درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

English is taught all over the world either as a foreign or second language. It is taught as a foreign language in the Iranian educational system as well. However, it has always been the issue that EFL programs have been developed without conducting a systematic needs analysis from the learners’ perspective. The present study examined the effect of employing critical needs analysis on the learners' speaking skills improvement. To this end, 128 Iranian intermediate learners from three language institutes were selected and assigned to two experimental and control groups. The learners' Necessities, Wants and Lacks through a questionnaire and semi-structured interview were investigated. The experimental group received treatment based on the results of the interview and questionnaire. The results of the inferential statistics showed that the students' highest mean score was in the Necessities sub-dimension, followed by the Lacks, and Wants sub-dimensions which revealed that the students' needs were mostly the items which were necessary for the learners' use of language. In contrast, the control group received treatment based on the pre-determined syllabus of the course. The results of an independent sample t-test indicated that in the post-test, the speaking scores of the participants in the experimental group were significantly higher than the scores in the control group.

The current study aimed to investigate the relationship among English for academic purposes instructors’ interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence types, language teaching anxiety, and classroom management beliefs taking a correlational research design. To this end, a convenient sample of 98 EAP instructors were asked to complete the excerpted sections of McKenzie’s Multiple Intelligences Questionnaire, Teacher Anxiety Scale, and Behavior and Instructional Management Scale. The results of Pearson product-moment tests revealed a significant negative relationship between interpersonal intelligence and classroom management beliefs while no significant link was observed between intrapersonal intelligence and classroom management beliefs. The same results were obtained for the possible relationship between these two intelligence types and language teaching anxiety. Furthermore, a significant negative relationship was found between EAP instructors’ language teaching anxiety and classroom management beliefs. The multiple regression analysis also showed that interpersonal intelligence could strongly predict EAP instructors’ classroom management beliefs. Furthermore, the two independent samples t-tests demonstrated that language and content instructors differed with regard to their language teaching anxiety and classroom management beliefs in EAP classes. The results were discussed in light of previously existing literature and some pedagogical implications were presented for EAP teacher training courses.

This study sought to promote EFL learners' speaking ability drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic discourse pattern (DDP) and to explore their perceptions towards implementing dialogic teaching (DT) in a speaking classroom. To this end, from the population of students in different language institutes, 47 students were selected based on a purposive sampling method. The data were collected at two step-wise processes adopting a mixed-method approach. First, the researcher directed two EFL teachers to apply the DDP principles in a dialogic (DG) and non-dialogic group (NDG). The intervention lasted for 12 weeks. Then, a posttest of speaking was conducted to track the possible improvement. The findings attested that the dialogic talk could promote EFL learners’ speaking ability. Next, DG group was required to complete a written discourse completion task to determine the extent to which incorporating DT could promote learners’ speaking ability. To analyze the data, Thomas's (2006) inductive approach was adopted comprising the dominant themes. The results revealed different themes and sub-themes such as developing self-directed learning skills, disseminating critical literacy practice, fostering language learning, promoting motivation and affective factors, to name but a few. The findings propose some implications for classroom management, materials preparation, and language policy program.

Complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) are measures of language proficiency in productive skills. This study with a non-equivalent control group pretest-post-test design explored whether Dynamic Assessment (DA) procedures enhances EFL teachers' writing CAF. Three 22-member groups of homogeneous teachers were randomly assigned to one control group (Non-DA), an interactionist DA group (IA-DAG), and an interventionist DA group (IV-DAG). After the nine-session treatment, the study groups took a writing post-test. A one-way ANOVA test showed that the experimental groups outperformed the control group, although no significant differences were found between DA groups. Besides, no statistically significant differences were found between the groups' writing complexity. Considering accuracy, IA-DAG outperformed Non-DAG whereas no significant differences were observed between the experimental groups and between IV-DAG and Non-DAG. Fluency measures showed the superiority of DA groups to the control group. The first conclusion was that DA processes have a decisive role in improving writing skills and the CAF triad. Second, CAF components do not develop in a linear process, and employing DA procedures can be useful for its improvement. The paper has implications for language teachers and SLA researchers.