مطالب

This study was conducted in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) context to explore Iranian teachers' perceptions of their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and their sense of professional identity (PI) as well as to scrutinize how their cognitions were practiced in EAP classes. To this end, two ELT teachers and two content instructors (i.e. subject experts who teach EAP courses in addition to their specialized field of study) from a university in Tehran participated in the study and their classes were observed for a full academic semester. To thoroughly probe the teachers' cognitions, semi-structured interviews were also conducted. The results of content analysis indicated some commonalities but major discrepancies in the cognitions and practices of the two pairs of teachers with regard to their PCK. Teachers of both camps claimed to have interactive EAP classes where group work is highly appreciated and students' questions are welcomed. Attending to their discrepancies, the content instructors seemed to adhere to 'transformative' education by reflecting on their teaching, hearing learners' voice, being responsive to their learning needs, and encouraging teacher-learner collaboration. On the other hand, the ELT teachers reflected a more 'traditional' approach, leaving behind issues of flexibility and innovation in their teaching methods. As far as the EAP teachers' PI is concerned, the study came up with eight factors as the underlying constituents of their PI. It was also found that pedagogical content knowledge and professional identity are interrelated attributes of EAP teachers. The findings provide implications for syllabus designers as well as EAP teacher education.

An interesting area of psycholinguistic inquiry is to discover the way morphological structures are stored in the human mind and how they are retrieved during comprehension or production of language. The current study probed into what goes on in the mind of EFL learners when processing derivational morphology and how English and Persian derivational suffixes are processed. 60 Iranian EFL learners at intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency whose proficiency level were determined through Oxford Quick Placement Test, participated in masked priming experiments using E-prime software. Two separate priming tasks in Persian and English were conducted during the course of this study. The target words were primed in three ways: identity (careful""careful), related (care""careful) and control primes (desire""careful). Participants’ reaction times were measured by E-prime software and were fed into SPSS software for further analysis. The results indicated that Proficiency plays a role in the way derivational morphology is processed, because at lower proficiency levels more decomposition was detected while more proficient participants utilized more whole-word representation. Furthermore, Persian learners of English processing of the derived words could not be assigned strictly to decomposition or whole-word representations in the mind. What seems more plausible to assume is that highly frequent words (whether base or suffix frequency) as well as derived words with more productive suffixes are stored as whole words but lower base and morpheme frequency ones and those with suffixes having less productivity are decomposed. These findings lend further support to dual route model.

In spite of the highly beneficial applications of corpus linguistics in language pedagogy, it has not found its way into mainstream EFL. The major reasons seem to be the teachers’ lack of training and the unavailability of resources, especially computers in language classes. Phrasal verbs have been shown to be a problematic area of learning English as a foreign language due to their semantic opacity and structural differences between English and learners’ first languages. To examine the pedagogic potentiality of the use of corpus linguistics in the context of EFL, the present study aimed at comparing the effect of paper-based data-driven learning (DDL) activities, as a substitute for online DDL activities, with the activities designed based on dictionary entries in terms of their effect on learning phrasal verbs in both short and long run. To this end, the study adopted a quasi-experimental pretest posttest control group design. The analysis of the data collected through an immediate posttest as well as a delayed posttest showed that the DDL activities led to greater improvements by the participants. Based on the results of the study, it is argued that paper-based DDL activities can be used effectively in EFL classes to enhance learning and help learners to become more autonomous in their learning efforts.