فهرست مطالب باقر یعقوبی

Many studies have been conducted investigating the link between teacher reflection and classroom practices. It has been demonstrated that teacher reflection results in more self-awareness in teachers to renew their understanding and even reform their classroom practices (Farrell, 2015; Farrell & Stanclik, 2021; Walsh & Mann, 2015; Wright, 2010). However, considering that previous studies have mostly adopted etic approaches, limiting them to cognitive epistemologies, more holistic and emic approaches seem to be required. To address this gap, this article seeks to introduce autoethnography as a qualitative research method that has much to contribute to self-reflective studies. For this purpose, the first author’s first-hand experiences with an autoethnographic study were used to provide an exposition of the essence of autoethnography and how it is conducted. In this study, data were collected by the first author from a large range of past, present and external sources, including self-reflective journals, diaries, and talking with others (Chang, 2008). Then, data analyses and interpretation were done meta-autoethnographically (Ellis, 2016) to reveal the first author’s learning about autoethnography. This study is organized as follows: In the first section, autoethnography is introduced as a self-reflective approach “to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experiences (auto) to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis, Adam, Bochner, 2011, p.273). In autoethnography, the researcher investigates a familiar aspect of their life such as their childhood, school time or professional, cultural and/or social issues, and relationships with others (Chang, 2008). Therefore, the researcher(s), their subjectivity, and their stories that contribute to a better understanding of their experiences and the social-cultural context are all valid sources in autoethnographic studies. Autoethnography, originating with the emergence of postmodern philosophy, legitimates “many ways of knowing and inquiring (Wall, 2006, p.147).” Believing that getting knowledge about the researcher’s micro-sociocultural is still a valuable way of knowing, autoethnography seeks to discover personal experiences (Wall, 2006). The article proceeds in the second section to sketch out the methodological dimensions of autoethnographic studies through the first author’s lens. Her understanding of and experiences with autoethnography have been described through the methodological dimensions of autoethnographic research, including data gathering, saturation, writing, ethics, quality of autoethnographic studies, and her professional and personal development.  In the first part of learning about autoethnography, the first author indicates how her puzzling as a teacher about her classroom practices led to her relying on autoethnography as a self-reflective research method to explore her puzzle. She gathered data by using multiple data-gathering devices including, journal writing about past experiences and epiphanies, diaries doing an autoethnographic study, and utilizing external sources such as talking with others, literature, and documents. It also explains how the integrated steps of data gathering, data management, and data analysis in autoethnographic studies were initially confusing for the first author.In the second part of learning about autoethnography, the first author’s confusion, challenges, and decisions about saturation in autoethnographic studies are explained. It is indicated how the first author with the assistance of her mentors met the challenge by conceptualizing saturation in her autoethnographic study in two phases. The first phase of saturation took place when the authors considered the amount of data appropriate to start coding, although data are ever-growing in autoethnographic studies (Chang, 2008). The second phase was determined by the authors when they achieved a deep understanding of the investigated issue.In the third part of learning about autoethnography, the first author clarified how reading art–based autoethnographic studies with a variety of different writing styles seemed to be confusing at the beginning when she was looking for a commonly used systematic academic style of writing. It demonstrates how the first author decided to conservatively locate herself in the middle of the continuum of art and science in writing autoethnography. Regarding the different writing styles that are suggested by different autoethnographers (Adam et al., 2015; Chang, 2008), the first author with the assistance of her mentors opted for mixed realistic and descriptive styles in the text.The fourth indicates how the first author met the challenge of ethics in her autoethnography. Although autoethnography investigates the self, personal stories had taken place within social networks and in relation to others (Ellis, 2007). Therefore, making ethical decisions about others, particularly intimate others, is also required (Ellis, 2007). Due to the fact that autoethnographers make ethical considerations according to their condition, their relationships with others, their audience, and the value of reality, it is indicated how the first author used several suggested protective devices (Adam et al., 2015; Ellis, 2007) in making the decisions about others in her stories, including eliminating parts that threatened the privacy of others, using collaborative witnessing, writing anonymously and/or pseudonymously, sharing the manuscript with others. The fifth part is about the evaluation criteria, which were an important concern for the first author after completing her autoethnography. It addresses issues such as the context, meaning, and utility of the terms such as reliability, validity, and generalizability as applied in autoethnography (Ellis et al., 2011).  The first author attempted to provide clear and rich explanations about the process and product of her autoethnographic study to make the narrated stories more possible, believable, trustable, engaging, and meaningful for the audience. The sixth is about the researcher’s professional development that she experienced during and after the process of an autoethnographic study. Finding through the study that she internalized negativity to pair/group work activities was rooted in her early life experiences and the sociocultural setting she had lived in led to her efforts to socialize students into appropriate implementation requirements of pair/group work activities.The seventh is the researcher’s personal and professional development through the shifting from a positivist approach to a postmodernist viewpoint. Postmodernism believes that everyone may have his/her interpretation of reality and it provides an opportunity for researchers to gain and share their local and partial knowledge (Wall, 2006) and value their status in research. It is explained how turning to postmodernism has led the researcher to value others’ thoughts, ideas, and interpretations, particularly welcoming the students’ voices. Although the present study was limited to the first author’s understanding of autoethnography, it is hoped that sharing the experiences with an autoethnographic study through the lens of an autoethnographer teacher has implications for teachers on how to use autoethnography as a data-led approach to promote self-reflection on their classroom practices. Moreover, it may open new windows of opportunities to renew and reform the educational system, principles, beliefs, values, teaching methods, and teachers’ personal and social behaviors in the Iranian educational system to be able to educate critical teachers.

Although previous studies support using pair work in the language learning classroom, some have shown that getting L2 learners into pairs without raising their awareness about the global norms of collaboration will not necessarily create quality opportunities for interlanguage development. In this study, we investigated the contribution of teaching collaborative ground rules through peer modeling to a learner’s routine participatory patterns over time. Using a qualitative single case study methodology, we focused on one intermediate EFL learner interacting with different peers in pairs in an intact class. According to the syllabus of the course, learners had to pair up each session (9 sessions in total) with three different partners to do a narrative task. On the fifth session, a model performance with collaborative ground rules knitted into it was demonstrated to the class to find out how the provision of peer modeling would change the pair participatory patterns. Our analyses of the data from the learner’s audio-recorded performances prior and subsequent to the modeling session suggest that the provision of peer modeling has qualitatively expanded the learner’s interactive patterns in pair interaction. This study contributes to our understanding of collaborative tasks, and it also suggests that peer modeling could be used as a useful pedagogical technique for teaching learners how to collaborate meaningfully in dyadic interaction.

Interlanguage pragmatics has attracted considerable attention in recent years. One strand of interlanguage pragmatics research includes studies comparing the effectiveness of implicit versus explicit teaching on the development of pragmatics. Many studies, although inconclusively, have shown the superior effect of explicit teaching of pragmatics, but few have focused on finding ways to improve the implicit teaching of pragmatics. The present study attempted to unfold the effect of collaborative dialogue on the quality of implicit teaching of request (head act and preparator).  To this end, 28 participants (19 to 33 years old, intermediate) majoring in English (freshman and junior) were divided into two groups. The experimental group (n=14) had the opportunity to complete the tasks collaboratively and the control group (n=14) were not provided with any specific pragmatic instruction. The instructional procedure included four successive sessions of teaching request in situations where the sociological parameters were systematically varied. For the purpose of data collection, the classes were audio-recorded and a pretest-posttest design for discourse completion task (DCT) was adopted. For the purpose of data analysis, target request head acts and preparators were scored and also the audio recordings of classes were transcribed and the process of learning during treatment was checked in detail. The findings indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in producing target preparators and head acts. And evidence of noticing the pragmatic forms namely noticing unnoticed forms, noticing the gap, and negotiation of form was observed during the collaborative task. This study suggests that teachers may need to provide learners with the opportunities for collaborative tasks along with input enhancement tasks in order to improve the pragmatic knowledge of the learners.

The prevailing pattern of classroom interaction is a tripartite exchange structure known as IRF (teacher initiation, student response, teacher follow-up/feedback; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). Although it has its own contributions to classroom discourse, it has been criticized on several grounds, particularly for affording minimum learner participation opportunities (Kasper, 2001). An alternative practice has been promoting learner initiation and agency through moving out-of-IRF. However, when the form of interaction is teacher-fronted, IRF becomes the centerpiece and moving out of it tends to be difficult. This paper aims at exploring first what learners need to take initiatives and exercise agency in teacher-fronted interaction, and second how teachers can play a facilitative role in this process. Conversation analytic study of an EFL teacher’s naturally-occurring interaction with learners during a homework review activity demonstrates how the teacher’s extended wait-time practice affords a learner the interactional space needed to initiate a question and voice her locus of trouble. Moreover, the teacher's consistent extended wait-time practice after the learner’s initiation functions as an invitation bid for other learners to orient to the trouble and successfully negotiate it in their learner-learner interaction. Extracts of this study portray learners’ management to drive their own learning.

One of the recent issues in English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) writing instruction has been the quest for a more effective way to give feedback to L2 learners’ writing drafts. Although teacher-learner writing conferences have been increasingly used for providing ample opportunity for negotiating revisions, relatively little attention has been given to actual teacher-learner conversation. Drawing on sociocultural theory, which holds that all cognitive developments are results of ‘social interactions’, and drawing on conversation analysis as an analytical tool, this study attempts to explore the different functions of ‘silence’ in writing conferences during teacher-learner conversation. The data comes from transcripts of six 1-hour writing conferences video-recorded in a graduate program with 7 candidates in Iran. During the writing conferences, learners’ drafts were discussed. Findings of the study demonstrated that teacher’s silence can play a key role in the management of turns in writing conferences, thereby providing the parties with various opportunities for accomplishing intersubjectivity: the teacher used silence to rethink the information provided during writing conferences, and the learner exploited silence to revise the writing draft. The current study, reporting a range of functions of silence in writing conferences, offers an extension to the existing literature and draws language teachers’, specifically writing instructors’, attention to different functions of silence in writing conferences.

This paper investigates learner-initiated responses to English language teachers’ referential questions and learner initiatives after teachers’ feedback moves in meaning-focused question-answer sequences to analyze how interactional practices of language teachers¡ their initiation and feedback moves¡ facilitate learner initiatives. Classroom discourse research has largely neglected learner initiative in this pedagogically crucial arena. Addressing this pedagogical issue and drawing on sociocultural theory and situated learning theory¡ this qualitative study focuses on meaning-focused question-answer sequences to understand whether unfolding sequences¡ as structured by teachers¡ solicit learner-initiated participation. The data come from 10 videotaped and transcribed lessons from seven English teachers and their intermediate level students¡ at four private language institutes in Iran¡ which were analyzed within conversation analysis framework. Based on detailed analysis of classroom episodes¡ a very small number of learner initiatives was uncovered. The analysis revealed that several interactional practices by teachers (addressing the whole class¡ extending wait-time¡ encouraging student-student interaction¡ acknowledging response¡ giving positive feedback¡ and using continuers) tend to prompt learners’ initiation and learners can also create learning opportunities for themselves (following silence or following their own or other initiation). To characterize the findings¡ a typology of interactional acts that prompt solicited and unsolicited learner initiation is also provided. Some episodes are analyzed and the implications for teachers and teacher educators are also discussed.

Pairing theory with methodology, this study demonstrates how EFL teachers’ limited wait-time practice structures in and affects the structuring of the unfolding classroom discourse with reference to learners’ participation opportunities. Informed by the tenets of conversation analysis, we have observed, videotaped, and transcribed line-by-line 10 EFL teachers’ naturally-occurring classroom interaction. Analyses of six episodes from the data suggest that teachers’ seemingly inadvertent implementation of limited wait-time tends to reduce learners’ interactional space. Moreover, it serves the (dys)function of triggering those interactive practices whose structuring diverts teacher talk from the major pedagogic goal, i.e. increasing leaner participation. The findings of this study can be analytically generalized to the theoretical model of communicative competence. They can also help teachers on their way towards developing their classroom interactional competence.

Once severely rejected, first language (L1) use is no more considered to be inherently detrimental in foreign language pedagogy. Recent research within sociocultural framework has come up with numerous facilitative roles for L1 use (Anton and DiCamilla, 1999; Swain and Lapkin, 2000; Storch and Wigglesworth, 2003). Also, studies from humanistic perspectives that deal with the teachers’ and learners’ attitudes about L1 use report generally positive attitudes from both groups (Duff and Polio, 1990; Macaro, 2001). However, contrary to this bulk of theoretical and empirical support, there seems to have been an evident animosity towards L1 use in the Iranian private English language institutes. The present research was therefore designed to delve deeper into the apparent discrepancy between theory and practice in this regard by identifying some contextual constraints on the teachers’ language choice. After preliminary exploratory interviews and a small-scale pilot study to make sure of the reliability and validity of the instruments, two separate sets of questionnaires for young learners’ parents (243 participants) and teachers (31 participants) were designed and administered. The results of the analyses showed that both parents and teachers held significantly negative attitudes towards L1 use. The findings also indicated that parents reflect their negative attitudes to the institutes so as to hamper L1 use by talking directly to the teachers, threatening to change institutes in the case of dissatisfaction, and influencing the institute principals’ policies about L1 use.

This study focuses on the use of communication strategies in teacher talk. While previous studies have presented communication strategies largely from an outside researcher''s perspective، the aim in this paper is to move the focus to that of classroom contexts، especially EFL teaching contexts. Furthermore، it is argued that communication strategies should also be studied in the situated talk of the classroom teacher، and not just second language learners. Showing some examples from our database، we underscore the crucial role these devices play in classroom interaction. The participants were five non-native Iranian teachers. The data consisted of a total of fifteen recordings، made up of three lessons for each teacher. The detailed examination of the database revealed that the teachers in the study made frequent use of different types of communication strategy in their talk with students and these strategies were potentially an important aspect of teacher talk. The most important implications of this finding are that، first، an extended concept of communication strategies that moves beyond learners to include teachers'' communication strategies should be taken into account and، second، developing these strategies are necessary for effective L2 communicative language use.

Pair and small group work is infrequently welcomed in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes under the assumption that students tend to use their first language (L1)، which is considered detrimental to learning the new language. From sociocultural perspective، however، students’ first language is claimed to play the role of an important psychological tool and can facilitate the learning process. Hence، the current study is an investigation to examine the impact of students’ L1 use on their collaborative interaction، specifically on the construct of language-related episodes (LREs)، in completing form-focused editing tasks in pairs in an EFL context. The findings show that learners’ L1 can affect their interactional talk and can play certain socio-cognitive roles such as the provision of explanations for the suggestions made in pair، helping make sense of the utterances، sharing ideas instead of unilateral solutions to linguistic problems، and assisting one another in reaching solutions to the problems at hand. The functions were seen to be all conducive to the pair members’ target language development.

Questioning practice constitutes one of the typical and fundamental interactional tools in L2 teaching. Much L2 research on teacher questions has been quantitative studies focusing on identifying question types and their roles in language acquisition and meaning negotiation. However, by drawing on conversation analysis within a sociocultural perspective, this study examines qualitatively how EFL teacher questions can scaffold learning processes. The data were collected through videotaping EFL classroom interaction. Eleven sessions of seven intermediate-level teachers in private language schools were recorded. Through the microanalysis of the transcribed data, the study found that EFL teachers vary in their structuring of unfolding question-answer sequences and that only a small number of teacher questions tended to provide learning opportunities. Four question types providing scaffolded assistance were identified: simplifying questions, marking questions, prompting questions and asking-for-agreement questions. This study contributes to understanding how the interactive nature of the questions teachers pose can shed light on the connection between teachers’ practices and students’ learning across unfolding sequence. It argues that teacher questions are more than elicitation techniques; they are mediational interactional tools to assist participation and comprehensibility. Some examples illustrating these communicative moves of questions and their scaffolding functions are provided. The implications for teacher education are also discussed.

Initiation, Response, and Feedback(IRF) sequences are the most frequent interaction network in any classroom contexts. IRF sequences have been examined profusely in previous studies and were reported to be negatively correlated with participation opportunities (Kasper, 2006; Cazden, 2001; Ellis, 1994).In all these studies, all contingent factors of any classroom context which might influence interaction network have been overlooked. Therefore, IRF sequences have been improvidently considered as static and inflexible interaction patterns which are unfolded invariantly in classroom. Based on video- taped data from ten English as a foreign language (EFL) classes, which were analyzed within conversation analysis framework, this study uncovered a modified version of IRF sequences labeled as ISRF (Initiation, Struggle, Response, and Feedback) sequences. Previous literature reported that IRF sequences offer very limited learning opportunities. ISRF sequences, on the other hand, have been shown in this study, to destroy even those very limited learning opportunities which IRF sequences could offer. The finding can both benefit teachers and teacher educators. It warns novice teachers to avoid applying this new interaction pattern in their classes and demands teacher educators to inform their trainees of the negative effect of ISRF sequences.