Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice
Volume:4 Issue: 9, Fall- Winter 2011

The current study examines the impact of different task types on learning prepositions in form and meaning- focused interaction enhancement- based classes. The participants were 57 second Year University students enrolled in three intact lab classes at Tabriz Islamic Azad University.  The first group was provided with form-focused interaction enhancement, the second with the meaning-focused interaction enhancement, and the third was the control group which received no interaction enhancement. During 12 sessions, the participants practiced using prepositions employing oral picture description and written picture description tasks. Having practiced using prepositions during the term using different tasks, the participants were presented with Oral Picture Description (OPD), and Written Picture Description (WPD) tasks in posttest. The results indicated that there are differences among the participants regarding their use of prepositions in performing oral picture description task in form and meaning–focused interaction enhancement- based classes. It also became clear that the group with meaning focused interaction enhancement outperformed the group with form- focused interactionenhancement and the control group. There were also differences among the participants of the three groups regarding their use of prepositions in WPD task in form and meaning -focused interaction enhancement- based classes.

This study aimed to investigate sources of motivation of English language teachers in Iranian public and private language schools. To this end, a Language Teacher Motivation Source (LTMS) questionnaire was developed on the basis of the related literature. The LTMS examined four sources of motivation, i. e., extrinsic (economic, social, emotional, educational), intrinsic, altruistic, and subject matter motivation. Having been piloted and validated, the LTMS was administered to 200 male and female EFL teachers who had been classified in terms of their gender, age, marital status, academic degrees, job status, and their years of language teaching experiences. The results of parametric statistical analyses showed a hierarchy of language teacher sources of motivation that were not similar among different groups of language teachers in terms of their teaching experiences and level of education. This study suggests that authorities pay close attention to the sources of language teacher motivation to improve the quality of English language teaching and learning.

Derived from the emerging paradigm shift in English language teaching and assessment, there has been a renewal of interest in dynamic assessment (DA) to be used as an alternative to the traditional static testing in language classrooms. However, to date, DA practice has been mostly limited to clinical treatments of children with learning disabilities, and it has not been widely incorporated into the EFL contexts. In order to find out the reasons behind the slow trend of DA practice, this research adopted a framework, based on the post method pedagogical principles and recommendations, to delve into the prospect of methodological realization of DA approaches in Iranian EFL classrooms. To this end, two instruments, a questionnaire and an interview were developed to explore the practicality of DA through seeking 51 Iranian EFL teachers' perception of DA practice in their classrooms. The results indicated that most of the teachers were negative about the practice of DA in their classrooms and believed that a full-fledged implementation of DA in Iranian EFL classrooms is too demanding. The feasibility of DA in Iranian EFL classrooms, where teachers are deprived of DA training, guideline, and technological resources, is questioned seriously due to the factors such as time-constrained nature of DA procedures, large number of students in EFL classrooms, the common practice of static tests as the mainstream, and overreliance on the teachers' teaching and assessment abilities. The paper suggests the framework of inquiry in this study, which was derived from the post method pedagogy, to be utilized as a blueprint for a critical appraisal of any alternative method or theory which is introduced into ELT contexts.

This article presents the attitude of ESP learners towards the role of Self-Access Language Learning Centres in improving their reading comprehension. It provides an evaluation of the success of these contents as well as an interpretation of students’ understanding of the related concepts. Finally it identifies factors that enhance or hinder the successful implementation of Self-Access Language Learning. Both qualitative and quantitative instruments were used to elicit data that give insight into learners’ perceptions of the issues under review. Self-Access Language Learning was evaluated positively by the students, both as a means to improve specialised English and as a means to develop autonomy as well as autonomous learning skills. The study identified a number of factors that contributed to these perceptions. It also revealed that students’ understanding of independent learning is rather shallow. Finally a number of recommendations were made for a successful implementation of Self-Access Language Learning into a curriculum.

The view that academic writing is purely objective, impersonal and informational, which is often reflected in English for Academic Purposes materials, has been criticized by a number of researchers. By now, the view of academic writing as embodying interaction among writers, readers and the academic community as a whole has been established. Following this assumption, the present study focused on how second/foreign language writers enact, construct, and invent themselves through writing. In this study, the theoretical stance on identity is grounded on Ivanič’s (1998) four interrelated aspects of writer identity, namely autobiographical self, discoursal self, authorial self, and possibilities for self-hood in the socio-cultural and institutional contexts. Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2004a) was used as the analytical tool for analyzing texts. Based on a corpus of 30 research articles, the overall distribution of evidential markers, hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions were calculated across four rhetorical sections (Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Discussion and Conclusion) of the research articles. According to the results of this study, identity is a critical aspect of writing which should be brought into the mainstream of second/foreign language writing pedagogy through consciousness -raising or the specific teaching of certain features.

This paper aims at studying the speech act of congratulation in Persian and English with regard to semantic formulas. To gather the semantic formulas related to congratulation, the researchers chose 100 movies (50 in Persian and 50 in English) as the instrument of the study. The only model of cross-cultural comparison was related to that of Elwood (2004). Therefore, we used Elwood’s model as the yardstick to design a new classification for coding congratulation utterances. The new model which is designed in this study covers the categories of the Elwood’s model but omits the overlapping strategies which were observed in that model. The new model enjoys more clarity and is more clear-cut. Also, the non-congratulatory categories of Elwood’s model are deleted in the new design. Six generic categories were recognized as the model of analysis: (1) offering congratulation; (2) mentioning the occasion; (3) blessing wish; (4) expressing feeling; (5) divine statement; and (6) complimenting. In order to investigate the significant of differences between Persian and English categories, the researchers employed Chi-square formula. The results of the study revealed that a) there is a significant difference among various semantic formulas in each language and b) Persian and English congratulation utterances are significantly different with regard to mentioning the occasion, expressing feeling, and divine statement. However, no significant difference was observed with regard to complimenting, offering congratulation and blessing wish. Pedagogical implications are discussed in the context of EFL to link theory into practice.

This study explored the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and learner variables of Iranian learners of English as a foreign Language (EFL) with special reference to their personality types to examine what implications these associations have for teaching EFL. It tried to find any possible relation between vocabulary learning strategies use of Iranian EFL students and two personality types, namely emotionality and openness to experience. For so doing, a representative sample of the EFL students was chosen, which comprised 120 second year EFL students from Islamic Azad university of Tabriz.  The data were collected using two questionnaires - Schmitt’s vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire and HEXACO personality assessment questionnaire;only two dimensions of emotionality and openness to experience were investigated in this research. The Pearson correlation coefficient was used to measure the associations between the learner variables and use of vocabulary learning strategies. The findings showed differences in strategy use indicating that these strategy choices are correlated with their personality type. It was found that there is a positive relation between emotionality and cognitive strategies, and also between emotionality and metacognitive strategies. The results also showed that there is a positive relation between openness to experience and memory, and social strategies.

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) are developing branches of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction in Iran. These branches have a marginal status in the tertiary education, and the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology’s high commission offers no clear guidance for selecting and developing basic academic instructional materials related to the linguistic or communicative standards expected by teachers (Mazdayasna & Tahririan, 2008). This paper tries to evaluate an ESP textbook written for BSc students of physics entitled, ‘English for the students of physics’, which is prepared by the Center for Studying and Compiling University Books in Humanities (SAMT). The present research was based on qualitative and quantitative research techniques and included two steps. First, internal, external and overall evaluation of the book was carried out based on McDonough & Shaw (1993) model. While conducting the external evaluation of the book, the intended audience, the proficiency level, the context of use, the language, the author's views on language and methodology, the inclusion of a vocabulary list/index, visual features, and the cultural aspects were examined. The internal evaluation included the presentation of the skills, grading and sequencing, discourse skills, listening section, the representation of different learning styles. And in overall evaluation, general suitability of the textbook was assessed. In the second step, six teachers each responded to a 22-item textbook evaluation questionnaire to express their perceptions concerning various aspects of the textbooks. The results revealed the extent of appropriateness of the textbook used by BSc students of physics. Suggestions are offered for the future revision and/or designing the textbooks.

The term  “ philosophy of research in applied linguistics” may be considered to cover a wide range of academically and philosophically important issues that have recently begun to capture the attention of scholars in research programs in their efforts, on the one hand, to reflect upon how they have traditionally approached their scientific practices and, on the other, to reconsider and redefine their research priorities in the light of new findings and revise their methodologies and designs in the very scope of their field. Language researcher’s personal commitments and presumptions and other issues of central importance will, definitely, influence future developments in research programs in applied linguistics and possibly result in fundamental changes in the way researchers in linguistics currently view their own work as well as research priorities in general. The research topics and approaches applied in the field of philosophy of research in applied linguistics, definitely, involve various philosophical and theoretical commitments, as well as methodological preferences and practices. In the present paper, alternative beliefs about the fundamental issues of the philosophy of research in applied linguistics and the central issues in research methodologies have been discussed.

The readers' ability to integrate current information with given information has been considered as an important component of reading comprehension process. One aspect of this integration process involves anaphoric resolution. The purpose of this study is to investigate the process of anaphoric resolution, focusing on inferential rigidity of different types of anaphoric ties. Ninety EFL learners were selected from the accessible population of undergraduate EFL students at a university in Iran. In this study an anaphoric resolution test, containing 30 different expository texts, was used. The participants were asked to underline the antecedents of the anaphors. Once the data was collected and scored, it was subjected to a number of appropriate statistical procedures. The Results of the analysis of variance revealed a significant effect of different types of anaphoric ties, F (4, 87) = 10.28, p