Research in English Language Pedagogy
Volume:10 Issue: 1, Winter 2022

A test is a tool for making quantified value judgments and/or comparisons, and a good test is a bias-free gauge that does its value judgments and quantifications with precision. This requires that the test be at least reliable. In applied linguistics in general, and TESOL in specific, the question of test reliability has always been at the forefront of all test construction activities. As high-stakes gate-keeping tests gained more and more importance in a globalizing post-industrial world, the statistical procedures used to estimate their reliability indices, too, became more and more complex and precise. Classical Test Theory (CTT) is no longer preached, and test developers and testing agencies have resorted to Generalizability Theory (G-Theory) and Item Response Theory (IRT) as their main dishes; more recently, they have decided to spice up their activities with Differential Item Functioning (DIF). This paper seeks to provide the less-versed reader with a short and simple account of these topics. The aim of this paper is to turn the tumid prose describing complex mathematical and statistical topics in psychometrics and measurement into readable English so that students less versed in the field can make sense of them, and university professors can use the paper as a simple and informative source in their teaching activities.

Vocabulary Guru (VG) is a custom-made mobile application (app) developed based on the task model and agile methodology via qualitative needs analysis. This investigation intended to assess the impact of VG on EFL learners’vocabulary recognition. First, 84 academic vocabularies were selected, based on their frequencies defined by the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2017) and the Academic Core Vocabulary Website (Davies & Gardner, 2019). From 141 university students, 60 intermediate female students were selected who were randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group practiced the target vocabularies via VG, whereas the control group learned them via the conventional method. A vocabulary recognition test was developed and administered twice to both groups. Finally, two paired samples t-tests and two independent samples t-tests were utilized to estimate within and between-groups differences. The findings revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group significantly.

The present study aimed at examining the possible impact of input enhancement of collocations on the reading comprehension among Iranian Field-Dependent (FD) and Field-Independent (FI) students. Firstly, 120 intermediate female EFL learners took a Nelson proficiency test and the results were used to select 90 students who were given Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) to distinguish the FD learners from the FI ones. Ultimately, 28 FD and 28 FI learners were left. These learners were classified into four groups, two of which consisted of 14 FD, and the other two comprised 14 FI learners. One FD and one FI group served as the experimental groups while the other two were control groups. A reading pretest was given to all groups and the researchers incorporated techniques of input enhancement of collocations in the texts covered in the experimental groups. In control groups, the same materials with no enhancement were administered. Having finished the eight treatment sessions, the researchers gave all four groups the reading comprehension posttest whose results were used to examine the research questions. Since the two independent variables of the current study were categorical, and the dependent variable and covariate were continuous, ANCOVA was employed to do the data analysis. Based on the statistical analysis outcome, input enhancement of collocations had a significant impact on the reading comprehension performance of Iranian field-dependent learners. Yet, it had no significant effect on the Iranian FI learners’ reading comprehension performance. Finally, the findings showed that input enhancement of collocations had a significant effect on the reading comprehension performance of Iranian FD and FI EFL learners differently; that is, FD learners outperformed the FI ones. The findings of the study imply that teacher training courses should include some training on input enhancement techniques and cognitive styles so that teachers’ awareness regarding input enhancement and their cognitive styles were raised.

Dynamic assessment (DA) has been recently used to dominate the realm of pragmatic research. This study investigated the effect of dynamic assessment on EFL learners’ complaint speech act performance, as the most face-threatening one.  Thirty-three participants were selected using the convenience method of sampling. They formed two groups of NDA (non-dynamic assessment) (n = 15) and DA (dynamic assessment) (n =18) and the participants were all lower-intermediate on the Oxford Placement Test. The learners in both groups took a discourse completion test (DCT) as the pretest and posttest. At intervals, the participants in the experimental group took an intervention within the DCT test over five sessions. The gradually constructed hints which were constructed using both literature and experts’ view were given upon the participants’ response. The results of the study using the Rasch model and Classical True Score Theory revealed that DA groups significantly outperformed NDA groups. Furthermore, most of the participants in DA group made considerable changes from the pretest to the posttest. Rasch model reveals that the learners had idiosyncratic zigzagged changes as was predicted by Vygotsky. The findings of the study can shed light on language teaching and materials development for the complaint speech act.

Research on second language acquisition generally suggests that input needs to be noticed before turning into the intake. Therefore, the current paper explored the comparative effects of textual enhancement on Iranian EFL learners’ vocabulary noticing. Thirty students from an intact class of general English course participated in this study. During the semester, an extended paragraph from which 18 target words were perceptually enhanced using boldfacing and Emoji stickers or were left untouched was distributed to the participants using the smartphone Telegram application. After 45 minutes, they received a set of post-reading vocabulary questions through Telegram and were asked to type the answers and send them back to the examiner.  The results of Repeated Measures ANOVA indicated that both textual enhancement techniques had a significantly positive effect on their vocabulary noticing. The paper discusses the findings and implications for both EFL teachers and language learning materials developers.

The present study aimed at examining the possible effects of the functional-based approach vs. structural-based approach on the accuracy of certain grammatical structures on Iranian EFL learners. In many textbooks taught in Iran, grammar is reflected as an important tool for the enhancement of language proficiency. Reading the table of contents of many textbooks, one can find out that functions have been written for each grammatical structure. Nevertheless, observing classes, one can see little to no emphasis on the functional use of the grammatical structure. To achieve the main goal of this study, 41 male and female learners with the age range of 15 to 30 were selected from among 60 learners as homogeneous lower-intermediate participants of the study by Oxford Placement Test (OPT). They received different interventions in the two experimental groups of functional (N = 20) and structural (N = 21) being divided non-randomly based on their OPT scores. The Functional group was taught grammar using the functional approach while the structural group experienced grammar instruction using the structural approach for four sessions. Analyzing the obtained data of role-play tests performed on both groups and at both pretest and posttest using paired samples t-test and ANCOVA uncovered that both structural and functional-based approaches can enhance the acquisition of grammatical accuracy,

Language Teachers’ awareness of their identity can affect their professional development and efficiency. Research proves that such awareness is subject to change over time due to the institutional and dynamic educational contexts. This study aimed at investigating the perception of identity by the early career vs. long career Iranian EFL teachers. A Likert-scale questionnaire consisting of 30 items was developed and administered to 120 novice and experienced teachers to inquire about teacher identity. Factor analysis was employed to obtain six factors of interpretable structure including career identity, interactional identity, institutional identity, professional identity, situated identity, and personal identity. The most significant factor perceived by both novice teachers and experienced teachers was situated identity and the least significant was recognized to be the institutional identity. The results showed that there is a medium relationship between years of teaching experience and identity. A small relationship was also found between teachers' gender and identity.

Differential Item Functioning (DIF) takes place when different groups of test-takers with the same level of ability perform differently on a single test. It means some other factors might arise due to group membership. The object of this article was to examine DIF in the MSRT (MCHE) test items. This is an English proficiency test that comprises a total of 100 questions including listening comprehension (LC), structure and written expressions (SWE), and reading comprehension (RC) sections. To this end, 200 pre-intermediate to intermediate Iranian EFL learners with the age range of 25 to 32 in two different fields of study (100 Humanities and 100 sciences) were randomly selected for the analysis. The Item Response Theory (IRT) Likelihood Ratio (LR) approach was used to identify items displaying DIF. The scored item of 200 test-takers was subjected to the IRT Three-Parameter Model presenting the probability that a randomly selected test taker with an ability of theta (θ) answered an item correctly, using item difficulty (b parameter), item discrimination (a parameter), and pseudo-guessing (c parameter). The results of the independent samples t-test for means comparison of two groups indicated that Science test-takers outperformed the Humanities, especially in SWE and RC sections. It can be inferred that the exam was statistically easier for the Science test-takers at 0.05 level. The findings identified 15 DIF items as well. The implications and suggestions for further studies were also reported.