امید طباطبایی

The intention of the present paper is to seek whether gender has any impact on the effectiveness of applying Guthke's Lerntest approach in reading comprehension. For this purpose, after selecting 60 intermediate EFL learners, they were arbitrarily categorized to four clusters of males and females, two experimental and two control groups, each consisting of 15 male and 15 female learners. Both control and experimental groups took part in a reading performance class, but just the main groups (experimental) were subjected to interventionist model of dynamic assessment (DA) on their reading tests, and control groups were assessed through static testing method. A pretest and a posttest were given to the intermediate level and, a questionnaire comprising 16 items was given to the experimental groups to elicit their attitudes towards the application of Guthke's Lerntest approach. To examine the hypotheses of the current research, independent t-test and Likert -scale were used. The results of the study revealed that EGM and EGF learners were not very much different with regard to their performances on the reading post-test. In addition, the learners held highly positive attitudes towards DA practices in their EFL setting.

Although story mapping strategy has been shown to be beneficial in many reading comprehension classes, the benefits of this technique have not been thoroughly investigated in L2 writing research. The small number of previous studies (e.g., Li, 2007; Brunner, 2010) have found the potential benefits of using story mapping strategy on students’ writing performance, but they did not focus on different aspects of students’ writing. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the effect of story mapping strategy on writing performance of EFL learners in terms of writing components (i.e., organization, content, grammar, mechanics, and style). After administering a standard proficiency test (OPT), 30 out of a pile of 82 Iranian EFL learners all majoring English teaching were selected and assigned to two groups: one experimental group and one control group. Both experimental and control groups completed two thirty-minute composition writing tests, one as a pre-test and the other one as a post-test. The experimental group received four sessions of instruction on how to use story mapping strategy in writing personal narratives. The results of One-way ANOVA and post-hoc Scheffé test indicated that the experimental group, which used story mapping strategy, made more progress in their personal narrative writings. Also, the results revealed that L2 learners made more progress in all writing aspects. The study contributes to teaching pedagogy by encouraging teachers to use story mapping strategy in L2 writing classes