درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Although uninterpretable features are claimed to be an area of difficulty for EFL learners, they are still one of the less explored areas of research in the field of L2 pedagogy. The present study sought to investigate the impacts of two techniques, namely contrastive analysis and dictogloss on EFL learners’ mastery of resumptive pronouns, an uninterpretable feature absent in English relative clauses but present in most Persian ones. To this end, 77 elementary EFL learners with similar background in English were selected and assigned to three groups: one control and two experimental. Before and after the instruction the participants were administered a 50-item Grammaticality Judgment test and a 20-item translation test which had been developed and validated for use in this study. The results showed that all three groups had significant progression after the treatments, but the comparison among the groups indicated no statistically significant difference. This may suggest that L2 exposure had a more important role in the participants’ performance than the instruction type (contrastive analysis and dictogloss). The findings seem to support the importance of exposure to such L2 structures over time and that instruction cannot always accelerate acquisition.

This paper provides a fairly detailed corpus-based vocabulary profile of the Iranian EFL books used in public schools. To this end, the WordPerfect files of all the seven books were converted to text format to get rid of the formatting features and be compatible with the software used for analysis. The software tools used were the Compleat Lexical Tutor suite, version 6.2 (Cobb, 2011), AntConc (Anthony, 2012), and AntWord Profiler (Anthony, 2012). The output of the analysis included general counts of words in Iranian school books at different levels, the frequent function and content words, frequent n-grams, frequent metalinguistic words, the coverage of several well-known, corpus-based word lists in these books, the range of the words across the books, and the amount of vocabulary recycling. The paper discusses the vocabulary representativeness and recycling and the adequacy of exposure to English in these EFL books. Detailed word frequency tables as well as some practical implications of the quantitative results constitute important features of this article

مطالعه حاضر به بررسی نمود تخصص در تدریس معلمان انگلیسی در محیطهای رسمی آموزشی ایران پرداخته است. به طور خاص این تحقیق با این هدف شکل گرفت که نشان دهد چطور معلمان زبان انگلیسی در دبیرستانها و اساتید زبان عمومی در یک دانشگاه دولتی ایران خصوصیات تخصص در تدریس را آشکار میسازند. این تحقیق همچنین به مقایسه خصوصیات تخصص در تدریس معلمان و اساتید تازه کار و باتجربه در دبیرستان و دانشگاه پرداخته است. به این منظور طی یک تحقیق کیفی، 10 معلم دبیرستان و 10 استاد دانشگاه به صورت هدفمند برای مشاهده و مصاحبه انتخاب شدند. هر گروه شامل 5 معلم تازه کار و 5 معلم با تجربه بود. بعد از 3-2 جلسه مشاهده کلاس درس معلمان (به عنوان منبع اصلی داده ها) و یک جلسه مصاحبه با همه شرکت کنندگان، همه موارد و نمونه های تخصص در تدریس معلمان استخراج شد. این نمونه ها بعدا به صورت 6 نوع تخصص در تدریس طبقه بندی شدند: تخصص در مدیریت، تخصص در ایجاد انگیزه و ارائه راهنمایی و بازخورد، تخصص آموزشی، تخصص در شناخت مفاهیم، تخصص در ایجاد ارتباط بین موضوعات مختلف درسی و تخصص در مدیریت چالش ها. سپس جدولی طراحی شد که شامل همه انواع تخصص در تدریس و نمونه ها و مثالهای هر کدام بود (که از گزارشات مشاهدات و هم چنین از ادبیات موضوع استخراج شده بود). داده ها برای هر کدام از معلمان دوباره به صورت دقیق مورد بررسی قرار گرفت و مواردی که در تدریس عملی آنها وجود داشت در جدول علامت گذاری گردید. قدم بعدی مطالعه دقیق الگوهای تخصص در تدریس برای هر گروه از معلمان بود. تحلیل داده های جمع آوری شده نشان داد که تخصص در تدریس به صورت تقریبا مشابهی در تدریس عملی معلمان 4 گروه نمود پیدا کرده بود. سه گروه یعنی معلمان با تجربه دبیرستان و اساتید تازه کار و با تجربه دانشگاه موفقیت 100 درصدی را در حداقل یکی از انواع تخصص در تدریس نشان دادند که مربوط به ایجاد ارتباط در بین موضوعات درسی بود. این نوع تخصص تدریس برای معلمان تازه کار دبیرستان تنها 60 درصد بود. اساتید با تجربه دانشگاه تنها گروهی بودند که در دو نوع از تخصص یعنی تخصص در شناخت مفاهیم و ایجاد ارتباط بین موضوعات درسی به موفقیت کامل (100 درصدی) رسیدند. و معلمان تازه کار دبیرستان تنها گروهی بودند که در هیچ کدام از انواع تخصص در تدریس موفقیت کامل 100 درصدی را به دست نیاوردند.

The sociocultural approach to writing strategy use emphasizes the importance of context and the mediating resources that learners can use to enhance the quality of their performance in writing (Lei, 2008). Accordingly, the present study explored the sociocultural strategy use of a convenient sample of 105 BA level students of English Language and Literature who had passed essay-writing courses in a state university in Iran by analyzing their responses to the items of a newly-developed sociocultural strategy use questionnaire consisting of different sub-scales, namely, artifact-mediated, rule-mediated, community-mediated and role-mediated strategies. The results of the descriptive statistics revealed that the tool-mediated strategies, which are the subcategory of artifact-mediated strategies, had the highest frequency of use which is rather justified in the context of Iran. In addition, the students’ overall strategy use and their writing ability were correlated and a statistically significant relationship was found between these two variables. However, the results of the multiple regression analysis indicated that none of the sub-scales had a unique predicting power in accounting for the learners’ writing ability. The researchers also compared the sociocultural strategy use of more- and less-skilled student writers and found a significant difference in the strategy use of different individuals.

Planning, monitoring, and evaluating one’s performance constitute individuals’ metacognitive strategies. Recently, metacognition has been conceptualized not only at the individual level but also at pair and group levels. The concept of socially-shared metacognition has arisen based on the idea that group members observe, control, evaluate, and regulate each other’s actions to promote the group’s problem-solving. This article investigated the impact of motivational scaffolds on a group of Iranian EFL learners’ individual and socially-shared metacognition. Two groups of 30 female intermediate learners participated in this study. In the experimental group, the participants received the teacher’s motivational scaffolds as she provided instructions and feedback throughout individual and collaborative oral and written tasks. On the other hand, the participants in the control group were asked to take part in the routine oral and written classroom activities. The participants’ think-aloud protocols in individual and pair activities were analyzed, and instances of metacognitive activities were identified. The data were analyzed through two Mann-Whitney U tests, and the results indicated that motivational scaffolds statistically significantly enhanced the use of metacognitive strategies at both inter and intra-individual levels. Implications for classrooms are discussed

Academic writing ability is an important goal that learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) try to attain. While ESL students’ academic writings have been widely explored, owing to few studies investigating appraisal resources in EFL students’ argumentative writing, the gap still exists about EFL students’ academic writing. This study aimed to see how Kurdish-speaking learners of English employ appraisal resources in their writings. It further aimed to explore whether the appraisal framework can be utilized as an assessment scale for evaluating the students’ argumentative writing. To this end, the study investigated the argumentative essays written by 15 bilingual Kurdish-Iranian graduates of English within the framework of the appraisal theory. The instruments applied in this study consisted of a modified rating scale for assessing the essays in terms of the macrostructures exploited in them and the framework for the analysis of appraisal resources. Quantitative findings revealed high-graded essays employ more attitudinal items and fewer monoglossic resources than low-graded ones. Qualitatively, the high-graded essays articulated attitudinal values in nominal forms and sometimes in a backgrounded manner while these values were mostly presented by surge of feelings and in a foregrounded way in the low-graded essays. Regarding engagement, unlike the high-graded essays, the low-graded ones were poor in recognizing other voices and alternative positions. Inspired by the strength of the appraisal model evaluating writing, results suggest that high-graded essays are successful in positioning readers attitudinally and clarifying the ethical message to readers.

اهمیت برنامه های پیشرفت حرفه ای در بالا بردن کارآمدی معلم در دو دهه اخیر توجه محققین را در حیطه تربیت معلم به خود جلب کرده است. با این وجود، به نقش و تاثیر برنامه های آموزشی دانشگاه ها و کلاس های ارائه شده توسط آنها در بالا بردن کارآمدی معلمان، به ویژه در زمینه تربیت معلم برای آموزش زبان انگلیسی به عنوان زبان خارجه توجه کافی صورت نگرفته است. بنا بر این، تحقیق حاضر به بررسی تاثیر کلاس های ارشد آموزش زبان انگلیسی به عنوان زبان خارجه بر روی کارآمدی دانشجویان این رشته در ایران پرداخت. به علاوه، جهت کنترل تاثیر تجربه تدریس، کارآمدی دانشجویان با تجربه در تدریس و دانشجویان نو آموز و کم تجربه نیز بررسی گردید. بدین منظور، ۲۷۷ دانشجو از هفت دانشگاه اصلی تهران در این تحقیق شرکت کردند. نتایج تحقیق حاضر نشان داد که کلاس های ارشد آموزش زبان انگلیسی به عنوان زبان خارجه تاثیر معناداری بر کارآمدی معلمان نداشته است. با این وجود، نتایج نشان دادند که میان کارآمدی کّلی و زیر شاخه های کارآمدی معلمان با تجربه در تدریس و معلمان کم تجربه یا نو آموز تفاوت معناداری وجود دارد. همچنین، نتایج مصاحبه ها نشان داد که بر خلاف معلمان کم تجربه تر که علاقه بیشتری به درس تدریس عملی داشتند، معلمان با تجربه در تدریس علاقه مند به هر دو کلاس های تئوری و عملی بودند. علیرغم این تفاوت، شباهت هایی به ویژه در زمینه کارآمدی برای اداره کردن کلاس ها و مهارتهای آموزشی یافت شد.

Task difficulty across different macro-genres continues to remain among less attended areas in second language development studies. This study examined the correlation between task difficulty across the descriptive, narrative, argumentative, and expository macro-genres. The three components of task difficulty (i.e., code complexity, cognitive complexity, and communicative stress) were also compared in the four macro-genres. The design included the administration of short reading texts with comparable length and readability indices based on the four macro-genres followed by task difficulty questionnaire. The macro-genre-based reading textsalong with the task difficulty questionnaire were administered to 50 EFL students in the University ofLorestan, Iran. Task difficulty questionnaire explored the learners’ perceptions of task difficulty in the code complexity, cognitive complexity, and communicative stress domains. The results revealed that there were no significant differences among the task difficulty components in the four macro-genre-based text types. The findings also showed that there was no significant correlation between task difficulty of each macro-genre with those of the other genres except thoseofthe narrative and expository genres.The findings hold implications for the use of macro-genres with different task difficulty indices in task-oriented programs, teacher training, and testing.