درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Objective: The present study sought to explore EFL teachers’ cognition of rapport establishment and maintenance, as one of the aspects of classroom management, in the context of Iran’s foreign language institutes’ face-to-face EFL classes.Method: The study involved 12 Iranian teachers who taught adult learners. The sample size was determined based on reaching saturation, and the participating teachers were selected through purposeful sampling. The main instrument utilized in this qualitative study was a semi-structured one-to-one in-person interview, which aimed to elicit the participants’ cognition of rapport development. These individual interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed thematically.Results: The findings revealed that the participants believed in the importance of rapport creation for efficient classroom management. Besides, they recommended strategies for establishing rapport with learners, such as familiarization, verbal immediacy, non-verbal immediacy, attention to learners’ emotions, judicious L1 use, playing games, and utilizing social media. Moreover, they held that teachers’ personality traits and communication skills could impact their approach to building rapport.Conclusion: Altogether, the participants had a sound cognition of rapport maintenance as one of the aspects of classroom management. The findings of the current study provide implications for teacher educators, teachers, and institutes’ supervisors.

The teaching and learning of grammar have continuously been core areas of discussion among practitioners of TEFL. Despite significant investment in creating optimal conditions for grammar learning, it remains essential to explore innovative instructional methods that enable learners to engage meaningfully with grammatical structures, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of grammar acquisition. Learners may reconstruct various grammatical structures by interpreting grammar from their textbooks while drawing upon their own experiences, resources, and events from life. This is called a learning-oriented approach that involves hypothesis testing and conceptualization that, in turn, incubates awareness of one's limitations and needs. This study investigates whether the remodeling method of grammar instruction, where learners reconstruct grammatical structures based on personal experiences, significantly enhances Iranian EFL learners' grammatical and vocabulary proficiency. The research employed an experimental research design where a pretest was administered, and a posttest was administered. The study involved forty high school EFL students aged 15 to 16 from Imam Khomeini Technical High School in Shahreza, situated in the southern part of Isfahan province in Iran. While the performance of learners in the experimental group subjected to remodeling method interventions was obtained, their control group, which was not subjected to such intervention, was measured for comparison. The findings revealed that the experimental group recorded a higher improvement in grammatical knowledge due to the remodeling approach. Furthermore, the results indicated that engaging in the remodeling of various structures allowed learners to communicate more effectively in oral interactions and to enhance their understanding of grammar and vocabulary. Statistically significant differences were observed between the experimental and control groups. This study underscores the value of incorporating the strategy of having students remodel various structures based on their concepts in English language instruction to foster greater proficiency in the language. Based on the findings, the researcher recommends utilizing, activating, and implementing this strategy on the other skills of the English language.

The current study adopted a qualitative-quantitative design to compare the effects of output-based production (OBP) and input enhancement (IE) as two teaching techniques on a group of EFL learners’ writing and also to seek those learners’ perceptions on the two instruction procedures. Accordingly, 65 intermediate learners were selected through convenience nonrandom sampling from among 94 students in intact classes based on their performance on a sample proficiency test (the test had already been piloted among 30 learners). These 65 learners were subsequently divided into two groups consisting of 33 learners in the OBP group and 32 in the IE group. The researchers also made sure that the learners in both groups were homogeneous in terms of their writing prior to the treatment. Next, the treatment in both groups commenced. Once the treatment was over, the researchers gave both groups the same writing posttest. The results of the statistical analysis indicated that the IE group outperformed the OBP group significantly in their writing. The participants further sat for a semi-structured interview comprising five questions about their perception regarding both instructions which demonstrated that the IE group was generally more satisfied with the course than the OBP group. The findings of this study suggest more attention to the incorporation of IE in both English language schools and pre- and in-service teacher training programs.

Appraisal theory has provided researchers with a powerful analytical tool to explore how language users express their feelings, attitude and judgments in texts. The present study was conducted to explore the use of appraisals in Persian recounts with a focus on the attitude subsystem. Forty-eight online recounts were selected (22 female writers and 26 male writers). The analysis was conducted two times at a one-week interval using the UAM corpus tool software. The results indicated that women generally used more attitude resources in their recounts compared to men and they also used more affect than men, both men and women encoded their evaluation more explicitly rather than implicitly, and in both types of recounts, attitude subsystems appeared in a special order in terms of frequency. In conclusion, predominant use of attitude in Persian recounts can be considered as evidence of effectiveness and applicability of the appraisal theory.