فرهاد گل پور

The present study aimed at investigating the effects of explicit and implicit recasts on Iranian EFL learners' acquisition of English relative clauses. For this purpose, 64 participants were selected out of 94 intermediate level EFL learners at Falagh language Institute, Rasht, Iran. To have homogenized groups, the researcher administered a language proficiency test (TOEFL). Then, the researchers assigned them randomly to the explicit recast group, implicit recast group, and control group. They carried out some information gap tasks within four sessions. One group received explicit recast, the other group received implicit recast and the control one got no corrective feedback, for the target linguistic errors during the task performance. A grammatical judgment test was applied as the pretest and immediate posttest. The results of a paired-samples t-test and analyses of variance (ANOVA) showed that the scores of all three groups improved significantly overtime. However, the explicit recast group did significantly better than both the control group and the implicit recast group. The results of the study were elaborated in terms of counterbalance hypothesis and noticing hypothesis. The superiority of explicit recast implied a beneficial role for negative evidence in SLA and that explicit recast was a better choice than implicit recast in the L2 classroom.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the new version of Iranian EFL junior high school textbook (Prospect1) from the teachers’ perspectives. The participants included90experienced English teachers (42 females and 48 males) randomly selected from different junior high schools in different districts of Gilan province, Iran. The evaluation of the textbook was conducted quantitatively through a 5-point Likert scale with seven criteria including subject and content, activities, skills, physical layout, practical consideration, language and general criteria. However, it was accompanied by some open-ended questions that solicited teachers' views about each criterion and the book in general. The descriptive statistics including standard deviation, mean, percentage and frequency were used in the data analysis.The findings revealed that teachers have positive perceptions toward this book.They had a positive view about the prospect1 because of its content and topic relevancy to learners' needs, including real life situations, enjoying challenging subject, having communicative pair and group works and attending to four skills equally. However, they intensified some problems in their open ended questions such as insufficiency of teaching time that is 1.5 hour during a week, not focusing on explicit presentation of some words and grammatical points and not paying attention to some sub-skill strategies. These findings can be helpful for curriculum designers and textbook writers to design some valuable textbooks for other levels and to consider correspondence between time of teaching and volume of the book.