درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Researchers stated that learning and applying certain set of lexical bundles of native lecturers by non-native lecturers would help students improve their proficiency through incidental vocabulary input. The present study shed light on the lexical bundles in hard science lectures used by Native and Non-native lecturers in international universities with the main purpose of analyzing the structural and functional similarities and differences in their usage. The secondary purpose was to finalize and present a list of explored lexical bundles employed by Native lecturers in these lectures which could be helpful for students and also Non-Native lecturers. The corpus of this study consists of five and a half hours of three different native university lecturers’ lectures and about five and a half hours of three different non-native university lecturers’ lectures who were teaching hard science (nuclear physics and electronic engineering). The data were analyzed using n-gram tool in lextutor.ca website which is a free online software to analyze the lexical bundles of more than two corpora and compare them. Functional and structural analysis gave the following results. Findings showed that lexical richness of both Native and Non-Native lecturers was not good enough to expose students to rich environments to help them improve their English proficiency. In light of structural classification, the results revealed that dependent clause fragments in addition to verb structure phrases were the most widespread and Noun phrase + of-phrase fragments were the least employed structures of the identified lexical bundles in the lectures of Non-Native and Native lecturers. In terms of structural analysis, it was concluded that stance bundles were the most frequent function bundles used by both groups. Therefore, there were both similarities and differences in the structural and functional classifications of lexical bundles in the lectures of native and non-native lecturers.

Research on the characteristics of effective EFL teachers integrates many constructs, which are treated independently in most cases. Consequently, the present study aims to explore the perspectives of teacher educators, teachers, and learners with regards to teacher effectiveness as an attempt to reduce the mismatches. To meet this aim, 34 teacher educators, 39 teachers, and 161 learners engaged in the context of university and language institute were selected on the basis of convenience and criterion sampling to respond to the 30 items on a 5- point Likert- scale questionnaire. The questionnaire comprised of items related to subject matter knowledge, teachers’ personal and interpersonal aspects, and approaches to language teaching. While the English questionnaire was distributed among the teacher educators and teachers, the Persian version of the questionnaire was handed over to the learners in the institute to be returned within a week’s time. Moreover, the questionnaire was available online to enrich the data collected. The ANOVA results indicated that the perceptions of teacher educators and teachers were quite similar, but were significantly different from the perspectives of the learners. Additionally, based on MANOVA analysis, it was revealed that the differences existed mostly in the category of ‘subject matter,’ whereas there was a strong agreement regarding ‘personal and interpersonal features’ of effective EFL teachers. The findings of the study may be fruitful for EFL curriculum developers, administrators, teacher educators, teachers and language learners.

Although the importance of intercultural competence (IC) training has been increasingly recognized in recent scholarly reviews, home-based approaches invite further investigation in this paradigm. This study aims to make a contribution by exposing a domestic context to assess IC development through using qualitative and quantitative methods. To do so, sixty two undergraduate EFL student-teachers were guided to conduct two either on-line or face to face reflective ethnographic interviews over a sixteen-week course of cross-cultural communication. The quantitative findings obtained from the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) questionnaire showed significant increase in participants’ Perceived Orientation (PO) and Developmental Orientation (DO) after the course. Qualitative findings also revealed significant growth, provoking some new perceptions, and emphasizing the student-teachers’ positive responses to both IDI assessment and the intercultural interactions. The exploratory analysis of the participants’ reports on the ethnographic interviews resulted in seven emerged themes which conceptually matched the traditional IC model. Therefore, the study shows that using reflective ethnographic interviews in a mixed methods design is helpful in developing and assessing student-teachers’ IC.

This article intends to identify the use and typify the functions of tag questions (TQs) in Persian everyday conversations and dialogic interaction. The analyses were made based on two data sources: A documentary film titled Commander in which the participants are engaged in free interactions, and an audio-recorded instrument named CALLFRIEND which consists of Iranian native speakers' communication on the phone. The datasets were transcribed using CHAT conventions by the researcher. Also, two raters were involved in the coding process and several rounds of coding and discussions were carried out in an effort to fine-tune the functional classification. This study found some overlap between Persian TQs and the ones from other languages, which confirms speakers' presupposition accounting for the largest portion of the corpora. However, there have been found some functions, namely holding the floor, scorning hearer, and ordering or encouraging, which do not conform to any existing classifications of tag questions. The study was implemented within the principles of Conversational Analysis, and the researcher has explored the relationship between the functions and their settings in which conversations were uttered, the expected response, and any other influential sociolinguistic factors.

This study sought to examine the type and frequency of tasks in the Iranian high school English course books (Prospect 1, 2, 3 & English Book 1, 2, 3). The corpus was analyzed based on Nunan’s (1999) framework composed of five main task types, namely cognitive, interpersonal, linguistics, affective, and creative. To this end, the whole content of the aforementioned course books went through content analysis separately and accordingly descriptive and inferential results were reported regarding the frequency of each task type. The results showed that the linguistic tasks were the most recurrent type, whereas some task types (e.g., affective and creative) were totally absent. Furthermore, based on the results of Chi Square test, a significant difference was observed in the frequency of task types. While, according to communicative approach, communicative competence necessitates the inclusion of grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, and strategic competencies, the findings of the current study revealed that linguistic competence was overemphasized in these course books. This fact may lead to learners who are competent in producing linguistically appropriate utterances, which may at the same time be inappropriate with regard to context. The findings can have significant implications for EFL teachers and materials developers in making them conscious of the fact that the application of different types of tasks in textbooks is an important standard leading to more competent language users, especially in an EFL context like Iran.