فهرست مطالب sedigheh vahdat

This study was conducted to investigate the diverse perspectives of English for Specific Purposes Needs of M.A students of Sports Science in Iran based on their language learning needs. A total of 40 male and female students majoring in Sports Science as well as 4 subject instructors who taught ESP at the Sports Science Departments of the universities, took part in the study. The researchers employed a qualitative-quantitative research method encompassing two data-gathering tools: a questionnaire and an interview. Two sets of needs analysis questionnaires were used in this study: the students’ questionnaire and ESP instructors’ questionnaire. Prior to using students’ questionnaire and ESP instructors’ questionnaire for data collection, the questionnaires were piloted and validated. The verbal (tape-recorded) data of the semi-structured interviews were analyzed using descriptive statistics. They were thematically categorized to approve the participants’ reactions to the related items in the questionnaires. Based on what was revealed by the results, the M.A students of Sports Science often lacked the knowledge and key skills needed in their target language knowledge after graduation. They frequently discover themselves incapable of utilizing what they have learned practically. Additionally, ESP instructors expressed that they were also disappointed with the students’ poor writing ability at M.A level. The findings also demonstrated that reading and writing, followed by speaking and listening, were individually recognized as the most vital skills by the participants. Furthermore, the participants expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of translation, writing, and grammar exercises, interesting topics, and pictures in ESP materials.

The global spread of English resulted in a surge in the global demand for learning this lingua franca. The majority of English language teaching is conducted through global ELT coursebooks. However, the end users have continuously criticized the promotion of Western values, consolidation of linguistic imperialism, and hegemonic practices through these books. This study describes the process of developing localized English language teaching materials based on research findings and Tomlinson’s text-driven approach. The selection of suitable texts is essential for optimizing language learning through SLA principles, such as providing learners with ample opportunities for meaningful language use and directing their attention toward meaning. After development, these materials, along with their accompanying audio and video files, were uploaded to an online platform (www.chamranelt.ir) where language teachers could employ them in their classrooms. This is the most prominent characteristic of the platform, and it is argued that it can be a solution to the possible cultural problems caused by global English language teaching coursebooks. These materials are more learner-centered, more engaging, and can provide learners with numerous opportunities to develop their intercultural communicative competence. Due to their cost-effectiveness, they can be efficiently marketed.

This study examined the effects of virtual English instruction via the Iranian Student Education Network (SHAD) on the speaking accuracy of Iranian high school English learners with varied personality traits during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants (n = 54) completed the Quick Oxford Placement Test and the Eysenck Personality Inventory before taking a speaking test based on the Vision English for Schools Series. The participants' voice-recorded responses to the speaking test were then analyzed for accurate verb usage. After completing 18 online sessions with diverse speaking tasks on SHAD, the participants retook the speaking test, and their performances were analyzed. The results indicated significant effects on the speaking accuracy of both extroverts and introverts, with introversion showing the most positive impact. Semi-structured telephonic interviews were conducted to gather participants' perceptions of virtual education. The findings highlighted the challenges and opportunities faced by Iranian high school English learners in online classes, with implications for virtual language education and materials development.

This study investigated the attitudes of teachers and students toward the Iraqi primary school sixth grade task-based English textbook. Two hundred students and two hundred English teachers were invited to provide their opinions through questionnaires and interviews. Specifically, the focus was on the suitability of English textbook tasks in terms of the target age group, culture, customs, traditions, class duration, classroom capacity, the availability of teaching aids, as well as the capability of teachers to interact and communicate the textbook material to students to achieve the desired learning outcome. Two instruments were used in this study. The first instrument was two questionnaires to investigate the teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward the English textbook of sixth-grade primary level based on TB, and the second instrument was a semi-structured interview to investigate teachers’ attitudes. The semi-structured interview was used to survey the participants’ attitudes, feelings and intractability with the task-based English text. The results of questionnaires pointed to the negative attitudes of the teachers and students toward the English textbook of grade 6. Moreover, both the teachers and students faced difficulty understanding and following the tasks in the textbook, leading to their confusion and waste of time. That is, the tasks were believed to be difficult to complete, perform or even redo out of the class. Finally, the textbook content appeared unsuitable for both teachers and students in terms of cultural norms and their application in local daily life situations. The study concluded with recommendations for the Iraqi Ministry of Education to modify the textbook content to match the group age-targeted 12 years old, their cultural standards, the classroom capacity, and teaching aids.

Despite extensive studies concerning written error correction, it is imperative that more research be conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of error correction on improving L2 writing. Driven by this gap, this study aimed to examine whether unfocused direct and indirect types of written corrective feedback had any impact on the writing accuracy of the Iranian English language learners’ new compositions. Through the random matching technique, ninety Iranian English language learners from seven foreign language centers in southwestern Iran were split into two groups for treatment and one group for control. As part of the evaluation, a writing test was utilized to determine whether the learners had improved their writing accuracy due to the treatment. The results showed that the participants in both treatment groups improved their writing accuracy, though the learning gains from both treatment were not significantly different. This study concludes with some implications for teachers regarding their use of appropriate types of written error correction.

This study investigated the different aspects of the English for Specific Purposes Needs of M.A students of Ancient Iran History studying at the Department of History in Iranian universities. The participants were selected from the universities of Iran based on convenience sampling. The Needs Analysis was designed on a qualitative and quantitative survey, using the semi-structured interviews and the questionnaires. 45 M.A students and 5 ESP instructors expressed their views through questionnaires and interviews. The results revealed that the students asked for the inclusion of the four language skills in their ESP courses. That is, a new ESP course focusing on the integration of all four skills should be developed. The instructors, however, echoed the reading skill as the predominant need for students to achieve a higher standard in academic and future careers. The interviews showed that the ESP courses were not sufficient to account for the specific needs of the students since these courses were not prepared according to the learners’ needs. The students expressed that they needed to master English because they had to use English sources during their academic studies. However, the ESP courses did not fully prepare the students to embark on their studies because it did not sufficiently take into account the learners’ needs. The students were dissatisfied with the current ESP courses of Ancient Iran History and asked for the urgent revision of ESP materials. The ESP instructors’ responses to the interviews indicated dissatisfaction with the students’ poor language skills, lack of motivation, and the insufficiency of the needs-responsive ESP coursebook. Giving more weight to English in the M.A entrance exam was suggested by instructors as one possible solution as this may increase the students’ level of motivation which may lead to the improvement of their language proficiency. The findings of this study can help researchers and ESP practitioners make particular pedagogic decisions. It presented a detailed description of the process of the Needs Analysis as a prerequisite step to design an ESP coursebook for English specific courses of the Ancient Iran History field at M. A level.

Although a great deal of research has been conducted on various aspects of implicit and explicit knowledge, very few research have examined how written corrective feedback (WCF) works on implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge. Inspired by this gap, the aim of the present study was to investigate whether the direct and indirect unfocused kinds of WCF can lead to an increase in the learning gains in terms of implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge. To that end, 90 participants selected from a statistical pool of 380 EFL learners in seven private English language institutes were assigned into two treatment groups and one control group via random matching technique to receive the intended treatment. Using MANCOVA and one-way ANCOVA statistical techniques, data related to two treatment groups and one control group were collected. The results showed that both types of direct and indirect unfocused WCF could increase the students’ implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge. The results also suggested that although both written feedbacks improved the learners' performance almost equally, the direct type of WCF was slightly more effective. The study concludes with implications for teachers regarding their use of appropriate types of written error correction.

Listening taking over half of the learners’ time and effort (Nunan, 1998), forms a basis for acquiring much of a language. There are factors affecting listening comprehension and its perception, such as the speech rate, phonological properties of the text, the quality of the recording, the learners’ anxiety, and listening comprehension strategies (Goh, 2000; Hamouda, 2013). At the Iran Language Institute in Dezful, S.W. Iran, some teachers attributed some learners’ perception of partially unsuccessful comprehension of the recorded material to factors such as rate of speech, T-unit length, and pauses between T-units or inside T-units. This study aimed at the probable association between learners' and teachers' perceptions of these variables and compare them to the real qualities of the recordings they listen to. Thus, in an analytic single-shot design, a researcher-made questionnaire was developed and was answered by 504 (229 male and 275 female) participants together with their teachers in 21 classrooms across the six levels of proficiency at the Iran Language Institute. The results, not normally distributed, were juxtaposed with Kendall's tau and Spearman's rho correlation coefficients to ensure maximum agreement between the statistical analyses. The results indicated a strong or moderate correlation between the audio tracks' characteristics with neither learners' perceptions nor teachers' perceptions. Teachers' and learners' perceptions showed a moderate correlation between the perceived rate of speech and a weak correlation between their perceptions of between-T-unit pauses.

The global spread of English and its role as a lingua franca has created a great demand for learning English worldwide. Up to the present time, this demand has been mostly met by major international publishers of English-speaking countries such as the United States and Britain. However, the promotion of Anglo-American cultural content and ideology through international coursebooks has long been criticized in the EFL settings in which they are used. The current study investigated the cultural appropriacy of these coursebooks for the Iranian context. The main instruments were four researcher-made questionnaires. The questionnaires were first piloted and then administered among 197 teachers and 186 students who were selected based on availability and willingness to cooperate. Next, a one-sample t-test was run on the data and the results showed that the coursebooks spread the hegemony of English. Also, it was found that the coursebooks promote a concept of gender equality which is in contrast with the Iranian concept that assumes equal rights for both sexes in primary rights and not in secondary rights. The findings also suggest that the international teaching materials do not promote nonIslamic western values. Suggestions for developing localized language teaching materials have been put forward.

This study compared the effects of teacher-provided written corrective feedback and manipulation of resource-directing dimensions of task cognitive-complexity along +/- Here and Now condition on the grammatical accuracy of Iranian EFL learners’ writing products. There were 45 participants in the study who were randomly assigned to three experimental groups. All the participants were first given a prompt for the pre-test of writing, and then each group received its own intervention (direct written corrective feedback, indirect written corrective feedback, and task manipulation) for four sessions during four weeks. Subsequently, all the groups took the pre-test prompt of writing for their post-test performance after which the data were collected for the statistical analyses and fed into SPSS. The findings of the study confirmed the significant effects of direct written corrective feedback on increasing the grammatical accuracy of learners’ writings. There were implications, then, based on the results, highlighting the role of meaningful context of task application in the classroom.</strong>

Processability Theory, a component of the cognitive approach to second language acquisition tries to enhance understanding of how the interlanguage knowledge systems can be restructured by second language learners (Pienemann, 1998, 2015). The present study intended to run a similar investigation into the syntactic development of Right-Brain and Left-Brain Dominant Iranian EFL learners based on Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998, 2015).185 Iranian university students took part in this study. They received a Demographic Questionnaire, the Hemisphere Dominance Inventory (DHI), a validated researcher-made grammar test designed based on the stages of Processability Theory. To analyze the data classical item analysis was used. Results pertained to the research questions revealed that the stages predicted by Processability Theory did not account for the Iranian Left and Right-Brain Dominant EFL learners in learning syntax. Results of this study indeed showed that the difficulty level of different grammatical structures presented by Pienneman in PT did not match the difficulty order obtained in this study by Left and Right-Brain Dominant EFL respondents.

Drawing on Walsh's (2012) idea that boosting learners' contribution and interaction can play a key role in their foreign language learning, this mixed-methods study tried to cast some light on the ways by which teachers, via their choice and use of language, create or block learners' contribution in direct interactions in the classroom. A total of 800-minute recordings of 10 teachers' talks and their learners' in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes were studied utilizing a Conversation Analysis methodology. The interaction patterns identified in the recordings suggest that teachers could manipulate their talk either to facilitate or obstruct learners' involvement by the inserted turns they take. The findings of the study indicate that the teachers need to minimize their interventions while the learners taking their turns, and instead pave the way for a more interactive discourse. In addition, a 'listening culture' in the classrooms should be encouraged in order to create opportunities for more classroom interactive talk. A number of implications for teachers and teacher trainers are also given.

Although a surfeit of studies have examined the students’ attitude towards foreign and / or second language both inside and outside Iran, it seems scanty studies have been devoted to evaluate Prospect-trained students’ attitude towards English. This quantitative study investigated the students’ attitudes towards English language learning among 80 junior high school students in Ahvaz, Iran. These students have been exposed to English through Prospect course-books (the newly designed course-books in Iranian Educational system) for three years. To this end the researchers adapted a Likert scale questionnaire some items of which have been taken from Attitude and Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) designed by Gardner. The questions comprised three parts each of which represented one aspect of students’ attitude towards English language (Cognitive, Behavioral, and Emotional aspects). The choices opted by the participants have been calculated using descriptive statistics (minimum score, maximum score, mean, and standard deviation).The results indicated that the participants enjoyed a positive attitude towards all three aspects with differing degrees. Additionally, participants’ demographic information was used to justify some parts of the findings. The findings can be inspiring for teachers and material designers to consider attitude aspects more than ever.

The present study examines the role of gender in reading comprehension of short stories taught through awareness-raising among Iranian EFL learners. In so doing, twelve male and eighteen female learners with lower intermediate English proficiency were selected as the research sample. Next, they were randomly divided into two fifteen-member groups (i.e., a control group and an experimental group). The control group followed the conventional methods and the experimental group was taught the same short stories using awareness-raising activities. Consequently, an independent sample t-test was run. The obtained results indicate the experimental group demonstrates a better performance than the control one. According to the means, the female learners in both groups outperformed the male ones.

A teacher's language awareness (TLA) is generally believed to exert a tremendous influence on language instruction. However, reviewing literature revealed that it has not received due attention in teacher training centers in Iran. Therefore, this paper reports on an investigation into the metalinguistic awareness of prospective teachers at Teacher Education Universities of Iran training to be junior and senior high school English teachers. The study focuses on the test performance of these prospective teachers as an indication of their explicit knowledge base and also the relationship between the metalinguistic knowledge and their error identification capability. To that end, a metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT) and a grammaticality judgment test (GJT) were administered to 207 student teachers to canvass the nature and extent of their repertoire of explicit knowledge about language and of grammatical terminologies as part of their TLA. The results revealed a moderate level of metalinguistic knowledge and a significant relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and error identification ability. Moreover, the findings of the study shed light on the prominence of metalinguistic knowledge as a means of improving teacher's linguistic proficiency, detected the lacunae in student teacher's knowledge about language and signaled the need for improvement in prospective teacher's metalinguistic knowledge.

Degree of aptness of the nominal metaphor X is a Y or the extent to which the metaphorical statement expresses its specific non-literal meaning and the nature of relationship between aptness and semantic features of topic (X) and vehicle (Y) is the subject that is addressed in this study. Conducting an experiment in which 35 undergraduate students judged degree of relevancy of 10 semantic features of topic and vehicle of nominal metaphors, the researchers of this study sought to find how aptness of a metaphor is related to various meaning aspects of topic and vehicle. The instrument was a test including 20 nominal metaphors, each one followed by 10 semantic features of topic and vehicle. The participants were required to judge the degree of relevancy of each feature on the basis of a Likert scale ranging from 0 (irrelevant) to 3 (completely relevant). The obtained results suggested that several aspects of meaning might simultaneously be in operation throughout metaphor comprehension. However, these aspects are not at the same level; that is, one meaning aspect plays the dominant role, while others play a secondary role. Taking Glucksberg‟s class-inclusion view of metaphor comprehension and Gentner‟s structure-mapping view and based on the results obtained in the experiment, this article presents a model according to which degree of interpretability and aptness of a nominal metaphor is determined by degree of relevancy of a specific meaning aspect of vehicle.

In this study two modes of reading (CAR and Print reading mode) were compared with regard to their effectiveness for L2 reading comprehension. A group of 120 English major students were divided into three classes: CAR, Print reading, and Control. Based on the English proficiency scores each class was divided into two groups (high and low levels of proficiency). Three classes were taught by the same teacher and covered the same materials in their weekly four-hour reading lesson over one semester. From the three classes only CAR and Print reading groups received reading strategies instruction. This study also investigated the effect of gender and the role of teacher in CAR class. The data came from English proficiency test, reading comprehension test (pre-test), questionnaire, reading comprehension test (posttest), observation, and students’ emails. The results indicated that strategy instruction had an impact on reading comprehension. In other words, CAR and Print reading mode evoked better reading comprehension than the control group and CAR resulted in better performance when compared to the Print reading mode. Interestingly, EFL students with a higher proficiency level showed a significantly higher level of reading comprehension of the text when compared with those students with a lower proficiency level. Regarding the gender the findings indicated that gender played no significant role in CAR class. Finally, based on the observation and students’ emails the researcher concluded that the nature of the EFL teacher’s role changed in CAR class when compared with the print reading and traditional classes.

In this study two modes ofreading (CAR and traditional print mode) were compared in regards to their effectiveness for L2 reading comprehension. A group of 120 English major students were divided into three classes: CAR, Traditional, and Control. Based on the English proficiency scores each class was divided into two groups (high and low levels of proficiency). Three classes were taught by the same teacher and covered the same materials in their weekly four-hour reading lesson over one semester. From the three classes only CAR and Traditional groups received reading strategies instruction. This study also investigated the effect of gender and role of the teacher in CAR class. The data came from English proficiency test, reading comprehension test (pre-test), questionnaire, reading comprehension test (posttest), observation, and student's emails. The results indicated that strategy instruction had an impact on reading comprehension. In other words, CAR and traditional mode evoked better reading comprehension than the control group and Car resulted in better performance when compared to the traditional mode. Interestingly, EFL students with a higher proficiency level showed a significantly higher level of reading comprehension of the text when compared with those students with a lower proficiency level. Regarding the gender the findings indicated that gender played no significant role in CAR class. Finally, based on the observation and students emails the researcher concluded that the nature of the EFL teacher's role changed in CAR class when compared with the traditional class.