درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

An understanding of language as ‘open, dynamic, constantly evolving and personal encompasses the rich complexities of communication (Shohamy, 2007, p.5). Knowing about the important role of culture as well as psychological aspects of language can give us a broader view of languageteaching and learning. In order to obtain a better understanding of different aspects of language teaching, the present study aims to investigate the possible relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’home-culture attachment and its underlying components, with their emotional intelligence. To this aim two questionnaires namely: Home culture Attachment/dependency and Bar-On EI test were distributed among 80 EFL teachers, both men and women who taught at different levels in state schools in Birjand, Kermanshah and Zabol. Data were analyzed using Pearson’s correlation coefficient and multiple regressions. Finally results of the study revealed no significant relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ home culture attachment and its underlying components, with their emotional intelligence. The most important result of this study is bringing about awareness for EFL teachers, EFL syllabus designers, teacher educators and policy makers about the important factors in cultural attachment or detachment of Iranian EFL teachers that consequently affects their teaching and transfer of cultural values into their students.

Reading comprehension ability consists of multiple cognitive processes, and cloze tests have long been claimed to measure this ability as a whole. However, since the introduction of cloze test, different varieties of it have been proposed by the testers. Thus, the present study was an attempt to examine the relatedness of Cloze-Elide test, Multiple-choice (MC) cloze test, and C-test as three different types of cloze procedure used for measuring reading comprehension. To this end, one C-test consisting of four short texts, one fixed ratio (n=7) multiple-choice cloze test, and one cloze-elide test were prepared from reading passages with similar readability levels. The participants of the study were 30 (male &female) freshman university students majoring in English literature. The results of ANOVA test showed that there were not any statistically significant differences at the 0.05 level of significance among the performance of the students on the three tests measuring their reading comprehension. Therefore, it was concluded that against the advocates of each test who claim superiority of it over the other types, these three types of cloze tests in this study assessed the reading comprehension in a similar way. So, the testers can be confident to make use of these tests as reading comprehension tests interchangeably.

Despite their widespread popularity and rapid growth, the Internet-mediated English educational materials for learners of English as a foreign/second language (FL/SL) have rarely been analyzed in terms of their potential hidden curriculum. Accordingly, the present study aims to address this need through conducting a CDA investigation into some lessons which are randomly selected from an English educational website called “Englishcentral.” Adapting, expanding, and adopting some elements of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Network, the researchers attempt to describe and explain the representation of “Iran” in Englishcentral. Investigating and thematizing the research data revealed that the keyword “Iran” was used in this website to refer to three groups of social actors, namely the Iranian government and officials, Iranian people, and Iranian people and/or government/officials. The way these social actors are associated and dissociated, activated and passivated, personalized and impersonalized creates remarkable findings which give support to the presence of particular hidden agenda in this program. In all, the results of this study reveal that the Iranian social actors are portrayed unfavorably in Englishcentral, which is an alleged English educational program.

There is a growing interest among the higher education principals and policy makers to improve teacher evaluation methods and more important than that to use the evaluation data. A number of research studies implied the ineffective instruction of ESP courses in Iran (Atai, 2002; Eslami, 2005; Hayati, 2008; Ahmadi, 2008; Sherkatolabbasi & Mahdavi, 2012; Boniadi, Ghojazadeh & Rahmatvand, 2013). The basic objective of research in field of ESP/EGP instruction and evaluation is to facilitate informed decisions for the betterment of English classes. The literature suggested that most of the teachers and students were dissatisfied with the students’ progress in specific English courses. Data was collected from the teachers by various ways including observation checklist and feedback form. To carry out the study, 12 ESP and EGP teachers were observed using Marshall’s rubrics (2011) and observation logs’ analysis. Then, 18 teachers offered feedback on different aspects of their own courses. The data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively using ANOVA statistical measurement. The findings firstly indicate that EGP teachers were more standard teachers in comparison to ESP teachers. Secondly, the feedback forms show discrepancy between the views of EGP teachers and ESP teachers in some areas including the material effectiveness and students’ interest. To reach a standard point in EGP/ESP instruction, more evaluation is to be applied by the faculty members, university principals and the teachers themselves. Politically correct attitudes towards teachers should not lead to ineffective English courses. Some practical implications are suggested to upgrade the current practice in ESP classes

این تحقیق تلاشی در فعال کردن دانش لغوی غیرفعال از طریق توجه دهی و بررسی تأثیر جمله نویسی به عنوان فعالیت پس توجه دهنده بر تقویت تأثیر توجه دهی است. چهل و دو دانشجوی زبان انگلیسی سطح متوسط به بالای بزرگسال خانم، در دو گروه هم سطح از یک دانشگاه سراسری انتخاب شدند. آنها در تحقیقی شرکت کردند که در آن توجه به کلماتی که تولید آنها به آسانی فهمیدن آنها نبود، از طریق علامت زدن آن کلمات در یک متن خواندن انجام شد. سپس، شرکت کنندگان در یک فرآیند ٤ هفتگی جمله نویسی متراکم/ پراکنده شرکت کردند؛ شرکت کنندگان یک گروه هر هفته در طول ٤ روز پی در پی در هر روز، یک جمله با یکی از ١٦ لغت توجه شده نوشتند و گروه دیگر این فرآیند را یک بار در هفته تجربه کردند، به گونه ای که آنها بدون هیچ وقفه زمانی، ٤ جمله با ٤ کلمه توجه شده نوشتند. نتایج نشان داد که ارائه فعالیت پس توجه دهنده بر ارتقاء دانش لغوی تولیدی هر دو گروه به طور معناداری تأثیرگذار است. تعامل بین عامل زمان و روش های یادگیری معنادار بود. همچنین، نتایج عملکرد گروه پراکنده بهتر از گروه متراکم بود، ولی این تفوق معنادار نبود.

Among the linguistic resources for creating grammatical metaphor, nominalization rewords processes and properties metaphorically as nouns within the experiential metafunction of language. Following Halliday's (1998a) classification of grammatical metaphor, the current study investigated nominalization exploited in an English applied linguistics textbook and its corresponding Persian translation. Selection of these textbooks was motivated by consulting 10 ELT professors. Analysis started by identifying nominalization instances and recurrent patterns of nominalization in the books through adopting a mixed approach. The frequency of nominal expressions was counted, and eventually chi-square was run to find out the probable significance of nominalization use in English and Persian academic text samples. The quantitative differences in using nominalization turned out to be significant, and results revealed variations in the ranking patterns of nominalization in both texts. Qualities as entities tended to recur more in English than in Persian. However, the noun to noun modifier was frequently exploited in the Persian translation. The similarities in the employment of nominalization patterns might reflect the awareness of both the author and the translator of the role of metadiscourse markers in scientific texts. The main reason for the differences lies in the matter that knowledge is realized in different languages. The findings of this study have implications for textbook writers, English for Academic Purposes students, and translators.

این مطالعه موردی به بررسی این موضوع می پردازد که یک معلم تایوانی که در یک دوره ی کارشناسی ارشد آموزش زبان شرکت کرده است چگونه از زبانشناسی ساختارمند- نقش گرا و آموزش سبک محور در طراحی و آموزش زبان به فراگیران زبان انگلیسی در تایوان استفاده کرده است. با استفاده از روش مدت دار قوم شناسی، نتیجه این تحقیق نشان داد که برداشت و تصور این معلم از دستور زبان از دیدی سنتی، محدود به جمله و متمرکز بر ساختار به فهمی کاربردی تر از ارتباطات پیوسته مابین سبک و ویژگی های متن تغییر قابل توجهی کرد. این تغییر زمانی رخ داد که معلم توانست از زبانشناسی ساختارمند- نقش گرا برای فهم عملکرد زبان در ادبیات کودکان استفاده کند. با این وجود، میزان توانایی این معلم برای استفاده از زبانشناسی ساختارمند- نقش گرا و آموزش سبک محور در تمرینات کلاس تا حدی تحت تاثیر چارچوب برنامه ریزی شده ی اجباری تدریس و آزمون های رایج در مکانی بود که وی پس از بازگشت به تایوان در آن مشغول به کار شد. این تحقیق بیشتر در ایجاد فهمی جدید از دستور زبان در آموزش زبان انگلیسی و تربیت معلمان بهتر در آسیا کاربرد دارد.

To investigate the effects of etymological elaboration, contextual pragmatic clues, and lexical knowledge on L2 idioms comprehension and production, 60 male intermediate level EFL students in three groups were selected. Each group was randomly assigned to one treatment condition. Group one participants were presented with the etymological explanation of idioms. In group two, the same idioms were presented in short, familiar contexts, and in the third group, the participants focused on the exact meaning of the constituent parts of each idiom. At the end of the experimental period, comprehension and production posttests of idioms were administered. Two one–way ANOVA procedures were used to analyze data. Results showed that the participants of the etymological elaboration group performed significantly better than the participants of the lexical knowledge group on idiom production. The differences between the means in all other comparisons were not statistically significant. These findings may have implications for teachers, learners, and syllabus designers.

Teachers’ sense of efficacy belief has been introduced as a context-specific construct, but the related literature is not clear on this specificity. This study was an attempt to show how contextual factors influence efficacy beliefs among English language teachers. To this end, thirty Iranian EFL teachers working in both school and private institute contexts were chosen as the participants to respond to Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Beliefs questionnaire (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001) twice: once based on school context and once based on private institute context. Afterwards, the participants were invited to a brief interview designed to investigate further the reasons for which they had scored higher in either context. The interview findings and the results of a t-test revealed that context really made a difference. It is argued that the proper or improper functioning of efficacy building sources is the cause of the difference

این تحقیق یادگیری لغات انگلیسی برای درک مطلب دانش آموزان از طریق آموزش تکلیف محور را مورد بررسی قرار داد. صد و سی وپنج دانش آموز دختر دبیرستانی از دو سطح مختلف تحصیلی یعنی کلاس اول و چهارم از یکی از دبیرستان های شهر اصفهان انتخاب شدند. آن ها به طور تصادفی در چهار گروه یعنی دو کلاس شاهد و دو کلاس آزمایش در دو سطح مختلف قرار گرفتند. جهت ارزیابی درک مطلب دانش آموزان در ابتدای شروع ترم و قبل از تدریس دروس یک آزمون از هر چهار گروه به عمل آورده شد. گروه های آزمایش لغات چهار درس را از طریق آموزش تکلیف محور و گروه های شاهد همان تعداد دروس را به شیوه ی سنتی آموزش دیدند. در پایان ترم، درک مطلب دو گروه در هر دو سطح توسط آزمون دیگری مورد ارزیابی قرار گرفت. نتایج به دست آمده از طریق مقایسه ی میانگین بین دوکلاس شاهد وآزمایش در هر دو سطح نشان داد که گروه آزمایش که از طریق تکلیف محور آموزش دیده بودند بهتر از گروه کنترل که به شیوه سنتی آموزش دیده بودند به آزمون پاسخ داده بودند. همچنین تست نمونه مستقل نشان داد که عملکرد کلاس اولی ها بهتر از عملکرد کلاس چهارمی ها بود.