مطالب

English coursebooks used in vocational secondary schools should accommodate the engineering students’ needs for their future profession. It is essential to reveal company trainers’ and engineers’ perception of the English coursebook used at school to know whether the English coursebook meets students’ needs for their future profession or not. Therefore, in this study, we investigated company trainers’ and engineers’ perception of the English coursebook that is used at vocational secondary schools based on the social semiotic perspective. We distributed open-ended questionnaires and conducted in-depth interviews to both engineers and engineering company trainers as professionals about the topics and registers provided in the English coursebook. The results of data analysis revealed that the topics and registers in the coursebook are not relevant with what students need for their future profession as engineers. In fact, both engineers and company trainers believed that the English coursebook should provide topics and registers related to the engineering field. Thus, we hope that the findings of this article would positively contribute to the development of English materials and coursebooks for vocational secondary school level.

Enhancing speaking ability is an important component of the acquirement of a language. The innovative aspect of this study is improving speaking ability through online strategy-based instruction by applying the Moodle course management system as an instructional platform. To this end, a group of 80 Iranian female and male students at the advanced level participated in the treatment. Participants of the study were divided into four groups of 20. The subjects in experimental groups benefited from two particular instructional focuses of this study include social and affective strategies. In order to assess the effect of the treatment pre and posttests design were utilized. Consequently, the data were analyzed through One-Way ANOVAs and t-tests. The findings revealed that strategy treatment was successful in improving the participants’ speaking ability. Therefore, the findings suggest that online strategy-based instruction can positively influence the speaking ability of Iranian advanced EFL learners. In addition, a questionnaire from Kitchakarn (2015) was employed to understand students’ perceptions and attitudes toward computer-based learning. The statistical analysis of the questionnaire revealed positive attitudes of participants toward computer-based learning.This study may have pedagogical implications for material practitioners, CALL package designers and distance learning planners to include strategy instruction in English courses.

Forty general English teachers at the university level attended three supervisory sessions. The qualitative data were collected through a triangulation of various techniques, including: pre/post-supervision semi-structured interviews, classroom observation checklists, reflective journals, field notes, and transcriptions of audio-recorded data from supervisory meetings. Thematic analysis was used to identify recurring themes at each layer of the onion model. The Chi-square analysis revealed a significant difference between teachers’ attitudes and strategies before and after the supervisory meetings. The results demonstrated that teachers experienced a process of growth with a developmental trajectory from the outer layers to the inner layers of the onion model fostering the core qualities of self-confidence, self-efficacy, self-awareness, and autonomy. Furthermore, the analysis indicated that the supervisor played a significant role in teachers’ development by using supervisory strategies such as: empathetic listening and accepting the problems, empowerment by activating core qualities, giving attention to inner obstacles, giving balanced attention to cognition, emotion, and motivation, and help to get autonomy in core reflection. The findings support making deliberate efforts to establish regular supervisory practicum meetings as part of academic professional culture, and the core reflection approach as a valuable strategy.

Advantages of language teaching and learning in foreign contexts are undisputable. This study intended to check if Reasoning Ability (RA), as a promoted cognitive skill which is emphasized not only in the field of education, but also as an important element of most professions, is cognitively enhanced along with English language learning. To this end, a sample of Iranian primary school children, aged 5-8 years, were selected through purposive sampling and divided into thtree groups; that is, monolingual, bilingual, and limited bilingual children, in order to investigate their RA enhancement during early formal education. Also, a researcher-made psychometric test was used to measure quantitative, visual, nonverbal, matrix, and abstract reasoning of the sample during early primary school education. The results of the analyzed data indicated that the bilingual group outperformed the monolingual and the limited bilingual children in matrix, visual, abstract reasoning and logical thinking. The findings of the study can be used by educational policymakers to reconsider the primary school curriculum, and through holding workshops on streghthening national and religious values help English language instructors to unravel related problems.

This qualitative study aimed at critically analyzing the curricular materials for the teaching of English in Iran. The objective was to evaluate the adequacy of the content and ideological assumptions of EFL textbooks, focusing on the conceptual metaphors related to the concept of success. The study was conducted within the frameworks of Critical Pedagogy and Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA). The spirit of these two approaches lies in their rejection of all forms of domination, establishment of a theoretical discourse that enables social action, and detection of the hidden relationships between language, power and ideology through metaphorical encodings. To achieve the objective of the study, the analytical tools proposed by Chartres-Black were employed. The results of material analysis revealed that preparation and imposition of cultural materials may create situations in which identity conflict and violence are inevitable, and that the avoidance of such situations requires educators to intervene, with a mentality that education is liberating practice.  

EFL teachers’ professional identity is a multi-dimensional and complicated concept. It is influenced by many other issues in the educational context such as reflective practice. This study intended to explore the relationship between professional identity and reflectivity of Iranian EFL teachers. It also aimed to examine how high and low reflective teachers perceive the professional identity components. The participants were 89 EFL teachers teaching at three universities in Shiraz, Iran. Their selection was based on convenience sampling. The participants were asked to fill out two questionnaires including teacher professional identity questionnaire (Liou, 2008) and teacher reflectivity questionnaire (Akbari et al., 2010). Pearson product correlation coefficient revealed that there was a positive relationship between EFL teachers’ professional identity and reflectivity. Furthermore, the findings of regression analysis indicated that reflectivity could predict EFL teachers’ professional identity. Furthermore, the participants were categorized into two high and low reflective groups. Two groups were interviewed to examine the professional identity perceptions used by high and low reflective teachers. The thematic analysis showed that high reflective teachers used and implemented much more professional identity components in their teaching practice in comparison to the low reflective teachers.

Unlike Lexical Projections, Functional Projections (Extended Projections) are more of an ‘abstract’ in nature. Therefore, Functional Projections seem to be acquired later than Lexical Projections by the L2 learners. The present study investigates Iranian L2 learners’ acquisition of English Extended Projections taking into account their level of grammatical proficiency. Specifically, the aim is to identify the level of grammatical proficiency at which the acquisition of Extended Projections could occur in the process of learning English by the Iranian students. Two hundred and seventy Iranian female L2 learners of English participated in this study. Participants were administered three tests with a ten-day interval between each test. First, an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was used to classify the participants’ level of grammatical proficiency. Second, a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) was administered in order to assess the learners’ ability to recognize grammatical problems in Extended Projections. Finally, a picture description task (PDT) was administered to examine the learners’ ability to produce grammatical Extended Projections. The results indicated that the learners are able to recognize and produce English Extended Projections even at lower levels of grammatical proficiency. The results also showed that the learner’s recognition and production of English Extended Projection improves with their increased level of grammatical proficiency.

The current study was an attempt to investigate the impact of grouping type on the grammatical accuracy of Iranian EFL learners in collaborative writing. Through administering the Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency, 64 female university students available participated in this study and were assigned to two groups--heterogeneous and homogeneous. The treatment process lasted 12 weeks of collaborative writing and revising, with emphesis on the development of the the participants’ written grammatical accuracy. They were pretested and posttested through a descriptive free writing measure. The results revealed that the participants in both groups had higher posttest scores. Using ANCOVA, it was found that there was a differential effect of grouping type on the grammatical accuracy of homogeneous and heterogeneous pairs, indicating that the participants in heterogeneous group had significantly higher posttest scores than those in homogeneous group. Furthermore, although the grammatical accuracy of both groups increased, a significant difference was observed between them, revealing that the participants in heterogeneous group outperformed those in homogeneous group. The findings of this study can be interpreted in terms of the sociocultural theory and Vygotsky’s idea of the zone of proximal development.

The focus of current research is the translation of psychology book titles. There are numerous studies in the field of titles translation, but they are restricted in Persian context. The aim of this study is thus to investigate the translation strategies used by Persian translators when transferring English psychology book titles into Persian. To achieve this objective, 245 titles of translated psychology books published from 2007 to 2013 in the field of personal success were first gathered from Isfahan Municipality Library, some local bookstores and online sources. Then, the types of original titles and their translations were examined based on Genette (1989) categorization. The findings thereof revealed that most of the titles had the form, title plus subtitle in both languages in terms of structure. The forms of the titles were also analyzed, and it was discovered that nominal titles were the most frequent ones in the source text and translators preferred not to change the original structure. Next, the corpus was analyzed based on Vinay and Darbelnet’ (1995) model and the findings showed that the modulation was the most frequently-used translation strategy. It was also revealed that the translators were inclined to change the semantics and point of view of the source language. The second most frequently-used strategy was literal translation, showing the popularity of direct translation strategies. Finally, the functions of titles were analyzed based on Nord’s (1995) model. Since functions are highly subjective and cannot be tabulated, they were discussed one by one in the discussion section of the study. The findings of this study can boost the theories of title translation and provide the functional issues of translation studies with new insights.