درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The issues of humor and collocation are among the themes that have recently attracted the attention of researchers in language pedagogy. In line with this current trend of research, this study investigated the effect of reading humorous texts on learning collocations by Iranian EFL learners. To achieve this end, 59 Iranian EFL students majoring English Literature and English Translation were selected as the participants, and their language proficiency and knowledge of collocation were determined via Success Test and Collocation tests. They were given a pre-test (in order to determine their knowledge of specific collocations used in humor texts), five tests with five humor texts, and a post-test (in order to find the effect of reading humor texts on learning collocations). Paired sample t-tests and ANOVA were then employed to analyze the collected data. The findings of the study revealed that humor texts can bear positive impacts on collocation learning of Iranian EFL learners. The findings of the study can have implications for teaching collocations.

In the educational setting of Iran, language assessment literacy (LAL) is still an underexplored issue. This paper investigated the development of LAL among EFL students taking language assessment course at state universities in Iran. The three components of LAL (i.e., knowledge, skills, and principles) were the focus of the inquiry. To collect the required data, a questionnaire, encompassing 83 Likert items and a set of open-ended questions, was developed, and responses from 92 course instructors were collected. Teaching and assessment practices of two course instructors were also observed throughout an educational semester. SPSS (26) was used to analyze the data. Findings revealed that these courses mainly focused on knowledge and skills, overlooking the principles of assessment. Adherence to traditional assessment approaches, use of inappropriate teaching materials, and lack of practical works in assessment also characterized the investigated courses. The paper concludes with suggestions to better design language assessment courses to increase the assessment literacy of English graduates who will probably enter the teaching contexts after graduation.

Teachers need to know new applications for developing online materials and then they should become aware of different ways to present them to online audience. This study tries to help ELT teachers to overcome challenges and difficulties of vodcasting by recognizing their social and biological motives (Activity Theory), and using Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). It can alter teachers’ negative attitudes towards online materials development via providing useful tools and techniques to become better producers of their knowledge to survive professionally. This QUAL-quan inquiry initiated with 10 University professors of Islamic Azad University-South Tehran Branch. All these participants answered ‘Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)’ questionnaire, ‘Personality Test and Job Satisfaction’, ‘Three-D Test’, and ‘Spatial Recognition Test’. The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with those whose data were grounded and initiated from open coding, down to axial coding, and finalized with selective coding. Participants produced vodcasts as pre-test. Then, they received the treatments on an exclusively launched ‘MArt’ Telegram group in the form of the researcher-designed audios and videos and YouTube samples. As a post-test, each of the participants made another vodcast. Then, two experts who are ELT university lecturers evaluated the two sets of recorded data. Finally, all the interpretations and analyses were presented in different graphs and charts along with researcher’s interpretation based on theoretical frameworks. The results show that whether ELT teachers are capable of producing vodcasts or not. Besides, VTS help teachers to become much more visually literate and produce more successful vodcasts. Both treatments of the present study and the derived codes can be used in teacher education, and they can turn into a task-based digital or paper-based coursebooks benefiting M.A. TEFL students.

Due to the importance of idioms, many researchers and teachers have long sought to find ways of making idiom teaching and learning more effective. This study compared three visual mnemonic devices (pictures, mental imagery, and movie clips) in terms of their effect on EFL learners’ recognition and recall of English idioms. Ninety intermediate level EFL learners who were preparing themselves for IELTS participated in this study. They were in three groups of thirty members each. Each group was taught idioms using one of the afore-mentioned visual mnemonic devices. Receptive and productive tests of idioms were administered to all groups after the treatment. The one-way ANOVA procedure was used to analyze the collected data. The results revealed statistically significant differences among these devices, with pictures method being the most effective on both recognition and recall of idioms. The findings of the study can have significant theoretical as well as pedagogical implications for language researchers, textbook designers, curriculum developers, teachers, and language learners. 

Despite the abundance of research investigating general and academic vocabularies and developing dozens of word lists, few studies have compared academic vocabulary with general service word lists such as conversation vocabulary. Many EAP researchers assume that university students need to know all the words in West’s (1953) General Service List (GSL) as a prerequisite to academic words (e.g., Coxhead’s, 2000) and teachers at language institutes recommend conversation students to learn words in Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) as a follow-up to the GSL. The present study compared the academic and conversation vocabularies by exploring frequency and coverage of words in academic and conversation corpora. The GSL and AWL words were investigated in a conversation corpus and an academic corpus, each containing around 12 million running words. The analysis revealed that 1200 GSL word families were highly frequent in both corpora and 645 GSL word families were highly frequent in the conversation corpus but of low frequency in the academic texts. Also, a new academic word list of 700 word families was developed, which proved to be much more rigorous than Coxhead’s AWL. Further analysis indicated that the abovementioned 645 GSL words had a very low coverage of academic texts (0.7%), while they covered 4.05% of the conversation corpus. The new academic word list covered only 1.6% of the conversation corpus, whereas it had a high coverage of the academic texts (9.1%), much higher than that of the AWL (7.5%). The analysis of some other academic corpora revealed identical results.

: Corrective Feedback (CF) provision on performance involves calling attention to learners' erroneous utterances, which stimulates classroom language learning. Despite widespread research in this area, a controversy still exists as to the time of CF in communicative tasks especially when learners' task engagement is targeted. Employing 60 intermediate-level Iranian learners, a four-week study examined the effects of immediate versus delayed CF types on oral engagement, grammar gain as well as on Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency (CAF) in the context of a dictogloss task. The statistical analysis showed that despite statistically significant improvements in the case of Grammaticality Judgement Test (GJT) from the pre-test to the post-test, no statistically significant difference was found between the two groups with regard to their grammar gain, complexity, accuracy, fluency, as well as on their social and cognitive engagement. However, results in the case of behavioral and emotional engagement revealed that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups of immediate and delayed CFs. The findings of the present study call for more flexibility and confidence on the part of the teachers in providing either immediate or delayed CF whenever appropriate and without being concerned about the adverse effects of feedback

New approaches and methods to language learning and teaching have drawn the attention of many researchers. This study aimed at investigating the role of Iranian EFL learners’ attitudes towards the value components of the Partnership Approach (PA) on motivating their active engagement in the learning process. A descriptive research method (survey study) was used, and 72 male and female Iranian EFL students whose ages ranged from 18 to 26 were randomly selected to participate in the study. They were asked to respond to a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire addressing the objectives of the study, and then 30 of the participants were randomly interviewed to reveal the possible consonance with the questionnaire outcomes. The study was conducted at Islamic Azad University (IAU), Najafabad Branch. The findings indicated that although both male and female participants showed significantly positive attitudes towards the value components of the PA, except for the inclusivity value, female participants held significantly higher positive attitudes. The highest motivational value from both male and female participants’ point of view was for the challenge value component. However, reciprocity and inclusivity were the value components with the lowest motivational values from the male and female participants’ point of view, respectively. Focusing on the importance of the psychological factors in education, the findings of the study may encourage both education policy-makers and practitioners in the field to think more critically, and make more reasonable decisions for their policy and practice.