language proficiency, neophobia, and emotioncy towards the selected words to be instructed. Two weeks after the instruction session, the participants were given a retention test. To compare the mean scores of each participant exposed to the three emotioncy-based language instruction conditions (i.e., avolvement, exvolvement, and involvement), a one-way repeated measures ANOVA was employed. The results showed that the participants outperformed in recalling the words that were taught through the involvement level of the hierarchy of the emotioncy model in comparison to those taught through the exvolvement level as what is currently practiced in language classrooms. Finally, drawing on the concepts of emotioncy, emo-sensory quotient, embodied cognition, and multisensory learning, the study elaborates on the value of senses in evoking emotions conducive to cognition and memory enhancement. After all, the study suggests that senses act as the main gears that stimulate the evocation of certain emotions, and the resultant emotions shape cognition, resulting in better LTM retention of vocabulary items.

The purpose of the present research is to investigate the perceptual learning style preferences of 131 learners who studied Persian as a second language (from 17 nationalities) in Iran and 97 learners of Persian as a foreign Language in 28 other countries, taking into account predominant perceptual learning style preferences and demographic variables including age, gender, etc. for the first time. The Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire (PLSPQ) was administered. The descriptive statistics of the learning styles preferences showed that tactile, kinesthetic and auditory are respectively the first three learning style preferences among the learners of Persian as a second language, while the other learners of Persian as a foreign language preferred kinesthetic, tactile and auditory learning styles. The data analysis showed that there were no significant differences between the style scores of the two groups. Also, the findings revealed a significant difference in preference between foreign and second language learners of Persian using group styles. Foreign Persian language learners exhibited a high preference for the group learning style. In addition, the correlation was significant between geographic region (to be or not to be Asian) and different learning styles.

There is a bulk of studies supporting the positive effect of strategy instruction on reading comprehension. This study examined the effect of two reading strategies (i.e., false correction and inference strategy) on English reading comprehension of Iranian paramedical students, using a pretest, posttest, control group design. It also surveyed their attitudes toward the effect and usefulness of these strategies. The participants were sixty paramedical students, selected through availability sampling from the Medical University of Kashan. They were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group (CG). The first experimental group was instructed to use inference strategy (henceforth IS), whereas the second was instructed to use a strategy based on elaborative interrogation theory (i.e., false correction strategy, henceforth FCS). The experimental data were collected through a researcher-made pretest and posttest, and survey data through a researcher-made questionnaire. The results of statistical analyses indicated that IS group significantly outperformed FCS and CG on the posttest. The results of questionnaire data also showed that IS led to more positive attitudes. Moreover, IS was perceived as more useful in meeting participants’ academic needs. The findings of the study imply a needs-based approach to ESP pedagogy.

This study investigated a new blended approach for enhancing vocabulary achievement. To this end, the project used a convenience sample of 50 intermediate EFL learners ranging from 19-35 years of age from three intact classes studying English translation at university. They were randomly assigned to two groups of 25 students each. In the experimental group, the treatment consisted of providing photos/cartoons related to the sessions’ course of instruction on Instagram, with the learners discussing and exploring the meaning of vocabularies via peer scaffolding using metacognitive strategies. The control group followed the syllabus and assigned homework according to the class program. To investigate the vocabulary achievement of the participants, a piloted multiple-choice vocabulary posttest was administered. The results that were analyzed through independent samples T-test revealed that the blended approach could significantly affect the performance of the experimental group. This study has implications not only for teachers, researchers, and syllabus designers but also for EFL learners with unpacking the notion of metacognition and peer scaffolding, proposing an integrated framework that illustrates how it may pervade the teaching-learning process as an educational goal. The implication of this study supports student responsibility, a student-centered classroom, and higher levels of cognition.

Naturalization is a translation procedure that is predominantly utilized in the translation of English medical terms into Indonesian. This study focuses on identifying types of naturalization involving the adjustment of spelling and pronunciation and investigating whether naturalization has been appropriately applied based on the rules in the Indonesian general guidance of term formation. The data were taken from the translation of selected articles of a medical textbook, General Ophthalmology (2008). The findings show that naturalization in English-Indonesian medical terms occurred in four categories, namely (1) adjustment of spelling with complex adjustment of pronunciation, (2) adjustment of spelling with simple adjustment of pronunciation, (3) adjustment of pronunciation without adjustment of spelling and (4) adjustment of spelling without adjustment of pronunciation. The products of naturalization have followed the guidance yet several new adjustment standards need to be included to enrich the pattern of foreign term adoption. In addition, this study recommends that types of ‘absorption’ in the Indonesian guidance of term formation needs to be revisited in order to precisely classify how foreign term’s pronunciation and spelling adjustment is made in the Indonesian language.

The present study aimed at examining the combined effects of pre-task and online planning time on complexity, accuracy, and fluency in narrative-based texts produced by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Overall, the implemented studies in this regard point to the facilitative impacts for both pre-task and careful online planning on complexity, accuracy, and fluency with some recorded trade-off effects. Using a between-groups design, sixty homogeneous participants were randomly assigned to four performance conditions: no planning (NP), careful online planning (OLP), pre-task planning (PTP), and both pre-task and careful online planning (POLP). The findings revealed that pre-task and careful online planning don’t have any significant effects on the level of complexity. The results also suggested that whereas the provision of abundant online planning time increases the accuracy level, the opportunity to plan prior to performance leads them to generate more fluent written discourse. In addition, compared with the NP condition, pre-task in tandem with careful online planning time enable the participants to produce more accurate, and fluent written discourse that lend support to the Dual-Mode system and Limited Attentional Capacity Model. The findings are of pedagogical significance in that they speak of the efficacy of planning as an important metacognitive learning strategy capable of helping teachers achieve the desirable pedagogical objective of enhanced complexity, accuracy, and fluency of learners’ task-based production. Theoretically, the results underscore the effectiveness of planning time in helping language learners overcome the limitation of their attentional capacity and direct them towards aspects of form and meaning.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the students’ English foreign language learning anxiety and English language performance test result. Thus, the objective of the study was to assess the relationship between students’ English foreign language learning anxiety and their English language performance. To attain this objective, a descriptive survey research design was employed. Students’ first semester English final examination result was used to explore the relationship between students’ English classroom anxiety and their English performance test result. In line with this, foreign language classroom anxiety scale and the students’ language performance scores were used to collect data. One hundred and seventy six (176) first year students were involved in the study. Multiple instruments that included questionnaire and document analysis were used to gather data. Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods were employed to analyze the data. The findings indicated that most of the students were found to be anxious. Furthermore, the findings showed that there was a significant negative relationship between students’ English foreign language learning anxiety and their English performance test result. Also, the findings of the study revealed that anxiety is much more prevalent in line with the subjects of the study and had negative correlations with their English language performance exam result. Finally, it was recommended that EFL instructors should acknowledge anxiety feelings as legitimate and attempt to lesson students’ feelings of inadequacy and failure by providing positive experiences and feedback to counter act anxiety.