مطالب

The current research was an effort to study the interaction of gender with text enhancement and meta-cognitive grammar instruction on learning and recall of English grammar. To this end, two groups of students consisting of 51 learners from both genders were formed. The participants were 51 male and 51 female learners. The 51 participants of each gender were further divided into two groups. Then, an OPT was administered to ensure homogeneity of the participants in terms of grammatical performance as well. Following that, two of the groups received text enhancement method and the other two groups received metacognitive instruction for learning grammar. Finally, the groups sat for a grammar posttest as well as a delayed posttest. When looking within groups, it was found the in metacognitive groups, males performed better on grammar posttest and delayed posttest in comparison with females. Regarding text enhancement groups, males and females did not significantly differ from each other both on posttest and delayed posttest. Finally, it was concluded that gender has the potentiality to affect the outcome of instruction when the role of input is considered in grammar instruction.

In this study, we attempt to bring to light various organisational and implementational clashes relevant to the conceptualisation of language policies at national level, and the planning of local practices with regard to degree programmes, language journals and conferences in Iranian higher education. We also prove that in its current status, the ELT syllabus in Iran, both at national and local levels, is a mixture of English Language Teaching, Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics (a hotchpotch), which suffers from ‘regulatory barriers’. The paper asks for an in-depth language policy and planning (LPP) that would clarify the blurred boundaries between ELT, Applied Linguistics, and Linguistics in Iranian higher education. This paper recommends that there should be a change regarding language-in-education policy and planning in Iran; a change that would be able to address both theoretical and applied language problems at national and local levels. The attempt should begin with organising a clear and comprehensive language planning with regard to language programmes. This would mean carefully determining the scope and boundaries of the fields as ELT, Applied Linguistics, and Linguistics in the higher educational context. The subsequent challenge is to fix the problematic implementation of language programmes at the local level, considering language journals, conferences, and syllabuses. The findings presented in this work are useful for language policymakers to regulate language-in-education policy and planning in Iran.

This paper focuses on the impact of an asynchronous online discussion forum on the development of students’ ability in and attitudes toward writing in English. Two groups of third-year students (N = 60) majoring in English were assigned to two treatment and control groups, each receiving different types of feedback. Students in the treatment group were required to participate in an online learning environment and exchange feedback with their peers, whereas students in the control group received the traditional face-to-face feedback provided by the teacher. The results of a pre-test, a post-test, and a survey revealed that students’ writing in the treatment group significantly improved, both semantically and syntactically, and they expressed more positive attitudes toward writing. The findings also indicated that as a result of engaging in the asynchronous online discussion forum and exchanging feedback with peers, students exhibited more control over their work, involved more effectively with the learning tasks, collaborated more with their classmates, and employed self-assessment strategies to independently revise or rewrite their work. The implications of the study offer guidelines to improve and facilitate writing skill in EFL contexts.

The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the rhetorical relations between text segments were identified. The texts were read aloud by 18 high-proficient Persian learners of English. We measured pause durations preceding segments, F0-maxima (as a correlate of pitch range) and speech rates of the segments. Results suggested that speakers give prosodic indications about hierarchical level by means of variations in pause duration but not pitch range or speech rate. Furthermore, it was found that speakers articulate causally related segments with shorter in between pauses and at faster rate than non-causally related segments. However, they did not vary any of the prosodic measures to distinguish between important vs. unimportant segments. Overall, the results suggest that (1) variations in pause duration and speech rate are not used systematically by Persian EFL speakers as fully structured cuing devices to indicate organization of spoken discourse, importance of sentences and meaning relations between sentences; (2) pitch change structuring as a cue to discourse prosodic prominence is completely absent in Persian learners' text production. The results are not consistent with earlier findings of prosodic realization of text structure and content in English native speakers' discourse data, but are in line with those obtained for non-native spoken discourse.