مطالب

This study investigates the effect of homogeneous and heterogeneous peer interaction on the development of Iranian EFL learners’ writing skill. Sixty female students of TEFL participated in the study. The participants were divided into two groups based on their English proficiency test scores. The homogeneous group consisted of 14 participants paired with partners with similar English proficiency test scores, while the heterogeneous group consisted of 16 participants who were paired with partners who had higher test scores. The pairs had interaction and peer collaboration before carrying out three types of writing tasks. The Repeated Measures ANOVA was used to compare the student writers’ pretest writing scores with their three post-test scores. The results showed that both groups, very similarly, had significantly higher post-test scores in all three writing tasks. The findings are explained based on the sociocultural theory and Vygotsky’s notion of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). The study offers several important pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research.

The shift of emphasis away from written to oral skills has stimulated an incipient concern in second language research to investigate ways of helping second and foreign language learners achieve higher degrees of oral proficiency. Priority solely taken over accuracy, complexity, or fluency of speech might be justifiable with regard to the context in which learning takes place. Accuracy and complexity have been suggested as paramount concern in syntactic processing typical of instructional contexts. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of a training program on the grammatical complexity of 114 English Major Students at Islamic Azad University-Tabriz Branch at three different planning levels. A 2x3 factorial design was employed with two levels of metacognitive training, trained and untrained, and three levels of pre-task planning, on-line task planning, and pre/on-line task planning. It was hypothesized that the trained participants would produce more complex speech than the untrained ones, and that various planners would produce speech with varying degrees of complexity. Yet, the findings revealed no significant difference in terms of grammatical complexity among the trained and untrained participants. The findings suggest proficiency level and learners' attitudes and goals as main factors influencing the complexity of oral speech.

Communication strategies (CSs) are systematic attempts by language learners to encode or decode meaning in a target language in situations where the appropriate target language rules have not been formed. Based on this view, communication strategies can be seen as compensatory means for making up for linguistic deficiencies of second or foreign language learners. Within the conceptual framework outlined, this paper is a report on a research conducted at Azarbaijan Teachers Education University on the students majoring in English Language and Literature. The main aim was to seek a relationship between the subjects’ use of communication strategies in solving communication problems and their proficiency levels in English as a foreign language. The data was collected by means of one-to-one interviews with the participants, and were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results indicated that the frequency of communication strategies applied by the participants varied according to their proficiency levels, i.e. low proficient learners tended to employ more communication strategies in comparison with high and moderate ones. The type of communication strategies employed also varied according to their oral proficiency level. It was revealed that high level participants employed more L2-based communication strategies where the low proficient learners used more L1-based ones.

Task-based learning and teaching in the realm of teaching young learners is still considered an adventure since very few experimental studies to date have tackled its applicability in that age group. The present research was an attempt to find out whether using task-based reading activities has any impact on the development of text comprehension in Iranian young learners studying English as a foreign language at the beginner level. Two groups of 25 students, aged 11 to 13, were the participants of the study. Through a reading pretest, it was ensured that the two groups were at the same level and belonged to the same population in terms of the reading skill. Having instructed the experimental group with four task types and the control group with classical reading activities, the researcher compared the reading performance of the two groups through a t-test which, not surprisingly, manifested the better performance of the experimental group. A follow-up reading test also showed that the experimental group still enjoyed a higher level of reading skill after one month. Furthermore, the scores gained from the four task types were compared and it was concluded that the students performed better in tasks which involved creativity and gave them the experience of playing.