Iranian Journal of English for Academic Purposes
Volume:5 Issue: 1, Spring 2016

Effective pedagogical practice promotes the achievement of students and builds up confidence of the teachers in teaching. The major cause for the gap in pedagogical practices can be attributed to the lack of pedagogical competence. The present study employed a mixed method research approach to examine Iranian high school English Language teachers’ perception of pedagogical competence in two phases.
A 53-item questionnaire of pedagogical competence was, first, administered to 365 high school English teachers of 415 teachers practicing teaching in Guilan Province, Iran, through probability sampling method (stage cluster sampling). The teachers’ age, gender, fields of study, university degrees, and years of teaching were taken into account. Second, to complement the findings of the questionnaire, a semi-structured interview based on the seven constructs was conducted to 84 high school English teachers selected through stage cluster sampling in Guilan's high schools. The results of MANOVA and interview analyses revealed that teachers with different demographic features generally had positive perceptions of pedagogical competence despite some opposing views they had on pedagogical competence regarding their age and experience. The findings would be practically used by teachers, schools, and education administration.

For the recent decades, scholars have examined the use of metadiscourse markers (MDMs) paradigmatically through several comparative studies across varying languages and cultures. No study to date, however, has investigated a comprehensive, full-fledged comparison of the possible disparities among the native English writers (NEW), Iranian English writers (IEW), and Iranian Persian writers (IPW) in crafting disciplinary research articles (RAs) in the academic field of medicine. By drawing on Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse taxonomy, the present research thus embarked on this comparison through the random selection of 240 medical research articles (RAs), 120 quantitative and 120 qualitative ones. By way of comparing the three groups of writers across the two types of RAs and obtaining a stronger homogeneity between the NEW and IEW, especially relating to the quantitative papers, the results could consequently espouse the perspective that medical RA genre is less impacted by the inevitable language differences thereby giving rise to the greater importance of consensually-acknowledged disciplinary epistemology underlying medical sciences. It is then suggested that ESP classes as well as the article writing workshops held in L2 make every effort to include the interactional phase of the discourse as well.

With the renewed interest in the field of second language learning for the knowledge of collocating words, research findings in favour of holistic processing of formulaic language could support the idea that these language units facilitate efficient language processing. This study investigated the difference between processing of a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) of congruent collocations. A read-aloud task was administered to monolinguals (Persian) and advanced bilinguals (Persian-English) to assess their reaction time (RT) to collocations in comparison to non-collocations. With respect to the frequency-based approaches to the study of collocations, a list of high frequency items and a second list of non-collocations were compiled. It was hypothesised that when bilinguals are at advanced levels of proficiency their processing rate should not differ significantly from monolinguals. The study also examined the assumptions of dual-route system model (Wray, 2002). The data was analysed using linear mixed-effects modelling. The results suggested no advantage for processing of collocations over non-collocations, whereas collocational processing displayed higher response rate for monolinguals in comparison to bilinguals which contradicted our hypotheses and is in line with dual-route model assumptions.

Initial teacher training courses are of utmost importance because they are the first entry point to the teacher professional career and determine the quality and quantity of teachers. Despite the importance of initial teacher training courses and their influence on the professional lives of teacher applicants, English teachers, and language learners, there is a dearth of research evaluating these courses in Iranian private language institutes. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study that utilized questionnaires with open-ended and Likert-scale items and available documents to evaluate the English Teacher Training Course(ETTC) held in an Iranian private language institute. Data were gathered from 60 teacher applicants applying for this ETTC and 94 English teachers who took this ETTC in 2016. Descriptive statistics and content analysis were employed to analyze the data. The findings indicate that while teacher applicants needed training most in teaching language skills and components, general teaching skills, and classroom management, the institute focused on the first area at the cost of second and third areas. Furthermore, it was found that the ETTC focused on received versus experiential knowledge, offered scant opportunity for teaching practice and classroom observation, and providedlittle training in classroom management skills. The article concludes by outlining the pedagogical implications of the findings for English teachers, trainers, and course designers.

The present study investigated the pragmatic awareness and production of Iranian Turkish and Persian EFL learners in the speech act of apology. Sixty-eight learners of English studying at several universities in Iran were selected based on simple random sampling as the monolingual and bilingual participants. Data were elicited by means of a written discourse self-assessment/completion test (WDSACT) with 10 situations asking the participants to evaluate the appropriateness of the given acts on a 5-point Likert scale. Participants were also required to produce the appropriate acts for the described situations when evaluated as being inappropriate. Native speakers evaluated as being inappropriate for the given situations. Alternatives were coded. Results provided almost insignificant differences between the 2 groups in terms of their perceptions of the appropriate and inappropriate acts and illustrated the monolingual/bilingual learners’ tendency towards using all superstrategies of apology, except for the case of “Responsibility Expressions” and “Promises of Forbearance.” Lack of cultural awareness and literacy in the Turkish language, the case of subtractive bilingualism in Iran, and insufficient pragmatic input may be sources of pragmatic failure on the part of the bilinguals.

With the growing demand for e-learning all over the world, constant evaluation ofits curriculumis incumbent upon institutions which aimto be competitive in thismarket. To this end, the present study employs SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, opportunities, Threats) analysis as the tool for the identification and prioritization of the gaps of the current e-TEFL(Electronic Teaching English as a Foreign Language) curriculumat one of the Iranian state universities, which ischosen to act asthe case for this study. In order to collect the required data on the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of the e-TEFL in this university, which for the ethical considerations is called the TARGET, aSWOT questionnaire wasadministered to 50 students and 15 instructors/ experts.The results of the analyses of the responses to the questionnaire led to ten major statements for each part of the SWOT. In addition, the scores of the external and internal factors(2.32 and 2.74 respectively) indicatedthatalthough e-TEFL has had a certain degree of achievement in this university, there are still a number of significant areas in need of improvement. In other words, thestrategies employed by the TARGET so far, have only been partially effectivein exploiting opportunities and defending against threats. Suggestions are made on how thecurrent strategies may be improved toreverse the trend and help the TARGET to take advantage of the opportunities. The study implies that the information obtained through SWOT analysis isvaluable for the e-TEFL curriculum designers who need to constantly seek ways to overcome weaknesses and minimize threats.

Teacher training programs should provide evidence that they are preparing teacher trainees for their teaching career. However, the literature contains few evaluation reports of the layout of the pre-service EFL teacher training program in Iranian EFL context, a gap which this study tries to fill. The participants of the study were high school EFL teachers (n = 346), teacher trainees (n = 97) and teacher trainers (n = 20) from Guilan Province. This study utilized a concurrent mixed-method design to evaluate the adequacy of the program. Different components of the program, including needs analysis, objectives specification, instructional materials, teaching activities, and assessment procedures were evaluated in this study. The results of the questionnaire and observation checklist were analyzed quantitatively. For interview results, both quantitative (percentages) and qualitative analyses were deployed. The results revealed that the program had not been adequately laid-out. Finally, some practical solutions for the improvement of the program are suggested.

The ability to comprehend and produce phrasal verbs, as lexical chunks or groups of words which are commonly found together, is an important part of language learning. This study investigates the effect of ‘conceptual metaphor awareness’, as a newly developed technique in Cognitive Linguistics, on learning phrasal verbs by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To meet this objective, two intact homogeneous groups (in terms of their knowledge of English phrasal verbs) of Iranian intermediate EFL learners were included. Both groups were given a pretest on phrasal verbs designed by the researchers. Then, in a 5-week instructional period the phrasal verbs were presented with traditional method of explanation and sentence examples to the control group, without providing any explicit explanation about the metaphorical nature of the meaning of phrasal verbs. In the experimental group, the phrasal verbs were presented with an explicit emphasis on the metaphorical nature of the meanings of phrasal verbs contributed by their particles. Two weeks after the last instructional session, a post test on target phrasal verbs (designed by the researchers) was given to the subjects in order to compare the performance of the subjects in the two groups in terms of guessing the meanings of the phrasal verbs based on the instructional methods they had been provided with. The results showed that the experimental group had significantly outperformed the control group; accordingly the outcome of this study let out positive results on teaching phrasal verbs with cognitively oriented methods like conceptual metaphor awareness.