Iranian Journal of Applied Linguistics
Volume:21 Issue: 1, Mar 2018

In view of the fact that pre-service teachers’ critical reflection through evaluating teaching activity of their peers is an important part of practicum activity, the current study aimed to analyze the recall and reflection journals written by pre-service teachers to identify and evaluate the discoursal features of their journals. To this end, a total of 272 recall and reflection journals written by pre-service teachers were analyzed on the basis of Hiebert, Morris, Berk, and Jansen's (2007) framework for analyzing their teaching practices. The findings indicated that the discourse of recall and reflection journals written by pre-service teachers is affective and descriptive rather than critical. Pre-service teachers predominantly ignore learners in writing their reflection journals. The findings of this study pointed to the need for explicit instruction of the discoursal features of reflection in teacher education classes. Therefore, teacher educators should help pre-service teachers to develop effective reflective discourse in practicum courses.

The competitive academic atmosphere of the higher education worldwide along with the current trend in producing research-oriented knowledge by universities has made research publication the first priority for doctoral students. In this study, we addressed the conceptions of purpose, process, and product of publishing research articles among Iranian doctoral students of applied linguistics. To this end, thirty students were interviewed and the data were analyzed using the grounded theory approach. The findings demonstrated that doctoral students publish papers to prepare a competition-winning resume, significantly contribute to the ELT community, turn into life-long learners and problem-solvers, and fulfill their course requirements. Furthermore, with regard to the research publication process, they highlighted the role of mixed-methods in spotting real problems in context and getting their papers published in prestigious journals. Additionally, the students believed that publishing in international journals grants them the opportunity to gain international recognition, attract an international audience, receive expert quality feedback from professional reviewers, publish in journals specific in focus and scope, and avoid publishing in cheap predatory journals. Finally, the findings suggest that the doctoral students need more systematic coaching to successfully conduct and publish their research

Despite the abundance of research on ELT teachers, little is known about teacher language awareness (TLA) with focus on its impact on pedagogical practice in the EFL context. To fill this gap, an in-depth study was conducted to examine the procedural dimension of TLA among eight EFL teachers with different teaching experiences (novice versus experienced) related to teaching grammar at Iranian language institutes. Data were collected through non-participant classroom observations and stimulated recall interviews (of at least 7 lessons per teacher) from eight EFL teachers at three private language institutes in Iran. The findings revealed the experienced teachers’ application of TLA in their pedagogical practices in comparison to their novice counterparts. Most importantly, the application of TLA in classrooms was affected by factors, such as context, time constraints, learners’ emotions, and previous experiences as learners and teachers. This study may expand the current understanding of TLA and its impact on grammar teaching and have implications for language teacher education and development.

This study investigated the quality of metacognition at its inter-individual level, i.e., socially-shared metacognition, across two collaborative writing tasks of different difficulty levels among a cohort of Iranian EFL learners. Moreover, it examined the correlation between the individual and the social modes of metacognition in writing. The analysis of think-aloud protocols of a number of pre-intermediate and advanced EFL learners revealed instances of episodes in which peers used metacognitive activities at pair level. Besides, comparing think-aloud protocols of tasks indicated more frequent and longer use of socially-shared metacognitive episodes in more difficult writing tasks. The study also found high correlation between the social mode of metacognition in L2 writing and learners’ individual metacognition. The pedagogical implications include the provision of learning opportunities in which learners are challenged to exploit metacognitive strategies, such as planning, monitoring, and self-evaluating.

This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read sentences containing ambiguous relative clauses in their L1 and L2. The results showed that L2ers adopt the same strategy as that used by English native speakers in both of their languages, indicating a target-language like parsing pattern in their L2 and an attrition of L1 parsing routine. Additionally, their attachment preferences were not modulated by WMC in L2. This result highlights the “skill-through-experience” position adopted by researchers who question the role of WMC in L2 syntactic parsing. However, high-capacity L2ers' preferences in L1 had attrited (becoming English-like), and low-capacity ones had no preference. This modulation, too, can bear out the above position owing to the observation that L2ers failed to differentiate between their L1 and L2, and particularly that their differing WMCs did not contribute to native-like performance in their L1.

This study investigated the cross-disciplinary variations in the generic structure of Introduction sections of 52 Applied Linguistics and 52 Chemistry research articles drawing upon Swales’ (2004) framework, taking into account the new insights proposed by Bhatia (2004), Shehzad (2008), and Lim (2012, 2014). To this end, in addition to collecting quantitative data and conducting frequency and Chi-square analyses, a number of semi-structured interviews were conducted with some Chemistry scholars and Applied Linguistics (ALs) experts for triangulation purposes. The results of the quantitative data analysis indicated that the two disciplines showed significant variations in the frequency with which they used some steps and sub-steps to realize the moves. The results of the qualitative content analysis of the interviews also helped understand why authors in each discipline might use a specific move/step more than the others and why a move/step was frequently used by the authors in one discipline, but completely absent in another. Finally, based on the results, some implications were presented to postgraduate students and novice researchers in Chemistry and Applied Linguistics to help them write effective research articles in their field. The findings of the study could also provide some practical implications for the EAP teachers to help their students become better writers. In addition, some suggestions were presented to genre analysts to help them obtain more dependable results when analyzing the generic structure of various sections of research articles.

For the first time, this study combined models and principles of authentic assessment from two parallel fields of applied linguistics as well as general education to investigate the authenticity of the TOEFL iBT speaking module. The study consisted of two major parts, namely task analysis and task survey. Utilizing Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) definition of authenticity, the task analysis examined the degree of the correspondence between the characteristics of the speaking module tasks in the TOEFL iBT test and those of target language use (TLU) tasks. In the task survey, a Likert Scale questionnaire of authenticity was developed by the researcher based on Herrington and Herrington’s (1998; 2006) four criteria of authentic assessment. The questionnaire was sent through email to 120 subjects who had already taken the test in order to elicit their attitudes towards the degree of the authenticity of the speaking section tasks. The results of the task analysis revealed a limited correspondence between the characteristics of the test tasks and those of the TLU tasks. However, the results of the task survey indicated that except for one factor (indicators), most of the test takers had a positive view toward the authenticity of the speaking module tasks in terms of the three other factors (context, student factor, task factor)