درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

An interesting area of psycholinguistic inquiry is to discover the way morphological structures are stored in the human mind and how they are retrieved during comprehension or production of language. The current study probed into what goes on in the mind of EFL learners when processing derivational morphology and how English and Persian derivational suffixes are processed. 60 Iranian EFL learners at intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency whose proficiency level were determined through Oxford Quick Placement Test, participated in masked priming experiments using E-prime software. Two separate priming tasks in Persian and English were conducted during the course of this study. The target words were primed in three ways: identity (careful""careful), related (care""careful) and control primes (desire""careful). Participants’ reaction times were measured by E-prime software and were fed into SPSS software for further analysis. The results indicated that Proficiency plays a role in the way derivational morphology is processed, because at lower proficiency levels more decomposition was detected while more proficient participants utilized more whole-word representation. Furthermore, Persian learners of English processing of the derived words could not be assigned strictly to decomposition or whole-word representations in the mind. What seems more plausible to assume is that highly frequent words (whether base or suffix frequency) as well as derived words with more productive suffixes are stored as whole words but lower base and morpheme frequency ones and those with suffixes having less productivity are decomposed. These findings lend further support to dual route model.

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

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.

Teachers’ sense of efficacy belief has been introduced as a context-specific construct, but the related literature is not clear on this specificity. This study was an attempt to show how contextual factors influence efficacy beliefs among English language teachers. To this end, thirty Iranian EFL teachers working in both school and private institute contexts were chosen as the participants to respond to Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Beliefs questionnaire (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001) twice: once based on school context and once based on private institute context. Afterwards, the participants were invited to a brief interview designed to investigate further the reasons for which they had scored higher in either context. The interview findings and the results of a t-test revealed that context really made a difference. It is argued that the proper or improper functioning of efficacy building sources is the cause of the difference

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 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.

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.

پژوهش حاضر رابطه ی بین باورهای انگیزشی زبان آموزان انگلیسی و استفاده از راهبردهای یادگیری را بررسی می کند. سه جز انگیزه (جز انتظار، ارزش و عاطفه) در رابطه با راهبردهای شناختی، فراشناختی و مدیریت تلاش بررسی شدند. دویست و پنجاه و هفت زبان آموز انگلیسی از سطوح مختلف توانش زبانی پرسشنامه ی فارسی ر اهبردهای انگیزشی برای یادگیری را پاسخ گفتند. بررسی تاثیر سطح زبانی بر باورهای انگیزشی بیانگر تاثیر معنا دار سطح توانش زبانی بر اضطراب آزمون و رویکرد هدف بیرونی بود، بدین معنا که زبان آموزان با توانایی زبانی پایین تر در مقایسه با زبان آموزان سطوح بالاتر به طور معنا داری مضطرب تر بوده و رویکرد هدف بیرونی بیشتری داشتند. نتایج همچنین نشان داد که خودباوری، کنترل عقاید یادگیری، رویکرد هدف درونی، و ارزش تکلیف حدود ۷۰ درصد از واریانس راهبرهای خودتنظیمی را توضیح می دهد. این پژوهش با پیشنهادهایی برای تقویت عقاید انگیزشی و راهبردهای یادگیری زبان پایان می یابد.

یکی از نظریه های موجود در باره ی چگونگی رشد توانش منظورشناختی زبان آموزان نظریه ی اجتماعی-فرهنگی ویگوتسکی است. مقاله حاضر با بررسی یکی از مفاهیم این نظریه یعنی ""حوزه رشد تقریبی"" برای رشد توانش منظورشناختی زبان آموزان پرداخته و به دو سوال پاسخ می دهد: اول اینکه آیا ارتباطی میان میزان کمک و حمایت ارائه شده به زبان آموز و سطح بسندگی زبانی او در یادگیری توانش منظورشناختی وجود دارد؟ دوم اینکه آیا ارتباطی میان ""حوزه رشد تقریبی"" فردی و ""حوزه رشد تقریبی"" گروهی وجود دارد؟ بدین منظور، بیست زبان آموز با دو سطح بسندگی زبانی انتخاب شده و به دو گروه تقسیم شدند. آموزش هر دو گروه بر اساس ""حوزه رشد تقریبی"" انجام شد. نتایج نشان داد که ارتباط معناداری میان سطح بسندگی زبانی و یادگیری توانش منظور شناختی وجود ندارد. از طرف دیگر، میان ""حوزه رشد تقریبی"" فردی و گروهی رابطه وجود دارد. این بدان معناست که دانش عمومی زبان تاثیر چندانی بر یادگیری توانش منظورشناختی ندارد. همچنین می توان گفت که کمک ارائه شده به زبان آموز کاملا فردگرایانه است و بر اساس ظرفیت و توان فرد زبان آموز معنا و مفهوم پیدا می کند.