students’ perceptions

Classroom climate has been demonstrated to associate with individuals’ various attributes and outcomes. Recent research has also confirmed students’ goal orientations deserving to be recognized as a significant achievement-related outcome. In this line, the current study intended to examine the relationship between Iranian EFL students’ perceptions of their classroom environment and their achievement goal orientations. The study also aimed to see whether different genders held different perceptions concerning the main study variables. To accomplish this aim, 570 high school students were randomly recruited and the two scales of students’ perceived climate questionnaire (WIHIC) and achievement goal orientation questionnaire (AGQ) were applied. The results indicated that learners held distinct perceptions of classroom climate and different goal orientations with gender having a significant influence on some of their components. Furthermore, correlations were obtained among diverse factors of the study scales. The findings provide implications for understanding the EFL learners’ perceived classroom climate and their achievement goals and hence planning the learning environments taking into account the students' goal orientations and the significant role of gender.

In an effort to examine EFL students’ and teachers’ perceptions about the role of implementing flipped teaching in the university context, a mixed-method research approach was employed. To this end, 80 male and female Iranian advanced EFL learners majoring in English translation, literature, and English teaching and 204 Iranian EFL instructors were selected. They answered the flipped teaching questionnaires, then ten percent of the participants (8 students and 20 teachers) volunteered for follow-up qualitative data collection procedures (i.e., the interview) to let the researchers produce more profound responses to the related concepts of the study. Then, the data collected from the questionnaires were coded and analyzed. Also, the qualitative analysis of the research was done using the interview transcripts to support the quantitative analysis results of the research. It included content analysis requiring the examination of the participations' interviews transcripts. The findings of the quantitative part revealed that a majority of students held positive perceptions about engagement, effectiveness, attitudes, and positive affect through flipped instruction constructs in the flipped teaching class. University instructors also had an inclination towards implementing flipped teaching on the whole for the constructs named language improvement, attitudes about flipped instruction, better education through flipped instruction, and difficulty of implementing flipped instruction. The qualitative investigation confirmed the previously-stated results to a great extent in that the EFL students and instructors generally preferred employing flipped teaching and they had positive perceptions about the role of this approach.

Lexical richness in written language production has been examined in different contexts and in relation to different genres but research into the effects of within-genre topics on lexical richness is still limited and takes little account of learners’ perspectives. The present study therefore sought to understand the effects of topics on lexical richness (lexical density, lexical diversity and lexical sophistication) in written essays by Vietnamese EFL learners. Data were collected from sixty-four English-major university students who each wrote four essays on four different topics across two genres (persuasive and descriptive) in their normal classes as progress tests. Ten students were also interviewed after they had completed all the essays to understand their perceptions of the writing topics. Lextutor’s VocabProfile was used to obtain measures of lexical density, lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. The results showed mixed effects of writing topics on these three lexical measures. Learner perspectives provided insights into how cognitive and affective individual factors contributed to the complexity of topic influence. Pedagogical implications are discussed in regard to how to enhance productive lexical use in writing through task selection and instructional planning.