فهرست مطالب مریم موذنی لیمودهی

Error analysis is considered as an invaluable pedagogical tool in teaching English as a foreign/second language (EFL/ESL). Despite abundant research, there are still lacunae in studies investigating the written grammatical errors among monolingual and bilingual male and female Persian and Turkmen EFL learners. To fill the gap, 158 Persian and Turkmen EFL learners from Golestan Province wrote two descriptive scripts that were examined for their most recurrent written grammatical errors. The errors were then analyzed and compared based on the framework of the study. Statistical analyses indicated significant relationships between Persian and Turkmens’ written grammatical errors and their gender. The frequency of monolingual Persians’ errors was significantly lower than that of bilingual Turkmens. These findings might interest EFL teachers, syllabus designers, and materials developers. Moreover, they could be a prerequisite to corrective feedback research while opening doors to further pertinent studies.

Despite the bulk of literature on various aspects of anxiety, its multi-dimensional aspect generates many controversies among researchers. Sometimes, EFL learners may suffer from proficiency and gender dependent anxiety in language learning contexts. This correlational study aims to explore the relationship between the construct of general anxiety across different English proficiency levels including elementary, intermediate, and advanced in Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 108 male and female (54 in each group) Iranian EFL learners aged 14 to 18 took part in the present study at a private language school in Gorgan, Iran. The analyses explored the general relationship between anxiety levels and English proficiency levels and also EFL learners’ gender. Chi Square tests were run in R software did not demonstrate a significant relationship between anxiety and levels of proficiency in general. Findings revealed a significant relationship between EFL learners’ level of anxiety and gender. The results might help design future studies and assist teachers, teacher educators, and syllabus designers to devise their courses and tests considering affective factors which ultimately lead to students’ self-efficacy.

Much uncertainty still exists about the possible role of myriads external and internal mediating variables such as language backgrounds and ethnicities in the process of corrective feedback (CF). To address the issue, 79 monolingual Persians and 79 bilingual Turkmens aged between 13 and 18 from two language institutes in Golestan Province, Iran participated in the study comprising three experimental and a control group each. Pretests revealed the learners’ grammatical errors based on which the experimental groups were provided with different strategies of metalinguistic CF, namely mid-focused oral metalinguistic CF (OMCF), written metalinguistic CF (WMCF), and oral/written metalinguistic CF (OWMCF) on their five most recurrent grammatical errors while the control groups received none. Following significant Kruskal-Wallis test results, the Conover’s pairwise comparison test was employed to exhibit differences among CF strategies. In monolingual Persians and bilingual Turkmens, all the experimental groups significantly outperformed the control groups. Mid-focused OMCF and OWMCF had significant effects on the reduction of Persians’ errors, but for Turkmens, all the CF strategies exerted a significant reduction of errors. The effectiveness rank of the CF strategies investigated through Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) selected OMCF as the best strategy for monolingual Persians while for bilingual Turkmens, WMCF ranked first. This ranking was highly stable for 10000 iterations changing the weights up to 50%. The outcomes of the research might be of help to EFL learners, EFL teachers of bilingual learners, syllabus designers, and materials developers, while opening doors to further pertinent studies.

Errors are one of the enigmatic parts in the process of foreign language (L2) learning as they are extremely versatile at each and every stage of the language learning proficiency. The present study, therefore, was an attempt to reveal Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical errors in writing at two levels of proficiency, namely lower intermediate and advanced, and then to investigate whether there was a relationship between the levels of EFL learners’ proficiency and the types of grammatical errors they committed in their scripts. The study was carried out at a private language institute in Gorgan, Iran. To this end, 60 female EFL learners (30 lower intermediate and 30 advanced females) whose age ranged between 13 and 17 participated in this study and wrote 150 word writing samples on a predetermined descriptive subject. The descriptive analyses of the data based on the scoring framework of the study demonstrated the types of grammatical errors at each level of proficiency. A Chi Square test was then run in SPSS Ver. 25 on the 16 common frequent error categories between both levels of proficiency, which verified the existence of a relationship between EFL learners’ levels of proficiency and the types of written grammatical errors they committed in their writing. The findings of the study might be of interest to EFL learners, EFL teachers, syllabus designers, and materials developers.