مطالب

Teacher professional identity is widely acknowledged as a multi-dimensional dynamic evolving concept contributing to teachers’ self-perception about their professional roles. This qualitative study aimed to explore how different instructional settings of teaching English as a foreign language in Iran impacted on teachers’ professional identities in a comparative way. To this end, 25 English teachers from public schools and private institutes of Kerman were interviewed to collect data and to examine how teachers conceptualize themselves at schools and institutes. All 25 participants (13 school teachers and 12 institute teachers) had a BA degree in English. Data analysis revealed that teachers of public schools had comprehended, strong, and thick initial professional identity in comparison to those teaching in private institutes. However, such an ideal professional identity was more vulnerable to professional identity shock that resulted from the discrepancy between initial professional identity arisen from pre-service training programs and an emergent one derived from the identity-in-practice in class life. In terms of preparation to teach, the findings showed that the teachers of public schools had more extended viewpoints towards teaching and its significance. Moreover, they believed that their identity influenced the teaching profession while the institute teachers believed in teaching influence on their identity that provided evidence for the variable nature of teacher professional identity resulting from parallel interconnections of different macro and micro factors leading to its steady reinterpretation and reshaping. Keywords: dyna

This study sought to examine the type and frequency of tasks in the Iranian high school English course books (Prospect 1, 2, 3 & English Book 1, 2, 3). The corpus was analyzed based on Nunan’s (1999) framework composed of five main task types, namely cognitive, interpersonal, linguistics, affective, and creative. To this end, the whole content of the aforementioned course books went through content analysis separately and accordingly descriptive and inferential results were reported regarding the frequency of each task type. The results showed that the linguistic tasks were the most recurrent type, whereas some task types (e.g., affective and creative) were totally absent. Furthermore, based on the results of Chi Square test, a significant difference was observed in the frequency of task types. While, according to communicative approach, communicative competence necessitates the inclusion of grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, and strategic competencies, the findings of the current study revealed that linguistic competence was overemphasized in these course books. This fact may lead to learners who are competent in producing linguistically appropriate utterances, which may at the same time be inappropriate with regard to context. The findings can have significant implications for EFL teachers and materials developers in making them conscious of the fact that the application of different types of tasks in textbooks is an important standard leading to more competent language users, especially in an EFL context like Iran.

There is little research on the task-based teaching approach in senior secondary L2 English writing classrooms. This study carried out an exploratory sequential mixed methods study to explore the suitability and adaptations of task-based language teaching in the domain of secondary schools in small cities. First, the researcher surveyed six EFL senior secondary teachers of different teaching experiences in China by convenient and purposive sampling to get background information, then had semi-structured interviews with them individually. To followed the interviews, the researcher surveyed 148 students via an online questionnaire also by convenient and purposive sampling. Findings indicated that, although most teachers acknowledged the usefulness of TBLT, they regarded it unsuitable and unfeasible in the context of Chinese senior secondary L2 writing classrooms. Also, students in the study ranked clear instruction and vocabulary increase as the first two contributors in improving their L2 English writing. But half of all students also valued an interesting writing classroom and took it as a third facilitator to develop their writing. Besides, adaptations were suggested to include professional task design, teacher discussion, reward mechanism and teacher profession development. In the future, further research is needed to examine the findings in this study, generalizing them to different contexts, ages and domains, and exploring teachers’ individual differences and their choice of teaching approaches.

Textbooks are considered as the common features of the classrooms and are important means to make contributions to curricula. Therefore, their contents are very essential to develop the adequate curriculum planning. A textbook analysis is a means by which different features of the textbooks can be analyzed and hence their effectiveness is validated. This study set out to evaluate the content of Vision 1, the textbook of Senior High School, grade 1, in order to investigate in which six levels of cognition in Bloom’s (2001) Revised Taxonomy of Cognitive Domain the activities of the four skills of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing would be graded. Thus, the activities of the textbook were codified based on the coding levels in Bloom's Revised Taxonomy of Cognitive Domain. Then, the data were analyzed and the frequencies and percentages of occurrence of various codes related to the cognition levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy were calculated. The results of the study did not detect any evidence for the presence of higher levels of the cognition and thinking process in the textbook activities related to the four skills. In other words, all activities in the domain of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing were classified in low levels of cognition, namely Remembering, Understanding, and Applying and failed to nurture the students for high levels of thinking skills. The findings provided some supports for supplying complementary materials by the teachers in order to train the learners for higher levels of the cognition.

This article intends to identify the use and typify the functions of tag questions (TQs) in Persian everyday conversations and dialogic interaction. The analyses were made based on two data sources: A documentary film titled Commander in which the participants are engaged in free interactions, and an audio-recorded instrument named CALLFRIEND which consists of Iranian native speakers' communication on the phone. The datasets were transcribed using CHAT conventions by the researcher. Also, two raters were involved in the coding process and several rounds of coding and discussions were carried out in an effort to fine-tune the functional classification. This study found some overlap between Persian TQs and the ones from other languages, which confirms speakers' presupposition accounting for the largest portion of the corpora. However, there have been found some functions, namely holding the floor, scorning hearer, and ordering or encouraging, which do not conform to any existing classifications of tag questions. The study was implemented within the principles of Conversational Analysis, and the researcher has explored the relationship between the functions and their settings in which conversations were uttered, the expected response, and any other influential sociolinguistic factors.

This study investigates the benefits of e-collaborative and collaborative writing tasks on the perception of Iranian EFL learners in a process-oriented approach. The study involved 74 intermediate Iranian EFL students at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan Branch. They were divided into three groups by random assignment as two experimental groups and one control group. The experimental groups were required to perform their tasks in collaboration; only one of these two groups had access to the Telegram Application outside the classroom. The control group, however, followed the conventional method of learning how to write. The participants were required to write two journals during the course. They were asked to write about their understanding, attitude, and experience on the writing activity. There were 136 diary entries to be analyzed in order to discover the themes in them. These themes were literally the emerging concepts in the diary entries related to research question of the study about the participants’ perception. After the identification of these dominant themes, content analysis was performed to interpret the data. According to the results of the study, a high percentage of students’ satisfaction showed positive perceptions of e-collaborative activities, and they reported that the instructional implementation of an e-collaborative writing project with a five-stage writing process did assist EFL learners to accomplish a collaborative writing task.