درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Assessing learners’ present and real life language needs can contribute to learners’ active participation in learning processes. Assessing learners’ taskbased needs and aligning them with pedagogical tasks are significant in English for medical purpose (EMS) courses. The main objectives of the present study were to assess learners’ needs and to determine whether they are practiced in EMS courses. In this study, pedagogical tasks practiced in EMS courses at universities of medical sciences in Iran were identified and the taskbased language learners practiced by stakeholders in real life situations were assessed. The results showed that some of the pedagogical tasks were not aligned with the real life task-based needs. Moreover, the pedagogical tasks and task-based needs were not aligned in terms of mode, channel, and degree of interaction. The results can be applied by EMS teachers and material developers for meeting the learners’ specific needs.

An understanding of language as ‘open, dynamic, constantly evolving and personal encompasses the rich complexities of communication (Shohamy, 2007, p.5). Knowing about the important role of culture as well as psychological aspects of language can give us a broader view of languageteaching and learning. In order to obtain a better understanding of different aspects of language teaching, the present study aims to investigate the possible relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’home-culture attachment and its underlying components, with their emotional intelligence. To this aim two questionnaires namely: Home culture Attachment/dependency and Bar-On EI test were distributed among 80 EFL teachers, both men and women who taught at different levels in state schools in Birjand, Kermanshah and Zabol. Data were analyzed using Pearson’s correlation coefficient and multiple regressions. Finally results of the study revealed no significant relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ home culture attachment and its underlying components, with their emotional intelligence. The most important result of this study is bringing about awareness for EFL teachers, EFL syllabus designers, teacher educators and policy makers about the important factors in cultural attachment or detachment of Iranian EFL teachers that consequently affects their teaching and transfer of cultural values into their students.

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.

این تحقیق یادگیری لغات انگلیسی برای درک مطلب دانش آموزان از طریق آموزش تکلیف محور را مورد بررسی قرار داد. صد و سی وپنج دانش آموز دختر دبیرستانی از دو سطح مختلف تحصیلی یعنی کلاس اول و چهارم از یکی از دبیرستان های شهر اصفهان انتخاب شدند. آن ها به طور تصادفی در چهار گروه یعنی دو کلاس شاهد و دو کلاس آزمایش در دو سطح مختلف قرار گرفتند. جهت ارزیابی درک مطلب دانش آموزان در ابتدای شروع ترم و قبل از تدریس دروس یک آزمون از هر چهار گروه به عمل آورده شد. گروه های آزمایش لغات چهار درس را از طریق آموزش تکلیف محور و گروه های شاهد همان تعداد دروس را به شیوه ی سنتی آموزش دیدند. در پایان ترم، درک مطلب دو گروه در هر دو سطح توسط آزمون دیگری مورد ارزیابی قرار گرفت. نتایج به دست آمده از طریق مقایسه ی میانگین بین دوکلاس شاهد وآزمایش در هر دو سطح نشان داد که گروه آزمایش که از طریق تکلیف محور آموزش دیده بودند بهتر از گروه کنترل که به شیوه سنتی آموزش دیده بودند به آزمون پاسخ داده بودند. همچنین تست نمونه مستقل نشان داد که عملکرد کلاس اولی ها بهتر از عملکرد کلاس چهارمی ها بود.

Despite their widespread popularity and rapid growth, the Internet-mediated English educational materials for learners of English as a foreign/second language (FL/SL) have rarely been analyzed in terms of their potential hidden curriculum. Accordingly, the present study aims to address this need through conducting a CDA investigation into some lessons which are randomly selected from an English educational website called “Englishcentral.” Adapting, expanding, and adopting some elements of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Network, the researchers attempt to describe and explain the representation of “Iran” in Englishcentral. Investigating and thematizing the research data revealed that the keyword “Iran” was used in this website to refer to three groups of social actors, namely the Iranian government and officials, Iranian people, and Iranian people and/or government/officials. The way these social actors are associated and dissociated, activated and passivated, personalized and impersonalized creates remarkable findings which give support to the presence of particular hidden agenda in this program. In all, the results of this study reveal that the Iranian social actors are portrayed unfavorably in Englishcentral, which is an alleged English educational program.

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

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.

Among the linguistic resources for creating grammatical metaphor, nominalization rewords processes and properties metaphorically as nouns within the experiential metafunction of language. Following Halliday's (1998a) classification of grammatical metaphor, the current study investigated nominalization exploited in an English applied linguistics textbook and its corresponding Persian translation. Selection of these textbooks was motivated by consulting 10 ELT professors. Analysis started by identifying nominalization instances and recurrent patterns of nominalization in the books through adopting a mixed approach. The frequency of nominal expressions was counted, and eventually chi-square was run to find out the probable significance of nominalization use in English and Persian academic text samples. The quantitative differences in using nominalization turned out to be significant, and results revealed variations in the ranking patterns of nominalization in both texts. Qualities as entities tended to recur more in English than in Persian. However, the noun to noun modifier was frequently exploited in the Persian translation. The similarities in the employment of nominalization patterns might reflect the awareness of both the author and the translator of the role of metadiscourse markers in scientific texts. The main reason for the differences lies in the matter that knowledge is realized in different languages. The findings of this study have implications for textbook writers, English for Academic Purposes students, and translators.

در سالهای اخیر، پژوهش در زمینه یادگیری زبان عوامل موثر بر انتخاب راهکارهای یادگیری زبان بویژه راهکارهای مهارت نگارش به منظور ارتقا یادگیری را بیش از پیش مورد توجه قرار داده است. نوع شخصیت به عنوان یکی از عوامل موثر در کانون توجه پژوهش حاضر قرار دارد که هدفش مطالعه راهکارهای نگارش در رابطه با نوع شخصیت در چند دانشگاه ایران بود. به این منظور، پرسشنامه راهکارهای مهارت نگارش مورد استفاده قرار گرفت تا راهکارهای حافظه ای، شناختی، جبرانی، فراشناختی، اجتماعی و عاطفی مورد استفاده ۲۱۰ نفر شرکت کننده در این پژوهش را مشخص نماید. پرسشنامه مایر بریگز برای مشخص کردن نوع شخصیت شرکت کنندگان مورد استفاده قرار گرفت. تحلیل نظرات ابراز شده شرکت کنندگان رابطه معنی داری را بین راهکارهای ارتباطی و نوع شخصیت نشان می دهد. بر اساس نظرات ابراز شده همچنین مشخص شد که راهکارهای فراشناختی و شناختی پر بسامدترین راهکارها و راهکارهای حافظه ای با کمترین بسامد مورد استفاده قرار می گیرند.

در حیطه ی فراگیری زبان سوم٬ نتایج متناقض تحقیقات نشان می دهد که در میان محققان در مورد مزایا و یا معایب دو زبانگی در فراگیری زبان سوم اجماعی وجود ندارد. بنابراین دغدغه ی اصلی مطالعه حاضر بررسی تفاوت های احتمالی بین دوزبانه ها و تک زبانه ها در خصوص دانش دستور می باشد. این تحقیق تلاشی بود برای بررسی اینکه آیا زبان آموزان تک زبانه فارسی و دوزبانه فارسی- آذری در یادگیری بند نسبی زبان انگلیسی تفاوت معنی داری دارند. برای انجام این مطالعه، در مجموع دویست دانش آموز دختر در حال تحصیل در کلاس دوم دبیرستان به طور تصادفی از دو ناحیه ی آموزش و پرورش شهرهای تبریز و شیراز در ایران انتخاب شدند. تمامی شرکت کننده ها از نظر سطح زبان انگلیسی، جنسیت، و سن همگن بودند. یک آزمون استاندارد تعیین سطح زبان انگلیسی، یک پرسشنامه و دو تکلیفِ ساختارِ نحوی در هر دو گروه اجرا شد. تجزیه و تحلیل داده ها نشان داد که تفاوت معنی داری بین زبان آموزان در ارتباط با بند نسبیِ انگلیسی وجود دارد. در نهایت، کاربردهای این پژوهش برای کسانیکه در امر یادگیری و آموزش زبان انگلیسی فعالیت دارند مورد بحث قرار گرفت.

Due to the potent role of critical thinking in learners’ academic success and its connection with factors conducive to learning such as argumentation ability, the present study seeks to primarily probe the correlation between Iranian EFL learners’ critical thinking ability and their argumentative writing achievement, and investigate the predictability of the students’ argumentative writing achievement based on their scores on critical thinking scale. Furthermore, the effect of gender on Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement was investigated. In so doing, 'Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal' (2002) as well as an argumentative writing assignment was employed, and the participants of the study included 178 EFL learners in three universities in Mashhad, Iran. Structure Equation Modeling (SEM) was utilized to analyze the data. The results substantiated the positive correlation between critical thinking ability and argumentative writing revealing that these two variables significantly and positively related to each other; among the predictors (subscales of the critical thinking) of argumentative writing, inference, assumptions, arguments were the stronger predictors. Finally, gender was not found to significantly affect Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement. The conclusions and implications of this study are pointed out with reference to foreign language teaching context.