Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Volume:6 Issue: 4, Autumn 2019

The study investigated a second language teacher educator and teacher learners’ awareness of classroom interactional competence (CIC) to communicate pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) on a teacher education course in Iran. Therefore, the teacher educator’s classroom discourse was scrutinized using classroom observation triangulated with an interview data with the educator to characterize the interactional features of his talk-in-interaction with respective discourse modes. The resulting 43 interactures represented four interacture types which mediated Effective Eliciting, Shaping Learner Contribution, Facilitating Interactional Space Focused on the Learner, and Facilitating Interactional Space Focused on the Teacher. The corresponding mode analysis revealed frequent mode integrity incorporating classroom context mode with a pivotal role in all except Facilitating Interactional Space Focused on the Teacher interactures. Later, the taxonomy was incorporated into CIC TLA questionnaires. 32 teaching candidates, and the educator completed respective ethnographically-developed questionnaire versions indicating their awareness of the teacher educator’s choice of CIC interactures. Besides, the interview data concerning the TLA deliberation was triangulated with a Spearman rho correlation results of the perceived CIC strategy frequencies. Consequently, the confirmatory evidence for the significant degree of correspondence (rho = 0.67, n = 33,  < 0.01) between the educator and teacher learners’ awareness revealed the student teachers’ heightened declarative TLA. The findings urge language teacher educators to tune interactures in type, mode, and intensity to the professional content and the TLA they negotiate with teacher learners thereby.

Describing the trends and developments in language teaching practice and research has been of considerable interest to the practitioners and researchers involved in the field. This study sought to provide a rough outline of Iranian language teaching research by analyzing a large collection of titles from language teaching research reports of Iranian researchers published in English-language academic journals. The 2612 titles came from articles published from winter 2006 to summer 2016. The main source of the articles was 21 journals published in Iran or international journals which featured a considerable number of Iranian authors. In several exploratory rounds of content analysis, the article titles in five language teaching journals were examined to identify their topic areas. Then, by collapsing some of the topics, a final list of topics was prepared. Then, the titles in all journals were examined and the topic area or areas which each covered were tallied. To triangulate this subjective analysis and furnish another frequency report for the topic areas of research in language teaching, the titles were submitted to the text-analyzing software AntConc 3.3.5w (Anthony, 2012), which put out two lists: a frequency-tagged list of two- to seven-word chunks, and a frequency-tagged list of key conceptual words. The subjective content analysis and the machine-based analysis together demonstrated how different sub-fields of language teaching were emphasized and received attention in Iran. The findings help researchers become more informed about the Iranian context and set better priorities. The limitations and weaknesses of the study and some caveats are also discussed.

Motivation is a crucial factor in learning a foreign language. However, some learners may become demotivated during their experience of learning a language. Demotivation among learners has rarely been addressed from the teachers’ perspectives. The purpose of the current study was to investigate novice and experienced English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ perceptions of sources of demotivation among language learners. Initially, through convenience sampling, different institute teachers were contacted. Thirty novice (n = 15) and experienced (n = 15) English language teachers volunteered to participate in face-to-face semi-structured interviews to investigate their beliefs about sources of learners’ demotivation. Content analysis was run to extract relevant demotivation sources, and frequency analysis was used to summarize and report the data. The findings revealed that both novice and experienced teachers had largely similar perceptions of sources of demotivation. Both groups indicated that method of instruction, teacher personality, classmates’ behaviors, anxiety, and physical environment of the language institutes have the potential to negatively affect motivation in learners. However, they differed in the degree of importance they attached to the factors falling within each of these demotivation sources. The findings suggest that teachers need to develop an awareness of the sources of demotivation among learners and the strategies to cope with them.

One of the relatively neglected aspects of today's English language pedagogy is the differences between written and spoken grammar. Many language learners often find that what they have learnt in their grammar classes is either irrelevant or (sometimes) even contrary to what they need to use the target language for oral communicative purposes. To fill part of the existing gap in the literature on this issue, This study was carried out. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of competitive and cooperative explicit and task-based instruction of spoken grammar features of heads, tails and ellipses on Iranian EFL learners’ awareness of these features. To this end, 90 female pre-intermediate EFL learners of Ghana Language Institute in Tehran were selected through convenience sampling. The participants were randomly assigned to four experimental groups, receiving explicit and task-based instructions in competitive and cooperative contexts. Prior to the treatment, a pretest was given to check the participants’ level of awareness of the spoken grammar features. After a 10-session instruction, a posttest was administered. The collected data were processed using the two-way ANCOVA procedure. The results indicated that competitive and cooperative contexts were equally effective on raising learners’ awareness of spoken grammar features. Moreover, there was a statistically significant interaction effect between type of instruction and the context of instruction. These findings may have important theoretical and pedagogical implications.

Classroom is an environment where teachers and students as inhabitants of different worlds are supposed to experience some sort of daily give-and-take. Such inherent discrepancies between these two groups of interlocutors might be among the untouched areas of research. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the cords and discords between first-year student teachers’ and their educators’ perceptions of educator interpersonal behavior. The sample of the study included 4 EFL educators and 102 student teachers majoring in TEFL at two branches of Iranian Teacher Education University. Data were collected with the Australian version of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) that was validated and modified into four formats for measuring the participants’ perceptions of the actual educators and an ideal educator interpersonal behavior. The results indicated that although both groups perceived an ideal educator interpersonal behavior in the same way, the educators generally overestimated their cooperative behaviors (Leadership and Students responsibility) but underestimate their oppositional ones (Uncertain) in comparison to what their student teachers perceived. The results also indicated that male and female student teachers perceived some cooperative behaviors in the educators from the opposite gender more significantly. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that there are some perceptual mismatches between student teachers’ and educators’ perceptions of actual educator interpersonal behavior. Therefore, the findings imply that educators should take some measures to locate these perceptual mismatches and eliminate them gradually.

The present study reports the results of a dissertation aimed at consolidating assessment and instruction of L2 pragmatics comprehension by drawing on an interventionist computerized dynamic assessment (C-DA) through which the test was embodied by providing graduated hints (from the most explicit to the most implicit) which were standardized for all test takers. To do so, a web-based software, called a Computerized Dynamic Assessment of Speech Acts, Routines, and Implicatures (CDASRI), accessible at http://da-pragmatics.com, was developed. Then, 137 upper-intermediate or advanced high school and university students ranging in age from 16 to 36 from two provinces of Khorasan Razavi and Golestan, Iran, were selected based on convenience sampling, who voluntarily took part in the study. Based on how many hints or mediations were used by each test-taker, the CDASRI provided three scores: actual score (traditional score), mediated score, and learning potential score (LPS). The results of the study indicated that the test could improve test takers’ pragmatic comprehension competence. Moreover, the significant difference between the mediated (using hints) and actual (without hints) scores of learners accounted for the fact that because of test-takers’ different Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) levels, their level of responsiveness to mediation was significantly different from one another. Hence, it can be concluded that traditional non-dynamic test loses sight of a big part of learners’ abilities through neglecting learners’ potentialities and putting emphasis only on their preliminary performance. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications for language teachers and instructors who seek an effective perspective for their assessment and instruction.