درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The primary purpose of the present study was to explore whether there was any significant relationship between attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction of Iranian EFL teachers on the one hand, and their choice of teaching strategies. Strategies mostly used by participants of the study with low, mid, and high levels of self-efficacy comprised another purpose of the study. To this end, a questionnaire was developed, piloted, validated, and its reliability was estimated for collecting the required data. Subsequently, based on cluster sampling, 420 male and female teachers from three different educational districts of Tehran responded to the questionnaire. Three separate MANOVAs were run to investigate the effect of teachers’ attitudes on strategies they employed for teaching grammar, vocabulary, and reading. This was followed by the same approach to study the effect of teachers’ self-efficacy and job-satisfaction levels, as well. The results revealed a significant relationship between three factors (attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction) and teachers’ choice of teaching strategies. Moreover, based on the scores obtained from the answers to the questionnaire, participants were classified into three levels of low, mid, and high which corresponded with their degrees of attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction. Accordingly, it was shown that high level of attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction strongly affected teachers’ use of vocabulary teaching strategies; mid to high level of attitude and efficacy affected use of reading and grammar strategies. Also, it appeared that strategies for teaching vocabulary are used more frequently among teachers than grammar and reading.

Investigating the “knowing”, a module of the KARDS model proposed by Kumaravadivelu (2012) for teacher education, of Iranian teachers of learner autonomy, this study is an attempt to illuminate some of the yet unexplored areas of teachers’ various types of knowledge of learner autonomy. Furthermore, it attempts to illustrate how Iranian Non-EFL teachers’ knowing affects their practices with regard to learner autonomy and how this could differ from that of Iranian EFL teachers. To that end 112 EFL and Non-EFL teachers were purposefully cluster-sampled. Based on convenient sampling but only after data saturation was reached were 12 teachers interviewed. Based on the result of the interviews and the data gleaned from the literature a questionnaire was developed. The sample were asked to complete the questionnaire and then through negative case analysis some were interviewed. The questionnaire tapped into the social, political, psychological and personal aspects of learner autonomy. The results indicated the informants, be it EFL or non-EFL, found learner autonomy to be a psychological construct, which can be traced back to their personal knowledge. Finally, with regard to the feasibility and desirability of learner autonomy implementation in the education system, the informants see learner autonomy as more of a desirable concept than feasible. It is hoped that teachers and teacher educators find the results as well as the suggestions-for-action made at the end of the study helpful and that the results have tangible implications for the Iranian education system when fed into professional development activities and strategic planning.

Abstract in every research paper has always been functioning as an attention-grabber which can encourage readers to keep reading the research or to dissuade it. Although abstracts are believed to play an important role in distributing the research findings, few studies have been done to evaluate the rhetorical organization of thesis abstracts, especially in the field of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). Thus, the purpose of the present study was to analyze the rhetorical moves of the MA thesis abstracts written from 1988 to 2015 in the field of TEFL in Allameh Tabataba’i University (ATU), an Iranian university. To this end, 300 MA thesis abstracts were analyzed based on Hyland’s (2000) rhetorical move framework. To track the rhetorical move trends of the thesis abstracts and for the ease of analysis, they were analyzed in three time intervals. The results revealed that while in the first interval (1988-1997) the most frequent rhetorical moves were the “Purpose”, “Method”, and “Product”, in the other two intervals (1998-2007 and 2008-2015) the “Purpose” was the most used rhetorical move. In addition, the least frequent rhetorical moves were the “Introduction” and “Conclusion” for the three intervals. The findings, on top of these, indicated that the rhetorical move patterns of thesis abstracts moved from Purpose-Method-Product (P-M-Pr) to Introduction-Purpose-Method-Product-Conclusion (I-P-M-Pr-C). That said, it can be concluded that in the examined thesis abstracts, the highest average of information was provided on the “Purpose” of the study, while the other moves, especially the conclusion move, was not deemed important; moreover, an increasing rate of information provision was detected on the “Method” and “Product” moves. This research bears some implications for L2 learners to better know their community of practice and writing instructors to prepare genre-based writing materials.

The sociocultural approach to writing strategy use emphasizes the importance of context and the mediating resources that learners can use to enhance the quality of their performance in writing (Lei, 2008). Accordingly, the present study explored the sociocultural strategy use of a convenient sample of 105 BA level students of English Language and Literature who had passed essay-writing courses in a state university in Iran by analyzing their responses to the items of a newly-developed sociocultural strategy use questionnaire consisting of different sub-scales, namely, artifact-mediated, rule-mediated, community-mediated and role-mediated strategies. The results of the descriptive statistics revealed that the tool-mediated strategies, which are the subcategory of artifact-mediated strategies, had the highest frequency of use which is rather justified in the context of Iran. In addition, the students’ overall strategy use and their writing ability were correlated and a statistically significant relationship was found between these two variables. However, the results of the multiple regression analysis indicated that none of the sub-scales had a unique predicting power in accounting for the learners’ writing ability. The researchers also compared the sociocultural strategy use of more- and less-skilled student writers and found a significant difference in the strategy use of different individuals.

Task difficulty across different macro-genres continues to remain among less attended areas in second language development studies. This study examined the correlation between task difficulty across the descriptive, narrative, argumentative, and expository macro-genres. The three components of task difficulty (i.e., code complexity, cognitive complexity, and communicative stress) were also compared in the four macro-genres. The design included the administration of short reading texts with comparable length and readability indices based on the four macro-genres followed by task difficulty questionnaire. The macro-genre-based reading textsalong with the task difficulty questionnaire were administered to 50 EFL students in the University ofLorestan, Iran. Task difficulty questionnaire explored the learners’ perceptions of task difficulty in the code complexity, cognitive complexity, and communicative stress domains. The results revealed that there were no significant differences among the task difficulty components in the four macro-genre-based text types. The findings also showed that there was no significant correlation between task difficulty of each macro-genre with those of the other genres except thoseofthe narrative and expository genres.The findings hold implications for the use of macro-genres with different task difficulty indices in task-oriented programs, teacher training, and testing.

Using a mixed methods design, the present study attempted to identify the factors influencing Iranian untrained EFL raters in rating group oral discussion tasks. To fulfil this aim, 16 language learners of varying proficiency levels were selected and randomly assigned to groups of four and performed a group discussion task. Thirty two untrained raters were also selected based on their volunteer participations. They listened to the audio files of the group discussions and assigned a score of one to six to each language learners based on their own judgments. They also provided comments on each language learners’ performance pointing to why they assigned such scores. The researchers had an interview with the raters after the rating session as well. The quantitative phase investigated whether linguistic features of accuracy, fluency, complexity and amount of talk were attended to by the raters in terms of having any relationship to the scores the raters assigned. Speech rate as an index of fluency and amount of talk turned out to be significantly correlated with the scores. Of more importance was the qualitative phase with the aim of identifying other factors that may account for the scores. The comments provided by the raters on each score and the interviews were codified based on Content Analysis (CA) approach. It was found that the raters attend not only to the linguistic features in rating oral group discussions, but they are also sensitive to the interactional features like the roles the participants take in groups tasks and the overall interaction patterns of the groups. The findings of this study may shed light on group oral assessment in terms of training the raters rating group oral tests and developing rating scales specific for group oral assessment.