Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice
Volume:9 Issue: 18, Spring - Summer 2016

Task-based language Teaching (TBLT) has occupied the pertinent literature for some long years. However, the role of specific task type in developing specific skill type seems to be amongst the intact issues in the literature. To shed more light on this issue, the present study was conducted to compare the effect of jigsaw and decision-making tasks on improving listening and speaking abilities of EFL learners. To this end, 75 female Iranian EFL learners, assumed homogenous based on their performance on the Nelson Test, were employed as the participants. Their listening and speaking abilities were also measured both before and after the treatment based on the listening and speaking subtests of the PET. Then, they were assigned to two groups of experimental A and B. The experimental group A received decision-making-based listening and speaking instruction for 12 sessions of 45 minutes, and the experimental group B received jigsaw-based listening and speaking instruction. In order to analyze the data, descriptive statistics and multiple inferential statistical analyses were conducted. The results revealed that those participants who experienced jigsaw listening and speaking tasks outperformed those who received decision-making-based instruction. The findings, then, bear certain theoretical implications for stakeholders.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of reading instructional approach called MCSR- Modified Collaborative Strategic Reading on reducing intermediate EFL learner's reading anxiety. Based on a pretest-posttest design, MCSR was implemented with 64 EFL learners at intermediate level. They received EFL reading instruction according to MCSR over two and a half months. A questionnaire called English as a Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Inventory EFLRAI was group-administered atthepretest and the posttest. Quantitative results indicated that participating students demonstrated significant gains in reducing reading anxiety. This study highlighted our understanding by considering the effectiveness of MCSR program and also it elaborated the effects of using strategies like MCSR in overcoming the big problem of reading anxiety among EFL learners as non-native students. And teachers changed the focus of attention from using traditional methods for teaching the essential skill of reading to modern programs like MCSR in order to remove their students' anxiety and stress in reading.

This study is a quantitative and functional corpus-based study of self-mention in soft science Master theses. One important purpose of this study was to find out the functions of self-mention in soft science Master theses. For this purpose, 20 soft science Master theses in four disciplines (Applied linguistics, Psychology, Geography, and Political sciences), were randomly selected out of the library of four American universities. Five Master theses were selected in each discipline, in a period of seven years (2007-2014). The present study analyzed only  the discussion section of these Master theses. The quantitative analysis of the corpus showed that the frequency of the various forms of self-mention in soft science Master theses is quite different. Among the analyzed resources, “I” with the frequency of 49 was the most frequently used first person pronouns. Based on Tang and John’s (1999) taxonomy of the discourse roles of personal pronouns, self- mentions were functionally analyzed. The findings of the functional dimension of the present study showed that the most frequent discoursal role of self-mentions in the corpus was the recounter of research process, whereas the least frequent role was originator.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of meta-cognitive strategy (planning, self-monitoring) awareness raising instruction on reading comprehension of Iranian ESP learners. Participants of three groups each comprising of 21 Iranian male students studying “Civil Engineering” in “Islamic Azad University of Buin Zahra” were selected and assigned to three groups: two experimental groups (group A, and B) and one control group (group C). To meet the aim of the study, two reading comprehension tests were administered to the participants in three groups. In the first phase, a reading comprehension was administered as a pre-test. In the second phase, two experimental groups received five sessions of instruction on planning and self-monitoring awareness raising strategies on the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) and control group received no training. In the third phase, after completion of the instruction, a reading comprehension test as a post-test was administered to the groups. The findings indicated that the participants in two experimental groups outperformed the control group in the post-test of reading comprehension. It is concluded that the instruction of planning and self-monitoring metacognitive strategies as learning aids can lead to the improvement of students’ reading comprehension performance.

This content analysis study, employing a multimodal perspective and critical visual analysis, set out to analyze gender representations in Top Notch series, one of the highly used ELT textbooks in Iran. For this purpose, six images were selected from these series and analyzed in terms of ‘representational’, ‘interactive’ and ‘compositional’ modes of meanings. The result indicated that there are no stereotypical predictions of any genders, and that both female and male social actors were represented on an equal footing. The corollary of this critical image analysis was the implications which are of vital importance for material developers as well as those responsible for choosing language teaching in general and ELT materials in particular.

This study embarks upon uncovering the probable relationships between Iranian parents’ attitudes, motivations, and home literacy practices (HLP) towards bilingualism, Persian and English. To undertake the study, sixty-eight parents of young language learners (YLLs) were asked to fill up a survey questionnaire. The questionnaire aimed to uncover parental attitudes, motivation, and the types of HLP towards bilingualism. The results of Pearson correlation and multiple linear regression analysis indicated that parents espoused positive holistic attitudes, integrative motivation, and formal practices in HLP towards bilingualism. The findings also revealed that there was positive relationship between parental attitudes, motivation and HLP. The multiple regression analysis for the corresponding variables revealed that only motivations predict the variance in the home literacy practices. Implications for teachers, policy makers, and curriculum developers along with some suggestions are provided.

In English as a Second Language Teaching and Testing situations, it is common to infer about learners’ reading ability based on his or her total score on a reading test. This assumes the unidimensional and reproducible nature of reading items. However, few researches have been conducted to probe the issue through psychometric analyses. In the present study, the IELTS exemplar module C (1994) was administered to 503 Iranian students of various reading comprehension ability levels. Both the deterministic and probabilistic psychometric models of unidimensionality were employed to examine the plausible existence of implicational scaling among reading items in the mentioned reading test. Based on the results, it was concluded that the reading data in this study did not show a deterministic unidimensional scale (Guttman scaling); rather, it revealed a probabilistic one (Rasch model). As the person map of the measures failed to show a meaningful hierarchical order for the items, these results call into question the assumption of implicational scaling that is normally practiced in scoring reading items. In English as a Second Language Teaching and Testing situations, it is common to infer about learners’ reading ability based on his or her total score on a reading test. This assumes the unidimensional and reproducible nature of reading items. However, few researches have been conducted to probe the issue through psychometric analyses. In the present study, the IELTS exemplar module C (1994) was administered to 503 Iranian students of various reading comprehension ability levels. Both the deterministic and probabilistic psychometric models of unidimensionality were employed to examine the plausible existence of implicational scaling among reading items in the mentioned reading test. Based on the results, it was concluded that the reading data in this study did not show a deterministic unidimensional scale (Guttman scaling); rather, it revealed a probabilistic one (Rasch model). As the person map of the measures failed to show a meaningful hierarchical order for the items, these results call into question the assumption of implicational scaling that is normally practiced in scoring reading items.

Affective factors are the most important factors in SLA and EFL studies. These factors include motivation, self-confidence, anxiety, etc. Researches on learners’ characteristics have been investigated for over a century. In the same vein, the present research, strived at exploring Iranian’s EFL learners personality types and motivation. In the article, the personality types and motivation of students were examined using Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and motivation questionnaire of Laine. For this purpose, 60 EFL students from one of the language institutions Mashhad (located in Iran) were chosen as  the participants of this study. Through two instruments and considering the participants’ previous semester scores, the data were gathered and analyzed by means of SPSS software. The correctional analyses revealed a significant relationship among motivation, personality and students’ success. Multiple regression analysis was also conducted to examine the strength of the relationship among the variables. Among the affective factors, personality type was found to be the best predictor of students’ success. The study provides some pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research.

This study aimed at investigating the impact of writing on Iranian EFL college students’ rhetorical organization. Thirty Iranian female undergraduate students majoring in English at Al-zahra University participated in the current study. The writing instructions included two stages, each lasting for four weeks. The participants were assigned to a control group and an experimental group according to an “S” model and received writing instructions based on genre and process approaches. The experimental group received writing instruction on text structure designed according to descriptive genre for the first four weeks, followed by the instruction on the process approach for the second four weeks. However, the control group received the process writing instruction only during the second stage. The research questions focused on whether summary writing with instructions on text structure improves students’ rhetorical organization or not. Also, the study sought to find out how students’ rhetorical organization improves when instructions on text structure are used as a supplementary tool to the process approach. The design of the study was quasi experimental. The findings revealed that summary writing with instructions on text structure helps students have better performances in rhetorical organization, concerning content, organization, language use, and syntactic complexity. Also, the obtained results indicated that genre and process approaches can be complementary, and summary writing with instructions on text structure can be used as a supplementary tool to the process approach.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ use of vocabulary learning strategies and their autonomy with a focus on the gender. To meet this objective, 82(39 males and 43 females) sophomore and junior students majoring in English Language Teaching who had passed at least 45 credits at Tabriz Azad University, in Iran were asked to take part in the study by filling the questionnaires on learner autonomy (LAQ) and vocabulary learning strategies (VLSQ). After discarding incomplete questionnaires, 70 acceptable cases were used in the statistical analysis. Correlation analysis indicated a statistically significant and positive relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ use of vocabulary learning strategies and their autonomy for both male and female students. The findings can have some pedagogical implications for teachers.