فهرست مطالب seyyed mohammadreza adel

In the context of language socialization, second/foreign language (L2) instruction is a crucial context for secondary socialization, especially when it takes place outside the learners’ culture of origin. This study explored how Iranian EFL learners socialize through the rules of EFL classes and how gender, parents, and native language affect their language socialization during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focused on two fundamental principles of language socialization (Lee & Bucholtz, 2015): agency and identity. In this ethnographic study, we collected the data by observing two classes in a WhatsApp group, interviewing the learners four times through Skype, asking them to write down their reflections about their class procedure, and writing our reflections about teachers-students interactions. We used Direct Qualitative Content Analysis method to analyze the data. To simplify data classification and interpretation, we utilized the MAXQDA-2020 software. The findings revealed two sub-categories for learners’ agency (talent and experience) and three sub-categories for learners’ identity (gender, parents, and native language). The results also showed that language socialization is bidirectional, and learners face forms of negotiating, accepting, or rejecting their agency and identity across this socialization process. The learners’ L1 and culture influence their opinion about the English language and culture. Whether this effect is negative or positive depends on proficiency level, gender, and social context. Finally, cyberspace provided a suitable context for language socialization, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Findings showed several pedagogical implications for EFL teachers and learners.

Advocating the inclusion of neurocognitive science concepts in English language teacher training curriculum is gaining more interest. However, little is known about the prospective teachers' perceptions of neurocognitive science core concepts. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the prospective ELT teachers' perceptions of the neurocognitive core concepts and the applications of them through the lens of four neuro-educational models in the classroom practices. Fifteen prospective Iranian ELT teachers were interviewed and the data were analyzed using the phenomenological method. The findings revealed that the prospective ELT teachers lacked a clear understanding of the neurocognitive concepts and their implications in classroom practices. The findings support the inclusion of neurocognitive science core concepts training in language teachers' professional development.

Intersectionality refers to the experience of multi-faceted emotions from diverse angles (Crenshaw, 1989). This concept, originally developed in Western studies, has been applied to critical pedagogy, which concerns minority individuals in educational or vocational settings. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the concept of intersectionality in Second Language (L2) education and propose a new term for the main concept. Recent research has encouraged the use of quantitative and mixed-methods designs for measuring intersectionality. As such, the new term "discrima," derived from the Latin word "discrimen" meaning discrimination, is proposed to refer to the emotion experienced after discrimination. Intersectionality is used to pave the way for further steps in quantifying the intersectionality line of research.This study also explores what intersectionality is, where it originates, where it occurs in L2 education, and whether the concept can effectively express what should be expressed. The implications of this research are relevant to educational policymakers and course designers who can use the concept in real-world settings. Emphasizing the emotional aspects of intersectionality may help prevent unpleasant L2 learning and teaching experiences for minority groups. Therefore, this new term may facilitate promoting L2 education internationally. It would be beneficial for future research to provide more details about the significance of the new term "discrima" in measuring intersectionality and to offer examples of how the concept of intersectionality can be applied in L2 education.

This study intended to investigate the effect of identity types on learners’ involvement, perceptions, and achievement scores using the validated L2 Quadripolar Questionnaire (Taylor, 2010), in the EFL context of Iran amongst the adult advanced learners of English in private institutions. Therefore, 170 participants, 69 females and 101 males were selected through convenience sampling. The data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance. The analysis of the relationship between the four main sub-constructs of the model and the two sub-constructs of involvement and perception showed significant mediation between the factors and achievement score of the language learners. Moreover, the finding of the study revealed that learners with strong public and imposed selves have a weak private self. Also, the other sub-constructs were determined to be affected by age and years of studying English. Females’ identity was dominantly reported to have higher ties with the sub-constructs of the L2 Quadripolar Model.

Text mining’ refers to the computational process of unstructured text analytics for extracting latent linguistic layers and themes. It is especially significant as content or thematic analysis in descriptive and interpretive studies. This process begins with structuring simple texts and proceeds with summarizing, classifiing, modelling, evaluating and interpreting the inherent textual concepts and patterns. Given that this method counts as an interdisciplinary innovation especially in discoursal studies, it is to be pursued more intensively in academic studies. Despite the multitude of English studies in this area, there has been little interest to date in text mining amongst Iranian researchers as evidenced by the critically limited number of local Persian and English studies. Thus looking into the theory and practice of text mining and its major analytic tools and methods in Persian and English, this paper aims to prepare the ground for utilizing this methodology in language studies. The last two decades faced a major increase in the rate and accuracy of knowledge generation in language studies due to advances in interdisciplinary studies of applied linguistics and computer sciences. At the heart of methodological innovations especially in discourse studies lies ‘text mining’ whose merits have only recently been appreciated by researchers. ‘Text mining’, ‘text data mining’ or ‘Text Analysis’ is the use of different data mining algorithms and methods like natural language processing and linguistic as well as statistical techniques to derive linguistic features, significant patterns and valuable themes from the unstructured texts through collecting unstructured data, pre-processing and cleansing them to detect and remove anomalies and processing and controlling operations (Zhou et al, 2012). These processes are further broken down into feature extraction, structural analysis, text summary, text classification, text clustering, and association analysis. Text mining is actually a complicated procedure of extracting valuable, significant patterns and trends from a large number of textual data used for such functions as product suggestion analysis, social media opinion mining, and sentiment or trend analysis (He, 2013). Dating back to Feldman and Dagan (1995), text mining is an innovative methodology with a relatively short history which is often integrated with corpus analysis to computationally analyze a large body of unstructured texts as potential inormatieofinsight. As a subfield of data mining in computer sciences and an interdisciplinary method, text mining borrows from corpus and computational linguistics, whose main purpose is to extract the meta-characters representing textual features (Pons-Porrata et al, 2007). Zhou et al (2017) believe that despite its short history, text mining has been remarkably evolved into the mainstream research methodology in many interdisciplinary areas in the wake of increasingly rapid developments in data mining. Hashimi et al (2015) explained the steps involved in text mining as a semi-automated process of collecting, structuring and then analyzing textual data as follows: (a) collecting unstructured data from a variety of sources like textual documents, social media, web pages, mails, blogs, etc. using specialized corpora for organization, (b) pre-processing and cleansing the data for removing the anomalies to unveil latent valuable information using text mining tools, (c) unstructured data conversion into relevant structured formats, (d) discovering the underlying data patterns using word structures, sequences and frequency, and (e) extracting useful knowledge and storing them in a secure database for evaluation, later retrieval, trend analysis and possible decision-making. Text mining aslso makes use of lexicometrics dealing with frequency and co-occurrence analysis of vocabulary to derive structures from texts; sentiment analysis is an application of lexicometrics looking for positive or negative emotions in documents and has been used in social media analysis for evaluating public opinion (Shangzhen & Lemen, 2016). Text mining is an area of inquiry that in itself deserves to be pursued more intensively in future studies and this paper, thus, is an attempt to review its basic principles, procedures and top analytic tools and to raise researchers’ awareness of the virtues of text mining.

The concept of authorial voice has been discussed by many scholars in the field of applied linguistics. This study was an attempt to explore voice from an appraisal theory perspective. To this end, Iranian and Iinternational author’s usage of authorial voice in their published research articles was investigated. A corpus of 30 research papers (15 Iranian and 15 International research articles) written in English language in the field of applied linguistics was gathered. The thematic analysis of authorial voice was conducted by using Swale’s move structure analysis (1990) as well as Martin and White’s appraisal model (2005). The data were analyzed mostly quantitatively. For the qualitative part some excerpts have been chosen from the texts to find a meaningful pattern. The findings revealed that the tendency of Iranian and International writers for some linguistic resources was to some extent the same that is they followed a similar pattern of voice. The two groups showed similarity when using Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. This study remarkably introduces a new form of studying authorial voice in different sections of the articles based on Swales’ move structure analysis (1990) and Martin and white’s appraisal model. This contributes to new information about authorial voice in different sections of articles in the field of applied linguistics, and gives unique insights about the assessment and teaching of voice in ELT and applied linguistic disciplines.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the perception of EFL teachers and learners on the fundamental principles and constructs of critical thinking, the main characteristics of a critical thinker, and strategies for reinforcing critical thinking ability. Semi-structured interviews with eight EFL teachers and ten learners, who were theoretically sampled from three different contexts of public, private, and seminary schools in Sabzevar and Qom, Iran, were conducted using the constructivist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2008). Using the MAXQDA software version 12, the data were analyzed based on the three levels of the open, axial, and selective coding of grounded theory. A model of critical thinking was proposed with ELT teachers’ and learners’ awareness as the core category and the characteristics of a critical thinker and strategies for reinforcing critical thinking ability as sub-categories. The results of the study revealed several pedagogical implications for EFL teachers to help their learners develop critical thinking skills, for EFL learners to think more deeply, solve problems better, communicate and collaborate more effectively, and for curriculum developers and syllabus designers to put certain critical thinking activities in textbooks and support in-service classes for teachers

The concept of literacy is inherently debatable and the definition of literacy has changed in the course of history with the concomitant change of philosophical orientations. The content and the method used by educational programs are dependent on the various definitions of literacy and the different viewpoints on literacy determine the chances of learning. English as a foreign language enjoys a significant status in our curriculum. It seems that an understanding of the multiple meanings of literacy could enhance the language learning of our language learners greatly. Owing to the fact that we strive for a more effective learning in our educational system, it seems necessary to look into the conceptualization of literacy on the part of the language learners. The present study intends to look into the conceptualization of literacy by language learners using a grounded theory approach. This could help us explain and enhance the language behavior of our learners. Taking into account saturation, 24 English language learners were interviewed. The collected data were analyzed using axial and selective coding and finally a theory emerged. The emerging theory illustrated that literacy is a scientific and original issue which is transferred through discourse and the expression of agency.

The present study reports the results of a dissertation aimed at consolidating assessment and instruction of L2 pragmatics comprehension by drawing on an interventionist computerized dynamic assessment (C-DA) through which the test was embodied by providing graduated hints (from the most explicit to the most implicit) which were standardized for all test takers. To do so, a web-based software, called a Computerized Dynamic Assessment of Speech Acts, Routines, and Implicatures (CDASRI), accessible at http://da-pragmatics.com, was developed. Then, 137 upper-intermediate or advanced high school and university students ranging in age from 16 to 36 from two provinces of Khorasan Razavi and Golestan, Iran, were selected based on convenience sampling, who voluntarily took part in the study. Based on how many hints or mediations were used by each test-taker, the CDASRI provided three scores: actual score (traditional score), mediated score, and learning potential score (LPS). The results of the study indicated that the test could improve test takers’ pragmatic comprehension competence. Moreover, the significant difference between the mediated (using hints) and actual (without hints) scores of learners accounted for the fact that because of test-takers’ different Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) levels, their level of responsiveness to mediation was significantly different from one another. Hence, it can be concluded that traditional non-dynamic test loses sight of a big part of learners’ abilities through neglecting learners’ potentialities and putting emphasis only on their preliminary performance. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications for language teachers and instructors who seek an effective perspective for their assessment and instruction.

The transformational approach (Freire, 1998) can be achieved through critical pedagogy. The present study describes the development and validation of a questionnaire to access critical pedagogy for evaluating teachers’ perceptions of critical pedagogy in two different contexts i.e. public and private schools. This study used a mixed-method design. In the qualitative phase, 15 experienced high school teachers from public and private schools in Sabzevar, Iran, participated in a semi-structured interview. Based on the result of the constructivist grounded work and the literature review, the main constructs of critical pedagogy were described. Then, an eight-construct operationalization of language teaching was presented, describing the fundamental principles of language teaching from the point of view of critical pedagogy. In the quantitative phase, 180 valid questionnaires, obtained from 59 males and 121 females, were used to run the Confirmatory Factor Analysis using the software LISREL 8.5. This resulted in a 70-item, five-point Likert-scale instrument with satisfactory construct validity which was based on the 21 constructs of critical pedagogy. As a validated measurement, the Critical Pedagogy Questionnaire can be highly useful for the researchers and designers in the field of ELT, English teachers, and instructors to evaluate the perception of their learners on critical pedagogy.

The present study explored the effect of a pedagogical blog on Iranian EFL learners’ creative and critical thinking skills using a mixed-methods approach. In the pedagogical blog, the researchers asked learners divergent and evaluative questions based on Lindley’s model (1993). The quantitative data were collected by administering Creativity Test Questionnaire (ATC) and the Persian version of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test and were analyzed using SPSS Version 16.0 software. The qualitative data consisted of the posts written by the participants of the study in the class blog and were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed that the pedagogical blog significantly improved the participants’ creative and critical thinking skills, which were represented in their posts by the main themes of fluency, elaboration, and flexibility as components of divergent thinking and inference, evaluation, induction, and reconstruction as features of open and active critical thinking skills. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper.

The present study was designed to initially test a model of the role of a set of cognitive (namely, aptitude and working memory) and motivational (namely, language learning goals, self-efficacy beliefs and self-regulation strategy use) individual differences variables in writing performance of a group of Iranian undergraduate EFL learners and, subsequently, to identify the possible differences in the writing quality and composing behavior of learners with different individual characteristics. A convenient sample of 125 BA level students of English Language Teaching and Literature from three state universities in Iran took part in the study. As for the data collection procedure, these participants, in various time intervals, wrote an argumentative essay, responded to the composing process scale, completed the aptitude and working memory measures and filled in the questionnaires exploring their motivational propensities, self-efficacy beliefs and self-regulatory strategy use in writing. The collected data were analyzed by using Path Analysis and Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). Due to some problems like small sample size and idiosyncratic nature of the data, the model did not give satisfactory fit indexes. However, it was found that cognitive variables were more strongly correlated with the writing competence of the learners than the motivational ones. More specifically, the construct of foreign language aptitude had the highest potential to account for the writing competence of the learners and the learners having different levels of this construct were different from each other in terms of writing quality and composing processes employed while writing.

Literature abounds with genre analysis studies on different sections of Research Articles in various languages and fields; however, scant attention has been given to Persian articles. Hence, this genre-based study analyzed the rhetorical move structure of conclusion sections in three different disciplines: applied linguistics, psychology, and Persian literature. A corpus with 30 articles from leading international and Persian journals was devised. This corpus was analyzed for the move structure based on Yang and Allison''s (2003) framework. After analyzing each article, the major moves were extracted and the frequencies were calculated and compared. Although the cross-disciplinary and cross‐linguistic analyses unfolded significant variation regarding Move 2, they revealed no marked differences in conclusion sections of the articles on psychology and applied linguistics. However, Persian literature articles displayed more variation, which, in turn, may suggest that in the Parisian articles, writers follow a standard of their own for writing conclusion sections.The study has pedagogical implications for academic writing courses.

“Prospect 1” is a newly designed and published book for English learners at high schools in Iran. The authors’ aimhas been to localize the content, form, and pictures of the book based on the Iranian culture. In particular, the purpose of this study was to analyze the pictures of the book from the point of views of Turkish, Persian, and Kurdish (Kormanj) students. The instruments used in the study were a questioner designed and validated by the researchers and a semi-structured interview. One hundred eighty two subjects (48 Kurdish, 77 Turkish, and 57 Persianstudents) were chosen as the participants of the study. Using Chi square, the analysis of the results showed that some pictures were not appropriately selected and the learners showed differences in understanding and interpreting the meaning and purposes of these pictures. It was concluded that when selecting pictures, it is better to consider sub cultures in Iran, too.

The purpose of this cultural study was the analysis of political identities construction in an EFL context. Our site of struggle for the analysis was a private institution and the related variables were English textbooks, six teachers and six learners as our cases. Our whole data collection took from 23 September 2010 to 30 September 2011. Our theoretical framework was inspired by constructivism and in particular Bakhtin's dialogism and we followed an ethnographic methodology in our data collection. The results of the content analysis of the textbooks, teachers and learner's data showed the existence and construction of political identities. The results were discussed in connection with the context of language teaching and some pedagogical implications were also suggested.