Abstracts in research papers are one of the focal parts of academic research, and they are one of the first things that a reader reads to determine the value of the research. Furthermore, acknowledgments appreciate those who have helped in writing a thesis. The present study investigated rhetorical moves in the acknowledgment and abstract sections of Iranian English language teaching and nursery students' M.A. theses. In addition, it investigated if there were any significant differences between rhetorical moves observed in the acknowledgment and abstract sections of Iranian TEFL and nursery students' M.A. theses in these two fields. Some of the 80 theses from the two disciplines, 40 each, were investigated. Hyland's (2000) models of the abstract rhetoric structure and acknowledgment structure were adopted to investigate the corpora under study. The results revealed that different steps and moves were used in theses from both disciplines. However, the results of Chi-square tests revealed that the differences between different moves and steps of these acknowledgments and abstracts from the two disciplines were insignificant. The findings have some implications for post-graduate students to be more aware of their addressees and language teachers to teach students about genre-based writing. پرونده مقاله

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of psychological factors on teachers` attitudes regarding technology use. To this purpose, such factors as ‘perceived usefulness’, ‘perceived ease of use’, ‘trialability’, ‘subjective norms’, and ‘attitude’ were investigated. The participants of the study were high school English language teachers in Shiraz, who were selected through stratified sampling as a representative sample of the available population. In order to assess the extent of the effect of each factor, five questionnaires were administered. Then, the elicited data were analyzed by means of path analysis. The obtained results revealed that ‘perceived ease of use’ was affected by ‘subjective norms’, and ‘trialability’ influenced the attitude of teachers about using technology in their teachings. The results also showed that the most influential factor on attitude was ‘trialability’. Furthermore, the results displayed that ‘perceived usefulness’ had a significant effect and subjective norms had an indirect but meaningful effect on the teachers’ attitude. The findings of the study have implications for school administrators and teachers to use them in their planning and instruction and, as a result, boost the learning environment. پرونده مقاله

This study focused on the effects dynamic form of text-based vocational vocabulary glosses: Dynamic glosses are a series of incremental mediations intended to support students in identifying correct word definitions. After running a pre-test (TOFEL ibt), 34 ESP learners in medical university were chosen to participate in the study, 17 students randomly assigned to the treatment group and 17 randomly assigned to the control group. Participants in treatment and control conditions received three short ESP texts with many vocational vocabularies using the computers in the language lab and the Adobe Connect application. As the participants in the dynamic gloss condition faced unknown vocational vocabulary items in the passages, the teacher provided the learners with a set of mediations from the most implicit to the most explicit prompts, and the learners tried to identify the correct meaning of the word. In the non-dynamic gloss condition, the learners were given the L1 definition for the target words. The post-test results indicated that the treatment group meaningfully outperformed the control group. پرونده مقاله

This quantitative research explores the implicit and explicit instruction of reading strategies and its connection through the application of metacognitive strategies by Iranian EFL students. To this purpose, 100 Iranian university freshmen, aged 20-35, studying at the Marwdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, were selected as participants through a convenient sampling method, from a pool of 117 students. Then, the Key English Test (KET) was used to check their homogeneity. The Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) was also used as a pre-test and post-test to specify the kind and occurrence sequence of learning strategies applied by the participants before and after the treatment. So, the participants were allotted to two experimental groups and received implicit and explicit instruction of reading strategies respectively. The results obtained from statistical data analysis showed that affective strategies were the very frequently-applied strategies, while memory strategies were the least frequently-applied strategies in the explicit group. It was also found that in the implicit group, cognitive strategies were the most frequently-applied strategies, while social strategies were the least frequently-applied strategies. These results have pedagogical implications for EFL teachers to use appropriate approaches in teaching reading strategies, that will ultimately help the students to develop more awareness and competence in reading comprehension. پرونده مقاله