Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice
Volume:6 Issue: 13, Fall- Winter 2013

The present study aimed at investigating the effects of explicit and implicit recasts on Iranian EFL learners' acquisition of English relative clauses. For this purpose, 64 participants were selected out of 94 intermediate level EFL learners at Falagh language Institute, Rasht, Iran. To have homogenized groups, the researcher administered a language proficiency test (TOEFL). Then, the researchers assigned them randomly to the explicit recast group, implicit recast group, and control group. They carried out some information gap tasks within four sessions. One group received explicit recast, the other group received implicit recast and the control one got no corrective feedback, for the target linguistic errors during the task performance. A grammatical judgment test was applied as the pretest and immediate posttest. The results of a paired-samples t-test and analyses of variance (ANOVA) showed that the scores of all three groups improved significantly overtime. However, the explicit recast group did significantly better than both the control group and the implicit recast group. The results of the study were elaborated in terms of counterbalance hypothesis and noticing hypothesis. The superiority of explicit recast implied a beneficial role for negative evidence in SLA and that explicit recast was a better choice than implicit recast in the L2 classroom.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the new version of Iranian EFL junior high school textbook (Prospect1) from the teachers’ perspectives. The participants included90experienced English teachers (42 females and 48 males) randomly selected from different junior high schools in different districts of Gilan province, Iran. The evaluation of the textbook was conducted quantitatively through a 5-point Likert scale with seven criteria including subject and content, activities, skills, physical layout, practical consideration, language and general criteria. However, it was accompanied by some open-ended questions that solicited teachers' views about each criterion and the book in general. The descriptive statistics including standard deviation, mean, percentage and frequency were used in the data analysis.The findings revealed that teachers have positive perceptions toward this book.They had a positive view about the prospect1 because of its content and topic relevancy to learners' needs, including real life situations, enjoying challenging subject, having communicative pair and group works and attending to four skills equally. However, they intensified some problems in their open ended questions such as insufficiency of teaching time that is 1.5 hour during a week, not focusing on explicit presentation of some words and grammatical points and not paying attention to some sub-skill strategies. These findings can be helpful for curriculum designers and textbook writers to design some valuable textbooks for other levels and to consider correspondence between time of teaching and volume of the book.

Performance deficiencies and inconsistencies among SLA or FL learners can be attributed to variety of sources including both systemic (i.e., language issues) and individual variables.  Contrary to a rich background, the literature still suffers from a gap as far as delving into the issue from language proficiency and learning style is concerned. To fill the gap, this study addressed EFL learners’ interlanguage performance (i.e., error types) in the light of their learning styles and language proficiency levels.  Participants were 73 Iranian graduate EFL learners, who received the Michigan proficiency tests along with the Perceptual Learning-Style Preference Questionnaire (of Reid) in order to measure their language proficiency level and learning style types. For the purpose of the study they were divided into pre-intermediate, intermediate and upper-intermediate levels. To explore their performance inconsistencies, both oral data from an semi-structured (SST) interview and written data based on an on-the-spot piece of writing were used and then classified based on Corder’s (1971) scheme into pre-systematic, systematic and post-systematic errors.   The results revealed significant relationships among the target variables, if not predictor-predicted relationships. The non-linear relationship among the variable underscores significance of an integrative approach to EFL learner’s performance inconsistencies and the importance of stylistic instruction in EFL contexts.

The current study attempted to cast light on the status quo of Iranian EFL teachers' perceptions of ICC. It further attempted to see if their experience would influence their conceptualizations of ICC. To this end, a total of 100 EFL teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire survey adapted from Han & Song's (2011) study. The results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed a number of commonalities and discrepancies among the participants' conceptualizations of International Communication Competence (ICC) and its relevance to ELT considering their teaching experience. The findings point to the prominence of intercultural teacher education in the Iranian context.

Demotivation is a relatively new topic in the field of second or foreign language acquisition which is in need of more rigorous research. In this regard, the present study was an attempt to investigate demotivating factors in learning English as a foreign language in an Iranian context. To this end, 382 Persian learners of English were selected through stratified clustering sampling procedure to participate in this mixed method study. The Data was collected through a 40-item Likert type questionnaire. The Factor analysis of the data extracted seven factors including a) inadequate facilities, b) reduced self-confidence, c) class characteristics, d) lack of purpose to study English, e) teaching methods, f) teachers and teaching styles, and g) negative attitudes toward English and the culture of English-speaking countries as demotivators. The Students’ perceptions of these seven factors were compared based on their general English proficiency levels. The Results revealed that low proficient learners perceived reduced self-confidence and negative attitudes more demotivating than their counterparts at other levels of proficiency.

Academic discourse enables others' voices in a text to be realized through conventionalized citational patterns. However, form amongst a variety of factors, one thing which may influence the way others' voices are textualized is writers' affiliations to different cultures. Following this assumption, the present contrastive study attempted to explore manifest intertextual constructions across the academic articles written by English and Iranian writers in the field of applied linguistics in a ten-year period (2000-2010). The typology of citation elaborated by Swales (1990), and subcategorized by Thompson and Tribble (2001) and Thompson (2005) were explored as the analytical framework of this study. The analysis demonstrated the dominance of different strategies of citations in the two corpora. The findings of this research may be helpful for novice writers and researchers in applied linguistics.

Willingness to communicate (WTC) plays a central role in learning a second/foreign language. The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of doing problem-solving task on learners’ WTC in English. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 61 pre-intermediate learners were chosen by means of administrating a placement test. Learners were pretested through three scales of WTC and its two antecedents: self-perceived communication competence (SPCC) and communication apprehension (CA). Of course, the experimental group was provided with fifteen problem-solving tasks during the course, while the control group was not. After fifteen sessions of the treatment, two groups were posttested through the same three scales. The results demonstrated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of their WTC’s level. Moreover, the learners’ WTC was found to be directly related to their SPCC and indirectly related to CA. So based on the MacIntyre’s path model (1994), these both antecedents can be the best predictors of WTC. The analysis of the data was done through multivariate analysis of variances (MANOVA) statistical programs.

The sway of the pendulum in language pedagogy towards conscious learning processes marks the paramount role of metalinguistic awareness. The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to compare the impact of teacher-oriented vs. learner-generated metalinguistic awareness activities on Iranian TEFL students’ writing accuracy. Sixty participants in three intact classes were randomly assigned as one control, and two experimental groups. All the participants received the same process-oriented instruction based on identical teaching materials. In the first experimental group, the teacher-focus metalinguistic awareness (TFMA) group, however, a collection of various form-focused activities, compiled by the teacher, was assigned and reviewed in the class weekly. In the learner-focused metalinguistic awareness (LFMA) group, the same assignments were assigned as supplementary self-study activities. The control group did not receive any structural assignments. The treatment perpetuated for six sessions and the analyses of the data obtained from the writing post-test revealed that both TFMA and LFMA groups outperformed the control group by producing more accurate writing and that the TF group surpassed the LF group. The findings lend credence to the significance of language awareness in EFL contexts and offer a number of pedagogical implications.

This study sought to investigate the probable effects of code-switching (CS) on Iranian bilingual English learners' reading comprehension. In this study, two intact classes of freshmen, taking the four-credit Reading and Comprehension Course 1, comprising a total of 70 participants, with 35 in each class, were randomly assigned as the experimental and the control groups after their initial homogeneity in reading comprehension was assessed via the reading section of the Preliminary English Test (PET). In the experimental group, the participants were allowed to switch codes during the twenty-hour-treatment that extended over five weeks. The participants in the control group, however, were required to rely exclusively on English as the language of communication and instruction with no CS. The independent samples t-test of the post test scores, administered at the end of the treatment, revealed significant differences in the reading comprehension of the two groups. The experimental CS group outperformed the control group. Since variables such as proficiency, teaching materials, and teach methodology, were kept constant in both classes, CS might be regarded as one of the probable causes of different levels of achievement in reading comprehension in both groups. Cautious use of CS to promote different aspects of the learning process will be discussed in the paper.

Oral participation (OP) in class is an important factor contributing to the development of oral fluency. Recent studies in language learning have addressed the necessity of classroom interaction, or rather students’ oral participation in class. A correlational research study was drawn upon to measure the oral participation and factors affecting oral activities of the ELT students studying at the M.A. level at Islamic Azad University of Ardabil in Iran. An initial pool of 93 participants was selected through purposive sampling. The data analysis was conducted using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results obtained indicated that there is a significant relationship between social and educational factors relative to the oral activities of EFL learners. The findings also showed that in oral participation, educational factors play the most important role in controlling the OP content.