Iranian Journal of Applied Linguistics
Volume:14 Issue: 2, Sep 2011

The present study examines the impact of focused tasks on the development of Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. To this end, we compared the effectiveness of the dictogloss (DIG) as an output-based task and the consciousness raising (CR) as an input-based task in teaching English requestive downgraders. Prior to the experiment, 147 Iranian EFL learners participated in the study to develop the instruments. Also, 43 American native English speakers provided the baseline data for the construction of the recognition test and the instructional treatment. We matched 60 Iranian EFL learners in two groups based on their scores on the Oxford Placement Test (2004). The groups were then randomly assigned to instructional conditions; namely, the DIG and CR tasks. The instructional treatment continued for 8 sessions. The results revealed that neither the effects of instructional treatment nor the effects of time were significant between the groups on pragmatic measures. The findings also demonstrated that participants in both tasks preformed significantly better in the immediate and delayed posttests than in the pretest. Similarly, participants in both groups maintained the positive effects of the treatment in the delayed posttest on the production and perception measures. For the recognition measure, however, the participants in the DIG condition significantly fell to a lower level in the delayed posttest.

Nowadays, teachers are receiving more attention in the studies done in mainstream education since it is believed that they play the most important role in educational settings, and therefore their different aspects, such as teacher efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence, have received great attention. Moreover, demographic characteristics of teachers are more examined these days since they are thought to play major roles in teachers’ performance in the classroom. Despite great attention to different aspects of teachers and their demographics in mainstream education, such studies are rare in the English Language Teaching field. This study was therefore designed to explore possible relationships among English language teachers’ sense of efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence on the one hand, and to document probable differences among them with respect to teachers’ gender, degree, and experience on the other hand. To this end, four different instruments, one for each of the variables, were administered among 264 Iranian English language teachers. The findings showed significant even though not high correlations among some of the components of teacher efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence, as well as significant differences among some the components of these variables with respect to teachers’ gender, degree, and experience. The results of this study can help teacher educators in dealing with different teachers since they will know about the variations among teachers’ performances in the classroom and the problems any teacher with certain characteristics may have.

Uptake is believed to be an indication of the effectiveness of focus on form practices and a possible facilitator for language acquisition. All the accounts of uptake in the literature have been based on the observational data derived from the audio-recordings of the meaning-focused classes. The present study is a novel attempt to account for instances of uptake in 18 hours of meaning-focused instruction in an intact EFL class through an elicitation instrument called uptake sheet. To this end, all instances of teacher- and learner-initiated preemptive Focus on Form Episodes (FFES) and uptake moves following them were identified and coded in the audio-recorded data. Then, the researchers cross-checked the audio-data findings with the ones in the uptake sheets. Compared to the oral uptake moves captured through the audio-data, the analyses revealed a significantly higher frequency of uptake moves in the uptake sheets following teacher-initiated FFEs, but a lower frequency of uptake moves was found in the case of learner-initiated FFEs. The findings would, hopefully, further clarify our conception of the nature and rate of uptake and would pave the way for further research on exploring multiple instances of uptake not accounted for so far in the literature.

This study investigated the main sources of Iranian student's demotivation in L2 learning and examined demotivation in relation to student's gender and level of education. To find the major demotivating factors, a questionnaire consisting of 32 items was developed and completed by 327 students. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to explore the factorial structure of the questionnaire. Based on the results, five categories of demotivating factors were identified: Learning Contents, Materials, and Facilities, Attitude towards English Speaking Community, The Teacher, Experience of Failure, and Attitude towards Second Language Learning. To examine demotivating factors in relation to student's gender and educational level, two one-way analyses of variance were run. The results indicated significant differences between male and female students in terms of three demotivating factors. Significant differences were observed between students at different levels of education with regard to the three demotivating factors. Finally, a multivariate analysis of variance was performed to examine demotivating factors in relation to student's gender and educational level. Significant differences were found between male and female students across educational levels in terms of all demotivating factors except one.

Considering the future of the application of a dual explicit-implicit learning system to the L2 theory and research, Ellis (2006) argues that further investigation of the distinction is useful for modeling, understanding, and measuring second language proficiency. This study explored the differential accessibility of EFL learner's explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge to their language proficiency. The participants were 160 EFL graduate and undergraduate students at Shahrekord University (Iran). A test battery including a timed grammaticality judgment test (GJT), an untimed GJT, and a TOEFL was used to gather the data. A set of correlation coefficients was computed to explore the contributions of implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge to the TOEFL and its sub-components. The results showed that there was no statistically significant correlation between the EFL learner's implicit grammatical knowledge and their TOEFL (sub-components) scores, but there was a strong relationship between the EFL learner's explicit grammatical knowledge and their general proficiency. A medium relationship also existed between the explicit knowledge and the TOEFL sub-components. Then, a Standard Multiple Regression demonstrated that explicit knowledge better predicted the EFL learner's general L2 proficiency. The results suggest that learning explicit grammatical knowledge is necessary in EFL contexts and needs much more consideration when the primary focus is on the cognitive academic language proficiency or skills.

This study explored EFL learners’ pragmalinguistic awareness in processing implicit pragmatic input and the extent to which their awareness of the target features was related to motivation and proficiency. It was carried out in an EFL context to explore the roles of these two variables, particularly intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, in noticing bi-clausal request forms in implicit pragmatic input. The participants in this research were 121 advanced EFL learners from a language center, participating as members of intact classes. All participants took a proficiency test and completed a motivation questionnaire in order to explore the factorial structure of motivation. Then, out of them, 35 learners were randomly selected to form the treatment group. They then took part in a noticing-the-gap activity as a treatment task. The degree of learner's awareness of the target pragmalingustic features was assessed through a respective awareness questionnaire administrated immediately after the treatment. However, the current study shows that EFL students are rather extrinsically motivated and instrumentally oriented to notice pragmalinguistic features, which is incompatible with what Takahashi reported on students’ intrinsic orientation to notice pragmaliguistics in the Japanese EFL context. This suggests that learners in different contexts have different motivational dispositions to pragmalinguistic awareness.

The current study tries to investigate the particular role familiarity with the genre of the text plays in EFL learners’ performance on two types of tests, i.e. cloze test and C-test. It also attempts to determine whether C-test is a measure of language proficiency like cloze test. The participants of the study were fifty-one intermediate undergraduate students majoring in English Literature at the University of Isfahan. In two sessions, the participants took a battery of measures (a) two newly developed cloze tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres, and (b) two newly developed C-tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres. The results of data analysis revealed that familiarity with genre has a significant impact on the performance of EFL learners on both cloze test and C-test. The results further disclosed that there is a significant correlation between cloze test, as a measure of language proficiency, and C-test with the same genre.