میثم میرزائی شجاع خانلو

Given that students’ personality traits can have a powerful role in language learning, this study sought to investigate how well L2 leaners’ communication apprehension and request speech act can be predicted through the components of the Big Five Personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness). The study also examined which of these traits could be the best predictor of L2 learners’ communication apprehension (CA) and request speech act. One hundred and seventy-nine Iranian EFL learners at three universities in Shiraz, Iran were recruited. To single out the participants for the study, Oxford Placement Test was employed. To identify the learners’ personality traits, gauge their pragmatic competence of request speech act, and measure their communication apprehension, The Big-Five Inventory, Discourse Completion Task, and the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24) were applied, respectively. Standard multiple regression was used and the results showed that the Big Five personality can predict L2 learners’ communication apprehension and request speech act ability. Moreover, the results evidenced that extraversion and neuroticism largely contributed to L2 learners’ request speech act ability and CA, respectively. The findings offer implications for EFL teachers in helping their students increase their speech act productions and managing their communication apprehension based on their personality traits.

Investigating language teacher cognition and ways of promoting their cognition are the building blocks of teacher education because their practices are highly contingent on their cognition about underlying concepts in language pedagogy. This study explored the development of novice teachers’ cognition about corrective feedback (CF) through task-based teacher education. The data were culled from two novice Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers through a questionnaire, observation, and journal. They took part in a course centering on the ways of enhancing knowledge about CF. The course was based on task-based teacher education. The teachers were to learn and practice giving feedback through some task-based teacher education activities such as role plays and observations. The data before the course indicated that the teachers had restricted knowledge about the functions and types of CF. However, the task-based teacher education course raised the teachers’ awareness about the scaffolding potentialities of CF. They also gained insights into implicit and explicit CF types as well as their functions. In addition, CF helped them enhance their awareness about the intrusiveness of error correction in the process of communication flow. Finally, the contribution of the findings of the study for novice teachers and teacher educators and how they should educate novice teachers are discussed.