درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Communicative language use largely entails regular patterns consisting of pre-constructed phrases or sequences. These sequences have been examined by many researchers to find the situation-based formulas which may help L2 learners follow a possibly more target-like speaking system. This study, therefore, explored two categories of formulaic expressions including speech formulas and situation-bound utterances used by EFL learners. The randomly selective participants included 30 intermediate and 30 advanced learners, who performed a total number of 120 role-play tasks focused on the situations which required the use of thanking, requesting, offering, and apology speech acts. Audio-recorded data from role-plays were transcribed and analyzed based on existing lists of speech formulas. Results showed that the participants produced more than 102 types of formulaic sequences that could be called “a list of pragmatic routines for thanking, requesting, offering, and apologizing speech acts in the EFL context”.  This list includes 44 and 58 speech formulas and situation-bound utterances, respectively. Results further indicated that advanced language learners used more diverse situation-bound utterances in terms of its internal and contextual complexity than their counterparts in the intermediate group due to expert judgments. Because these formulas can increase coherence in speaking, and enhance effective and natural communication, their instruction could be part of the language teaching curriculum.

The purpose of the present study was first to offer a tentative solution to the problems observed in writing pedagogy in Iran by devising a more comprehensive approach to genre-based writing instruction. In the second phase, a quasi-experimental research design was adopted to determine how effective the model was in writing instruction, compared with the traditional, product-oriented approach, as well as Swales’ genre-based approach. The participants were selected randomly and then divided into three groups: A control group (CG) (N=8) that received product-oriented instruction, Swales’ model (SM) group (N=8), and the system-nested, genre-oriented, structurally mediated model (SGSM) group (N=7). The results obtained through One-way ANOVA revealed that the SM group outperformed the CG group on the posttest of writing. Moreover, the SGSM group outperformed the other two groups on the posttest of writing. The pedagogical and theoretical findings of the study were then discussed.

The objectives of the present study were threefold: First, it sought to investigate difficulties Iranian EFL high school learners face to understand English idioms. Second, it attempted to explore intermediate EFL learners’ language learning strategy preferences to comprehend idioms. Third, it aimed to examine whether there was a significant difference between successful and less successful students' strategy use in idiom comprehension. To this end, 200 Iranian male and female students of the three grades of different senior high schools in Qom, Iran, were selected through convenience sampling. They responded to a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire (Alhaysony, 2017), investigating the challenges of idiom comprehension. Afterwards, they took the Oxford Quick Placement Test. Ninety-eight of them were selected as intermediate learners. Third, they took a multiple-choice test on idiom comprehension, developed by the researcher, and responded to the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (Oxford, 1990). Descriptive statistics, frequencies and means, and a one-sample t-test were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that the participants complained that idioms were challenging mainly because they were not taught well in class and were not part of the course syllabi. They also revealed that successful learners in understanding idioms used all six categories of strategies in the high and medium levels. They employed metacognitive strategies the most (M= 3.88), but affective strategies the least (M= 2.84). The results of the t-test suggested significant differences between successful and less successful learners' strategy use. The results provide insights into the challenges and strategies of English idiom comprehension.