مطالب

This study analyzed the requirement of English education for arts students and the language needs for arts administrators in the workplace in Taiwan. A total of 83 participants, comprising 37 graduate students majoring in the arts and 46 company administrators in art-related jobs, responded to a questionnaire requesting their opinions concerning English education. The results indicated that the language skills that the students required were similar to those that company administrators used in the workplace. Reading was the skill that company administrators used the most, and speaking was the least used skill. However, among the 30 language tasks, the comparison of mean scores indicated a discrepancy in needs between the students and company administrators. The arts students required sufficient vocabulary and adequate reading practice, because they were required to take English proficiency tests as a graduation requirement and their course materials included English articles and journal papers. Regarding the company administrators, introducing artwork and presenting products were crucial because they must sell artwork. The results can serve as fundamental information for reforming and preparing English curricula and courses tailored to the needs of arts students in Taiwan.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the validity of the English section of Iranian Universities PhD Entrance Exam in TEFL. To this end, 15 EFL learners from university of Isfahan who were in their last semester of that MA education were invited to contribute to the study. A group of 5 university lecturers were also asked to support the study as expert judges. A TOEFL reading paper was used to divide the participants into three ability groups, each consisting of five learners. Think-aloud study was used to find out the strategies each ability group used when completing the test. All the participants completed the reading section of the PhD Entrance Exam while verbalizing their thoughts. The verbal reports were transcribed and coded based on Barati’s (2005) taxonomy of Test-taking strategies. The Chi- square analysis of the think aloud protocols revealed that Monitoring and Evaluation strategies were used significantly more than other strategies by all ability groups. Moreover, the results indicated that the high ability group of test takers were more successful compared with others in maneuvering among different type of strategies. Further, different patterns of strategy use were observed in the three ability groups. The findings of the present study may be of interest to the PhD Entrance Exam developers as well as EFL material designers and classroom instructors.

The nature of heterogeneity issues within the context of Iranian, English language learning contexts in high schools is one of the under-researched lines of inquiry. For this aim, a researcher-made, Likert-type questionnaire whose items were initially validated through a multi-stage, exploratory research design among 30 teachers was distributed among some 67, Iranian EFL teachers with different degrees of experience (less vs. more) to find the teachers’ concerns/challenges and their strategies to tackle them. The findings suggested that the concerns behind heterogeneous classes were not consistent regrading weak and strong students. In the second place, it became evident that the order of tendency towards adopting the four enunciated strategies was not the same in the two less and more experienced teachers. Possible interpretations regarding teacher outlook as mapped on ‘teacher experience’ to target heterogeneity issues were presented in the end.

The study aimed to investigate students’ self-efficacy, self-esteem, and attitude as determinants of their writing performance. The participants for the study were 373 South Gonder Zone Preparatory School students who were chosen using multistage sampling technique. Questionnaire and writing test were employed to gather data. Pearson’s Correlation technique was used to analyze the associations among the variables of this study. A standard multiple regression technique was used to check the combined effect of the students’ self-efficacy, self-esteem and attitude on the writing performance of students; a Stepwise regression technique was used to check the effect that each predictor variable could have on the students’ writing performance. Also, ANCOVA was employed to compute the independent effects of the students’ self-efficacy, self-esteem and attitude on the students’ writing performance after age and gender were adjusted. The study revealed that (1) the variables were significantly and positively correlated to each other; (2) the combined effect of the independent variables on students’ writing performance was R2 = .222 which means that 22.2% of the variation in the students’ writing performance was explained by the composite impact of self-esteem, attitude and self-efficacy of writing; (3) the independent effects of the three predictor variables on writing performance were found to be significant although attitude was identified as the only predictor of writing performance when age and gender were controlled. The study concludes that self-efficacy, self-esteem and attitude have significant roles in predicting performance of writing though attitude takes the lion’s share in determining the latter.