درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In spite of the highly beneficial applications of corpus linguistics in language pedagogy, it has not found its way into mainstream EFL. The major reasons seem to be the teachers’ lack of training and the unavailability of resources, especially computers in language classes. Phrasal verbs have been shown to be a problematic area of learning English as a foreign language due to their semantic opacity and structural differences between English and learners’ first languages. To examine the pedagogic potentiality of the use of corpus linguistics in the context of EFL, the present study aimed at comparing the effect of paper-based data-driven learning (DDL) activities, as a substitute for online DDL activities, with the activities designed based on dictionary entries in terms of their effect on learning phrasal verbs in both short and long run. To this end, the study adopted a quasi-experimental pretest posttest control group design. The analysis of the data collected through an immediate posttest as well as a delayed posttest showed that the DDL activities led to greater improvements by the participants. Based on the results of the study, it is argued that paper-based DDL activities can be used effectively in EFL classes to enhance learning and help learners to become more autonomous in their learning efforts.

Although uninterpretable features are claimed to be an area of difficulty for EFL learners, they are still one of the less explored areas of research in the field of L2 pedagogy. The present study sought to investigate the impacts of two techniques, namely contrastive analysis and dictogloss on EFL learners’ mastery of resumptive pronouns, an uninterpretable feature absent in English relative clauses but present in most Persian ones. To this end, 77 elementary EFL learners with similar background in English were selected and assigned to three groups: one control and two experimental. Before and after the instruction the participants were administered a 50-item Grammaticality Judgment test and a 20-item translation test which had been developed and validated for use in this study. The results showed that all three groups had significant progression after the treatments, but the comparison among the groups indicated no statistically significant difference. This may suggest that L2 exposure had a more important role in the participants’ performance than the instruction type (contrastive analysis and dictogloss). The findings seem to support the importance of exposure to such L2 structures over time and that instruction cannot always accelerate acquisition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

این مطالعه موردی به بررسی این موضوع می پردازد که یک معلم تایوانی که در یک دوره ی کارشناسی ارشد آموزش زبان شرکت کرده است چگونه از زبانشناسی ساختارمند- نقش گرا و آموزش سبک محور در طراحی و آموزش زبان به فراگیران زبان انگلیسی در تایوان استفاده کرده است. با استفاده از روش مدت دار قوم شناسی، نتیجه این تحقیق نشان داد که برداشت و تصور این معلم از دستور زبان از دیدی سنتی، محدود به جمله و متمرکز بر ساختار به فهمی کاربردی تر از ارتباطات پیوسته مابین سبک و ویژگی های متن تغییر قابل توجهی کرد. این تغییر زمانی رخ داد که معلم توانست از زبانشناسی ساختارمند- نقش گرا برای فهم عملکرد زبان در ادبیات کودکان استفاده کند. با این وجود، میزان توانایی این معلم برای استفاده از زبانشناسی ساختارمند- نقش گرا و آموزش سبک محور در تمرینات کلاس تا حدی تحت تاثیر چارچوب برنامه ریزی شده ی اجباری تدریس و آزمون های رایج در مکانی بود که وی پس از بازگشت به تایوان در آن مشغول به کار شد. این تحقیق بیشتر در ایجاد فهمی جدید از دستور زبان در آموزش زبان انگلیسی و تربیت معلمان بهتر در آسیا کاربرد دارد.

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.

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

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 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

There is a growing interest among the higher education principals and policy makers to improve teacher evaluation methods and more important than that to use the evaluation data. A number of research studies implied the ineffective instruction of ESP courses in Iran (Atai, 2002; Eslami, 2005; Hayati, 2008; Ahmadi, 2008; Sherkatolabbasi & Mahdavi, 2012; Boniadi, Ghojazadeh & Rahmatvand, 2013). The basic objective of research in field of ESP/EGP instruction and evaluation is to facilitate informed decisions for the betterment of English classes. The literature suggested that most of the teachers and students were dissatisfied with the students’ progress in specific English courses. Data was collected from the teachers by various ways including observation checklist and feedback form. To carry out the study, 12 ESP and EGP teachers were observed using Marshall’s rubrics (2011) and observation logs’ analysis. Then, 18 teachers offered feedback on different aspects of their own courses. The data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively using ANOVA statistical measurement. The findings firstly indicate that EGP teachers were more standard teachers in comparison to ESP teachers. Secondly, the feedback forms show discrepancy between the views of EGP teachers and ESP teachers in some areas including the material effectiveness and students’ interest. To reach a standard point in EGP/ESP instruction, more evaluation is to be applied by the faculty members, university principals and the teachers themselves. Politically correct attitudes towards teachers should not lead to ineffective English courses. Some practical implications are suggested to upgrade the current practice in ESP classes