درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Almost little is known about creative writing. In this research, creative writing has been introduced as an alternative to academic writing. The aims were to introduce creative writing as an alternative to academic writing to boost the participants’ attitude towards writing in general. The participants were 32 senior university students studying English Translation at Islamic Azad University, Tehran. The study includes two phases: quantitative and qualitative. For the quantitative phase, the participants were given a questionnaire so that the researchers could measure their attitudes about writing. Then, a creative writing pretest was administered, followed by a posttest to see to what extent the treatment could help the participants improve their writing skill. For the qualitative phase, a videotaped oral interview with the participants was closely examined to find out about the participants’ attitudes towards writing. The means of the pretest and posttest indicated a three-fold increase in the scores after the treatment was over. The oral interview, furthermore, showed that most participants had a negative attitude towards creative writing. It was finally concluded that creative writing might be considered as a useful asset in academic contexts, expected to alleviate the negative attitude of learners towards writing to feel more confident.

The post methods era has witnessed a dramatic change inapproaches to and methods of teaching as well as testing. At the heart of such a change, collaborative learning has received top priority and testing domain has actually gone under scrutiny. This new mode of education has made stakeholders, especially in higher education; reflect on an interactive e-assessment based instruction. Such a cyber-based environment provides immersive and authentic learning, mixed with a type of e-assessment task, no longer functioning like a summative test but it has become learning and teaching tool. The present research study intends to shed some lights on the characteristics of an e-assessment-based App in a descriptive format on one hand, and its viability in an exploratory design on the other, with emphasis on e-assessment at its core for teaching ESAP- English Specially for Academic Purposes- while instruction and assessment of language skills and sub skills are included. The descriptive and exploratory design of the study highlights the mode of interactivity inherent in this App, which provides a chance for learners to explore, make errors and construct meaning/solutions to their problems via hyperlinks in the created App.    

Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucial importance of error analysis prior to developing any materials concerning suprasegmental features, and (c) the effectiveness of materials developed on the basis of the findings in the first two phases of the study. Sixty-Four Persian-speaking intermediate EFL learners were selected as participants for the purposes of this study. Twenty-Four of them assisted in the second and forty of them in the third phase. Since the results obtained in the first two phases were to be used for the preparation of the materials in the final phase, the researchers devised a pretest posttest design to prove or disprove the efficacy of the whole study. Thus, two intermediate classes in one of the language schools in Isfahan were chosen and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The first phase of the study confirmed the great impact of Persian language on EFL learners’ English pronunciation (51.82%). The second phase supported the idea that some suprasegmental features such as linking sounds are obstacles to proper pronunciation for Persian-speaking EFL learners. The results obtained from the last phase of the study indicated that pronunciation training with supplementary materials is rewarding albeit the progress might be slow.

در مقاله حاضر مسائل مربوط به اصول نظام مندی در زبان و نظام مندی در حوزه واژگان و دستور بررسی می شود. درک جنبه های مختلف ارتباط متقابل میان نظام زبانی و کارکرد عناصر آن یکی از مسائل روز در بررسی های زبان شناسی معاصر است. تعاریف نسبتاً زیادی از نظام زبانی و نظام مندی وجود دارد و از طریق تعاریف و روش های متعدد و مختلف به سختی می توان به ماهیت رویکرد نظام مند پی برد. در بسیاری از تعاریف، زبان، نظامی نشانه ای و کارکردی است که برای تبادل و حفظ اطلاعات در جامعه بشری و ذهن بشر به کار می رود و زبان نظامی است که در درون آن نظام های آوایی، صرفی، واژگانی، نحوی و دیگر نظام های فرعی متمایز می شوند. رویکرد نظام مند امکان بررسی چند بعدی در محتوای واقعیت زبانی را فراهم می کند. در علم فلسفه، نظام به عنوان مجموعه ای از عناصر که در ارتباط با یکدیگر قرار دارند و وحدت و یک پارچگی مشخصی را ایجاد می کنند، بررسی می شود. در زبان شناسی، نظام عبارت است از تعدد منظم واحدها، گروه ها، مقوله ها و دسته های زبانی که یک پارچگی و وحدت تام و ساختار مشخصی دارند و با بسیاری از عناصر بیان ظاهری مرتبط هستند

The present study has been conducted with the purpose of exploring the relationship between EDBI staff's General English proficiency and their technical English Writing as well as the way each ESBP and GE courses affect their writing skill. The kind of the study is quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test, being conducted among EDBI staff in Tehran Branches and Headquarters. In data collection two standard tests were used, namely Preliminary English Test (PET) for homogenous subjects, and also the level of their GE progress at the end of the treatment, and Business English Certificates (BEC) test Level B1, to measure their technical writing skill with appropriate validity and reliability. The findings indicate that: 1) there was a correlation between subjects’ general English proficiency and their business writing proficiency; 2) teaching writing of banking texts significantly improved EDBI staff’s General English; 3) teaching writing of banking could significantly improve EDBI staff’s Business English proficiency; 4) teaching writing of banking could significantly improve EDBI staff’s Business English proficiency more than GE proficiency.

Reading comprehension ability consists of multiple cognitive processes, and cloze tests have long been claimed to measure this ability as a whole. However, since the introduction of cloze test, different varieties of it have been proposed by the testers. Thus, the present study was an attempt to examine the relatedness of Cloze-Elide test, Multiple-choice (MC) cloze test, and C-test as three different types of cloze procedure used for measuring reading comprehension. To this end, one C-test consisting of four short texts, one fixed ratio (n=7) multiple-choice cloze test, and one cloze-elide test were prepared from reading passages with similar readability levels. The participants of the study were 30 (male &female) freshman university students majoring in English literature. The results of ANOVA test showed that there were not any statistically significant differences at the 0.05 level of significance among the performance of the students on the three tests measuring their reading comprehension. Therefore, it was concluded that against the advocates of each test who claim superiority of it over the other types, these three types of cloze tests in this study assessed the reading comprehension in a similar way. So, the testers can be confident to make use of these tests as reading comprehension tests interchangeably.

The importance of input has been a broadly documented concept in the field of second or foreign language acquisition. However, kinds of input and ways of its presentation are among the controversial issues in L2 classroom research. Therefore, this study was designed to compare the effects of three kinds of input-based instruction on intake and acquisition of the English causative structures by Iranian EFL learners. A total of 105 university students in four intact classes were randomly assigned to four different conditions: processing instruction (PI), textual input enhancement (TE), consciousness-raising (C-R), and control (CO). A pretest/posttest (immediate and delayed) design was used, where participants’ ability to interpret and produce the target structure was assessed through administering a multiple choice interpretation test and a sentence-level production test. Moreover, a grammaticality judgment test was run to assess the amount of intake. Results revealed that learners in the PI group significantly outperformed learners in the other groups on both immediate/delayed production posttests. The findings also indicated that, C-R group could not retain the significant effect of instruction on delayed production posttest and TE tasks were not effective in improving the learners’ production of the target structure. Moreover, the PI group outperformed the other groups on grammaticality judgment test too. Based on these findings, we can conclude that PI which encompasses the most outstanding features of both focus on form and meaning instruction might be a more effective approach in helping EFL learners to acquire the target grammatical forms.

The current study aimed at investigating the academic learning needs of Iranian undergraduate students of English Language and Literature from the perspective of 320 stakeholders including undergraduate students (n=252), graduates (n=51), English literature instructors (n=7), and language instructors (n=10). To this aim, atriangulation of the most important data collection instruments of needs analysis (i.e., questionnaires, class observations, and semistructured interviews) was adopted for data collection at eight different Iranian state universities. The results of data analysis revealed that the above-mentioned students are not adequately equipped with learning and communication strategies during their academic and preacademic studies. The results of the current study may promise implications for the provision of some extracurricular EFL courses at the tertiary and senior high school levels in order to enhance students’ sociocultural and strategic competence based on the shared decision-making process among different stakeholders in the course design community