Taxonomy

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 purpose of this study is to prioritize the development of social responsibility in the food industry based on the taxonomy method. The method of this research is qualitative-quantitative, which in the qualitative stage of the research, using in-depth interviews with food industry experts, Experts were identified by purposeful sampling and snowball sampling, and due to the adequacy of the data, a total of 13 experts were interviewed. The model was fitted using a questionnaire based on structural equations with Smart PLS software based on base theory and in a quantitative stage of research.  In this study, 149 questionnaires were collected from a number of companies active in the food industry in Tehran and Zanjan provinces. In the second phase of the research, those food industry experts in the selected provinces were considered as cluster sampling classified as community. The required number of samples was determined based on the sample adequacy method.  The model was fitted and the model was approved and finally using taxonomy method, degree development of food industry responsibility was achieved. According to the results of the research, Zarmakaron Company was able to occupy the first rank among nine companies.

Writing is considered one of the most difficult skills in EFL/ESL. Thus, meticulous recognition and classification of students’ errors in certain contexts is a worthwhile endeavor which provides us with both diagnostic and prognostic power. Accordingly, a total of 430 students in 15 English writing classes held during 12 consecutive semesters in a private university in central Taiwan were the subjects of this study. They composed 5703 essays which were rated and coded by the authors. Adopting and modifying the error taxonomy proposed by Zheng & Park (2013), the authors classified a sum of 63460 errors into four main groups with their subsequent subcategories. This study revealed that the highest problematic areas for Taiwanese university students were ‘misformation’ with 51.55% of the whole including errors in tenses, parts of speech, prepositions, subject/verb agreements, and run-on sentences. Then, ‘omission’ errors ranked second with 21.30% including errors in articles, plural suffix-s, and relative pronouns. Finally, the third and fourth error types were ‘others’ with 15.13% including spelling, capitalization, and wrong vocabulary, and ‘addition’ with 12.01% containing errors in articles, unnecessary words, and conjunctions. This study provides numerous genuine samples from the students’ compositions being annotated based on the applied error taxonomy. Thus, the data presented in this study can provide researchers with a practical framework for future studies in error analysis, as well as pedagogical implications in the field.