درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Although decades of research have well elaborated on teacher professional development, we still do not have a thorough picture about what teacher professional development could entail and what components it consists of. The present study aims to develop and validate a teacher professional development scale in an Iranian English foreign language context. An initial tentative model with 130 items was piloted and tested through exploratory and confirmatory data analyses on a sample of 400 EFL teachers. This level resulted in the removal of 28 items in our sample loaded, resulting in a final 102 teacher professional development inventory. The developed inventory measures the extent to which EFL teachers are professionally developed and makes teachers aware of multiple characteristics of professionally developed teachers. These competencies are essential components of teacher professional development, enabling the teachers to utilize them in everyday teaching and learning practices in the classroom settings which, as a result, leads to student achievement. As teachers fulfill important professional roles, they need valid instruments to assess their day-to-day functioning in the class. With the instrument developed and validated in the current research, we, in fact, allow language teachers to assess their extent of professional development in different pedagogical contexts.

مطالعه حاضر با استناد به فلسفه ی انکارپذیری پوپر سعی بر آن داشته تا به طور تجربی بررسی کند که آیا عواملی مانند جنسیت، آشنایی با موضوع متن، علاقه به موضوع یا محتوای متن، حدس زدن جواب سوالات، و عوامل مربوط به بافت اجتماعی می توانند بر پایه ی قوی از فلسفه ی انکارپذیری استوار باشند. در این مطالعه عملکرد آزمون درک مطلب 203 دانشجوی زبان ایرانی شامل 110 زن و 93 مرد به وسیله ی مدل آماری رگراسیون لوجستیک و نظریه پاسخ-سوال (IRT) مورد بررسی قرار گرفت. نتایج نشان داد که برای عوامل آشنایی با متن و جنسیت تنها مدل رگراسیون توانست عملکرد افتراقی را نشان دهد که این نتایج تاثیر جنسیت را تایید می کرد ولی نتایج مربوط به آشنایی با متن کاملا متناقض بود. نتایج حاصل از دو مدل رگراسیون و IRT در خصوص درآمد و حدس زدن جواب سوالات در تضاد با یکدیگر قرار داشتند ولی نتایج مربوط به تحصیلات والدین و محل سکونت با هم همراستا بوده و تاثیری معنادار بر عملکرد افتراقی سوالات آزمون درک مطلب داشتند.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the significance of verbalization and teaching the concepts of listening on the development of listening performance among Iranian EFL learners. To do so, an experimental study was designed in which the participants were sixty pre-intermediate learners selected based on the results of their performance on a standard version of Oxford Placement Test (OPT). The participants were divided into two experimental groups. The learners in experimental group I (Systemic Theoretical Instruction- Explanation and Materialization (STI-EM), were exposed to materialized tools which consisted of presenting the target concept in charts accompanied by the examples and related strategies to extract the concept, while Group II students (Systemic Theoretical Instruction- Explanation, Materialization, and Verbalization (STI-EMV), enjoyed materialized tools as well as collaborative verbalization. The learners in both groups went through pre-test, intervention, and post-test. The collected data were analyzed through employing analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The results indicated that the group which practiced collaborative verbalization in L1 outperformed the one which was just mediated by teacher's oral explanation and materialized objects

Cognitive linguistics gives the most inclusive, consistent description of how language is organized, used and learned to date. Cognitive linguistics contains a great number of concepts that are useful to second language learners. If-clauses in English, on the other hand, remain intriguing for foreign language learners to struggle with, due to their intrinsic intricacies. EFL grammar books are paying focal attention to present explanations of if-clauses in terms of their form not meaning, hence not giving attention to their contextual meaning usage. Cognitive linguistic insights on if-clauses discuss their complexity in such a way that could be very beneficial for L2 learners. This study aims to investigate the effect of two different ways of teaching (cognitively-oriented and task-oriented) on learning English if-clauses. A sample of 60 non-English postgraduate students in three groups, two experimental groups (cognitively-oriented and task-oriented) and one control group participated in our study. The results indicated that participants from the cognitively-oriented group performed better than those in task-oriented and control groups and proved a higher degree of comprehending English if-clauses in different contexts. The findings have implications for curriculum and materials developers, as well as the English language teachers in incorporating insights from cognitive linguistics in second language materials.