نشریه پژوهش های زبانشناختی در زبان های خارجی
سال دهم شماره 1 (بهار 1399)

The aim of this study was investigating the relationship between cultural identity and language achievement, the relationship between cultural identity and multiple intelligences, and the relationship between multiple intelligences and language achievement of Iranian EFL learners. This study also sought to find which types of EFL learners’ intelligence can predict their cultural identity and language achievement. Initially, to select a homogeneous sample, language learners took TOEFL and 180 learners were selected. Afterwards, the cultural identity and multiple intelligences questionnaires were applied. The results of statistical analyses revealed that there was a moderate and significant relationship between cultural identity and language achievement, a statistically positive and significant relationship between cultural identity and multiple intelligences, and a statistically positive and significant relationship between multiple intelligences and language achievement. The results also indicated that EFL learners’ cultural identity can be predicted by their interpersonal intelligence and their language achievement can be predicted by their linguistic intelligence. Being aware of such results, English teachers can equip themselves with effective techniques to handle possible challenges.

The purpose of the study is to determine a contrast between prefix verbs of contemporary Persian and German languages. In Persian, the prefix verb is derived from a simple verb and a prefix, and the meaning of the prefix verb may be changed to simple verbs, by adding the derived prefix. In German, the prefix verb is derived from a simple verb, noun or adjective, and a prefix. The meaning of the derived verb or its syntactic valence may change, when the prefix is added to a base word. There are different patterns of word-formation meaning of Persian and German verbal prefixes. In addition, there are similarities between the two languages in relation to prefix verb systems, but there are obvious differences between them. Of course, the components of convergence and divergence of prefix verbs in both languages are relatively balanced. Although the data and initial research findings of the study are adapted from Persian and German references on the issue, the secondary findings are derived from the author’s research.

The present study aims at investigating the presence of Differential Item Functioning (DIF) in terms of gender in a high stakes language proficiency test, the National University Entrance Exam for Foreign Languages (NUEEFL). The participants (N = 5000) of this study have been selected randomly from a pool of examinees who had taken the NUEEFL as a university entrance requirement for English language studies (English literature, Teaching, and Translation). The results revealed that among 95 items, 40 items exhibit DIF between male and female. Our investigation revealed that the test is not unidimensional and a correct answer requires other knowledge, ability, and skill than the ones that the items aim to measure. It is concluded that the NUEEFL test’s scores are not free of construct-irrelevant variance and the overall fairness of the test is under question. In addition, the current research provides several important implications for test designers, stake-holders, administrators, as well as teachers and students.

Writing may be regarded as the most complicated competence in language teaching. Acqisition-Methods of this competence, language learners' being unaware of such modern strategies as "free writing" and "creative writing" in the area of language teaching, the non-application of such modern methods on the part of university instructors etc. led to the shortcoming with writing competence, more specifically, by institutions for translator-training. Drawing on moderate Constructivism and process-oriented writing, the authors of the present paper have tried to present a micromodel on how to familiarize the students with writing processes in the context of free/creative writing. The outcome of such a familiarity will be dynamizing courses related to teaching writing, resolving the students' fears from how to start writing and creating texts which are well-organized in terms of "propositions" and "phrase structures". On the ground of moderate Constructivism, the present exploration aims to present an essential base theme for including free-writing in the current undergraduate German Translation program.

Although many researchers have addressed demotivation, few studies have investigated English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ demotivation-reducing strategies. To bridge this gap, the present study sought to explore EFL learners’ perceptions of the sources of demotivation and their strategies to deal with it. Participants were 30 Iranian EFL learners at different levels of proficiency and from different language institutes, selected based on convenience sampling. This research was carried out through a qualitative method using interviews. The data were collected via two semi-structured interviews concerning learners’ perceptions of sources of demotivation and the strategies they used to deal with it. To analyze the data, the researcher used content analysis, the results of which indicated that learners specified five sources of demotivation including method of instruction, teacher’s personality, peer’s characteristics, anxiety, and classroom physical conditions. The learners mentioned studying English at a particular time of day, studying with students with better English knowledge, finding a friendly teacher, asking the teacher to tell jokes in English, and asking for exciting tasks and games in classrooms as demotivation-reducing strategies. Teachers are encouraged to take the sources of demotivation into account in order to help learners become less demotivated, and cooperate with learners in using demotivation-reducing strategies.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the quality and expected competencies of the undergraduate Russian language curriculum from the stakeholders' perspective. The research method is descriptive-survey. The statistical population of the study consisted of faculty members, undergraduate students and managers (graduates) in Russian language. The available sampling method was 12 faculty members, 11 managers and 106 people Students are selected as statistical samples. To collect information, three researcher-made questionnaires were used by professors, students and managers. Content validity was used to measure the validity of the questionnaire. Using Cronbach's alpha coefficient, the reliability of the professors' questionnaire was 76.0, the students were 0.89 and the managers were 0.87. Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (T-test, independent t-test, Friedman test and ANOVA) were used to analyze the data. The results showed that other elements of the curriculum were relatively desirable in terms of students other than the content elements and activities.

Dynamic assessment is a new approach toward testing which is deeply rooted in a variety of theories and therefore attracted researchers in recent decades. However, most of the researches conducted in the field have been in experimental settings and few of them, if at all, have studied its applications in real educational setting.Thus,aimed at diagnosing and removing learning difficulties of Iranian high school students in productive skills of English, the current research was an attempt to present and explain a local model of dynamic assessment and then compare its results against a standard model. The findings showed that the local model is not only able to prognosticate language problems but also to propose a local inventory of mediation for removing them. Besides, the results of a post test only control group design through analysis of variance showed that the participants which used the model outperformed both control group and the one in standard dynamic assessment approach. These findings have implications for teachers, syllabus designers and educational decision makers.

The present study targeted at comparing the English self-efficacy level of Iranian EFL high school students majoring in mathematics, sciences, and humanities as well as examining the relationship between their self-efficacy and their English achievement. Analyzing the self-efficacy features and sources in each major was another aim of the research. The sample comprised 15 English teachers and 150 high school students from the three majors. The required data were collected via an English self-efficacy questionnaire, the participants’ scores on their final English achievement test, and the interviews conducted with the teachers and the students. The results indicated that the humanities were significantly different from the two other majors both in their self-efficacy beliefs and their English achievement. In addition, a significant relationship was found between the two variables only in math and humanities groups, but not in sciences one. Different sources and features of self-beliefs emerged as a result of the qualitative analyses of the interviews. The findings can be illuminating for teachers as well as curriculum designers, who can contribute to the development of positive self-beliefs in EFL learners by implementing helpful strategies and plans in designing the content of the course books and also in the methodology used in classes.

During the past few decades, documentation of test takers’ proficiency level has been accomplished through large-scale assessments most importantly Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment (CDA) in order to provide skills mastery profile of test takers in fine-grained detailed information. Accordingly, the present study attempts to scrutinize reading comprehension test items of a high-stakes test under CDA. To delve into this issue, DAF was used to detect the probability of mastery of attributes among test takers, and DIF was applied to show item performance among different candidates in terms of gender. Thus, the participants of this study were 3220 females and males attending PhD national admission test in Iran. Through adopting sequential exploratory mixed method design, GDINA model was run by the application of R-studio package. Results of the study revealed that test items suspected DIF against female. In the end, the findings of this study were discussed in light of their implications for language testing community to perceive potential social harm which derived from biased test items in PhD national admission exams.

Metaphors are central to academic writing and scientific theorizing. To create awareness about the features of metaphor in English academic writing, this study investigated frequency, types, and key categories of metaphor in published articles of non-native speakers and compared them with those of native speakers. The data have been collected from 50 research articles with the topic of cancer and gene silencing. For description of frequency and types of metaphors, a sample section of articles was coded with manual metaphor identification procedure and for identification of key categories, a semi-automatic procedure including of software and manual analysis was conducted. Findings suggested that similar to the writing of native speakers, metaphor was a highly pervasive phenomenon in 2nd language academic writing of non-native speakers and indirect metaphor in comparison to direct and implicit metaphors led the rank type of metaphoricity. The results, however featured more number of key metaphor categories with higher variety of metaphorical words in the written discourse of non-native speakers.

Task features and learner variables are believed to play an important role in language outcome. Thus, the present factorial between-subject study set out to determine the main and interaction effects of task manipulation in terms of intentional reasoning and planning time and learner variables with regard to language learning aptitude on Iranian intermediate learners’ written performance in letter writing tasks. Lexical and syntactical complexity and also accuracy were the linguistic elements measured as dependent variables in the writers’ performance. First, the participants were randomly divided into three experimental groups; each group included 70, 76, 80 participants respectively. Then, they were assigned to planning and no-planning groups within each experimental group, and there were the same number of high-aptitude and low-aptitude participants in each planning group. Three letter writing tasks with different degrees of reasoning demands (low, medium, high) were designed, and each experimental group received one of these tasks. The ones in planning groups were also given 10 extra minutes for planning before performing the tasks.

The current research is a corpus-based lexical study which aims to discover the presence of Coxhead’s (2000) academic word list (AWL) in a corpus of language teaching textbooks. The AWL, as the most well-known list of academic vocabulary available, is used to increase the knowledge of English vocabulary in students studying different disciplines across universities of the world. In the present study, after a series of steps, we developed a corpus of more than 11 million words, composed of language teaching textbooks. The corpus consists of 13 areas, which constitute almost equal number of words in the corpus. Then, using the Range software, the AWL coverage was analyzed across the corpus. The results reveal that the AWL items cover 11.13% of the entire corpus. This is higher than the figure obtained in similar studies conducted on many other disciplines. We also analyzed the AWL’s coverage in each sub-corpus, and found a significant difference among the coverage figures.

This study investigated the effectiveness of information and communication technology (ICT) on the Learning engagement and Academic Performance in the conversation of the Arabic Language Curriculum. This study was Quasi and pretest-posttest with control group. The population included all undergraduate students of Arabic language and literature of Kharazmi University in first semester of 2018-19 academic year, Who selected conversation of the Arabic Language (27 individules) and this students (14 persons for experimental group and 13 persons for control group) were selected by random sampling method. The experimental group received ICT intervention during 0ne semester and control group trained using traditional teaching method. Data was collected using a questionnaire of learning engagement source of the questionaire scores point of students was used as the indicator of academic performance. The covariance analysis showed that ICT has increased Learning engagement and Academic Performance. According to the results using ICT in Arabic language training could be used as an effective intervention to increase Learning engagement and promote Academic Performance.

In the present study, possible factors affecting ‘Grouping’ within English language classes were collected drawing on some English language teachers affiliated in Iran and Japan (no.19) and Iranian learners (no.83). The teachers' viewpoints indicated seven factors, including (1) linguistic level (45.16%), (2) age (3.22%), (3) student needs (3.22%), (4) psychological factors (22.58%), (5) number of students in the classroom 12.90%), (6) the number of classroom sessions (3.22%), and (7) random factors (9.67), which showed the tendency of Iranian teachers to focus on product-oriented while Japanese teachers were more preoccupied with process-oriented methodologies in grouping. Students’ viwes involved some six factors including (1) the use of strong partners in each group (45.09%), (2) using homogeneous groups (29.41%), (3) the ability to act with the teacher (knowledge and experience) (3.92%), friendship (15.68%), and 5) friendship with linguistic level (5.88%) which could show their tendency towards improving their linguistic level and not necessarily their social skills through group work. Consequently, based on the evidence obtained in this study, it is recommended that before implementing any new approach – here, teamwork in communicative-style teaching - we should first consider the value system of teaching and learning in the region rather than implementing the related materials. After examining the beliefs of teachers and their students and in particular teachers, then we can align teachers' attitudes with new changes.