فهرست مطالب

Teaching English Language
Volume:12 Issue: 30, Summer and Autumn 2018

  • تاریخ انتشار: 1397/06/06
  • تعداد عناوین: 8
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  • Khodayar Mehrabi, Alireza Jalilifar, Abdolmajid Hayati, Peter White Pages 1-26
    This study reports on a corpus-based study of action nominalizations and their distribution in the thematic structure of introduction sections of research articles (RAs) across hard and soft sciences. Using the UAMCorpus Tool software, the corpus was tagged to locate the action nominalization instances. Manual text analysis was undertaken to exclude cases which did not comply with action nominalization criteria and to include instances of zero-derivation nominalizations. Action nominalizations were significantly more frequent in the introduction sections of hard science RAs (χ2= 39.850, P=.000). Results, however, did not show a significant difference in the lexical densities of the introduction sections of the two text groups. Moreover, the writers of RAs indicated a higher tendency to employ the action nominalizations in clause rhemes which may be attributed to the role of clause rhemes in the information structure of clauses. ESP writing instructors may use the findings of the present study to raise the awareness of the novices of the vital role of nominalization in facilitating their production of appropriate academic discourse.
    Keywords: Academic Discourse, Action Normalization, Hard, Soft Sciences, Lexical Density
  • Reza Ghafar Samar, Nasrin Shokrpour, Elham Nasiri Pages 27-44
    This study aimed at investigating the applicability of teaching lexical bundles to the writing performance of medical students in an EFL context. Four components of the writing proficiency, namely Task Response (TR), Lexical Resource (LR), Grammatical Range and Accuracy (GRA) and Cohesion & Coherence (CC), were investigated with regard to the effect of teaching lexical bundles. Thirty medical students in the preclinical stage at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences participated and the study was performed through a two-phase procedure. In the first phase, paragraph and essay writing principles were taught after a pretest. The posttest was administered following the treatment. Data were analyzed through T test. The results of the first phase indicated that all components except GRA changed significantly. In the second phase, the students were introduced and exposed to four-word lexical bundles extracted from the medical corpus. Having access to the corpus analysis software, the students could explore the corpus and learn the lexical bundles contextually. They were also given the list of lexical bundles for explicit exposure and were guided to use them appropriately in their writing assignments. The essays assigned following the lexical bundle teaching were regarded as the posttest of the second phase while the posttest of the first phase was regarded as the pretest of the second phase. Data analysis revealed that LR changed significantly and the students were able to benefit from lexical bundles to improve their LR that enabled them to write more naturally and use collocations more appropriately. Students, writing instructors, syllabus designers, and material developers can best benefit from the findings of the present study.
    Keywords: Corpus, EFL Context, Lexical Bundles, Lexical Resource
  • Kobra Tavassoli, Hossein Farhady Pages 45-65
    Within recent advances in education, teachers are expected to be aware of and apply effective procedures of instruction and assessment to enhance learning. This requires teacher education programs to provide opportunities for teachers to improve their knowledge in different areas, including assessment knowledge, to meet the new challenges. To help EFL teachers to improve their language assessment knowledge (LAK), the first step is to have information on their present status of LAK. Therefore, this study was designed to investigate the LAK needs of EFL teachers. Fulcher’s needs assessment questionnaire (2012), expanded by some open-ended questions, was administered to 246 EFL teachers to explore their perceptions of the importance of major issues in language assessment and the level of their own knowledge. The findings revealed that the majority of the participants considered the major topics in language assessment as either essential or important to be included in language assessment courses. However, major differences were found between the priorities given to these topics by various groups of teachers. Further, it was observed, in line with the findings of previous research, that EFL teachers claimed they needed to improve their LAK. Details of the findings and implications for teacher education programs are discussed.
    Keywords: Assessment knowledge, EFL teachers, Language assessment knowledge, Needs, Professional knowledge
  • Hajar Ghafarpour, Ahmad Moinzadeh, Abbas Eslamirasekh Pages 67-87
    The teachers' behaviors sometimes have a more intense and long-lasting influence than the information being transmitted; meanwhile, the concentration of much of the curriculum of teacher education has just been on the course content or teaching methods. In this study, the relationship between students' motivation and teachers' behavior is investigated based on the Model for Interpersonal Teacher Behavior (MITB). The questionnaires were distributed to 211 students of eight classes of general English course at the University of Isfahan. Results indicated that among the eight scales of the model, students' motivation is significantly positively correlated with the friendly scale, and significantly negatively correlated with dissatisfied, and reprimanding scales. This may have cultural and psychological implications. Furthermore, some modifications on the graphical presentation of the MITB are proposed and a model for an ideal English teacher in Iran is obtained and compared cross-culturally.
    Keywords: Ideal Teacher, Model for Interpersonal Teacher Behavior, Motivation, Proximity
  • Abbas Ali Rezaee, Ali Akbar Khomeijani Farahani, Lihadh Abdulameer Mubarak Pages 89-116
    Scaffolding is an instructional strategy which significantly contributes to learning processes. Learning strategies, as well, have often been noticed as being important in helping EFL learners acquiring a new language. The study is an attempt to find out the effect of using scaffolding strategies on EFL learners' use of different language learning strategies. To achieve the aim of the current study, a fifteen-week experiment was conducted. A sample of 100 Iraqi EFL university students participated in the study. The participants were divided into two groups: an experimental group, receiving conversation instruction through different scaffolding strategies, and a control group, being taught according to routine lecture method based on a teacher-centered approach, dominating in Iraqi university contexts. In both groups, the students' use of learning strategies was pre- and posttested. A paired samples t-test, an independent t-test and a multivariate ANOVA were used for statistical analysis of the data obtained. It was found that there is a statistically significant difference between the two groups in favor of the experimental group. This indicates that using scaffolding strategies throughout the teaching process is more effective than the routine lecture method within the teacher-centered approach framework.
    Keywords: Scaffolding, Learning Strategies, Teacher-centered, Lecture Method
  • Farahman Farrokhi, Mohammad Zohrabi, Mohammad Hassan Chehr Azad* Pages 117-143
    One of the possible negative consequences of the corrective feedback (CF), as a way of focus on form, can be a trade-off between the learners' spoken complexity and accuracy, due to their attentional limitations. Consequently, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of the different CF types on Iranian EFL learners' spoken complexity and accuracy and the trade-off between them. To this end, four preintermediate intact classes were randomly selected as the delayed explicit metalinguistic CF, intensive recast, extensive recast, and control groups. All groups' participants participated in spoken reproduction tasks for six sessions and their errors were treated differently. Then, the data were transcribed, coded for the complexity and accuracy, and statistically analyzed. The results indicated that different CF types had insignificant effects on the complexity of the spoken production. However, the delayed explicit metalinguistic CF group significantly increased the spoken specific accuracy. Considering the trade-off between the spoken complexity and accuracy, it was revealed that the correlations between them was statistically insignificant and different CF conditions had no significant effect on it. These findings suggest that CF, of the delayed explicit metalinguistic type, can be an effective way for the development of the spoken specific accuracy of the Iranian EFL learners. In addition, its development has no negative effects on their spoken complexity
    Keywords: Corrective Feedback, Focus on Form, Spoken Complexity, Spoken Specific Accuracy, Trade-off Hypothesis
  • Leila Seidinejad, Zohreh Nafissi * Pages 145-167
    This study aimed at investigating the probable effect of teaching three divergent creative thinking techniques on both EFL students' creative thinking skill and syntactic complexity of their essays. For the purpose of this quasi-experimental study, 54 female undergraduates of English literature were selected from two intact writing classes at Alzahra University in Tehran. In addition to the regular writing class, the experimental group was taught three techniques, namely brainstorming, synectics and SCAMPER and the comparison group practiced process writing activities through an online tool named padlet. Abedi's creativity test (1996) coupled with two topics from the writing topics of TOEFL (Lougheed, 2004) were administered as pretests and posttests. Furthermore, syntactic complexity of essays was measured through Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010). The result showed that practicing these techniques had a significant effect on improving EFL students' creative thinking skill and the syntactic complexity of their essays over time. Thus, material developers and teachers could benefit from the suggestions of this study.
    Keywords: Creative Thinking Techniques, Synectics, SCAMPER, Syntactic complexity, Padlet
  • Puyan Taheri *, Mahsa Hedayat Zade Pages 169-198
    This study was an attempt to examine the contribution of metacognitive strategies to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' listening comprehension performance and their metacognitive awareness. Fifty seven out of sixty eight EFL students were selected to participate in this study after their performance on Oxford Placement Test. The participants were then randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. After signing a consent form, both groups sat for the Preliminary English Test as their pretest. After filling in the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), the students in the experimental group received five sessions of listening practice and strategy training using The Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) Model (1999). The students in the control group, however, did not receive any instruction about strategies. After the strategy training the learners in both groups took another version of the PET as their posttest, and the experimental group filled in the MALQ again. Two types of tasks, namely, selection and completion were used to measure the participants’ listening comprehension after the treatment. Several paired samples t-tests and an ANCOVA were conducted. The results indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the listening tasks. The experimental group's metacognitive awareness improved dramatically after the strategy training. Meanwhile, the students performed significantly better in the selection tasks than in the completion tasks. Teachers are advised to allocate part of their teaching time to strategy training. Material developers should also take into consideration using task types because the performance of students may vary in different task types.
    Keywords: Listening comprehension, metacognitive strategies, task-based language teaching, task types