فهرست مطالب محمود هاشمیان

The present study investigated the probable effects of asynchronous direct and metalinguistic computer-mediated corrective feedback (CMCF) on the writing ability (WA) and willingness-to-write (WTW) of upper-intermediate L2 learners. To this aim, a convenient sample of 90 upper-intermediate L2 learners volunteered to participate in this study. In the next stage, they were assigned into 3 intact groups. Intact experimental groups received asynchronous direct CMCF and metalinguistic CMCF on the different aspects of their writings, whereas the control group did not receive any CMCF. To check the (probable) impact of asynchronous direct and metalinguistic CMCF on the participants’ WA, the researchers assessed the participants’ WA before and after the treatment. Furthermore, participants filled out a previously developed and validated WTW questionnaire before and after the treatment, which measured their WTW. In the last stage, 16 participants of the experimental groups were interviewed to provide an in-depth understanding of factors affecting the participants’ WTW. ANOVA results revealed that the participants’ WA significantly improved due to both asynchronous direct and metalinguistic CMCF, with no significant difference between the efficacies of the CMCF types. Besides, the results indicated that both CMCF types resulted in an improvement in the participants’ WTW. Furthermore, the theme analysis of interview findings suggested that the participants perceived CMCF to be facilitative. The interview results were in agreement with those of the quantitative analyses. The findings of this study may contribute to understating L2 learners’ needs and considering pedagogical decision-making for course developers and instructors.

Although listening is a crucial skill to enhance one’s position in academia, this skill is challenging for most L2 learners. The first step to improve L2 learners’ listening skill is to figure out their listening problems and to provide them with appropriate instruction. The aim of the current study was told-fold: (1) It explored Iranian intermediate L2 learners’ listening problems, and (2) it examined the effect of metacognitive strategies’ instruction on Iranian intermediate L2 learners’ listening comprehension. Participants were a random sample of 31 intermediate L2 learners in Iran. The Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administered to the participants to check their homogeneity. Also, the participants’ listening comprehension was pretested. After 10 treatment sessions, the participants were posttested to check the (possible) changes in their listening comprehension ability. In order to check the participants’ listening problems, they filled Liu’s (2010) Listening Comprehension Processing Problems Questionnaire. Data were analyzed through one samples t test and paired samples t test, whose results indicated that metacognitive strategies elevated the participants’ ability in terms of listening. Results revealed that the participants had problems in the steps of parsing and perception, although the problems were not significant. On the other hand, in the utilization phase, there seemed to be no problem. As a result, applying the findings of this research will help materials developers, curriculum planners, instructional decision-makers, and teachers.

The flipped teaching has nowadays become a new movement in teaching and is getting pervasive in the educational system. The goal of this study was to explore if there was any significant difference between L2 learners’ oral complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in flipped and traditional classes. To do so, both traditional and filpped classes were resorted to in order to see which class matched the students’ needs. Moreover, this study was done to find out if it had any significant effect on the learners’ motivation, self-efficacy, engagement, self-confidence, and autonomy. Via an OPT, 40 homogenous, lower-intermediate students were chosen from a language school in Isfahan, Iran. Then, they were randomly assigned to experimental 1 and 1 control groups. Initially, all the students attended an interview session and their responses were audio-recorded; then, 2 teachers scored their responses to make certain the interviews enjoyed reliability. Afterward, the students took a pretest with 2 questions relevant to their actual life and the grammar they would acquire in the course of the treatment. After taking 4 treatment sessions, the students received a posttest to see how much they had progressed during the 4 treatment sessions. Also, a questionnaire was adapted from another study to figure out the students’ satisfaction regarding this type of teaching. The results revealed that the flipped class increased the students’ motivation, self-efficacy, engagement, self-confidence, and autonomy. However, no significant difference was seen between the learners in the flipped class and those in the traditional class, as far as oral CAF was concerend. Based on the students’ answers to the questionnaire, most were satisfied with the flipped model. To conclude, materials developers and syllabus designers should modify instructional materials and books taught in language schools and add some parts to them in line witth technology to satisfy digital natives.

This study employed 2 theories of motivation (i.e., the regulatory focus and the regulatory fit) to examine how L2 students with different motivational compositions perform L2 oral tasks, especially in terms of accuracy and fluency. The researchers asked 52 intermediate students of a higher education center in Shahrekord (Iran) to partake in an experiment in which they were, first, categorized into 2 groups of either prevention-oriented or promotion-oriented based on their dominant motivational composition. Afterward, the research was conducted in 2 stages: the first one with a conditionally neutral speaking task (regulatory focus) and the second one with 2 conditionally charged speaking tasks, each designed to either induce prevention condition or promotion condition in the mind of the test takers, to see how task condition and motivational orientation of the participants tended to interact (regulatory fit). Results did not reveal any significant causal relationship between the participants' motivational orientation/task condition and their fluency and accuracy. We postulated that the predictions of these 2 theories were not realized because of the interference of extraneous factors such as curriculum design and learning experience.

Politeness plays an important role in ini tiated e-mail requests sent from students to faculty. One such feature of requests susceptible to politeness is the degree of imposition, which is one of the important variables in speech act production. Although the literature on requests is abundant, there are few studies on low- and high-imposition requests, in general, and on Iranian L2 learners’ low- and high-imposition requests, in particular. Through analyzing L2 learners’ requests, this study was an attempt to explore the distribution of pragmalinguistic means when writing English e-mail requests with low- and high degrees of imposition. For the purpose of this study, a corpus of 208 e-mail requests was collected for a rigorous qualitative analysis. The e-requests were classified into 4 categories: information, validation, feedback, and action. They were, then, coded and analyzed. It appeared that, though similar in many ways, the distribution of request type, openings, head act strategies, and internal and external modifiers were relatively conditioned by the degree of imposition. The findings can have valuable resources for future studies of potential interlanguage pragmatics studies, which are concerned with L2 learners’ performance and pragmatic competence in L2 learning.

In the last 2 decades, studies on conceptual metaphors have profoundly increased. The development in this field was followed by Lakoff and Johnson's (1980b) work on describing the conceptual role played by metaphors and their correspondence with language and thought. This study aimed to compare conceptual metaphors in Persian and English through a corpus-based approach as well as examining both the universality and culture-specificity of conceptual metaphors within Persian/English and describe in detail the Persian conception of some metaphorical concepts from the cognitive perspective. The cognitive theory of metaphor was resorted to and applied to a cross-cultural analysis of a randomly selected set of conceptual metaphors in English and Persian. To analyze the data, 12 conceptual metaphors introduced by Wright (1999) were investigated and gathered. Then, the metaphorical expressions in the 2 languages were grouped under their source and target domains. Results pointed to the fact that whereas there is a certain degree of universality in terms of the predominant conceptual metaphors, there are also variations between the 2 languages for cultural and linguistic reasons.

The goal of this study was to compare the use of conceptual metaphors in English novels written by native and nonnative writers of English. Therefore, two novels were selected: To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee, a native English writer, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a nonnative English writer. To find the instances of conceptual metaphors in each book, approximately 10% of the pages of each novel was randomly selected and examined line by line based on the framework introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). In the next step, to find the number and type of metaphors used in each book, the identified metaphors were categorized under their underlying concepts and counted. Then, the frequencies of different types of metaphors in each book were tallied and tabulated, and with the use of a chi-square test, the possible differences among the 2 writers’ use of different types of metaphors were found. Results indicated that, in both novels, there were significant differences among the 5 types of metaphors that were identified, namely structural metaphors, ontological metaphors, orientational metaphors, metonymy, and personification. Findings revealed that, in both books, ontological metaphors were the most frequently used type and personification was the least frequently used one. Also, no statistically significant difference was seen between the two writers’ use of the different types of metaphors. Findings are claimed to bear some implications for L2 pedagogy, benefiting teachers, syllabus designers, writers, and L2 learners.

Being a successful L2 learner/communicator involves the ability to apply not only linguistic and communicative competences, but also metaphorical competence and fundamental cognitive abilities like emotional intelligence (EI). In fact, EI can act as a predictor of one's success in life. Furthermore, because metaphors are the main means of helping to understand abstract concepts and to act upon abstract interpretations, L2 teachers, being aware of their learners’ EI profiles, should make them aware of their L2 metaphorical competence of the conceptual world. In spite of the importance given to L2 learners’ metaphorical comprehension/usage and their individual differences, almost no systematic attempt investigated the issue. This study scrutinized L2 learners’ EI profiles to underline the leading and the least common type of EI among 126 upper-intermediate L2 learners (51 males and 75 females). First, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was computed to investigate the relationship between the participants’ metaphorical competence and their EI. Second, standard multiple regression analysis was run to see the best predictors of the participants’ metaphorical competence level. The results demonstrated that, first, there was a medium positive correlation between the participants’ metaphorical competence and their EI. Second, the participants’ EI and gender were the 2 predictors of their metaphorical competence level, but EI was a stronger predictor than gender. The findings have implications for L2 pedagogy, suggesting the incorporation of an account of L2 learners’ metaphorical competence development and a report of their individual differences such as a profile consisting of their EI into L2 teachers’ class agendas.

Differences in nonnative speakers’ pragmatic performance may lead to serious communication problems. Although previous research has investigated different types of request strategies employed by English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) learners, little is known whether they use different or similar types of request strategies in the faculty context. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate cross-cultural variation in the use of request strategies by EFL/ESL learners to their faculty. To this aim, the request strategies elicited from 38 intermediate Iranian EFL learners in Iran, 24 intermediate ESL learners in England, and 16 British native English-speaking teachers were examined. A discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit the EFL/ESL learners’ request strategies to the faculty. Frequency findings suggested preference for the use of conventionally indirect request strategies to their faculty by the participants. Moreover, chi-square results indicated that their first language (L1) had no effect on the choice of request strategies employed by such learners to their faculty. Conclusions are that EFL/ESL learners generally use more negative politeness strategies to mitigate their requests to their faculty.

Although lexis research (e.g., Lewis, 1997; Taguchi, 2008) has already evidenced the possibility of teaching formulaic sequences (FS), further research is still needed to examine the procedures or frameworks through which the approach can be applied and probe the second or foreign language (L2) areas where it demonstrates more relevance. This pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study aimed, firstly, to compare the effects of intensive and extensive lexis-based L2 instructions on the development of IELTS candidates’ speaking performance and, secondly, to explore whether different types of speaking tasks (i.e., monologic vs. dialogic) have any differential effects on the frequency of using FS by L2 learners. To this end, three intact classes including 40 L2 learners preparing themselves for IELTS in a language center in Iran were randomly assigned to one control and two experimental groups. The groups received the same amount of instruction, however differently, two receiving intensive and extensive instructions in FS (or unanalyzed chunks) and the other receiving conventional non-lexis instruction. The results revealed that both lexis groups outperformed the control group pointing to the effectiveness of both intensive and extensive lexis-based instructions to the learners’ development of speaking proficiency. Moreover, the results showed no significant difference between the effects of intensive and extensive types of lexis instructions upon IELTS candidates’ development of speaking performance. Further, it was revealed that dialogic tasks were more conducive to the FS use than monologic tasks. Finally, the implications for L2 theory and pedagogy are discussed.

The present study investigated the pragmatic awareness and production of Iranian Turkish and Persian EFL learners in the speech act of apology. Sixty-eight learners of English studying at several universities in Iran were selected based on simple random sampling as the monolingual and bilingual participants. Data were elicited by means of a written discourse self-assessment/completion test (WDSACT) with 10 situations asking the participants to evaluate the appropriateness of the given acts on a 5-point Likert scale. Participants were also required to produce the appropriate acts for the described situations when evaluated as being inappropriate. Native speakers evaluated as being inappropriate for the given situations. Alternatives were coded. Results provided almost insignificant differences between the 2 groups in terms of their perceptions of the appropriate and inappropriate acts and illustrated the monolingual/bilingual learners’ tendency towards using all superstrategies of apology, except for the case of “Responsibility Expressions” and “Promises of Forbearance.” Lack of cultural awareness and literacy in the Turkish language, the case of subtractive bilingualism in Iran, and insufficient pragmatic input may be sources of pragmatic failure on the part of the bilinguals.

As far as making errors is an indispensable part of L2 learning process, appropriate and pertinent corrective feedback (CF) is a significant medium for L2 teachers to prevent their learners’ errors from getting fossilized and assist them progress along with their L2 learning process. There are various factors contributing to the efficacy of CF, but proficiency level is of paramount importance. In this study, various oral CF types preferred by L2 learners at intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced levels of proficiency were considered. For this purpose, 20 participants were selected for each level. Different types of oral CF were identified, and their distribution in relation to the proficiency levels of the learners was determined. After conducting chisquare tests and comparing the significance values with respect to their preferred CF types, it is observed that the most significant CF types among the intermediate participants were paralinguistic signals and clarification requests. Moreover, for the upper-intermediate participants, recasts and repetition were the most frequent and significant types of CF that assisted them to reformulate their utterances. Finally, with regard to the advanced participants, the results pointed out that as they became more proficient in terms of their linguistic threshold, they would show no significant positive or negative attitudes towards any certain type of CF for treating their errors. The findings suggest that L2 teachers should adjust CF types and correction techniques to their learners’ proficiency levels and provide proper types of CF that can foster a more productive learning milieu to enhance learning quality and speaking ability.

This study was an attempt to shed light on the use of requestive speech act by Iranian nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English and Canadian native speakers (NSs) of English to find out the (possible) similarities and/or differences between the request realizations، and to investigate the influence of the situational variables of power، distance، context familiarity، and L1’s (possible) influence. Participants were 4 different groups: Canadian NSs of English، Persian NNSs، Iranian hotel staff، and Iranian English learners. Data were obtained by a discourse completion test (DCT) including 12 situations and was translated into Persian to elicit the data from the Persian NNSs. Then، data were analyzed and codified based on the cross-cultural speech act realization pattern (CCSARP; Blum-Kulka & Olshtain، 1984). Findings indicated that the Persian culture is more direct and positive-politeness oriented، whereas the Canadian culture tends to be indirect and negative-politeness oriented. The Iranians revealed more variations in their request performance and were more sensitive to power differences. The Canadians were fixed and used conventionally indirect strategies in most situations.

This study aimed to identify the portions of teaching materials for English classes in Iran’s high schools. The efficiency of these materials was evaluated by (a) eliciting the teachers’ perception of the materials to identify their distribution portions and (b) studying the teachers’ satisfaction to identify whether the materials were successful to develop the EFL teachers’ knowledge and skills for real classes. Participants were 94 in-service teachers. Two questionnaires elicited their perception and satisfaction of the programs. Findings indicated the programs focus strongly on grammar, reading, vocabulary, and pronunciation and weakly on speaking, writing, and listening. Results indicated the teachers showed positive attitudes towards the materials for teachers’ knowledge and negative attitudes towards materials for teachers’ skills in teaching. Findings necessitate attention to all portions of EFL to meet students’ needs and bringing more practice into classes than theories.

As a natural phenomenon, difference manifests itself in all aspects of human’s life. Individual differences are essential issues to be considered in individuals’ education. In recent years, education has gone under a fundamental revolution, and the emphasis has been placed upon individuals’ talents/interests. This study examined how L2 learners’ individual differences (i.e., emotional intelligence and gender) may creep into their metaphorical competence. It investigated the following issues among 126 upper-intermediate L2 learners (i.e., 51 males and 75 females). First, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was performed to explore the (probable) relationship between the participants’ metaphorical competence and their emotional intelligence. Second, standard multiple regression analysis was run to make out the best predictors of the participants’ metaphorical competence level. The results confirmed that, first, there was a medium positive correlation between the participants’ metaphorical competence and their emotional intelligence. Second, the participants’ emotional intelligence and gender were the two predictors of their metaphorical competence level, but emotional intelligence was a stronger predictor than gender. The findings suggest some implications for L2 pedagogy. L2 learners’ individual differences (i.e., emotional intelligence and gender) require proper methods be considered so as to develop their metaphorical competence; these methods should not be extrapolated from the whole L2 learners to other L2 learners with different characteristics, though.

Test washback is generally defined as the influence of tests on teaching and learning process. Inspired by Messick’s consequential validity and Shohamy’s critical language testing, this critical impact study explored the transformative or reproductive practices different stakeholders undertake in relation to the detrimental impacts of Konkoor in Iran. The participants were 60 EFL teachers, a sample of 319 pre-university students, and 15 parents in Iran. Questionnaires, observation checklists, and semi-structured interviews were employed to collect the data. The results showed that Konkoor has considerable negative washback on the teaching and learning process. The participants’ pedagogical practices in return only perpetuated Konkoor’s impacts by teaching and learning to the test, practicing test-taking techniques, using in-authentic materials, reviewing previous Konkoor items in class and tests. Finally, it is suggested that pedagogical practices should transform the high-stakes testing situation and the related hazardous test impacts and thus result in fairer learning-oriented language assessment.

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance and the ubiquity of metaphors in language. Their effect has been instrumental in making significant headway into the pedagogical practice and design of teaching materials. The current study was carried out to explore the efficacy of focus-on-form (FonF) and focus-on-forms (FonFs) instructions on learning metaphorical language by Iranian intermediate learners of English. First, 60 participants who were homogeneous in terms of language proficiency and metaphorical competence were assigned to 3 groups, 2 being the experimental groups and 1 the control group. One of the experimental groups was exposed to the explicit teaching of metaphors (i.e. FonFs) included in 20 reading passages. The second group was taught the target metaphorical expressions through implicit instruction (i.e. FonF). And, the control group went through the usual classroom instruction; they took the same pretest and posttest as the 2 experimental groups did. To analyze the data, a three-way ANOVA and analysis of covariance were utilized. The findings revealed that the FonFs-taught group gained better results on the posttest. The results seem to indicate a positive correlation between the FonFs and metaphorical competence. It could be claimed that it is possible to enhance L2 learners’ metaphorical competence through the FonFs instruction of metaphors.

This study aimed to examine cross-cultural differences in performing refusal of requests between Persian native speakers (PNSs) and English native speakers (ENSs) in terms of the frequency of the semantic formulas. Also examined in this study was whether Persian EFL learners would transfer their L1 refusal patterns into the L2, and if there would be a relation between their proficiency level and the transfer of refusal strategies. To do so, 66 PNSs (studying Archeology and Law) and 59 ENSs from both genders filled out the Persian and English versions of the same discourse completion test (DCT), respectively. Also, the Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was used to form 2 groups consisting of 61 high proficient (HP) Persian L2 learners and 81 low proficient (LP) ones, who all filled out the English version of the DCT. The refusals strategies used by the participants were turned into semantic formulas, and then classified into 3 groups of Direct, Indirect, and Adjuncts to Refusals. Findings showed no significant differences in the use of Direct refusal strategies between the ENSs and the PNSs. Unlike the PNSs who outweighed the ENSs in the use of Indirect strategies, the ENSs employed substantially more Adjuncts to Refusals. Findings also indicated the occurrence of pragmatic transfer in the use of Indirect and Adjuncts to Refusals by both the HP and LP L2 learners. However, the LP group was found to transfer their L1 refusal patterns more than the HP group.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of portfolio assessment as a process-oriented mechanism on the autonomy of Iranian advanced EFL learners. A particular concern was to examine the potential effect of gender on portfolio assessment by taking the learners’ writing ability into account. The participants were 80 male and female advanced EFL learners to whom the Learner Autonomy Questionnaire (Kashefian, 2002) was administered to check their homogeneity prior to the study in terms of autonomy; a truncated form of a TOEFL test was also given to the participants to assess their language proficiency. The participants were then randomly divided into 4 groups: 2 experimental groups (20 females in class A and 20 males in class B) and 2 control groups 20 females in class C and 20 males in class D). The portfolio assessment was integrated into the experimental groups to explore whether and to what extent their autonomy might enhance and also to investigate the possible effect of gender on portfolio assessment in writing ability. The portfolio assessment was based on the classroom portfolio model adopted from Hamp-Lyons and Condon (2000), consisting of 3 procedures: collection, selection, and reflection. In contrast, the control groups received the traditional assessment of writing. The data were analyzed using 2 independent samples t tests, mean, and the effect size. The results showed that the portfolio procedures considerably improved the autonomy of the participants. Also, gender had no impact on portfolio assessment.

This study investigated the impact of Cooperative Learning techniques―Student Team-Achievement Divisions (STAD) and Group Investigation (GI)―on L2 learners‘ reading. Applying the Nelson Test, 90 preintermediate female college students were randomly selected and assigned to 3 groups. The experimental groups (A & B) received instruction according to the STAD and GI techniques. The control group (C) was instructed via the Conventional Instruction (CI) technique. Then, the participants took quizzes on the same materials. Results showed the STAD technique is more effective in improving reading, while the GI and CI techniques didn‘t enhance it significantly. The claim is that team rewards may have a strong impact on L2 learners‘ performance toward reading comprehension.