درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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 (RC) and critical thinking (CT) are the two basic cognitive skills that should be developed through involving language learners in a carefully planned instruction. Multiple intelligences (MI) instruction may assist learners in developing RC and CT in L2 education. This study probed the effect of MI-based reading instruction on the Iranian EFL learners’ RC and CT skills. In so doing, it compared the effectiveness of an MI-based reading instruction with a traditional one. To this end, 4 intact classes from several English language institutes, comprising 56 Iranian intermediate-level EFL learners, were selected and randomly assigned to MI-based (experimental) and traditional (control) groups. A multiple- choice RC test, a reading summary test, and the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal test were used as the instrumentations to collect data on the participants’ RC and CT. Analysis of covariance revealed a significant effect for the MI-based reading instruction. Furthermore, the RC scores increased more significantly in the MI-based group in comparison to the traditional one. However, the CT scores did not significantly improve in both groups. There was also no statistically significant difference in the CT scores between the two groups after the treatments. Iranian EFL educators are, then, encouraged to develop MI-based lessons and activities for diverse students and take explicit instruction for the enhancement of CT skills in EFL reading courses

این تحقیق تلاشی در فعال کردن دانش لغوی غیرفعال از طریق توجه دهی و بررسی تأثیر جمله نویسی به عنوان فعالیت پس توجه دهنده بر تقویت تأثیر توجه دهی است. چهل و دو دانشجوی زبان انگلیسی سطح متوسط به بالای بزرگسال خانم، در دو گروه هم سطح از یک دانشگاه سراسری انتخاب شدند. آنها در تحقیقی شرکت کردند که در آن توجه به کلماتی که تولید آنها به آسانی فهمیدن آنها نبود، از طریق علامت زدن آن کلمات در یک متن خواندن انجام شد. سپس، شرکت کنندگان در یک فرآیند ٤ هفتگی جمله نویسی متراکم/ پراکنده شرکت کردند؛ شرکت کنندگان یک گروه هر هفته در طول ٤ روز پی در پی در هر روز، یک جمله با یکی از ١٦ لغت توجه شده نوشتند و گروه دیگر این فرآیند را یک بار در هفته تجربه کردند، به گونه ای که آنها بدون هیچ وقفه زمانی، ٤ جمله با ٤ کلمه توجه شده نوشتند. نتایج نشان داد که ارائه فعالیت پس توجه دهنده بر ارتقاء دانش لغوی تولیدی هر دو گروه به طور معناداری تأثیرگذار است. تعامل بین عامل زمان و روش های یادگیری معنادار بود. همچنین، نتایج عملکرد گروه پراکنده بهتر از گروه متراکم بود، ولی این تفوق معنادار نبود.

Although decades of research have well elaborated on teacher professional development, we still do not have a thorough picture about what teacher professional development could entail and what components it consists of. The present study aims to develop and validate a teacher professional development scale in an Iranian English foreign language context. An initial tentative model with 130 items was piloted and tested through exploratory and confirmatory data analyses on a sample of 400 EFL teachers. This level resulted in the removal of 28 items in our sample loaded, resulting in a final 102 teacher professional development inventory. The developed inventory measures the extent to which EFL teachers are professionally developed and makes teachers aware of multiple characteristics of professionally developed teachers. These competencies are essential components of teacher professional development, enabling the teachers to utilize them in everyday teaching and learning practices in the classroom settings which, as a result, leads to student achievement. As teachers fulfill important professional roles, they need valid instruments to assess their day-to-day functioning in the class. With the instrument developed and validated in the current research, we, in fact, allow language teachers to assess their extent of professional development in different pedagogical contexts.

This article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study was designed to explore the effects of changing complexity dimensions on listening task performance and to achieve two aims: to see how listening comprehension task performance was affected and to investigate possible overlaps between EFL learners’ perceptions of task difficulty and hypothesized task complexity. A purposive sample of 54 first-year EFL learners randomly assigned to two parallel conversation classes in an English department of a major public university participated in the study and performed listening tasks in a language lab. The instruments used for data collection were seven tasks taken from a TOEFL Test Preparation Kit, each followed by listening comprehension questions and an item on the participants’ personal perception of the difficulty of the task. During counter-balanced administrations, the tasks were manipulated for one of the four dimensions of task difficulty (adequacy, immediacy, perspective, and prior knowledge). The resulting data included the participants’ perception of difficulty as well as their performance scores under less complex and more complex conditions. One-sample T-test and correlation analyses of the data revealed that for all of the four complexity dimensions, the hypothesized less complex task condition led to better learner performance. The correlation between learner-assigned difficulty score for the task at hand and theoretical task complexity level was significant only for the immediacy dimension (r=-0.67, p<.05). The results offer support for task complexity frameworks, raise doubts about learners’ perceptions of tasks, and imply possibilities for task manipulation in language learning contexts.

امروزه موضوع ارتقای سطح آموزش در سیستم های آموزشی نوین، مسئله ای مهم است. کیفیت آموزش به عوامل گوناگونی از جمله فعالیت استاد، فعالیت زبان آموزان و مواد درسی وابسته است. در این کار پژوهشی نقش تأثیر مواد درسی برروی کیفیت زبان آموزان در محیط های آموزشی ایران بررسی می شود. بر همین اساس، در این مقاله نقش مطالعه متون ادبی در خانه در بالابردن سطح کیفیت آموزش، تجزیه و تحلیل می گردد. منظور از مطالعه در خانه، مطالعه ای است که زبان آموزان برای تکمیل و بهبود مطالعه مواد درسی مرتبط با موضوعات آموزشی و فهم بهتر محتوای آن ها در خارج از محیط آموزشی به آن می پردازند. مؤلفان معتقدند که مطالعه آزاد متون ادبی در خارج از وقت های آموزشی می تواند تأثیر به سزایی بر روی کیفیت آموزش زبان روسی داشته باشد. در این مقاله برآن هستیم تا مشخصاً با ذکر دلایل و شواهدی تأثیر مثبت مطالعه آزاد متون ادبی را بر روی کیفیت آموزش زبان روسی به دانشجویان فارسی زبان اثبات کنیم و درعین حال معیارهای لازم را برای انتخاب متون ادبی برای دست یابی به هدف فوق و نیز مقدار و نحوه مطالعه آن ها ارائه نماییم.

The importance of demotivation in language learning has been overshadowed in the commonplace research on language learning motivation and even in mainstream psychology (Dörnyei, 2005). The purpose behind conducting this study was to investigate the relationship between students’ demotives for studying in general and English language in particular. Besides, the importance of educational context was investigated through explaining the changes in students’ responses based on the type of university and gender. In Iran, university education is highly important for youngsters and the type of university with their various contexts is determining for their future. There are popular state universities among which one technical university as well as its satellite campus were selected. Besides, a distance-education and a unisexual university were represented in the present sample, overall comprising 194 bachelor students of different majors. Consequently, the factors considered as demotives are ranked, elaborated on and analyzed in order to shed light on the educational context-specific demotives and the pros and cons of current practices of EFL instruction in the universities.

Language and culture are now deemed to be co-constitutive; hence English language teaching (ELT) textbooks should incorporate cultural aspects and promote intercultural competence. However, careful decisions should be made as regards to the cultural content of materials and the ways in which culture is represented. This study was an attempt to deconstruct the patterns of cultural representation and intercultural interactions in Interchange textbooks, an ELT textbook series taught to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Iran. Using content analysis of texts and images and with the focus on nationality, gender and race, it examined how different cultures were reflected in Interchange 1, Interchange 2, Interchange 3, and whether cultural bias or inequality was present. The quantitative and qualitative data analysis revealed that the white male group was dominant in all three textbooks. And, to use Kachru’s (1985) terms, inner, outer and expanding circle nationalities were represented in the textbooks, with the expanding circle constituting the major nationality, but American culture of inner circle was predominant. Additionally, the interactions were mainly limited to superficial aspects of the target culture although these textbooks sought to show various intercultural interactions. Dominance of male and white characters and the US culture indicated inequality in race and gender, and the superficial treatment of culture in the textbooks. Less attention to the hybrid culture and deeper level of intercultural aspects, i.e. critical reflections, in the textbooks suggests that the materials be supplemented by EFL teachers’ constructive discussion of the cultures that interact.

تحقیقات متعدد نشان داده اند که اصطلاحات زبان شناسی و محدوده توصیف کننده های خارجی موجود در یک زبان از زبانی به زبان دیگر متفاوت است. پژوهش حاضر به بررسی شباهت ها و تفاوت های میان فرهنگی توصیف کننده های خارجی در کنش گفتار درخواست می پردازد. بدین منظور،پرسشنامه ای از 30 دانشجوی عراقی و 30 دانشجوی مالایی دانشگاه علوم مالزی جمع آوری شد. قالب نظریه مدیریت روابط اسپنسر اوتی (2008) برای آنالیز توصیف کننده های خارجی بکار گرفته شده است. داده های این تحقیق از پرسشنامه ای در قالب آزمون تکمیل گفتاری که از 8 موقعیت تشکیل شده جمع آوری شده است. داده ها سپس براساس طبقه بندی توصیف کننده های خارجی عاریه گرفته شده از بلام کالکا،هاوس و کسپرآنالیز شده است. هدف اولیه این تحقیق مقایسه تاثیرعوامل موقعیتی بر تحقق الگوی توصیف کننده های خارجی کنش گفتار درخواست بین دانشجویان عراقی و مالایی می باشد. نتایج این تحقیق می تواند در مطالعات میان فرهنگی و بین فرهنگی موثر باشد.

Materials evaluation studies have constantly demonstrated that there is no one fixed procedure for conducting textbook evaluation studies. Instead, the criteria must be selected according to the needs and objectives of the context in which evaluation takes place. The speaking skill as part of the communicative competence has been emphasized as an important objective in language teaching. The present study explored the core units of spoken grammar inherent in four widely-used ELT textbooks following McCarthy and Carter’s (2002) classification. A coding scheme was developed to make it possible for the researchers to use the classification in codifying the data. The data were then analyzed to detect the units of spoken grammar inherent in the target textbooks. Results from codification of dialogues and transcripts of audio recordings showed that the units of spoken grammar are not evenly distributed in these ELT textbooks. In addition, a significant difference was found between the textbooks in their inclusion of different categories of the spoken grammar.

Although explicit and implicit knowledge of language learners are essential to theoretical and pedagogical debates in second language acquisition (SLA), little research has addressed the effects of instructional interventions on the two knowledge types (R. Ellis, 2005).This study examined the relative effectiveness of explicit and implicit types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of four morphosyntactic features by four measures of explicit and implicit language knowledge. The measures included: oral elicited imitation, timed and untimed grammaticality judgment, and metalinguistic knowledge tests. A pretest and two posttests were conducted immediately and three weeks after the instructional interventions. Durable effects of FFI on low intermediate Iranian learners were found for the target language forms.In particular, explicit and implicit FFI positively facilitated the development of explicit and implicit knowledge of the target features, both immediately after the instructional interventions and, marginally decreasing, over time. Also, explicit FFI was more effective than implicit FFI as measured by both explicit and implicit knowledge tests. The findings may contribute to understanding of the efficacy of explicit and implicit FFI on L2 learners’ controlled (explicit) and spontaneous (implicit) use of morphosyntactic forms at relatively early stages of L2 acquisition.

در مطالعات توجه به ساختار و شکل زبان، میزان جذب به عنوان نشانگر تاثیر فعالیتهای تمرکز بر روی ساختارهای زبان و تسهیل فراگیری آن در درازمدت عنوان شده است. با این حال، تمام مطالعات صورت گرفته در این زمینه بر اساس مشاهدات ضبط شده از کلاسهای ارتباط-محور بوده است. پژوهش حاضر تلاش نوینی برای اندازه گیری میزان جذب با استفاده از برگه های ثبت میزان جذب بر اساس 18 ساعت تعامل ارتباط-محور و معنی-محور بین یک مدرس و زبان آموزان ایشان می باشد. در این راستا، بر اساس داده های ضبط شده تمام موارد توجه پیشگیرانه به ساختار و شکل زبان نشات گرفته از طرف مدرس و یا زبان آموزان و میزان جذب آنها از طرف زبان آموزان شناسایی و دسته بندی شدند. سپس، این یافته ها با میزان جذب ثبت شده توسط زبان آموزان در برگه های جذب مورد مقایسه قرار گرفت. نتایج این تحلیلها نشان داد که میزان جذب در برگه ها نسبت به مقدار آن در مشاهدات شفاهی در مورد ساختارهای زبانی که از طرف معلم مورد تاکید قرار گرفته بود بسیار بیشتر بوده است. اما این موضوع در مورد ساختارهایی که از طرف زبان آموزان به صورت پیشگیرانه مورد توجه قرار گرفته بودند مورد تایید قرار نگرفت. نتایج این پژوهش کمک شایانی به روشن نمودن بیشتر برداشت محققین و مدرسان زبان انگلیسی در مورد ماهیت و میزان واقعی جذب می نماید و زمینه های جدیدی را برای کاوش بیشتر میزان جذب معرفی می نماید.