درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Based on the importance of virtual classrooms and due to the inevitability of using them in difficult situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the current study was an attempt to investigate the perception of high school EFL teachers toward virtual learning systems' experience. Also, probing the perception of high school EFL teachers toward virtual learning systems' opportunities, exploring the perception of high school EFL teachers toward virtual learning systems' challenges and threats, and informing the educational society of the solutions to the barriers of virtual learning systems based on the perception of high school EFL teachers were the other objectives of the current study. To this end, the attitudes of 120 EFL teachers (males=67, females=53) with the age range of 30 to 50 who were teaching at different high schools of West Azerbaijan province, Urmia, Iran, were gathered via a researcher-made questionnaire. The results of the study show that although high school teachers faced some barriers such as low internet access, low interaction, and low concentration by learners, actually they actually have positive attitudes toward the use of digital learning, particularly in virtual classrooms. Furthermore, the findings showed that data retention power and quick and easy access were favored by most of the teachers, and they believed these two items can be regarded as positive opportunities. In addition, teachers presented some comments such as adding visuals to the virtual classrooms, using chat boxes, and planning interaction hints to resolve the virtual classrooms’ existing problems such as poor connection and low concentration. The implications of the study will be discussed.

Combining Bachman’s (1990) conceptualization of content validity with Messick’s (1989) unifying model of construct validity, this study attempted to fill the gap in researching content validation in the context of a university reading achievement test by (a) examining traditional content validity evidence and (b) analyzing the test scores to either back-up or rebut the evidence and explore the construct of the underlying test structure. On a sample of 477 third-year English-majored test takers at a Central Vietnamese University (CVU), the study was conducted in the pre-test stage where the test content was compared with the test specification and the post-test stage where the test scores were processed via Rasch and CFA competing model analyses. Results showed that while content relevance was satisfactory and the test construct was to a large extent not threatened by construct-irrelevant variance, content coverage of the test remained problematic with instances of construct underrepresentation. Moreover, the study supported the one-factor model of general reading ability as the underlying structure of the reading achievement test over the correlated three sub-skill and higher-order factor models. The study bears implications for both test writers in designing and test takers in performing the L2 reading test.