A key issue in language teacher education is what teachers need to learn in language teacher programs and how this learning impacts their language teaching practices. The seeds for teacher professionalism are planted and nourished during teacher education program to develop independently after graduation from pre-service teacher educations. The purpose of this study was to investigate English teacher education programs and their effects on novice/experienced English language teachers' professionalism in Iran. The researchers used purposeful sampling to select 150 participants from five Farhangian University Branches in Iran (2016-2017). For this purpose, a computerized questionnaire was constructed and validated. A one-way ANOVA indicated that out of the four dimensions of professionalism-- professional development, reflection, responsibility, and ethics-- only two-- professional development and reflection-- were statistically significant for both novice and experienced teachers. The programs had positive impact on teachers' professional development and reflection. The study has implications for teacher educators, developers of instructional materials, and syllabus designers in the context of Iran. پرونده مقاله

The study of ecolinguistics to date has been reserved for the field of discourse analysis. However, applying ecolinguistics in pedagogical contexts is a promising way to increase learners’ critical language awareness. To realize this potential, one needs validated measures to quantify learners’ critical language awareness in ecological contexts to conduct research in this field. In the absence of any instrument to measure language learners’ ecological critical language awareness, the researchers of this study developed and validated a questionnaire. An exploratory sequential mixed methods design with two phases was employed. In the exploratory and qualitative phases, the researchers defined the construct and developed a questionnaire based on the underlying factors of the construct. After taking several steps to ensure its content validity, the questionnaire was administered to 200 intermediate-level EFL learners who were selected through convenience sampling. In the quantitative phase, the participants were exposed to ecolinguiscally-informed teaching materials in an English pedagogical context. The collected data were analyzed, and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), Cronbach alpha coefficient for reliability indices, and model evaluation estimates were run to ensure the measure’s reliability and validity. EFA substantiated the initial components of the six-factor tentative construct. CFA gave statistical support to the six components as well. All components enjoyed high-reliability estimates. The calculated model-fit estimates verified the CFA model as a valid measure of ecological critical language awareness. The developed measure paves the way for further empirical investigation of ways to raise learners’ ecological critical language awareness in EFL contexts. پرونده مقاله

The present study investigated whether word learning and retention in a second language are contingent upon a task's involvement load, i.e., the amount of need, search, and evaluation the task imposes. Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) contend that tasks with higher degrees of these three components induce higher involvement load, and are, therefore, more effective for word learning. To test this claim, 64 Iranian intermediate EFL learners were selected based on their performance on the Preliminary English Test (PET). The participants were randomly assigned to two equal groups. Each group completed different vocabulary learning tasks that varied in the amount of involvement they induced. The tasks were jigsaw task (Group A) and information gap task (Group B). During the ten treatment sessions, recall and retention of the 100 unfamiliar target words were tested through immediate and delayed posttest. Data were analyzed using repeated measure ANOVA. The results indicated that learners benefited more from jigsaw task with higher involvement load. This study supported the Involvement Load Hypothesis, suggesting that higher involvement induced by the task resulted in more effective recall; however, no significant difference was observed between the two tasks in the retention of the unknown words. پرونده مقاله

Language learners receive different types of corrective feedback during the process of second language acquisition. Recast, as an approach to corrective feedback, is one of the most-frequently error correction techniques in classroom contexts. A plethora of research has addressed recast; however, the present study focused on comparing learners’ grammar achievement via oral and writing modalities through two perspectives, cognitive and ecological, who received recast. One hundred and twenty language learners, all first-year college students at Islamic Azad University and Applied Science University in Tehran participated in this study. They were assigned to four groups. The participants in all groups were exposed to different instructional programs based on the cognitive and ecological perspectives to language learning orally or in writing, and all learners received recast orally. Results obtained by a pretest and a posttest indicated that all groups made progress in their grammar achievement, while there was a statistically significant difference between the groups in the posttest. The participants in the ecological group had higher gains of grammatical structures than those in the cognitive group. However, data analysis revealed that there was no statistically significant difference between two oral and writing groups in their grammar achievement. پرونده مقاله

The advent of postmethod pedagogy has completely changed today's conceptualization of language teachers, and the importance of powerful teaching has increasingly gained momentum in the field of TESOL. However, contemporary English language teaching contexts suffer a dearth of a workable package to educate the much-needed autonomous postmethod language teachers who are able to have their own contextualized praxis. As such, the present research aims to nurture the required self-growth and self-development in language teachers through forming collaborative professional and critical discussion circles. Enjoying a mixed method research design whose quantitative section included a quasi-experimental design consisting of three phases--a pretest, an educational 12-week long treatment phase, and a posttest--the results of the study gained by two instruments, namely, the reflective teaching questionnaire developed by Akbari et al. (2010) and two similar language teaching episodes, bore witness to the significant changes in the level of reflectiveness of all 13 language teachers who partook in these discussion circles. Developmentally speaking, participating language teachers were found to initiate the whole process, direct it, and finally evaluate the new experiences further along the road. Hence the ideals of teacher development, self-growth and personal development, were accomplished through the study. پرونده مقاله

The advent of postmethod pedagogy has completely changed today's conceptualization of language teachers, and the importance of powerful teaching has increasingly gained momentum in the field of TESOL. However, contemporary English language teaching contexts suffer a dearth of a workable package to educate the much-needed autonomous postmethod language teachers who are able to have their own contextualized praxis. As such, the present research aims to nurture the required self-growth and self-development in language teachers through forming collaborative professional and critical discussion circles. Enjoying a mixed method research design whose quantitative section included a quasi-experimental design consisting of three phases--a pretest, an educational 12-week long treatment phase, and a posttest--the results of the study gained by two instruments, namely, the reflective teaching questionnaire developed by Akbari et al. (2010) and two similar language teaching episodes, bore witness to the significant changes in the level of reflectiveness of all 13 language teachers who partook in these discussion circles. Developmentally speaking, participating language teachers were found to initiate the whole process, direct it, and finally evaluate the new experiences further along the road. Hence the ideals of teacher development, self-growth and personal development, were accomplished through the study. پرونده مقاله

The study examined the impact of high school English teachers’ awareness of pedagogical competence on student learning. A psychometric measurement instrument of English language teachers' pedagogical competence (ELTPC) was first developed through factor analysis with 320 high school teachers in Guilan, Northern Iran. Based on the developed instrument, 36 teachers were divided into two groups of aware and unaware teachers of pedagogical competence (PC) according to Contrasting Groups Method of cut score. Then, 160 high school third graders received instruction from the aware and unaware teachers for 7 weeks. Finally, a survey regarding the teachers’ implementation of pedagogical competence in classrooms was conducted with 30 students. The findings from the experiment and survey supported the teachers in aware group. Although, based on the survey results, the aware teachers were reported to act better, they were not reported as highly practicing the pedagogical competence. The findings can be practically used by schools, education administration, and teacher educators. پرونده مقاله

The primary aim of this study was to shed light on the impact of a new instruction model, reflective reciprocal teaching (RRT), on English as a foreign language learners' (EFL) reading comprehension ability. Its mode of inquiry was a mixed-method, and it took on a quasi-experimental design, including a pretest, treatment, and posttest paradigm. The sampling techniques were both convenience and random sampling by which 100 EFL freshman learners were selected and assigned into three groups of reflective reciprocal teaching (RRT), reciprocal teaching (RT), and control. Two tests, namely Oxford Quick Placement Test and Michigan English Language Assessment Battery, were used to measure EFL learners' proficiency level and reading comprehension ability in its quantitative phase. ANOVA was utilized to analyze the collected data. Also, during the next step, which aimed to explore the learners' perceptions of RRT instruction, semi-structured interviews were used to collect qualitative data. The results indicated that the RRT group outperformed the control group regarding their reading comprehension ability; however, the RT instruction did not significantly impact this issue. Accordingly, thequalitative data analysis findingsindicated that self-regulated learning, perceived competence, metacognitive awareness, confidence, and intrinsic motivation were the significant results of the RRT instruction model, contributing to the learners' reading comprehension ability. پرونده مقاله

From the dawn of the third millennium, the utilization of state-of-the-art technology for educational purposes, especially computers and the Internet, has become prevalent across the globe. In this regard, flipping EFL classes appears to be an effective approach to practicing second/foreign languages through computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in order to extend the class time to asynchronous activities outside the class, and make the students more autonomous and actively engaged in the painstaking process of language learning. However, this question merits consideration why many current CALL programs run and taught through flipped learning do not seem to take full advantage of collaborative learning and peer-assessment, specifically taking place in asynchronous channels of communication, namely threaded comment forms and discussion boards. The present study investigates the prospect of realizing social presence as a shared feeling of community among the learners by restructuring and optimizing the existing methods for flipping language classes. Employing a qualitative research based on grounded theory and data triangulation, the researchers recorded, transcribed and analyzed 41 semi-structured group and individual interviews with 44 participants attending an online IELTS preparation course on the first researcher’s website for over one year. Additionally, the same interview questions were posed in an open-ended questionnaire accessible to the participants from the website. The obtained results suggested that learner-centered flipped classes in which asynchronous student-driven content development and out-of-class peer-assessment through commenting and replying are adequately practiced can tremendously increase student interactivity, thereby fulfilling the sense of social presence. پرونده مقاله

Hedges, as tools to express tentativeness and doubt, have been studied in plenty of research papers in the Iranian EFL research setting. However, their use in a learner corpus, portraying Iranian learner English, is in need of more research attention. With this end in view, this study aimed at investigating how Iranian EFL learners who have majored in English-related fields in Iran deployed hedges in their academic, expository essays. This study was conducted through running the corpus analysis software MonoConc Pro-Semester version 2.2 on the electronically compiled Iranian Corpus of Learner English, totaling 436,035 words. Automatic and manual analyses suggested that hedges comprised only 7.4% of the total metadiscourse in the Iranian Corpus of Learner English, with 0.68 occurrences per 1,000,000 words. In a comparable native corpus, a sub-corpus of the British Academic Written English, hedges were used with 1.43 occurrences per 1,000,000 words (21% of the total metadiscourse in the corpus). Log-likelihood statistical analysis confirmed statistically significant differences between the two corpora in terms of the use of hedges, with underuse of hedges in the Iranian academic, expository essays relative to the English natives’ essays. Implementations of the results for English academic writing instruction including genre-based, explicit teaching of hedges through data-driven techniques with the aid of tools such as AntConc software and corpora such as the BAWE are considered. پرونده مقاله

With the latest paradigm shift in SLA from Cognitivism to Sociocultural Theory (SCT), more studies are carried out to investigate the efficacy of Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) through a social and cultural lens. A more recent offspring of SCT is Activity Theory which provides an explanatory framework for scrutinizing an activity in a social setting. The present study aimed at investigating the impact of Scaffolded WCF within the framework of Activity Theory on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance in terms of reduction of the learners’ writing errors with respect to the content, vocabulary, mechanics, organization, and grammar. Finally, different types of Activity Theory-based strategic mediations (i.e. artifact, rule, community, and role mediations) Iranian EFL learners employed in their writing revisions were investigated. Accordingly, 25 Iranian university-level students, through convenient sampling, were chosen to participate in the study. The treatment they received on their writings was a graduated Scaffolding WCF in their Zone of Proximal Development in the form of both peer and teacher feedback. The findings indicated that Scaffolded WCF statistically significantly contributed to the participants’ writing performance in terms of content, vocabulary, mechanics, organization, and grammar. With respect to the mediation strategies used by the learners, it was discovered that the learners benefitted from all the available mediators although with various degrees. It is hoped that the findings of this study will promise implications for promoting a teacher/learner-friendly method of providing WCF based on SCT, which can be utilized in large classes typical of Iranian EFL university courses. پرونده مقاله

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) could be seen as a theory in qualitative more than in qualitative stud- ies. This might have led to difficulty in doing CDA. Accordingly, this study attempted to develop a quan- titative profile in the form of an analytic rubric. For this purpose, Fairclough’s model of CDA was select- ed as the research framework. The techniques used for structuring analytic scales were used over three steps. First, the criteria corresponding to text, context, and text-context interaction were identified as ide- ology, intertextuality, date, power, contextual clues, background knowledge, and culture. The next step involved validating the extracted criteria through Item-Objective Congruence Index. The final step in- cluded scaling via specifying an even number of qualities for each item accompanied by a range of scores. Then, the rubric was checked for reliability. The results of the correlation analysis revealed that the scale is reliable across different raters. The results of the present study might have educational impli- cation for CDA-oriented reading attempts. Moreover, it could open a turning point, since previous efforts to do CDA have been extremely qualitative. پرونده مقاله

This research study explored the impact of learning styles and input modalities on the second language (L2) learners' input processing (IP). This study also sought to appraise the usefulness of Processing Instruction (PI) and its components in relation to the learners' learning styles and input modalities. To this end, 73 male and female Iranian EFL learners from Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch participated in the study. The participants from four intact classes were exposed to PI. The data were collected through a pre- test and two parallel posttests on the target structure, reconstructive elicited imitation tasks in both aural and written modes, and a structured interview. The data were analyzed using MANOVA. The findings revealed that the ectenic learners had a more form-based rather than a meaning-based approach towards IP. Input modality was also revealed to be an influential factor in L2 learners' IP. Furthermore, the Explicit Infor- mation (EI) turned out to be more of use to the ectenic learners while the synoptic group largely benefited from the Structured Input (SI) activities. پرونده مقاله

Different issues have been probed in learner corpus research since the late 1980s.However, taking the im- portance of meta discourse markers (MDMs) in signposting academic discourse, their use in Iranian EFL learners‟ academic essays is an area of research in need of a more serious analysis. Contributing to this line of investigation, this paper reports a corpus-based study of the use of MDMs in the academic essays of Iranian EFL learners who have majored in English-related fields in Iran. For this, based on Hyland‟s (2005)model of MDMs, the recently-compiled Iranian corpus of learner English was analyzed for in- stances of MDMs and compared with a sub-corpus of the British academic written English. The findings indicated overuse in categories (interactional and interactive) and overuse and underuse in types of MDMs (hedges, transitions, etc.) in Iranian EFL learners‟ essays relative to the English-natives‟ essays, with more instances of interactional MDMs in the former compared with more uses of interactive MDMs in the latter. Suggestions have been proposed for such profiling of MDMs among Iranians as rooted indif- ferences between Iranian and English cultures, previous instruction, and so forth. Implications of the re- sults for English language teaching including explicit teaching of MDMs have been considered. پرونده مقاله

This study sought to investigate dynamic assessment (DA) - an assessment approach that embeds inter- vention within the assessment process and that yields information about the learner’s responsiveness to this intervention - and the writing performance of the second language (L2) learners in Web 2.0 contexts. To this end, pre and post-treatment writings of 45 participants were analyzed to examine the impact of asynchronous collaborative computer mediation and face-to-face collaborative mediation on L2 learners’ writing performance. Three textual features of syntactic complexity, vocabulary complexity, and quantity of the overall information conveyed in the learners’ pre and post-tests served as the basic units of analy- sis. The findings of the present study indicated that using blogging as a Web 2.0 tool to provide mediation contributed more to the enhancement of the overall writing performance. Moreover, the asynchronous collaborative computer mediated group, as compared to the face to face mediated group, showed signifi- cant improvement in the vocabulary complexity, syntactic complexity, and quantity of overall infor- mation presented in a single paragraph. The findings of the present study also revealed that DA proce- dures were applicable via Web 2.0 tools and were advantageous to L2 learners’ writing performance sug- gesting that L2 practitioners and instructors should dynamically consider the integration of Web 2.0 tech- nology into L2 writing courses. پرونده مقاله

The present study developed a questionnaire (Appendix 1) based on the relevant literature and interviews with 22 EFL learners, resulting in a 27-item questionnaire that was distributed among 360 EFL learners. A sequential mixed methods design was used. The analysis of the qualitative data revealed the elements of EFL learners’ spiritual intelligence. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of EFL learners’ responses generated four factors, namely: (1) Learning English for personal, social, and educational benefits, (2) learning English for personal, social, and academic achievement, (3) learning English to promote religious values, and (4) learning English for intercultural communication. The results of the study suggest that this scale is a reliable and valid measure of EFL learners’ SI. This study also revealed that SI has a significant relationship with gender and educational levels. The findings can help researchers define SI and how EFL learners’ SI can be measured. Educationists, practitioners, academics, theorists, teacher training centers, teachers, curriculum constructors, and pedagogic planners may find the results of this study beneficial if they are concerned with the importance of SI in the educational context and its influence on the performance of EFL learners. پرونده مقاله