درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

یادگیری یک زبان خارجی از طرفی با نوعی دانش راهبردی و از طرف دیگر با سطحی از اضطراب آزمون ارتباط دارد، اگرچه معمولا داشتن اندکی اضطراب آزمون طبیعی است. مطالعه اخیر به بررسی رابطه میان استفاده از راهبردهای شنیداری، اضطراب آزمون و عملکرد آزمون شنیداری فراگیران ایرانی سطوح متوسطه و پیشرفته ی زبان انگلیسی به عنوان زبان خارجی پرداخت. بدین منظور 80 فراگیرایرانی زبان انگلیسی ( 40 نفر در سطح متوسطه و 40 نفر در سطح پیشرفته ) در این تحقیق شرکت نمودند و پرسشنامه ی استفاده از راهبردهای شنیداری لی (1997)، مقیاس اضطراب آزمون ساراسون(1975) و دو مونولوگ از عملکرد آزمون شنیداری که از بخش شنیداری تافل TOEFL ETS)) انتخاب شده بود را کامل نمودند. نتایج آزمون همبستگی پیرسون نشان داد که بین اضطراب آزمون وعملکرد آزمون شنیداری رابطه منفی معنی دار و بین استفاده از راهبردهای شنیداری و عملکرد آزمون شنیداری رابطه مثبت معنی داری وجود دارد.همچنین نتایج تحلیل رگرسیون چندگانه نشان داد که استفاده از راهبردهای شنیداری پیش بینی کننده ی بهتری برای عملکرد آزمون شنیداری است.به علاوه نتایج آزمون تی مستقل نشان داد که بین فراگیران ایرانی سطوح متوسطه وپیشرفته ی زبان انگلیسی در میزان استفاده از راهبردهای شنیداری و میزان اضطراب آزمون تفاوت معنی داری وجود دارد.

Articles in general and definite articles in particular can create problems even long after all other aspects of English have been mastered. The present article investigated the learnability problems related to the acquisition of count-mass distinction of English nominals by Persian L2 learners. The theoretical underpinning of the study is the interpretability hypothesis (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007) arguing that the features which are semantically interpretable can be acquired. To this end, 50 learners constituted the participants of the study and completed a forced-choice elicitation task requiring the use of articles. The results of the study substantiated the interpretability hypothesis. Nonetheless, the advanced L2ers showed a conservative behavior in the mass context. They significantly opted for a/an in wide scope indefinite non-referential de/re context. The findings reveal that article suppliance creates more learnability problems in the plural and indefinite mass contexts compared to the count singular ones.

هدف این تحقیق, تحلیل استعارى عقاید زبان آموزان در مورد شرایط کنونى و ایده آل تدریس و یادگیرى زبان انگلیسى در مدارس و مؤسسات زبان و تاثیر این شرایط در چگونگى یادگیرى آنهاست. به منظور بررسى کیفى از زبان آموزان مؤسسات و مدارس خواسته شده که نظرات خود درباره شرایط کنونى و ایده آل تدریس و یادگیرى زبان را در قالب استعاره با کامل کردن جملات ناتمام، بیان کنند. بررسى و تقسیم بندى استعاره هاى بدست آمده توسط دستورالعمل ارایه شده مارتینز (2001) نشانگر اجراى شیوه هاى تدریس و یادگیرى رفتارگرایی در مدارس بود، در حالیکه زبان آموزان آنها به شیوه هاى شناخت گرایی گرایش نشان دادند. نتایج همچنین حاکی از این عقیده زبان آموزان مؤسسات است که در حال حاضر در کلاسهاى آنها از شیوه هاى شناخت گرایی استفاده می شود در حالی که آنها به شیوه هاى نوین تدریس موقعیتى تمایل دارند. در مجموع نتیجه گیرى می شود که زبان آموزان مؤسسات از نقطه نظر استفاده از شیوه هاى تدریس و یادگیری یک گام فراتر از زبان آموزان مدارس هستند که تأیید این نکته مى تواند دلیلی بر موفقیت بیشتر آنها به شمار آید. در پایان، کاربرد این یافته ها در موقعیت انگلیسی به عنوان زبان خارجی در ایران مورد بررسى قرار گرفته است.

This study investigated the impact of using the technique of self-monitoring on non-academic EFL learners’ composition writing. Fifty female students studying English at Navid English Institute in Shiraz, Iran were chosen based on the results of a proficiency test. They were all 16-20 years old and were intermediate learners of English who were divided into two control and experimental groups and took a writing pre-test. The experimental group (EG) received a training program on the effective use of the technique of self-monitoring proposed by Charles (1990). That is, they learned to add annotations expressing doubts and queries on various parts of their five composition drafts. The students in CG wrote their drafts without annotations. At the end of the twenty-second session course, both groups took a writing posttest. The results indicated that the learners in EG performed significantly better and the global features of organization and content in their writing were enhanced. Surveying the students’ views on self-monitoring, through a questionnaire, revealed their interest in taking charge of their writing task. Findings point to the efficacy of the self-monitoring technique in promoting learners’ writing proficiency and autonomy in handling writing tasks.

This study investigated the comparative effect of teaching idiomatic expressions through practicing them in conversation and paragraph writing on intermediate EFL learners’ idiom learning. The participants were sorted out of a population of 134 intermediate students in Zabansara Language School in Khorramabad based on their scores on a Preliminary English Test (PET) and an idiom test piloted in advance. The selected 84 participants were divided randomly into three groups: two experimental groups, namely, conversation and paragraph writing groups, and one control group. The two experimental groups received different treatments. In one class, idioms were taught and learners were asked to make a conversation practicing the new idioms, and in the other class, they were asked to write short paragraphs using the idioms. In the third class, the control group, the new idioms were presented and then practiced through different written exercises. At the end of the treatment period, the researchers administered an idiom posttest. The analysis of the collected data revealed that using new idioms in conversation and paragraph writing helped students learn idioms more efficiently than just practicing them through different written exercises. Moreover, the use of idioms in conversation proved to be more effective than using them in paragraph writing. The findings can have implications in preparing materials, teaching/learning foreign languages, and designing syllabus.

Although images are abundant and play significant aesthetic and pedagogical roles in today’s EFL course books, they are still one of the less explored areas of research. The present study is an attempt to examine the role and function of images in Iranian high school EFL course books; it also aims to cast a critical eye over their suitability and efficiency. To this end, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) model of visual grammar was adopted. The findings revealed that although the informative and/or illustrative functions of the images make them important resources in Iranian high school EFL course books, their full potential for language learning does not seem to be adequately exploited. This relates to flaws at the representational mode of meaning making, such as outdated portrayal of objects, gender stereotyping, and overdramatizing national identity as well as shortcomings at the interactive mode, such as poor modality due to grayscale printing and plain graphics with no contextualization or pictorial detail. These flaws make the images seem out of today’s world and hardly credible for high school students who are already adept at new technology. Since these shortcomings may sacrifice pedagogical objectives, the study calls for changes in both technical quality and underlying messages of images in the course books.

An overview of pedagogical interventions in the field of interlanguage pragmatics reveals the under-exploration of the processes in which changes in learners' second language (L2) pragmatic competence are established and that most of these investigations have focused on the product or final outcome of the learners' pragmatic development (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Kasper, 1996; Vyatkina & Belz, 2006). This study aimed to provide a qualitative analysis of the microgenetic development of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' pragmatic knowledge of request speech act. A total of 140 male and female participants received instruction on request strategy types and internal and external modification devices for seven sessions (weeks) through consciousness-raising (C-R) tasks. The data were collected after instructional sessions during the first, third, fifth, and seventh weeks through discourse completion tests (DCTs). The results indicated that, in the course of time, the participants stopped using direct request strategies and employed conventionally indirect strategies more frequently in situations involving high-status interlocutors and high-imposition requests. Moreover, as time progressed, the learners became more preoccupied with pragmatic appropriateness rather than grammatical correctness. The results of the study suggest that C-R instructional tasks offer an effective means of teaching pragmatics. Considering request speech act, learners should become conscious of the significance of concepts such as status and imposition as well as internal and external modification devices in request formulation.

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.

هدف از مقاله حاضر بررسی توانش شناختی مدرسین متخصّص زبان انگلیسی می باشد که برای نخستین بار به عنوان بخشی از جدیدترین مدل تحت پژوهش راجع به تعریف تخصّص در آموزش زبان انگلیسی در حیطه زبان شناسی کاربردی مطرح است. بدین منظور، تحقیقات پیشین در این زمینه مطالعه گردید که ماحصل آن استخراج ده تم شناختی بود که سپس از طریق مصاحبه هایی که با صاحب نظرانِ این رشته انجام گرفت مورد بررسی بیشتر واقع شد. مصاحبه شونده ها شامل اساتید دانشگاه در رشته زبان انگلیسی، تعلیم دهندگان معلمین زبان و نیز مدرّسین برجسته زبان انگلیسی در ایران بودند. ده تم استخراج شده مورد تأیید ایشان واقع شد که در نهایت شامل موارد ذیل هستند: سرعت در شناخت الگوها، توجه گزینشی، دیدگاه کلی نگر، حافظه برتر، سرعت در کدگزاری اطلاعات، قدرت پیش بینی، نگرش به نقش معلم، آگاهی از موقعیت-محور بودن رویدادهای کلاسی، آگاهی از سطح دانش، و برقراری ارتباط بین دانش پیشین و دانش جدید. در این مقاله هر یک از تم ها به همراه گزیده ای از سابقه تحقیقات پیشین و توصیفاتی از نظرات مصاحبه شوندگان به تفصیل آمده است. هم چنین بر این نکته تاکید شده است که ویژگی های شناختی مدرسین متخصّص تنها یک بعد از چند بعد مدل توصیفی تخصّص در آموزش زبان انگلیسی می باشد که در یک رساله تکمیلی دوره دکتری تخصّصی این رشته در حال تدوین می باشد.

В контексте гуманизации и гуманитаризации образования большое внимание уделяется индивидуальным способностям человека. Обучающийся становится активным участником образовательного процесса. Изучение языков является одним из основных компонентов, помогающих ребенку развить свою индивидуальность, сформировать межкультурную коммуникативную компетенцию, способствующую успешному общению с представителями других культур на изучаемом языке, это путь к ценностям цивилизованного мира. В связи с этим в статье представлены положения гуманистической педагогики, рассматриваются основные этапы изучения иностранных языков в мировом пространстве и в российской школе.