Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice
Volume:1 Issue: 3, Fall- Winter 2008

The ways individuals use words can reflect basic psychological processes, including clues to their thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and personality. This paper seeks to determine whether there is a relationship between Iranian EFL learners' writing styles and their personality and gender.  It focuses on gender and two key dimensions of personality (Neuroticism and Extroversion), which were assessed using Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (revised version). The concept of formality/contextuality was suggested as the most important dimension of variation between linguistic expressions. An empirical measure of formality, the F-score, was suggested, based on the frequencies of different word classes. Nouns, adjectives, prepositions, and articles are more frequent in formal styles; pronouns, adverbs, verbs and interjections are more frequent in contextual styles. The frequency of positive and negative emotional words was calculated by the program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. The result shows no significant relationship between these variables. The reason is supposed to be other non-linguistic determinants of formality (e.g. situation and educational level) which may have a stronger effect on EFL writing styles.

The fallacy persists in discourse analysis research to explore lexicogrammatical phenomena detached from any adjacent plane of the meaning potential. In an attempt to dispel this and toss out some preconceived notions about what a modern SFG vantage point should involve, this study homes in on one aspect of SFG within prose fiction in particular, which is very revealing in terms of how separate system networks are actually in synergistic simultaneity, and how SFG allows one , phenomenally well, to bring such synergies out, getting to the heart of the fact that language pervasively operates on multiple planes of textuality simultaneously. Thus, building upon Halliday’s 2004 work, the quest is if it is interpersonally significant when the Residue is split into two parts; more importantly, if it is also laced with some lexicogrammatical quality on the textual plane, in light of the fairly well-entrenched assumption that there is always Theme at work when the Residue is split. Halliday is the only scholar to touch upon the topic of Discontinuous Residue and its relationship to Marked Theme in the culmination of his groundbreaking career, i.e. his 2004 work. Having driven home the proposal to make into a watchword the ubiquity of interlocking macro-semantic system networks, some pedagogical and research implications and suggestions flowing from this are brought up.

University students in Iran need English to reinforce their specialist knowledge in order to meet their academic needs and not to be isolated from technological advances. The architecture students at the university level in Iran are no exception. Bearing this in mind, the present research intends to address itself to the following questions: 1) what are the problems in materials design in ESP courses in general and architecture students in particular? And 2) what are possible solutions to the problems identified? In an effort to pave the road for preparing a textbook for architecture students in Iran, we have analyzed the textbook presently used by architecture students at Islamic Azad University, Tabriz branch. To do this, we prepared two questionnaires to be answered by both the students and teachers about the content of the textbook under discussion. On the basis of their responses and also the researchers' comments on the issue, we have tried to discuss the shortcomings therein, and to give possible solutions.

Despite the heterogeneity of ideas regarding the definitions of genre, there are also common instances shared among scholars interested in particular aspects of the notion. Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993) are primarily interested in the sociological and psychological aspects of genre's functioning and construction, respectively.. Swales analyzes the genre of 'article introduction', into four generic moves on the basis of the communicative intentions they serve, and Bhatia investigates the tactical aspects of their construction. The present paper, is an attempt to study the patterns of thematic development-based on Daneš(1974) proposed patterns-  in such generic moves. For this purpose, 12 academic papers were analyzed for their constituent generic move structures, with respect to the thematic choices and progression inside these moves. The results indicated that each move has characteristic patterns of thematic selection and progression, which must be motivated by the global discourse topic and the communicative intention of these moves, as moves of dissimilar communicative intentions had characteristic patterns of thematic selections. In the light of the result of the experiment conducted on the teachability of generic moves, it is believed that the present study can have insightful implications for writing and reading pedagogy.

This study explored the use of meta-cognitive strategies (MCS) in reading comprehension among Iranian EFL learners with varying levels of proficiency (i.e. high proficient vs. low proficient). Furthermore, there was an attempt to investigate the impact of motivation on language learners’ MCS use. The proposed hypotheses predicted: 1) there is no significant difference between the high proficient EFL learners’ use of MCS compared to their low proficient peers, and 2) there is no relationship between the two groups’ MCS use and their motivation. One hundred participants, aged 16-24, were selected from the intermediate and advanced EFL learners in Jihad Daneshgahi Institute of Kermanshah. The data was collected through: a) a modified version of the FCE reading paper,  b) a modified version of the PET reading paper, c) Taraban's (2006) MCS Questionnaire,  and d) an adapted form of Gardner's (1985) motivation questionnaire, and was submitted to a series of independent samples t-test and co-relational analysis. The results indicated: 1) a significant difference between the two groups in terms of the use of meta-cognitive strategies, favoring the highly proficient readers, and 2) a significant relationship between the use of meta-cognitive strategies and motivation of the participants.

This research attempts to investigate the effect of the English language test of the University Entrance Examination (UEE) in predicting the academic achievement of Iranian EFL learners. To achieve this goal, Isfahan, Tabriz, Mashhad, Shiraz and AllamehTabatabaeiUniversities were randomly selected. Then, the scores of the English majors admitted to those universities were collected from the aforementioned universities. Subsequently, the scores of special courses were included and the scores of the general ones such as theology, Ethics, etc. were excluded. Afterwards, the English scores of the learners were obtained from the Educational Testing Measurement (ETM) to investigate the relationship between the set of scores from the ETM and their achievements at the aforementioned universities. The results showed significant relationships between the UEE scores and the academic achievement in all fields of the study when quota (Q) six was included. However, in the same fields of study when Q six was excluded, the observed correlation was rather low except for the scores of the English majors in ShirazUniversity. It was also discovered that the correlation observed between the two sets of scores of the English majors in MashhadUniversity did not reveal significant relationships when Q six was excluded.

Research in L1 writing has found numerous benefits of employing collaborative learning in the classroom. The research findings on group work provide clear evidence that engaging learners in group activities increases opportunities for students to engage in the negotiation of meaning, which further leads to better acquisition. The present study, implementing two different collaborative feedback models, based on various sources and modes of feedback, examines the effect of each on the students’ writing quality. Sixty Iranian students, majoring in English Translation, were assigned into three homogeneous groups based on their obtained scores on Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and sample paragraph writing. They covered five topics in a sequence of ten written texts − before and after receiving feedback − over a 15-week semester. The results revealed that students incorporated both the teacher’s and peers’ oral/written comments in the process of draft editing, and that they benefited from the two collaborative feedback models almost equally. The interview results also confirmed co-operative learning as an effective teaching strategy that could be used to enhance achievement and socialization among students and to improve attitudes towards learning and working in groups, especially in EFL settings.

This study attempted to investigate whether there was any significant difference between the speaking achievement of learners who were trained by means of audiotaped dialogue journal, dialogue journal writing, or traditional free speech. The participants, 45 male and female students aged between 21 and 32, were selected by random sampling from among free speech classes in an English teaching Institute in Tehran. On the basis of the scores obtained from an oral interview, a one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed, and it was proved that the three groups were homogeneous in terms of their speaking ability. Yet, the ANOVA performed on the scores of the learners after the treatment showed that the oral proficiency of the three groups differed significantly. A follow-up Tukey test revealed that the audiotaped dialogue journal group did not have any advantage over the dialogue journal writing group, whereas there was a statistically significant difference between the audiotaped dialogue journal group and the traditional free speech group.

This study set out to explore the impact of three levels of task planning on the accuracy of task-based oral performance with narrative task types among sixty Iranian sophomores majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Islamic Azad University – Tabriz Branch. It was hypothesized that simultaneous pre-task/on-line planning would lead to more accurate performance. To test the research hypothesis, a quasi experimental design was used with three levels of planning (pre-task planning (PTP), on-line task planning (OLP), pre/on-line task planning (POLP). The participants in the study included 60 pre-intermediate TEFL sophomores at Islamic Azad University-Tabriz Branch who were selected out of a population of 200 TEFL sophomores on the basis of their scores on a proficiency test and an oral pre-test. One-way ANOVA run on the post-test data indicated statistically significant effects on the accuracy of the participants' task-based oral performance under POLP planning condition. However, there was no significant effect on accuracy as a result of PTP and OLP planning. The independent samples t-test analysis revealed significant accuracy gains in the POLP groups whereas the same improvements were not observed in the PTP and OLP planners.

The research reported here examined the relative effectiveness of semantic mapping, as an interactive pre-reading strategy, on reading comprehension of Iranian undergraduate students (non-EFL majors). It also examined whether there was an interaction between gender and the effect of teaching semantic mapping strategy on reading comprehension. The participants in this study consisted of 120 male and female pre-intermediate undergraduate students taking a General English course at UrmiaUniversity in Spring 2008. A Certificate of Advanced English Reading Paper (CAE) was administered to measure the students’ proficiency at the beginning of the research. Later, the participants were semi-randomly (Mackey and Gass, 2005) assigned into experimental and control groups. The experimental group was instructed on how toemploy semantic mapping strategy in reading while the control group received normal reading instruction. The post-test results supported the findings of earlier research that instruction on the application of semantic mapping contributed to reading comprehension. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper.