مطالب

In an attempt to liberate teachers from deficiencies of the conventional methods, Kumaravadivelu (1994) proposed the concept of “post method condition” to overcome the challenges caused by the very nature of methods. The literature regarding post-method pedagogy has indicated that most of the studies focus on its theoretical aspect, while the practical realization has been largely untouched. To this end, the present study was an endeavor to unveil the perspective of Iranian EFL teachers concerning the applicability of this pedagogy. 21 male and female in-service EFL teachers from different cities in Iran (Shiraz, Marvdasht, Bushehr, Tehran, and Gonbad-e-Kavus) participated in this qualitative research where data came from semi-structured interviews as the primary source of data collection. The interview data were transcribed and coded using Straus and Corbin’s (1998) constant comparative method, including three codification processes of open, axial and selective codings. The finding indicated that absence of required autonomy among teachers, teacher’s job security, students’ passivity, absence of critical thinking skills among students, dominance of transmission model of teacher education, inefficiency of the textbooks, teacher’s focus on coverage and grade pressure, and demanding nature of post-method pedagogy as the main pedagogical barriers which prevent language teachers from applying this pedagogy in their teaching practices.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation as focus-on-form tasks tending to encourage the acquisition of nominal clauses (NCs) in English. It explored (a) whether textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation would promote and enhance the knowledge of NCs, (b) whether these two tasks would differ in terms of enhancing learners' knowledge of nominal clauses, and (c) whether learners' use of self-regulatory capacity for grammar acquisition would have differential effects on textual enhancement and explicit explanation groups. A test of recognizing noun clauses and a test of producing combined sentences were used as both the pretest and the posttest to measure the achievement of first-year undergraduate university students in four intact classes. A grammar self-regulation questionnaire was also administered to measure the use of self-regulatory capacity. The findings demonstrated that both textual enhancement and explicit instruction contributed to developing grammatical knowledge of the learners at both recognition and production level. The results also showed that the learners who received textual enhancement used their grammar self-regulatory capacity more effectively in developing their receptive knowledge of NCs. It can be concluded that textual enhancement, which provides learners with less explicit instruction, pushes them to use their self-regulatory capacity more effectively in improving receptive knowledge of grammar.

From a Systemic Functional perspective, Grammatical Metaphor (GM) as is taken to be a chief driving force in the discourse of different genres, an important adult language machinery for ideational meanings to be semantically cross-mapped and realized through a different form in the stratum of the lexico-grammar, in order to convey changed meanings and tinker with the discursive flow and development of text in real time, mainly through nominalization of adjectives and verbs. Using a number of established works of the English novel as data, this study draws upon the author’s previous model for the categories of GM used in modern prose fiction, with the main focus placed on one of the six categories, Prepositional GM (PGM). PGM figures with a very high frequency in fiction and occurs when a GM is preceded by a preposition. This study finds that the language of prose fiction in English deploys some of these PGMsin either of two different meaning sof the adverbial, varying according to context. Again, as seen to be the hallmark of GM by many, GM is found to open up vast ideational meaning potentials in the semantics stratum, from which the lexico-grammar makes choices according to context and intended meaning. As argued elsewhere in the literature and here, and as backed up by the author’s own experience of the advanced teaching of writing and reading, broadened understanding of GM is a critically important component to writing instruction and its effectiveness, as seen in the large-scale horizons and agendas for effective teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Iran and beyond.

This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read sentences containing ambiguous relative clauses in their L1 and L2. The results showed that L2ers adopt the same strategy as that used by English native speakers in both of their languages, indicating a target-language like parsing pattern in their L2 and an attrition of L1 parsing routine. Additionally, their attachment preferences were not modulated by WMC in L2. This result highlights the “skill-through-experience” position adopted by researchers who question the role of WMC in L2 syntactic parsing. However, high-capacity L2ers' preferences in L1 had attrited (becoming English-like), and low-capacity ones had no preference. This modulation, too, can bear out the above position owing to the observation that L2ers failed to differentiate between their L1 and L2, and particularly that their differing WMCs did not contribute to native-like performance in their L1.