Journal of Studies in Language Learning and Teaching
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Jul 2023

The issue of syllabus design is of great importance in language education and has attracted the attention of many material developers and language instructors over the last decade. The main purpose of this paper is, thus, to provide theoretical rationale, concepts, and practical approaches for those English teachers and material developers who want to develop their own courses. The paper also seeks to familiarize the ESL/EFL instructors and material developers with the tools and techniques of developing a course in TESOL, acquaint them with fundamental issues and practices in language curriculum development and provide them with necessary information to deepen their understanding of course development. Key elements and essential components in a course development process including different types of approaches to foreign language syllabus design, the current schools of syllabus design, the role of teachers in syllabus design, goals and objectives, material development, grading, sequencing of contents, textbook selection, syllabus and evaluation will be explained in detail. Potential practical guidelines to teaching English language, syllabus design and material development will be presented in order to provide language teachers with the necessary knowledge and skills for planning, implementing and evaluating in a given course.

Testing has traditionally been a critical component of educational programmes. While there is a considerable amount of research on various dimensions of assessment, only a limited number of studies have explored learners’ perceptions of assessment practices, to date. Accordingly, this qualitative study is an attempt to examine a group of undergraduate university students’ perceptions of their past assessment practices. To this end, 30 Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) students who had just taken a course on Language Assessment were asked to compose narratives (of at least 2000 words) about their assessment experiences. The collected data were then analyzed thematically, and the results indicated that students mostly held negative feelings toward their previous language assessment practices. Moreover, most of the students did not assign any significance to assessment, considering it redundant. The study found that instilling more positive views toward assessment is required to improve self-regulatory learning and therefore better learning outcomes in students.

This study attempted to investigate the most common oops-moment strategies of 11 Iranian novices and experienced English language teachers at private institutes in Zanjan, Iran, so as to find possible relationships among their oops-moment strategies, their personality, and teaching experience. To gather data about how they deal with hard questions in their English class, they were interviewed in their workplace. Their students were also interviewed in order to verify their teachers’ claims. For the purpose of gathering the data related to teachers’ personality, the ‘Big Five’ test of personality was utilized. The interviews were transcribed and imported to Nvivo 8 software for analyzing and coding the data, and the scores on the personality test were examined using IBM SPSS statistics 20. This research proposes five most commonly-used strategies among teachers including asking for time and checking the answer, confessing lack of knowledge, explaining the rules and the related information, asking smart students to answer the question, and postponing answering the question. The last strategy was found to be commonly used by novice teachers, the first and third strategies were mostly reported by experienced teachers. The findings also showed that the teachers who were open to experience and agreeable according to the personality test tended to use the second strategy, those who appeared to be emotionally unstable reported to use the first and the last strategies, and finally the teachers who were conscientious and extrovert tended to confess their lack of knowledge. The pedagogical implications are also discussed.

The present research aimed to study how lexical bundles are used in research articles authored by English native and Iranian nonnative writers in the field of biomedical engineering. The type and frequency of lexical bundles employed in the discussion sections of 50 native and 50 nonnative research articles were examined using the AntConc software. The results indicated that, compared to native writers, nonnative ones have a greater tendency to use lexical bundles. In addition, it was found that the variety of the bundles employed in the articles written by nonnative writers is higher. Regarding the type of the bundles, the results revealed that prepositional phrases with of-phrase and other prepositional phrases were more frequent in the native articles, while other prepositional phrases and verb phrases were used more in the nonnative articles. The least frequency in both groups of the articles was related to adverbial clauses. The findings of the present research can be used in syllabus design and materials preparation for academic writing courses.

OOver the past few decades, studies have gained considerable momentum on the concept of growth mindset, which has become one of the major factors in evaluating learner uptake of academic outcomes. This quantitative study examined how the incorporation of praise for intelligence and praise for effort affects young Iranian language students’ achievement of English conditional structures. For this purpose, a Quick Oxford Placement Test (QOPT) was administered to the target population of female learners learning English in a private language institution. From those at the lower intermediate proficiency level, three groups, 25 in each, were randomly selected and divided into one control group and two experimental groups, namely praise for effort and praise for intelligence. All the groups attended grammar lessons on English conditionals for twelve 75-minute evening sessions on alternate days of the week. Prior to the treatment, a pretest on grammar conditionals was applied to assess the learners’ entry behavior. After the treatment, a parallel form of the same test was given to gauge the efficacy of the intervention. The analysis of the obtained data revealed that the proper use of praise for effort and praise for intelligence could improve the learners’ competence in conditional structures compared to those in the no-treatment group. Notably, the results of the study may offer practical implications for how language teachers improve learners’ success in language grammar in general and English conditional structures in particular.

Studying teachers’ beliefs may help to reveal the gaps between what teachers believe and what they do in the classroom. This study attempts to inquire into Iraqi EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices in teaching English grammar. Two hundred Iraqi English teachers in high schools were selected as the participants of the current study. They were given a questionnaire on beliefs about grammar instruction, and interviews were conducted with 10 of them. The data collected from the questionnaires and the interviews were analyzed by SPSS and MAXQDA, respectively. The results revealed that novice and experienced teachers have nearly similar beliefs on grammar instruction; both groups believed that grammar is a significant and unavoidable part of their instruction. However, novice teachers believed that environmental conditions can have effects on their grammar instruction, while experienced teachers believed that personal characteristics might influence their grammar instruction. The majority of the participants agreed on integrating grammar instruction, and over 80% of them favored explicit instruction of grammar. This study has practical implications.