مطالب

Speaking and listening are essential language skills used as a measure for evaluating the students’ proficiency level. These skills receive more importance in the Iranian new educational curriculum by the publication of new English book series. However, as noticed in some of the classes, the purpose of mastering oral language abilities is not efficiently fulfilled. Accordingly, the present collaborative action research aimed to firstly identify the reasons underlying students’ inability to perform oral skills in order to do the online activities in classes and secondly provide some suggestions to solve the existing problem. The study was conducted in a junior high school in Marand, Iran. The participants included 36 female 9th-grade students, who met on the Shad application and were selected based on convenience sampling. Class observations, interviews, and students’ performance in language tasks were used to collect the required data. Gaming was implemented as the selected solution in a separate class planned for focused speaking and listening activities. More specifically, sentence-expanding games on different levels (adding words to a simple sentence to expand it and also adding sentences to the initiating sentence and making a short story) were used as the main methods in these sessions. The findings from the descriptive statistics indicated an improvement in students’ motivation and engagement in speaking activities, as well as their accuracy in making sentences. They also showed positive attitudes toward the use of these game-based tasks in EFL classes. The study provides practical implications for materials developers and language teachers.

Purpose: Social capital plays an important role in the success of any organization, including the education organization. As a result, the purpose of this study was presenting a social capital management model in the general directorate of education in Kermanshah province with a grounded theory approach. Methodology: This research in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of implementation method was mixed (qualitative and quantitative). The research population in the qualitative part was experts and senior managers of education in Kermanshah province and in the quantitative part were the principals of primary schools in Kermanshah province. The sample size in the qualitative part was estimated according to the principle of theoretical saturation 11 people who were selected by purposive sampling method and in the quantitative part was estimated according to Krejcie and Morgan table 332 people who were selected by random cluster sampling method. The research instrument in the qualitative part was a semi-structured interview and in the quantitative part was a researcher-made questionnaire, whose psychometric indices was confirmed and for data analysis was used from the methods of coding in MAXQDA software and exploratory factor analysis in LISREL software. Findings: Findings showed that in the central category of social capital management in education, causal conditions including categories of organizational factors, social factors and individual factors, contextual conditions including categories of social bonds of employees, cultural and social commitments and sustainable social development, intervening conditions including categories of legal requirements and frameworks, civic participation networks, organizational policies and organizational culture, strategies including categories of knowledge management, organizational resilience, job turnover and organizational participation and outcomes including categories of organizational outcomes, individual outcomes and social outcomes. Other findings showed that the factor load of all sub-categories except sense of identity on causal conditions, all sub-categories except collective power on contextual conditions, all sub-categories except success and education on intervening conditions, all sub-categories on strategies and all sub-categories except human capital accumulation, social cohesion, organizational learning, organizational entrepreneurship and interpersonal trust on outcomes were confirmed. Conclusion: Regarded to the importance of identified categories and concepts for the social capital management in education, planning is essential to improve the categories through their concepts.