درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Listening plays a significant role in daily communication and educational processes. In spite of its importance, listening has long been the neglected skill in second and foreign language acquisition, research, teaching, and assessment. However, on account of the entire challenges EFL learners encounter in classrooms due to the listening complexity, some pre-listening activities as supports in the procedure of teaching listening are proposed by experts in the field. This research investigated 80 male and female learners in 2 groups of 40, who were selected randomly, to determine whether pre-listening activities have a significant effect on listening comprehension of English texts. It also investigated whether there was a significant difference between male and female learners on pre-listening activities in terms of their effects on the comprehension of English texts. To do this, subjects first took a TOFEL test, which served as a pre-test, to make it possible to have homogeneous learners in a control group and an experimental group. In the experimental group, some pre-listening tasks, through which the learners received general prior information about the content of the listening texts, were performed. Then, they listened to and answered some multiple-choice comprehension questions which asked for the specific information in the listening texts. However, the control group’s listening comprehension tasks were destitute of pre-listening activities. The results of the analysis of the data obtained at the end of the experiment revealed that the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group. It also showed that females outperformed the male group. In other words, the treatments appeared to have a significant effect on the performance of the experimental group (and especially female learners therein) in listening comprehension.

The development teams who are geographically spread, culturally mixed and mainly depend on information and communication technology (ICT) for communication is defined as a global virtual teams (GVTs). Despite the advancement of technologies, achieving the efficient performance of GVTs remains a challenge. The reviewed literature has highlighted the importance of training and development, organizational commitment and motivation in enhancing the performance of GVTs. This study aims to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs), measures, and variables for assisting the GVT performance in global software development projects (GSD). In addition, this study aims to measure the GVTs performance involving online training and development, organizational commitment, and motivation in GSD projects. A survey was conducted among 103 respondents. Then, the performance measurement model (PMM) for GVTs in GSD projects was proposed based on the result of the survey. Finally, the project managers validated the study model. The proposed PMM includes four major components, namely performance measurement processes, mapping strategy for performance evaluation, measurements and performance analysis. The results showed the validity of the proposed model and confirmed that the PMM can assist project managers in measuring the performance of GVTs in GSD Projects.