Educational Psychology

The interdependency between education and psychology has been valued for a long time and the educational psychology as an interdisciplinary field reconciling these two disciplines has been introduced to the field of teacher education. However, theoretically present in teacher training programs, the practical ways of applying educational psychology has not gained enough attention. The interviews with 21 Iranian EFL teachers and educators reveal that those teachers start their career after doing a teacher education course, do not have enough awareness to deal with learners’ cognitive and emotional problems. Therefore, the researchers tried to put psychological theories into practice through assigning some mini-action research during the teacher education courses. To check the effectiveness of the method, two groups (experimental and control) were selected and then their awareness of psychological issues while reflecting on their teaching process were compared after the treatment. The qualitative findings of the study indicate that the method was successful in increasing pre-service teachers’ psychological awareness towards language teaching. The method is beneficial for those designing and planning teacher education courses.

What is learning after all? Being the cornerstone of educational psychology, this question has not lost its appeal since there still is no consensus over it. What makes providing a careful definition of learning important is that such definitions carry important pedagogical implications which might not be equally beneficial. This theoretical paper, therefore, has tried to define learning by a novel interdisciplinary approach through connecting educational psychology to philosophy. It has started with the dilemma of a lack of consensus over the definition of definition itself and the necessity for holding a theory of definition. Consequently, Aristotle’s definition theory has been chosen. To be impartial, it has been contrasted with that adopted by Karl Popper- Aristotle’s major critic. Then, mainstream leaning definitions have been investigated. Their inadequacy has been attributed to their non-adherence to a tenable definition theory. The paper recommends a framework for learning definition studies established by adopting Aristotle’s definition theory and other points discussed. Such a framework constitutes guidelines for future studies. These guidelines give future definition studies direction and coherence and allow us to move away from idiosyncrasies reflecting personal bias and, as such, they can direct us towards developing a consensual definition.

SUBJECT & OBJECTIVES : The psychological aspect of pure life is connected with mental health. Therefore, it is one of the important elements of a good life that contributes to meaningful living. One cannot live a happy life and use the all faculties of his soul unless acquires inner peace. This article proposes interdisciplinary research that contains educational psychology, logic, and philosophy. We will indicate how fuzzy logic could change the human view of mental health and pure life. METHOD & FINDING : In this research, the terms mind and health will be considered to shed light on the concept of mental health. Firstly, we argue in favor of the dichotomy between mind and body. Then, the definition of health is analyzed by concepts of normality and irritating mode. Also, utilizing educational psychology, fuzzy thinking, and philosophy of mind, a new definition of mental health will be proposed. In general, it will be indicated that by holding fuzzy approaches to mental states, the definition of health and illness and its subcategories have new interpretations. CONCLUSION : Fuzzy thinking creates a new viewpoint that sees the world and its events as an integration of contradictions such as health-illness and meaningful-meaningless life. The more mental states match health norms, the happier life will be. Therefore, the talk of the grades of inner peace and happy life is possible unless is fuzzy logic applied.

While different models and questionnaires have been devised and used to measure learners’ willingness to communicate in a second language (L2 WTC), to date, few scales, if any, can be found to measure foreign language teachers’ L2 WTC (FLT WTC). Therefore, the current project was designed to address this gap in the literature through an empirical investigation of the factors affecting FLT WTC. Consistent with an inclusive review of the literature and expert panel consultations, a model of contributing factors to FLT WTC was hypothesized, a representative questionnaire was devised and went through Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis. A large scale of 1044 foreign language teachers participated in different stages of the study. The statistical indices of the study confirmed that the model was fit and the questionnaire established appropriate levels of reliability, and face, content, construct, convergent, and discriminant validity. It was found that teacher perceptions, student traits, classroom atmosphere, classroom settings, and discussion topics play significant roles in FLT WTC. The study can draw the teachers’ / institutes’ attention to the factors affecting FLT WTC, and the validated questionnaire can be used as an instrument to measure FLT WTC in future studies.  

The present study aimed to investigate vowel hiatus resolution and its relation to vowel shortening in Persian and Central Kurdish within an Optimality-Theoretic framework. The results showed that both Persian and Central Kurdish ​​use glide formation through vowel shortening to resolve hiatus in certain environments. Persian has its own way to resolve vowel hiatus. The two high vowels /i/ and /u/, as a result of glide formation through vowel shortening, are changed into a short vowel and the glides /j/ and /w/, respectively. In Central Kurdish, glide formation occurs in high vowels /iː, uː/ and mid-high vowels /ēː, ōː/. In Persian, glide formation involves a quantitative reduction in the long vowel /iː/ and a quantitative and qualitative alteration in the long vowel /uː/. On the other hand, glide formation in Central Kurdish involves only a quantitative reduction in long vowels. Based on an OT analysis, the main factor in resolving vowel hiatus in both Persian and Central Kurdish is the obligatory presence of onset in the syllable structure. In contexts in which glide formation occurs through vowel shortening, the ranking of the active constraints in Persian and Central Kurdish is: ONSET, AGREE(place) >> MAX, DEP >> IDENT(µ).