درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Sandwich and cake formats of interventionist Dynamic Assessment suffer from two problems: both are time-demanding, and the intervention presented to the learners varies from one learner to another.  To suggest a solution to the above problems in teaching and assessing reading strategies, the present researchers have introduced ‘sauce’-format mediation through which intervention is provided for the learners within ‘mediation boxes’ along the test. Thirty Iranian intermediate EFL learners participated in the study. They were first given a non-mediated reading pretest, and then they took the same test along with a ‘mediation box’ following each question to observe the probable effect of ‘sauce’-format mediation.  To measure the transcendence of the given mediation, the participants answered a non-mediated delayed posttest at the end.  Comparing the means of the mediated posttest and non-mediated pretest on the one hand and those of the non-mediated delayed posttest and the pretest on the other revealed that the learners benefitted significantly well from the ‘sauce’-format mediation and could transfer their learning to a novel context. Findings of this study are consistent with the previous research on DA that intervention supports learner development.

Washback or backwash, used similarly, has been defined as the impact of testing on curriculum design, teaching practice, and learning behaviors. Iranian PhD candidates’ performance on this exam is required to pursue PhD study; therefore, degrees of washback both at the micro and macro levels are at stake. Despite the importance of this exam for the candidates, it seems that studies on washback and specifically washback effect of EPT on Iranian PhD candidates’ learning materials has not been given adequate attention in Iran. Given this, the present study attempts to examine the washback effect of EPT on Iranian PhD candidates’ learning materials. Based on sequential design, two phases of data collection were conducted with a two-week interval. In the first phase, attitude questionnaire was administered to 200 Iranian PhD candidates at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan (Khorasgan) branch. In the second phase of the study, 20 Iranian PhD candidates were interviewed. Finally, the collected data from both the questionnaires and the interviews were analyzed via quantitative and descriptive analysis, respectively. The results of the study revealed both positive and negative washback impacts on learning materials. The findings of the study have practical implications for language teachers in general, and EFL language teachers, syllabus designers, and material developers in particular.

There is scarce systematic research on the role of genres and their associated discourse features in Information Structure and its syntactic representations in Persian. The current descriptive, corpus-based study, therefore, aimed to investigate three different genres of Persian spoken language; that is, political, scientific and daily conversation, in terms of their Information Structure as realized through four syntactic devices of clefting, pseudo-clefting, passive and preposing. To this purpose, 1000 different utterances related to each of the mentioned genres, were extracted from the multi-media archive of IRNA (Iranian News Agency) website and daily conversations of the researchers’ family members and friends, based on Lambrecht’s theoretical framework in modeling the Information Structure. The collected data were then transcribed, the syntactic devices were identified, and descriptive statistics were used to see how the above syntactic devices are represented in each genre type. The results revealed that the devices are represented differently in the three genres of political, scientific, and daily conversations. This finding may be of interest to linguists and language theoreticians.

The present study aims at scrutinizing the inference complexity level (henceforth ICL) of test items of the Iranian State University TEFL Ph.D. entrance exam (ISUTPEE) from 2010 to 2017 through the lens of Kintsch's construction-integration theory (C-I) (Kintsch, 1988, 1998). Though there is ample research on inferencing in the field of reading comprehension, the existing literature reveals a serious gap in relation to inferencing complexity of test items in high-stakes exams that exert profound effects on the academic achievements of the individuals. Inferencing is examined in this study to explore the ICL of the test items of the Special Knowledge Test (SKT) according to three levels of memory representations of Kintsch's model: the surface model, the textbase, and the situation model. To this end, the test items for eight consecutive years of the ISUTPEE were examined in relation to the three distinct kinds of mental representations. To ensure the reliability of coding by the researchers, two other specialist coders assessed the ICL of 33% of the items. The intraclass correlation among the three sets of codes was 0.91. The results of the study showed that a large number of questions, accounting for more than 80% of the items, merely activate the surface and the textbase model of information representations in memory. Furthermore, the ICL for each of the four parts of SKT was examined. This analytical study carries a stark warning regarding a deficiency of systematic attention to ICL in the development of test items.

Some universities in Iran have recently witnessed a shift in admission criteria from university admission test performance towards high school records. This sudden change seems to be unwarranted since the predictive power of high school records has not been explored. To fill in this gap, this study aims at showcasing the predictive validity of high school records for undergraduate students of English language and literature. To this end, a random sample of undergraduate students studying at Shahrood University of Technology were selected as the participants, the predictor variables were operationally defined as the participants’ grade point average (GPA) in three school subjects including English, Persian and Arabic languages along with their overall high school GPA, and the explained variable was operationalized as the participants’ overall GPA for the first academic year. The results of Pearson correlation revealed a significant but very low correlation between the variables of interest. Moreover, the results of multiple regression analysis revealed that none of the predictor variables well predicts academic success in English language and literature. Although the results of this study are case-specific, they have clear implications for policy makers and interested researchers nationwide.

Although global English Language Teaching (ELT) coursebooks have been subject to numerous (critical) analyses, the changes occurring to their contents over different editions have received scarce attention. In this study, the researchers examined the transformations over different editions of Interchange series (level 2) regarding some selected aspects of their textual contents. Seeking experienced English teachers’ views of the global coursebooks’ transformations over the past decade was another aim of the study. The analysis and comparison of the included topics and titles, characters, sites and contexts in Interchange series as well as interviews with 12 English teachers revealed that the content-based changes of different editions of this coursebook are superficial and cosmetic-like and despite the claims for globality, fallacies such as real-life-ness, representation and globality are still evident. We hope the findings of the study would aid curriculum and policy makers, institute managers, and language teachers to reconsider the functioning and value of current global ELT coursebooks.