درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

پژوهش حاضر به بررسی خطاهای فارسی زبانانی که انگلیسی زبان خارجی آنها است در تولید عبارات موصولی زبان انگلیسی پرداخته است. باوجود آنکه در زبان انگلیسی، استفاده از ساخت پرسشی در اغلب عبارات موصولی بدون هسته مجاز نیست، فارسی زبانان به وفور از این ساختار در جملات انگلیسی خود استفاده میکنند. طی این پژوهش، ریشه های احتمالی این خطا شناسایی و تحلیل شدند و نهایتا فرضیه نشانداری تمایزبخش که قدرت بیشتری در توضیح این خطا داشت به عنوان چارچوب نظری این پژوهش انتخاب شد. پیکره شفاهی و کتبی این پژوهش طی دو سال از منابع متعدد و از 137 مشارک خانم و آقا به دست آمد. داده ها از گویه هایی که به طور طبیعی، نه با هدف این پژوهش، بیان شده بودند جمع آوری شد و شامل 126 عبارت موصولی خطادار بود که 85 عبارت (67.46%) بدون هسته معمولی، 25 عبارت (19.84%) هسته دار و 16 عبارت (12.69%) بدون هسته آزاد بودند. بررسی دقیق تر داده ها منجر به شناسایی تمایز نظام مند بین خطاها در دو نوع عبارت موصولی اصلی (بدون هسته در جایگاه فاعل یا مفعول) و دو نوع عبارت موصولی فرعی (بدون هسته در جایگاه فاعل و دارای فعل بودن ) گردید. این وسعت کارکرد عبارات موصولی در زبان انگلیسی نسبت به فارسی، می تواند موجب نشانداری این ساختار برای فارسی زبانان شود. به نظر می رسد این نوع نشانداری که ناظر بر گستره کاربرد جملات پرسشی و خبری در جایگاه عبارات موصولی بدون هسته است بیش از نشانداری از حیث تفاوت در تعداد واژگانی که در فارسی و انگلیسی برای یک کارکرد واحد وجود دارد، می تواند علت بروز این نوع خطا را توضیح دهد. پژوهش حاضر، بر ضرورت بررسی زبانشناسانه سایر ابعاد خطاهای نظام مند مشابه، همکاری متخصصان زبانشناسی و آموزش زبان دوم/خارجی در شناسایی و رفع مشکلات یادگیری، و پژوهش های بیشتر برای ارایه راه حل های آموزشی برای چنین مشکلاتی تاکید می نماید.

Vocabulary and grammar are two significant components of English which learners often find challenging in their process of learning English as a foreign language (EFL). Therefore, finding the best way to teach grammar and vocabulary has always been a controversial issue among English teachers and researchers. The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of dictogloss (DG) task, as one of the focus on form techniques, on EFL learners’ vocabulary versus grammar development. To this end, a quasi-experimental design was utilized to examine the effectiveness of the treatment. In this design, two classes were chosen, one as the experimental group (n=20) and the other as the control group (n=20). The participants were 40 female learners of English as a foreign language at intermediate level. In the experimental group the selected grammatical structures and vocabulary were taught using the DG technique, while in the control group the traditional method of teaching, present-practice-produce was used. The results gained from comparing pretest and posttest scores indicate that, although the experimental group outperformed the control group in learning vocabulary, there was no statistically significant difference between the experimental and control group regarding grammar scores. Therefore, it can be concluded that using DG task was more effective on vocabulary learning of learners than grammar development. The findings of this study will be of help for both English teachers and learners regarding finding the best method of teaching and learning English grammar and vocabulary.

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.

In an attempt to contribute to the ongoing debate about how output tasks affect noticing of linguistic forms, the present study set out to investigate the effect of pushed output tasks on grammatical accuracy in sentence writing of Iranian EFL learners. Fifty homogenous Iranian EFL learners were randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. Then, every group underwent ten different treatment sessions. The control group received writing instruction through conventional methods, while the experimental group received instruction through two pushed output tasks. In the case of the experimental group, in the first five treatment sessions, four grammatical structures were presented through picture cued tasks. The next five treatment sessions directed at other structures took place via reconstruction tasks. Two different versions of the writing section of the Preliminary English Test (PET) were used as pre/post-test. The results indicated that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group. Therefore, it might be argued that pushed output-based tasks had a positive effect on the Iranian EFL learner’s grammatical accuracy in sentence writing. These findings provide empirical support for the output hypothesis and have pedagogical implications for the choice of output-oriented grammar tasks.

Mixed in method, the present study investigated whether there was any significant difference between students’and teachers’perceptions of Iranian medical English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students’ language needs. In so doing, 220 EAP students of medicine, 30 subject-matter teachers of EAP, and 20 teachers of English for General Purposes (EGP) teaching medical EAP completed a Likert-scale questionnaire. Fifty of the students and 20 of the teachers also attended a semi-structured interview. The results of both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics indicated that, overall, there was a significant mismatch between the students’and the teachers’perceptions of medical EAP students’ needs. However, both teachers and students perceived reading comprehension as the most important language skill. Moreover, the students, in general, were found not to be satisfied with the EAP program presented to them. The results might prove fruitful for curriculum designers, materials developers, and teachers in (medical) EAP contexts to hear students’voices and to incorporate them in their programs, syllabi, and teaching.