Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Volume:8 Issue: 4, Autumn 2021

The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate English teaching and its impact on students from the engineering faculty in bilingual CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) application. It was conducted in a public Higher Education Institution (HEI) in Kosovo, at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Computing in which data were collected from 180 students. There were 56 students involved in the experimental group, whereas the control groups comprised of 68 students following conventional Technical Drawing with Descriptive Geometry class in native /Albanian language, and 56 students followed conventional English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes as the second control group. Two teachers, one in engineering field, and one ESP teacher were involved in this study throughout the semester, i.e. fifteen weeks. The study incorporated parallel teaching, the same content in two different languages in the experimental group: Albanian/native language by the engineering practitioner, and English by the ESP teacher. The results of three test terms for all the three groups were analyzed by applying SPSS statistical package, and revealed that the experimental group achieved higher success in learning. The study concluded that if there is no teacher available to offer CLIL to future engineers, then teaching engineering courses with the engineering practitioner can be conducted in parallel fashion with the ESP teacher, who can contribute to positive effect in terms of certain engineering subcategories and English professional vocabulary. As such, this study may be considered as a potential example in offering new professional engineering courses which include bilingual paired teaching, of English and a professional course.

The flipped teaching has nowadays become a new movement in teaching and is getting pervasive in the educational system. The goal of this study was to explore if there was any significant difference between L2 learners’ oral complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in flipped and traditional classes. To do so, both traditional and filpped classes were resorted to in order to see which class matched the students’ needs. Moreover, this study was done to find out if it had any significant effect on the learners’ motivation, self-efficacy, engagement, self-confidence, and autonomy. Via an OPT, 40 homogenous, lower-intermediate students were chosen from a language school in Isfahan, Iran. Then, they were randomly assigned to experimental 1 and 1 control groups. Initially, all the students attended an interview session and their responses were audio-recorded; then, 2 teachers scored their responses to make certain the interviews enjoyed reliability. Afterward, the students took a pretest with 2 questions relevant to their actual life and the grammar they would acquire in the course of the treatment. After taking 4 treatment sessions, the students received a posttest to see how much they had progressed during the 4 treatment sessions. Also, a questionnaire was adapted from another study to figure out the students’ satisfaction regarding this type of teaching. The results revealed that the flipped class increased the students’ motivation, self-efficacy, engagement, self-confidence, and autonomy. However, no significant difference was seen between the learners in the flipped class and those in the traditional class, as far as oral CAF was concerend. Based on the students’ answers to the questionnaire, most were satisfied with the flipped model. To conclude, materials developers and syllabus designers should modify instructional materials and books taught in language schools and add some parts to them in line witth technology to satisfy digital natives.

The prevalence of Sociocultural Theory (SCT) as a major theory in SLA has spurred a considerable number of studies to investigate the various aspect of L2 acquisition through the lens of this theoretical framework. The present study aimed at investigating the impact of Scaffolded Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance in terms of fluency, accuracy, grammatical complexity, and lexical complexity. Additionally, the study sought to inquire about the Iranian EFL learners’ attitudes toward Scaffolded WCF through a series of post-interviews and a questionnaire. For this purpose, 25 students who had enrolled in a university-level writing course were conveniently sampled after a homogeneity test for the study. The pedagogical treatment the participants received throughout the study was Scaffolded WCF (i.e. a ZPD-based teacher/peer corrective feedback on their writing performance). The data obtained from the pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest were analyzed using a series of ANOVA and Friedman’s tests. The findings indicated that Scaffolded WCF statistically significantly contributed to the participants’ writing performance regarding grammatical complexity, fluency, accuracy, and lexical complexity. The results obtained from the attitude questionnaire and the post-interviews also revealed that the participants held a positive attitude toward the adopted approach. The findings provide promising implications for the adoption of this approach in large classes typical of Iranian university-level writing courses.

As a model for a new pedagogical approach, Flipped Instruction has been recently exploited as a worldwide modern technique where the actual classroom activities following assignments in conventional classroom are reversed in a logical sequence which often seems to integrate or supplement with instructional materials in video or PowerPoint forms. The current research strives to illuminate the effect of flipped classroom (FC) instruction on the achievements in macro/micro EFL writing subskills of Iranian upper intermediate students. For the purpose of this experiment, 78 male and female upper intermediate EFL learners aged 25-38 were selected from three language schools in Ahvaz based on their scores on the Quick Oxford Placement Test, and then equally divided into control and experimental groups. An IELTS argumentative essay was used as the main tool of the study which was considered both as a pretest and a posttest. Used as a pretest, the IETLS argumentative essay was meant to support the fact that both groups were of similar status with regard to the writing proficiency. Besides, the posttest was used to assess any distinguishing features between the two groups due to the treatment. The control group experienced the conventional classroom instruction whilst the experimental group received FC instruction. To address the research questions, a descriptive statistics and two one-way MANOVAs were implemented. The results indicated that the students treated with FC scored statistically higher on the macro-subskills and micro-subskills than the students experienced conventional instruction. The statistical analysis of the quantitative data revealed that FC was an efficient means of developing writing subskills for the Iranian EFL learners. Moreover, results indicated a certain amount of pedagogical implications for teachers, learners, curriculum designers, and administrators.

The use of paired speaking tasks for the assessment of interactional competence has recently attracted the attention of many scholars in language learning research. The present study aimed at investigating whether task type has any effect on promoting language learners’ interactional competence measured by means of multi-factor qualitative coding of paired speaking tasks. The performances of 92 dyads of conveniently-selected intermediate Iranian EFL learners on four paired speaking tasks were assessed using a rubric developed based on recent models for the scoring of interactional competence. To reveal the factors contributing to interactional competence, confirmatory factor analysis was run rendering the four-factor rubric developed in the present study as a valid measure of interactional competence through paired speaking tasks. In addition, to check the effect of different task types on interactional competence, the researchers calculated ANOVA estimates. Mean difference statistics computed indicated that some significant effect with large effect size existed for task type. Post-hoc comparisons carried out made it clear that from among the four tasks (i.e., Spot-the-difference, Story-completion, Decision-making, and Free-discussion) only the Story-completion task was the source of variability in the scores of interactional competence. The findings are of significance in that they point to the centrality of task type in assessing speaking through paired tasks. The study has certain theoretical and practical implications for foreign language teaching/testing researchers and practitioners.

Neoliberal changes in pedagogy focus on marketization of teaching and learning processes through different innovative interdisciplinary strategies to evoke the collective appeal (Ross, 2007). The concurrent emergence of positive psychology as both exploration of interdisciplinary positive emotional experience and as diagnostically neoliberalistic query (Freeman, 2020) and the complicated entanglement of neoliberalism and emotions (Pilkington, 2016) can imply that the integration of positive psychology into the educational context might be correspondent with a sort of neoliberalistic framing of pedagogy. This issue entails an exclusive scrutiny on pedagogical contexts, where such boundaries often coalesced into totally optimistic streams. Accordingly, this qualitative study aimed at exploring EFL teachers' different strategies in line with the tenets of positive psychology while, simultaneously, complying with the premises of neoliberalistic streams. To this end, postulating its design on Reflexive Grounded Theory, this research collected the data via the qualitative procedures such as questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, field notes, and content analyses. Totally 116 participants, i.e., 52 males and 64 females, purposively screened for homogeneity concerns via Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQ), were interviewed afterwards. Besides, diverse online/offline materials and sources pertinent to the objective were gathered for the analysis through the respective procedures of codification, memoing, categorization, thematization, and theoretical sampling. The qualitative analyses of categorization and thematization yielded five major themes as the final results:legitimation, collective empowerment, logical positivism, wisdom of negotiation, and identification approach, delineating those eudaimonic strategies which can trigger a sort of positive psycho-pedagogy susceptible to neoliberalistic intents. Finally, this study implied raising the consciousness of teachers in the EFL context with regard to the subtle interrelationships between positive psychology and neoliberalistic tenets in accordance to pedagogy.

This study investigated the effects of form-focused and meaning-focused tasks with different involvement load indices on EFL learners' recognition of L2 idioms. To this end, a sample of 180 EFL learners (both male and female) in two language institutes was selected and randomly assigned into six groups. Form-focused tasks with involvement load 2 (Multiple-choice), 3 (Sentence-completion), 4 (Sentence-making) were used for three experimental groups, while meaning-focused tasks with involvement load 2 (Summary-writing), 3 (Writing with glossary), and 4 (Writing without glossary) were utilized for the other three groups. After the treatment, a 30-item test in multiple-choice format was administered to assess the participants' recognition of idioms. One two-way ANOVA and a series of independent-samples t-tests were run to process the collected data. The results indicated that the tasks with higher levels of involvement load were more effective on recognition of idioms. The results also showed that form-focused tasks were more efficient than meaning-focused tasks. Moreover, at involvement load of two, meaning-focused tasks were more beneficial than form-focused tasks, while form-focused tasks were more effective at higher involvement loads of three and four. The results of this study can have theoretical and pedagogical implications for language teachers, curriculum designers, and researchers.

Textbook is an essential element of teaching and learning materials. After the teacher, textbooks are the most important factor in learning. Since textbooks act as an important material in teaching and learning, they need to be evaluated regularly. In the light of the foregoing, this study aimed to evaluate “Active Skills for Reading” using a researcher-made checklist and a structured interview. This book was being taught in six classes of Chabahar Maritime University as a general English coursebook. The goal of this study was to determine the suitability of the book as a general English course from the students’ and teachers’ perspectives. To this end, 150 students and 4 teachers were selected, and data were collected during two semesters in 2020. The quantitative data of the checklist were analyzed by calculating descriptive statistics using SPSS version 26, and qualitative data was analyzed through deductive content analysis. It was shown that the teachers and students believed that the appearance of the book is attractive, the content of the book is up-to-date and practical, and the goals are well defined. It was also revealed that although the textbook had some shortcomings such as lack of enough grammar sections in each unit, teachers felt the book was still appropriate for general English courses, especially for developing the reading skills. Generally, it was indicated that the textbook had met students’ needs for a general English course. The study ends with suggestions for general English teachers and materials designers.