درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between attitudes towards cheating, academic self-confidence, and general language ability among Iranian EFL learners. One hundred and thirty-nine university EFL students participated in this study. Findings showed that attitudes towards cheating negatively correlate with academic self-confidence and ability as measured by students’ GPA. The relationship between age, gender, level of education, and attitudes towards cheating was examined too. Analyses showed that there is a negative correlation between age and attitudes towards cheating. However, no relationship was found between gender and level of education, and attitudes towards cheating. Furthermore, psychometric qualities of the Attitudes towards Cheating Questionnaire were examined. Analyses revealed that some items had low and negative item discrimination indices. When malfunctioning items were deleted the reliability of the scale improved. Implications of the study on correlates of cheating among Iranian EFL learners and the validity of the Attitudes towards Cheating Questionnaire are discussed.

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.

Through a descriptive Ex Post Facto research design, the relationship between teacher reflection and classroom management, the predictive power of teacher reflection components regarding classroom management, and classroom management strategies used by high and low reflective teachers were examined. To this end, 113 EFL teachers completed the Attitudes and Beliefs on Classroom Control (ABCC) Inventory (Martin et al., 1998b) and teacher reflection inventory (Akbari et al., 2010). The results of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient showed that there was a significant positive relationship between teachers’ reflection and their sense of classroom management. Moreover, a multiple regression was run whose findings revealed that practical and critical components of reflection are the best predictors of teachers’ sense of classroom management. Twenty teachers were also interviewed and the thematic analysis of the interview showed that high reflective teachers used different kinds of management strategies, for their students’ social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties using proper pedagogical planning and techniques of teachers’ teaching style, expertise, and experience in better assessment of the students in the classroom.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected many countries all over the world. Most universities and institutions throughout the world offer online instruction to avoid disruptions in education during this global pandemic. This qualitative study investigated Iranian EFL university lecturers’ perspectives toward online instruction during the Coronavirus pandemic. Based on a researcher-developed protocol, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 university lecturers from Karaj and Science and Research Branches of Islamic Azad University, in Karaj and Tehran, Iran, whose teaching experiences ranged from 7 to 27 years, to identify their perspectives toward online instruction during the COVID-19 outbreak. The interviews drew upon emergent methodology to categorize the interviewees’ value-laden comments into four major attitudinal themes, namely,change in pedagogy with four subthemes of online teaching software, synchronous versus asynchronous teaching, benefits of online instruction, and university lecturers’ challenges regarding online instruction; supporting students with two subthemes of establishing rapport and positive relationship with students and student engagement; ethics in online instruction with a subtheme of assessment in an online environment; and the future of online instruction with two subthemes of university lecturers’ suggestions or recommendations regarding online instructionand changes in learning approaches after the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings demonstrated that Iranian EFL university lecturers require professional training on the latest technology updates for online instruction. Further, the adequacy of technological infrastructure and free internet access could facilitate online instruction during the COVID-19 outbreak. Thus, universities and educational organizations are expected to promote the infrastructure and provide a variety of internet access alternatives.  

Given the importance of assessment in language education, this study was aimed at investigating the effects of interventionist and interactionist Dynamic Assessment (DA) on Iranian EFL learners’ perfectionism, willingness to communicate (WTC) and foreign language anxiety (FLA). The participants of the study were 166 pre-intermediate female and male learners at two public schools and one private language institute in Karaj. The participants were divided into three experimental groups and were given three separate questionnaires to measure their perfectionism, WTC, and FLA before the treatment sessions. During 14 sessions, groups A and B received instruction using interactionist DA and interventionist DA, respectively. Group C was instructed conventionally as the control group. At the end of the treatment sessions, they were given the same three questionnaires as the post test. The collected data were analysed using one-way ANCOVA. The results showed no significant differences among the two approaches of dynamic assessment and the control group in terms of their effect on learners’ perfectionism and willingness to communicate. Although there was no significant difference between the interventionist and interactionist models of DA, they were both significantly more effective than the control group on learners’ FLA. The findings suggested that dynamic assessment could reduce learners’ anxiety in language learning and lead to an effective teaching and learning process. These findings can have implications for teachers, students, and material developers.

In recent years social networking sites have affected almost all aspects of our lives. The Instagram social network has become popular among people, and there are lots of pages on this social media, which are explicitly presenting English materials to their followers. This non-experimental descriptive study aimed to determine the strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of English teaching pages on Instagram . Twelve English teaching pages were observed due to their high number of followers to discover the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. To provide more fruitful points for the SWOT analysis, ten active Instagram users were interviewed. They were asked to fill out a SWOT analysis written interview about Instagram English teaching pages. The interpretative approach and frequency and percentage were used to analyze the data, owing to the nature of the gathered data in this research. Employing the results of this study, admins of English teaching pages can take a forward step to make their pages more beneficial and more effective in the process of English teaching. The findings can also help those scholars or teachers who want to use Instagram to present their services. Being aware of the effectiveness of English teaching pages helps language learners be more cautious about selecting them as a source of learning English.

Although there is a large body of literature on the use of connectors by EFL learners in argumentative writing, African language learner groups are not represented and most studies have adopted a cross-sectional approach. This paper seeks to analyze how frequently connectors are used on the basis of pseudo-longitudinal data from first, second, and third-year undergraduate students from the Institute for Applied Pedagogy, University of Burundi. The study adopted the corpus linguistic and quantitative approaches. The data were collected through 2 writing assignments given to students in 2019. In total, 622 essays, amounting to 306,664-word tokens, were collected. Data preparation followed three steps, namely, typing the handwritten essays, preparing the TXT files, and metadata for the corpus. The latter was searched using AntConc tool, on the basis of a comprehensive list of 95 connectors, classified into 6 categories. The tool availed frequency information, that is, how often each connector occurs in the corpus. Percentages were computed using XLS facility and are presented in tables and graphs. Results indicate that 19 connectors were frequently used by learners, the most frequent ones being those which add information followed by those expressing a result relationship. However, connectors expressing transition and summation were found to be rarely used in the corpus. Another discovery is that learners in all three years of study seem to have the same preferences in terms of connectors. Furthermore, cases of misuse such as wrong combinations and incorrect spelling, semantic, stylistic and syntactic errors were observed at all levels. The findings of this study can be useful to learners, teachers, and material designers.

Thai students’ writing in English is a chronic problem documented in the literature of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Thailand. However, little research has been conducted on how Thai teachers and students perceive the importance of English-writing and what difficulties and expectations/suggestions they have in teaching and learning this skill at upper-secondary schools (U-SS). This study, therefore, plans to fill this gap by employing two sets of surveys and semi-structured interviews with 114 teachers and 170 students from 30 different U-SS in the Northeastern part of Thailand and two provincial supervisors of Foreign-Language-Education Divisions (Pro-Sup). Besides their various stated personal and contextual problems in terms of time constraint, insufficient resources and poorly-motivated and mixed-ability students, national test structures and the presence of untrained English teachers, the participants acknowledged the importance of English-writing and expected to have this skill taught at all school levels. These findings suggest that to improve the teaching and learning practices of this skill at U-SS in Thailand and other countries with similar contexts, relevant support and necessary reforms from teachers, school leaders and national-test and policymakers are needed.