Journal of Language Horizons
Volume:7 Issue: 3, Autumn 2023

The outbreak of the COVID-19 revolutionized education all around the world. The urgent shift to online education (emergency remote teaching) has been very demanding for administrators, teachers, students, and anyone involved in education. Although online and blended learning has long been practiced in education, this sudden unplanned shift created a different image, especially in less technologically developed countries. Accordingly, the present case study aimed at understanding the existing challenges and opportunities of this urgent shift to online education through the perspectives of Iranian EFL university students in online General English (GE) classes. A total of 68 university students participated in the study and the data was collected through semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and students’ reflection sheets. Content analysis using Nvivo 11® was conducted for the triangulated textual data. The findings were categorized into four major groups of challenges and opportunities, including technological, psychological/affective, linguistic, and environmental/social. Overall, 16 challenges and 11 opportunities were investigated that are discussed thoroughly in the paper.

There is ample research evidence for the significance of language learners’ beliefs for the process and outcome of L2 learning; however, the construct of developmental L2 learning epistemological beliefs (EBs), constituting beliefs about the certainty, simplicity, source, and justification of L2 knowledge, is extremely under-researched. The present study involved (a) the construction and validation of an L2 learning-specific developmental epistemology inventory (LDEI), and (b) the investigation of the relationship between language learners’ L2 learning-specific and general EBs. Capitalizing on 17 interview-housed themes and their developmental patterns across maximally variant samples in an earlier qualitative study, 68 belief statements (four on each theme, representing the four EBs’ developmental stages of absolute knowing (AK), transitional knowing (TK), independent knowing (IK), and contextual knowing (CK)) were worded and piloted. A higher-order factor analysis and the Schmid-Leiman solution (SLS) on data obtained from a widely variant sample of 571 L2 learners showed LDEI’s construct validity. Analyses unearthed (a) eight primary factors designating AK TK, IK, and CK’s items related to the nature of L2 knowledge and the nature of L2 knowing, and (b) four second-order components each representing one of the four developmental stages. Finally, LDEI scores of 123 of the 571 participants in the piloting phase were shown to be significantly, but only moderately, correlated with their scores on a general EBs questionnaire, showing the two constructs’ relative distinctiveness. Implications are discussed in light of existing models of epistemology and second language acquisition theories.

Exploring the effects of task planning as an implementational variable on second language (L2) performance has witnessed a noticeable growth over the past years (Ellis, 2005a; Skehan, 2014b). Building on this bulk of research, this study aimed at investigating the effects of three task planning conditions, i.e., pre-task planning (PTP), online planning (OLP), and the combination of pre-task and online planning (PTP+OLP), on young learners’ oral complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The participants were 60 EFL learners aged between 10 and 12 who were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions in the study, including the no planning (NP) condition (n = 15 in each group). The participants were asked to watch a short silent video and narrate its story. The results of the statistical analyses indicate that while PTP increases fluency, OLP and OLP+PTP improve both accuracy and syntactic complexity. The findings suggest that teachers of young L2 learners should utilize the promising potentials of different task planning conditions to channel learners’ language production toward more fluent, accurate, and complex production.

Flipped learning is one of the recent teaching methods in which teaching takes place outside the classroom, and class time is reserved for practicing and consolidating learning under the supervision of the teacher. Various studies in the world and Iran have examined the effectiveness of flipped learning in teaching English, but these studies have been conducted either in the context of schools and private language institutes, or with English language college students. This study examines the performance of 182 general English students at Farhangian University of Mashhad. Based on the results of paired and independent t-tests and repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance, flipped learning improves students' learning in a general English course. In addition, personality traits and tolerance of ambiguity do not affect the effectiveness of flipped learning. Moreover, the willingness to communicate, although statistically significant, does not meaningfully influence the effectiveness of flipped learning due to the small effect size which is around 3%. The findings imply that flipped learning can be one of the ways to increase the effectiveness of general language teaching regardless of learner characteristics such as personality, ambiguity tolerance, and willingness to communicate.

The present research sets out to examine the impact of reflective reciprocal teaching (RRT) as a mode of instruction on the academic self-concept of Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. To this end, three classes comprising 100 EFL learners majoring in English teaching were selected according to convenience sampling and designated as the reciprocal teaching (RT) group, the reflective reciprocal teaching (RRT) group, and the control group. A mixed-method approach and a quasi-experimental design with a pretest, treatment, and posttest paradigm were utilized in the present study. In the quantitative phase, the data were gathered via the academic self-concept inventory. The descriptive statistics and ANOVA results indicated the significant impact of the RRT on the learners’ academic self-concept. Also, qualitative investigation of the learners' perceptions via semi-structured interviews and content analysis revealed their positive perceptions regarding this mode of instruction. Taken together, it appears that the significant others (teacher and peers) role and instruction have the main contribution to the learners' self-beliefs. The results of the intervention program, in turn, generate a new outlook on all teaching, learning, and assessment processes. They also provide suitable grounds for improving psychoeducational constructs besides learners' cognitive and regulatory skills.

Notwithstanding the saliency of cognitive engagement, achievement goals, and academic burnout in the learning process, their triple interaction has been underresearched. Thus, the current study aimed to test a structural model of cognitive engagement, achievement goals, and burnout and specifically to investigate the hypothesis that cognitive engagement mediates the effect of achievement goals on burnout. To this end, a total of 384 advanced Iranian EFL learners from different private English language teaching institutes in the cities of Shiraz and Bushehr were selected based on the convenience sampling method. The participants of the study were requested to complete three adapted and validated Likert scale instruments on cognitive engagement, the modified version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey, and achievement goals entailing 12, 10, and 12 items, respectively. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach was carried out to test the hypothesized model of the study. The results of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirmed that the three instruments well fitted the data of the study. Also, the goodness-of-fit indices indicated a good model fit. Likewise, the findings of path analyses demonstrated that achievement goals negatively affected burnout and positively impacted cognitive engagement. Further, cognitive engagement was found to partially mediate the relationship between achievement goals and burnout. The findings of the present study may hold substantial theoretical and practical implications for EFL teachers, syllabus designers, and educational policymakers.

The digital commensality as physically eating together with someone (online or offline) using food apps through Instagram's intertextuality for a sustainable communication implies the application of an integrated corpus-based model in multimodal (inter)action analysis framework; it enables us to study the irresolvable dialectic between social actions and mediational means. The semiosis of Iranian digital commensality provides insights for considering user’s signifying tastes and their habits relied on food system, including food type choices, ways of preparation, the eating arrangement and manner. The results show that interactive signs of Easy-paz and Maman-Paz apps empower mediated actions to perform rituals and challenges for developing offline commensality through Instagram intertextuality.  The findings also show that online commensality was developed by Mr. Taster app via influencing and by Maaii app through Mukbang. Furthermore, Delino, and Snap-food apps were found to be benefiting from mediated actions to perform online-to offline commensality by equipping delivery mechanisms on individuals eating activities.

Do translators know what kinds of translation their readers like and what kinds they dislike? The translator, like every author, has some readers in mind. Hence, in order for a translation to be acceptable, it needs to fulfill its readers’ expectations. The present study surveys readers’ expectations regarding literary translation (novels and stories), literary translators, as well as the peritext, the text and the format of such translated books. To this end, readers’ reviews in three sites, namely Fidibo, Taghcheh, and Goodreads, were collected and then coded and classified following the thematic analysis approach. Chesterman’s (2007) tripartite model of reception which studies readers’ reactions, responses, and repercussions was adopted as the theoretical framework. Readers’ expectations were classified into five main categories, namely translational expectations, textual/linguistic expectations, peritextual expectations, formatting expectations, and good literary translators' features. The results indicate that readers like translations that are both fluent and readable and are free from linguistic and textual abnormalities which are often the result of literal translation. Furthermore, the results of translational expectations specifically show that readers prefer translation methods and approaches that truly transfer the meaning, style, tone, register as well as culture-specific concepts. As to the peritext, readers preferred that an introduction and a literary criticism of the foreign work be included in the translation. Also, they defined a good literary translator as someone who is fully competent in the foreign language, able to comprehend the original text accurately and well-endowed with writing ability.