فهرست مطالب dr. saeed mehrpour

The present study examined peer feedback accuracy in synchronous and asynchronous peer feedback conditions. Employing a counterbalanced repeated-measures design, the researchers examined the accuracy of 2327 comments provided by 96 intermediate EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners in synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated conditions. In the synchronous condition, the learners exchanged comments using the desktop version of WhatsApp, and the participants in the asynchronous condition created weblogs and provided feedback in the comment box. All students provided peer feedback in both conditions, and the accuracy of their comments in these computer-mediated environments was compared. Findings showed that the asynchronous condition yielded significantly more accurate comments and fewer missed erroneous items. The data analysis also indicated that low-intermediate students provided more accurate comments in the asynchronous condition. Further, the findings revealed that EFL learners provided comments supported by references to external sources, including textbooks, online sources, teachers’ lectures (referentially-justified peer feedback), which were significantly more accurate than those comments not accompanied by references. The findings of this study suggest that when the accuracy of peer feedback is of paramount importance, asynchronous peer feedback design should be implemented.

During COVID-19 pandemia, orthopedic ward of Shariati Hospital continued its work as the refferral ward for trauma patients. As an educational center with undergrad and postgrad medical students, we were forced to acutely change our policies and the ward workflow in a way to limit the danger of disease transmission and continue education and giving medical service at the same time. Here we reported our strategies that were adopted in our center to continue educational process as efficient as possible.

The present study investigated the effects of using the MoodleReader Module on Iranian EFL learners’ vocabulary depth and breadth. The participants of this study, chosen based on their availability, were 30 male and female Iranian EFL learners attending two intact reading comprehension classes. One class was assigned to the treatment group and the other one to the control group. Three tests measuring vocabulary breadth, depth, and partial knowledge of vocabulary were used to collect the data. The tests were administered in both classes at the beginning of the study as pre-tests; then, the treatment group received the MoodleReader as the extensive reading tool, while the control group used the traditional intensive reading program during three and a half months. At the end of the study, the three tests were once again administered to both classes as post-tests. To analyze the collected data, a set of paired and independent samples t-tests was run to compare the performance of the participants in both groups. The findings of the study indicated that the treatment group improved regarding all the three aspects of vocabulary knowledge, i.e., breadth, depth and partial knowledge and the control group improved in terms of vocabulary breadth, but not in terms of vocabulary depth and partial knowledge. The findings indicated that the application of the MoodleReader module affected the development of EFL learners’ vocabulary breadth, depth, and partial knowledge.

This study set out to examine the effect of explicit consciousness-raising of autonomous learning activities on a group of students’ General English achievement test scores following a mixed methods design. At the beginning of the study, four intact classes were selected based on their availability, of which one class was assigned to the experimental group and the others to the control groups, through random assignment. The treatment groups received a 10 session treatment on a number of autonomous learning activities to be done outside the classroom after the midterm exam which functioned as the pretest. At the end of the semester and after the treatment, all the four groups took the final exam (the posttest). An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare the posttest scores for treatment and no-treatment groups, and one-way ANOVA was run followed by Tukey HSD as a follow-up measure to find out the probable differences between the groups. To check the probable significant differences between students’ pretest and posttest scores, a set of paired-samples t-tests was run separately for the experimental group and control group 1. Then, the researchers conducted descriptive analysis related to the questionnaire items and checked the correlation of all the data taken from the tests and the questionnaire items. The results indicated that the treatment significantly led to better test scores in this context, where the eta squared statistic indicated a large effect size. In addition, the semi-structured interview data confirmed the results.

As a part of a larger-scale research, the present study aimed to use the main tenets of sociocultural perspective; namely, mediation, internalization, zone of proximal development, and the activity theory, to analyze the novice and expert teachers’ professional development through personal practical theorizing as an awareness raising technique. Furthermore, the study attempted to identify the contextual factors hindering teachers’ pedagogical beliefs enactment. The areas of mismatches between the teachers’ beliefs and practices were identified in the previous phases of the study and personal practical theorizing procedure was implemented in the program to help teachers converge their beliefs and practices. Within the domain of the qualitative research, a multi-case study design was utilized, employing eight novice and experienced teachers who were selected through purposive sampling. The teachers’ professional development in the proposed program was analyzed through the lens of sociocultural perspectives and the contextual factors hindering teachers’ beliefs enactment were enumerated based on the results gleaned through interview sessions

To date, a majority of comparative studies have been conducted to generally shed some light on the concept of pragmatic transfer between a native language and a second or foreign language. However, little research has investigated a multilingual situation where there is an interaction among three different languages spoken by one person. Of interest was whether pragmatic transfer of refusals among three languages spoken by the same person occurs from L1 and L2 to L3, L1 to L2 and then to L3 or from L1 and L1 (if there are more than one L1) to L2. The present study aimed to investigate the norms of production of refusals in three languages under investigation and to specify what impact, if any, the knowledge of these languages has on pragmatic transfer of refusals. To this end, 161 participants in 5 groups filled out a Discourse Completion Test (DCT), consisting of 12 situations on 4 types of refusal speech act. The collected data was coded and analyzed in terms of semantic formula sequences categorizedbased on the refusal taxonomy. The collected data from Kurdish learners of English who were also fluent in Farsi (Trilingual speakers) were compared with data obtained fromotherfour groups: 1)Native English speakers; 2)Monolingual speakers in Farsi; 3) Monolingual speakers in Kurdish; and 4) BilingualFarsi learners of English.The results revealed that pragmatic transfer exists in choice and content of semantic formulae- with the availability of the similar range of refusals.It was also found that the sociocultural norms of English, Farsi, and Kurdish languages differ with respects to the refusal speech act and individual's social power and relative distance play a critical role in performing such a speech act. This research suggests that, in spite of the norm differences existing amongEnglish and two other languages,transferof refusals mostly occurs from Kurdish as L1 but not from L2 (Farsi) to L3 (English). The study results would be used for further research in the field of teaching and learning English as a foreign language.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the manifestation of teaching expertise of EFL teachers in Iranian formal educational context. More specifically, it was intended to study how teachers of English in Iranian high schools and General English instructors in a state university manifest features of teaching expertise. The study also compared the expertise features of novice teachers with those of experienced ones in both high schools and university. To achieve these goals, through a qualitative research, 10 high school teachers and 10 university instructors were purposively selected to be observed and interviewed. Each group consisted of 5 novice and 5 experienced teachers. After 2-3 sessions of observation (which functioned as the main source of data) and one session of interview with all participants, an attempt was made to extract cases or instances of expertise in their teaching practice. These instances were later categorized into 6 types of expertise: expertise in management, motivational expertise and providing guidance and feedback, instructional expertise, content knowledge expertise, expertise in making connections between subjects of study, and expertise in dealing with challenges. A table consisting of these expertise types and all those instances or cases of expertise (extracted from the observation reports and also the literature) was designed. The data for each teacher was analyzed closely again and those cases which were present in their teaching practice were checked in the table. The next step was to look carefully at the patterns of expertise in each group of teachers. The analysis of the collected data revealed that teaching expertise was manifested almost similarly in the teaching practice of the four groups of teachers. Three groups i.e. experienced high school teachers, and novice and experienced university instructors exhibited 100% success in at least one type of expertise, namely making connections between subjects of the study. This aspect of expertise in novice high school teachers proved to be just 60%. Experienced university instructors formed the only group who achieved perfect performance (100%) in two types of expertise, namely, content knowledge expertise and expertise in making connections between subjects of study. And novice high school teachers formed the only group who did not achieve perfect performance in any of the teaching expertise types.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the oral narrative skills of late talkers mostly caused by mental disorders while they try to comprehend a wordless sequential picture story to create and narrate the relevant story. To this end, 15 (10 male and 5 female) participants were who were the students of a specialized school for physically and mentally retarded students selected based on the purposive sampling. They were the students of grade one with the age ranging between 6 to 13 years old. All of them had language delay which was caused by mental disorder. Their narrations were observed and recorded in a semi natural setting by the researchers canducted and their speech therapist (ST). Based on the data collected from the interview by the researcher, it was concluded that most of the students were not able to keep the sequence while narrating the picture story. With regard to syntactic patterns, all of the sentences were holophrastic or two-word utterances bearing a simple structure although some exceptions were identified. An element which was mostly seen in late talkers was their inability to name the objects because of their restricted lexicon therefore they compensated trying to define the function of the word they tried to utter.

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between language teacher's perception of instructional supervision and their self-efficacy. In addition, it intended to delve into the interplay among self-efficacy, perception of supervision, and teaching performance of Iranian EFL teachers. Employing a mixed-method design, the researchers collected the data, using questionnaires and observation. A total number of 116 EFL instructors teaching at language institutes in Shiraz participated in the quantitative phase of the study. Making use of purposive sampling, the researchers asked 46 of the participants to cooperate in the second phase of the study in which data was collected through classroom observations. In order to analyze the collected data, the researchers utilized descriptive statistics, Cronbach's alpha, Pearson correlation, multiple regression analysis, and code-recode agreement techniques. The findings of the study revealed a significant positive relationship between teacher's self-efficacy and their perception of instructional supervision (r = 0.22, p

The present study investigates the speech functions fulfilled by the sentences of a randomly selected body of national anthems of 70 countries using content analysis. The study reveals that these relatively short texts convey the richest and most impressive concepts to the readers or listeners. The results of the study indicate that 29 different functions are represented by sentences in the anthems analyzed among which 'description' and 'addres's are the most frequent ones and the least frequent ones are 'consolation', 'warning' and 'reproof'. Twenty five categories of these functions have some syntactic and lexical features in common. The results also show that the national anthems of Egypt and Palestine have the most and those of Greece and Pakistan the least intensive load of meaning. Other results indicate that the following concepts appear in all the analyzed national anthems: 1. Aggression, such as war, fight, 2. Pain, such as suffering, sacrifice, martyrs, 3. Liberty, independence, and rejection of slavery, 4. Nature, mountains, rivers, specific places, 5. Joy, such as songs, happiness, and love, 6. Religion, faith, God, prophet, 7. Nostalgia, such as history, memories, ancestors, and 8. Other abstract notions showing high values such as glory, honor, pride, unity, loyalty, justice, and peace.

Unprecedented interest in pragmatic abilities of competent speakers of language has raised some questions regarding the nature of pragmatic competence in different languages. Acquisition of pragmatics in early bilinguals has the advantage of illuminating the similarities and differences of pragmatic competence across languages. The purpose of this study was to investigate the comprehension of indirect requests and the production of requests in early bilinguals which is underrepresented in literature on pragmatic acquisition. At the same time the secondary purpose of the study was to tackle another gap in similar studies of first language acquisition, that is, reflecting on the implications of research findings for teaching pragmatics. The participants of the study were two bilinguals aged 3.5 and 2.4 at the start of the study which lasted for 8 months. The data comes from diary notes and recordings of the children‟s interaction with their mothers and in some cases their peers as well as their responses to indirect requests made by the researchers. The data were analyzed both qualitatively (using Straus and Corbin‟s (1998) model) and quantitatively (using chi-square tests). The analysis revealed that their comprehension of indirect requests did not differ significantly in the two languages and their production of requests was similar regarding the types of requests in the two languages. The findings suggest that there might be one pragmatic competence for both of the languages which bilinguals draw upon in production of requests and comprehension of indirect requests. The implications for teaching pragmatics are also discussed.

Today in multilingual contexts, many parents prefer to rear their children in the dominant language rather than in their mother tongue. This phenomenon is widespread among native speakers of Kalhuri dialect of the Kurdish language in the multilingual context of Iran, too. Nevertheless, some studies have evidenced the privilege of bilinguals in learning an additional language though some others have provided counterevidence in this regard. The present study chiefly intended to see if there was any difference between Kalhuri Kurdish learners who had been reared monolingually (using Persian) and the ones who had been reared bilingually (using both Kalhuri and Persian) in terms of their achievement in English. In addition, it aimed at exploring the relationship between gender and socioeconomic status and bilinguality vs. monolinguality. To achieve these purposes, data were gathered from 200 bilingual and 200 monolingual Kurd students living in the city of Kermanshah whose parent's native language was the Kalhuri dialect of Kurdish. Results of data analyses indicated that though gender had no relationship with bilinguality and monolinguality, most students from low socioeconomic class were reared bilingually. Moreover, the students reared bilingually outperformed their monolingual counterparts in terms of achievement in English.

The current study is an attempt to investigate the particular role learnersvocabulary knowledge plays in their reading comprehension performance. Itintends to determine whether breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge arerelated to EFL learner's reading comprehension, and to investigate which oneof these variables, that is, depth or breadth of vocabulary knowledge, makes amore important contribution to L2 reading comprehension. It also attempts toinvestigate whether there is a relationship between these two vocabularyknowledge dimensions, that is, depth and breadth. Finally, the study tries tofind out whether gender has any effect on learner's reading comprehensionand vocabulary knowledge. The participants of the study were sixty (30 maleand 30 female) EFL learners who were chosen from among five languageteaching institutes in Shiraz based on available sampling. To collect therelevant data, two tests measuring breadth and depth of vocabularyknowledge were administered to all participants. They also received a readingcomprehension test in which they were asked to read the passages and answersome multiple choice questions. The results obtained from the analysis of thedata indicated that while both depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledgeplay an important role in EFL learner's reading comprehension performance,depth of vocabulary knowledge makes a more important contribution. Theresults further revealed that depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge arepositively correlated, that is, those learners who had large vocabulary sizehad a deeper knowledge of the words, too. It was also found that gender hadno significant impact on learner's reading comprehension performance andvocabulary knowledge.