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Showing 6 results for Elt
Ramin Akbari, Kobra Tavassoli,
Volume 14, Issue 2 (9-2011)
Abstract
Nowadays, teachers are receiving more attention in the studies done in mainstream education since it is believed that they play the most important role in educational settings, and therefore their different aspects, such as teacher efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence, have received great attention. Moreover, demographic characteristics of teachers are more examined these days since they are thought to play major roles in teachers’ performance in the classroom. Despite great attention to different aspects of teachers and their demographics in mainstream education, such studies are rare in the English Language Teaching field. This study was therefore designed to explore possible relationships among English language teachers’ sense of efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence on the one hand, and to document probable differences among them with respect to teachers’ gender, degree, and experience on the other hand. To this end, four different instruments, one for each of the variables, were administered among 264 Iranian English language teachers. The findings showed significant even though not high correlations among some of the components of teacher efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence, as well as significant differences among some the components of these variables with respect to teachers’ gender, degree, and experience. The results of this study can help teacher educators in dealing with different teachers since they will know about the variations among teachers’ performances in the classroom and the problems any teacher with certain characteristics may have.
Azizullah Mirzaei, Najmeh Heidari,
Volume 15, Issue 2 (9-2012)
Abstract
In L2 instruction and assessment, the application of research findings that adopt an integrative, psycholinguistic approach to explore the information-processing and speech-management facets of fluency seems necessary. This paper reports on a study that drew on Levelt’s (1989, 1999) speaking-specific model to probe the problem-solving mechanisms (PSMs) of fluent and nonfluent L2 speakers through a speaking-oriented questionnaire and a series of output-related retrospective interviews. The fluent and nonfluent L2 speakers were identified using a newly-developed analytic fluency scale and the task-related speech samples of 200 participants. The results revealed that the fluent L2 speakers employed cognitive, linguistic, and interactional PSMs more frequently and with greater facility than the nonfluent participants particularly to compensate for deficits in their conceptual repertoire, bridge communication gaps, and negotiate the intended meaning with their interlocutors. Specifically, they efficiently reshaped the preverbal plan to avoid failure, adeptly employed a variety of fillers and hesitation devices to maintain the communication flow, and attentively monitored the conversation. However, the nonfluent L2 speakers entirely abandoned or completely changed their original speech plan after running into deficiencies in their own outputs that made their speech utterly disjointed. Still at times, they struggled to self-correct their speech but failed due to deficient linguistic and interactional competence, which adversely led to more disfluencies. The findings suggest that further research into the cognitive, linguistic, and interactional processes underlying (non)fluent speakers’ use of PSMs can be useful in explaining speech disfluencies or learners’ differential L2 fluency.
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Volume 17, Issue 1 (4-2014)
Abstract
Despite their widespread popularity and rapid growth, the Internet-mediated English educational materials for learners of English as a foreign/second language (FL/SL) have rarely been analyzed in terms of their potential hidden curriculum. Accordingly, the present study aims to address this need through conducting a CDA investigation into some lessons which are randomly selected from an English educational website called “Englishcentral.” Adapting, expanding, and adopting some elements of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Network, the researchers attempt to describe and explain the representation of “Iran” in Englishcentral. Investigating and thematizing the research data revealed that the keyword “Iran” was used in this website to refer to three groups of social actors, namely the Iranian government and officials, Iranian people, and Iranian people and/or government/officials. The way these social actors are associated and dissociated, activated and passivated, personalized and impersonalized creates remarkable findings which give support to the presence of particular hidden agenda in this program. In all, the results of this study reveal that the Iranian social actors are portrayed unfavorably in Englishcentral, which is an alleged English educational program.
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Volume 17, Issue 2 (9-2014)
Abstract
This paper provides a fairly detailed corpus-based vocabulary profile of the Iranian EFL books used in public schools. To this end, the WordPerfect files of all the seven books were converted to text format to get rid of the formatting features and be compatible with the software used for analysis. The software tools used were the Compleat Lexical Tutor suite, version 6.2 (Cobb, 2011), AntConc (Anthony, 2012), and AntWord Profiler (Anthony, 2012). The output of the analysis included general counts of words in Iranian school books at different levels, the frequent function and content words, frequent n-grams, frequent metalinguistic words, the coverage of several well-known, corpus-based word lists in these books, the range of the words across the books, and the amount of vocabulary recycling. The paper discusses the vocabulary representativeness and recycling and the adequacy of exposure to English in these EFL books. Detailed word frequency tables as well as some practical implications of the quantitative results constitute important features of this article.
Sara Mansouri, Bahram Hadian, Omid Tabatabaei, Ehsan Rezvani,
Volume 21, Issue 2 (9-2018)
Abstract
| Motivated by the concept of Communicative Language Ability and the eminence of the IELTS exam, this study intended to scrutinize the representation of functional knowledge (FK) and socio-linguistic knowledge (SK) as sub-components of pragmatic knowledge in the writing performances of both tasks of the online General IELTS-practice resources across three band scores. This quantitative inter-scores/intra-tasks and inter-tasks investigation aimed to reveal firstly whether the writers of three band scores 7, 8, and 9 differed from each other in their FK and SK level, and secondly whether the tasks differed in activating them. This study adopted a taxonomy of five illocutionary acts and 20 register features to investigate representation of FK and SK in a well-established corpus of 180 writing performances through both manual analysis and Multidimensional Analysis Tagger software. While the results of statistical analyses revealed no FK differences between the bands in task one (T1), T2’s higher bands involved more functional features because of the expression of a diverse range of psychological states, no speaker’s involvement, and less commitment to a future course of actions. Furthermore, socio-linguistically, band 9 scripts encompassed more logical relations, but conversational and spoken style in T1 and more integration, less simplified structures and ego-involvement in T2. The inter-task analyses uncovered T1’s greater activation of FK through self-mentions, others involvement, emotion, and intention expression. Nevertheless, when it came to SK register features, T2 overdid in both spoken and written genre elements except in persuasion, writers’ involvement, mental acts expression, and interactive discourse creation. |
Seyyed Mahdi Modarres Mosadegh, Mohammad Rahimi,
Volume 24, Issue 1 (3-2021)
Abstract
IELTS preparation courses have gained significant popularity in Iran in the past decade. Although teachers in such an exam-oriented context have started to use formative assessment to improve their writing instruction, their knowledge and beliefs about assessment for learning are still a myth. This mixed-methods study investigated Iranian IELTS teachers’ beliefs and knowledge about the four main aspects of formative assessment of writing in preparation courses for IELTS Writing task 2. Thirty-nine IELTS teachers provided answers to a 23-item questionnaire focusing on four areas: feedback, self-assessment, peer-assessment, and using assessment results for day-to-day classes, to illustrate how frequently they use such techniques. In the next stage, six of the teachers sat for an interview to provide their reasons for using/not using such techniques. The results showed that the teachers have good feedback literacy and make use of some self-assessment techniques such as rubric orientation while they did not value or know enough about how they can involve their students in their own learning process. The teachers seemed to overestimate their role in their students’ learning process while considering the students as somewhat incapable of monitoring their own progress and achievement, which is a crucial aspect of formative assessment. These findings have implications for teacher professional development and further formative assessment programs to be conducted in Iran.
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