درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study attempted to look deeply into how Iranian English teachers defined morality and if there was any significant difference with respect to gender and years of teaching experience. The study followed a mixed-methods design including a semi-structured interview and a multiple choice single-item questionnaire. The results revealed that while the main concern for the participants in different decades of teaching was choosing right over wrong, the prevailing theme for male and female teachers differed in that the male teachers moved towards less personalized and more agentic conceptions, whereas female teachers were more concerned with the context and society as their experience increased. The analysis of the quantitative data also illustrated there was a significant difference between female and male teachers in the 2nd and 3rd decades of teaching. Moreover, the differences between participants based on their level of experience were statistically significant

Multilingualism and its tangled relationship with culture have been the center of debate for many years. It still sparkles various conceptual arguments and day by day, more academic research is circulating on this subject. The concept of multilingualism and the arguments around this discourse roots in the language itself. To fully grasp the notion of cultural multilingualism, first, we need to perceive how and where language and culture are interlinked. The study of culture has the originality of studying history itself. The first studies on both language and culture date back to the earliest time human attempted to analyze and perceive history. The globalization of multilingualism has led scientists and experts to analyze multilingualism through a cultural lens. It's only in a few decades that perceiving and understanding multilingualism through cultural perspectives has opened the eyes of experts to new horizons. Concerning this fact, this study has evaluated Never Let Me Go, a 2005 Nobel-winning novel by the Japanese-British novelist and screenwriter, Kazuo Ishiguro according to cultural multilingual values. Additionally, this study questions the concept of cultural multilingualism, together with its significance in shaping one's identity and self as the main key in Ishiguro's novel. Proven by the given facts, the current study illustrates how cultural multilingualism forms the author's writing style and mindset as a multilingual individual.

This study was conducted to examine the comments provided by ChatGPT 3.5 and doctoral students on doctoral dissertation proposals. Feedback receivers’ behavioral engagement with these two feedback types was also examined. The participants of this study, selected based on convenience sampling, were 28 Teaching English as a Foreign Language PhD students from three provinces who wrote their dissertation proposals in English. The first version and revised versions of their proposals and the provided comments were analyzed to identify the feedback types and the extent they applied the comments. Furthermore, stimulated recall interviews were used to identify the reasons why they did not apply some of the participants. Findings showed that both ChatGPT 3.5 and doctoral students were successful in providing both content-related and form-related comments. These two feedback sources also provided significant numbers of elaborated and justified feedback on dissertation proposals. Feedback receivers applied most of the comments provided by these feedback sources, and the specificity levels of comments affected the incorporation rate. The findings of the thematic analysis of the stimulated recall interview data revealed that the participants did not apply the comments because they were too broad, inaccurate, difficult to apply, and difficult to understand.

Objective: Research on corrective feedback (CF) in L2 pragmatics instruction, especially in online teaching, is still in its infancy. To address this gap, this study sought to examine the types of CF provided by EFL teachers in online classes in response to the learners’ pragmalinguistically and sociopragmatically inappropriate production of the binary speech acts of request and refusal.Methods: Eighteen hours of online classroom interaction data were analyzed using conversation analysis and a taxonomy that classifies feedback into implicit and explicit input-providing and output-prompting CF.Results: The findings of the study showed that explicit output prompts were largely applied by teachers as the most frequent type of CF. The teachers tended to use prompting questions and metapragmatic clues to help learners better understand request and refusal speech acts, rather than directly offering input or reformulation. In addition, because of the face-threatening nature of speech acts of refusal and request, the teachers applied explicit output prompts as corrective feedback to reinforce the accuracy of learners’ production.Conclusions: It can be concluded that the online mode of instruction can impact the explicitness of pragmatic CF. This research is of great value for teachers to employ both implicit and explicit types of CF to develop learners’ competency in pragmatics in online instruction.

The present study investigates the effectiveness of a conceptual approach, grounded in cognitive linguistics, in enhancing the comprehension and production of phrasal verbs among Iranian EFL learners of English. To this end, 38 participants (16 males and 22 females) at intermediate levels of language proficiency were randomly assigned to an experimental and a control group, and underwent instruction through the conceptual approach or the traditional method, respectively. A pre-test was administered to assess baseline performance, followed by the intervention and two post-tests (i.e., a cloze test and a story-retelling task) to measure changes in comprehension and production of the phrasal verbs. The cloze test measured differences in phrasal verb comprehension, while the story-retelling task assessed production and accuracy. The mixed between-within-subjects ANOVA (SPANOVA) revealed significant improvement in the experimental group on the post-test. Independent sample t-tests confirmed superior performance in the production and accuracy of phrasal verbs for the experimental group. This suggests that the conceptual approach offers a systematic method for learners to approach phrasal verbs analytically, contrasting with the traditional perception of these elements as non-analyzable. As a practical implication, educators in EFL contexts, are strongly urged to adopt the presented conceptual approach. This innovative pedagogical strategy not only enriches the learning experience but also addresses linguistic challenges associated with phrasal verbs, fostering creativity in the instructional process through situational presentations and orientational metaphors. 

Dissatisfaction with product-oriented and static forms of assessment led to the emergence of process-oriented testing or dynamic assessment. Learners’ involvement in the assessment process can enhance their learning autonomy and help them process linguistic features more deeply. Accordingly, using a quantitative quasi-experimental research design, the researchers sought to explore whether utilizing DA principles would have any differential impact, believed to be statistically significant, on the Iranian male and female intermediate EFL learners’ learning and retention of English grammar. To this end, 30 EFL learners from two intact classes who were taking a general English course at Shayestegan English Language Institute, in Rasht, Iran were selected as a homoscedastic group of participants based on the scores they obtained on a sample copy of Oxford Solutions Placement Test (OSPT). The intact classes, each comprising 15 students, were then assigned to one experimental and one control group who then received treatment on their L2 grammar under different conditions: The experimental group received instruction on English grammar as per the principles of dynamic assessment in an eight-session intervention program. The control group likewise received treatment on L2 grammar over the course of the study, but they were trained using teacher-fronted instruction. Finally, the groups sat for an immediate and a delayed posttest of grammar to demonstrate their degree of learning and amount of retention of English grammar. Capitalizing on a 2 by 2 factorial design, which allowed for examination of both main and interaction effects of instructional modality and participants’ gender, the researchers employed a two-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to examine the participants’ performance scores. The results revealed that, regardless of participants’ gender, instruction as delivered through dynamic assessment privileged the participants in the experimental group much better than that of the conventional method in terms of their learning an

The goal of this study was to explore English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ and learners’ beliefs and classroom practices in relation to task rehearsal as an operationalization of repeating a task, which entails learners’ awareness of the repeated performance before they do a task for the first time. Five intact EFL classes with five teachers and 32 learners were recruited. The teachers asked the learners to perform a task that was included in the textbook twice with an interval of one week, while they made the learners aware of the second iteration prior to their first performance. Data were collected through observing the two sessions of each class and interviewing both the teachers and the learners immediately after the second task occasion. Results indicated that the participants (both teachers and learners) believed that task rehearsal was beneficial for facilitating task implementation and task performance. Findings also showed that task rehearsal led the participants to show changes in their classroom behaviors related to this practice from the first to the second session, which clearly reflected their beliefs. Implications of these results for L2 task implementation and teacher education are discussed.