Journal of English Language Teaching and Learning
Year:2011 | Volume:5 | Issue:7|Papers Count:7

As part of a wider attempt to bestow the spirit of scholarly prose upon the research articles’ rhetorical structure, academic writers invariably take advantage of quantity metadiscourse markers to avoid prolixity and live up to the implicit and explicit maxims of quantity category as suggested in Gricean CP and similar models. In order to develop a clear understanding of quantity strategies distribution in academic prose, 120 research articles were selected from among recently published journals in Sciencedirect database. The articles were selected equally from two disciplines in social sciences (SS) including applied linguistics and sociology and two disciplines from natural sciences (NS) including chemistry and medicine. The linguistic realizations of metadiscursive quantity strategies comprised of endophoric markers and collapsers were estimated through a manual analysis of the corpus. The results showed that collapsing is a widespread strategy specifically among NS writers. Differences were found between SS and NS writers in their use of initials, citations and footnotes\endnotes. It is argued that collapsing is an inherent property of NS disciplines giving rise to the dense use of such markers. At the end, the implications of the study to teaching and learning writing research articles are discussed.

This study is an attempt to find the relationship between EGP and ESP test in medical field of studies in Iranian context. To do this, four fields of study were randomly selected out of medicine fields. Estimating the mean and standard deviation of the tests, the variance overlap between EGP and ESP tests were calculated. The results indicated that there was no systematic relationship between the students' scores on EGP and ESP tests. In fact the findings indicate that they do not provide similar information. In other words it is not safe to claim that students obtain higher scores in EGP test will receive higher score in ESP test or vice versa in medical field of studies accordingly, it will be appropriate to accept that EGP and ESP tests have a complementary role in the assessment of the Language proficiency of ESP students.

The purpose of this study was to detect differentially functioning items in the University of Tehran English Proficiency Test (UTEPT) which is a high stake test of English developed and administered by the Language Testing Centre of the University of Tehran. This paper is based on the answers of 400 test takers to the test. All participants earned a master degree either in humanities or science and engineering. To achieve the purpose of this study, the participants were divided into two equal groups. The results of generalized Mantel-Haenszel indicated that out of 100 items 12 items were displaying DIF. Logistic regression procedure also flagged 14 items as exhibiting DIF. Nevertheless, the associated test of effect size for logistic regression showed that none of these effect sizes were large according to the guidelines proposed by both Zumbo and Thomas (1997) and Jodoin and Gierl (2001). Therefore, it was concluded that UTEPT doesn't show significant academic discipline DIF and is equally fair to both humanities and science and engineering groups.

The present article arises from a three-year cross sectional investigation into English Language Teaching (ELT) in secondary schools in Iran and the role of Communicative Pedagogy within this. The study has examined the extent of communicative pedagogy within the Iranian national ELT curriculum, the ELT programme and to some extent the English language coursebooks used in secondary schools. What is going to be done therefore is looking at one aspect of the study which is the role of authenticity in the above mentioned system.In order to investigate the situation, varieties of research instruments were applied in order to collect valid and reliable data. These instruments were mainly composed of a review of literature, a desk based analysis of the curriculum, administering questionnaires as well as conducting interview sessions. The questionnaires were mainly distributed among English language teachers and the interviews were conducted with some authors of the curriculum, textbooks and English language teachers in the Islamic Republic of Iran.It will be explained while the issue of authenticity has been addressed and considered within the newly designed national curriculum in Iran, this issue appears to play no role in either the textbooks or the English language teaching programme.

Earlier self-efficacy studies have been blamed for their methodological weakness and their mere reliance on self-report, survey, and correlational techniques for data collection. The purpose of this study; therefore, was to assess the impact of Feuerstein’s theory of mediation on EFL teachers’ sense of efficacy through direct observation rather than self-reports and to use experimental techniques to measure changes in the three key components in teachers’ self-efficacy -- efficacy in student engagement, efficacy in instructional practices, and efficacy in classroom management-- in 16beginning teachers participating in their in- service teacher development program. Intervention strategies-- modeling, rehearsal, and videotape analysis-- were implemented over a span of 15 two hour sessions. Progress was also monitored by students’ engagement in a real teaching performance followed by their self/ peer evaluation. Results of this study indicated that the participants made significant gain scores for all three components.

This study explored the nature of transfer among bilingual vs. trilinguals with varying levels of competence in English and their previous languages. The hypotheses were tested in writing tasks designed for 75 high (N= 35) vs. intermediate (N=40) proficient EFL learners with Turkish, Persian, English and Persian, English linguistic backgrounds. Qualitative data were also collected through some think aloud procedures. The findings revealed: 1) a significantly positive relationship between writing skills of the languages known by participants; 2) trilinguals performed significantly better than bilinguals in English writing tasks, although, qualitative data revealed that both groups used the same language, i.e. Persian, as the most frequently referred language and; 3) the higher-level writers tended to present less cross-linguistic influence than the lower level writers. The results are discussed in relation to different patterns of linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis and implications for language teaching in multilingual contexts.

The present study intended to propose a causal model of factors that would predict Oral Communication Apprehension (OCA) of Iranian learners of English as a foreign language. To conduct the study, 135 male and female University students majoring in English were selected. Five variables including: learners’ self-esteem and introversion/extroversion (as independent variables), their gender and proficiency level (as moderator variables) and their oral communication apprehension (as the major dependent variable) were selected. To collect the data necessary for the study a language proficiency test and three questionnaires were used. Statistical analyses revealed that all the independent and moderate variables predicted the participants’ OCA. Furthermore, extroversion was found to be the strongest predictor of OCA. Results of the t-test and one-way ANOVA revealed that females and students of the lowest level of proficiency experience a significantly higher level of OCA. The findings are finally discussed and pedagogical implications of the study are provided.