Journal of English Language Teaching and Learning
Year:2010 | Volume:53 | Issue:217|Papers Count:13

In the present study, an exploratory approach (Oxford, Cho, Leung & Kim, 2004) to language learning is adopted which holds that the number and type of strategies used by Iranian learners might vary with respect to the difficulty of task and their L2 proficiency. In this regard, the term task is defined, its leading dimentions and charecteristics are put forward, and the nature of learning startegies is touched upon. In cosequence, a new direction of strategy assessment; namely, task-based strategy assessment is focused on to investigate the relationship between task presence and difficulty and the use of reading strategies. The employment of reading strategies was perused via a strategy-frequency questionnaire in which the subjects themselves reported their strategy use after completing some language tasks. The results revealed that neither task difficulty or proficiency level alone, nor their interaction had a statistically significant effect on the reported frequency of reading strategy use.

This study investigated the amount of incidental vocabulary learning through comprehension-focused reading of short stories and explicit instruction to this goal. Forty male high school students were selected randomly, and divided into two groups of twenty. One group of these students was given five 400-word-level short stories to read with the purpose of comprehension, and the students in the control group were explicitly taught twelve vocabulary items selected from the short stories. Results demonstrated that students in the incidental learning condition did better and gained more vocabulary. The contributions of the study to the field of English language teaching were mentioned eventually.

In a speech community, people utilize their communicative competence which they have acquired from their society as part of their distinctive sociolinguistic identity. They negotiate and share meanings, because they have commonsense knowledge about the world, and have universal practical reasoning. Their commonsense knowledge is embodied in their language. Thus, not only does social life depends on language, but language defines social reality. With practical reasoning, people in a speech community use, appropriately, their commonsense knowledge in different social settings in order to negotiate suprasentential meanings. All of this knowledge is acquired without overt, explicit and intentional training. Proceeding along linguistic ethnography and functional lines, we may attempt to specify just what it means to be a truly successful and competent speaker of a particular language within the framework of a speech community.

Cloze was officially introduced in a journal on Journalism as a technique for estimating text readability and as "a new psychological tool for measuring the effectiveness of communication" (Taylor, 1953: 415). Different varieties of cloze have since been developed and experimented upon as measures of such diverse traits as reading comprehension and language proficiency. The findings of numerous corrleational studies on cloze as a measure of either skill is at best unsatisfactory and indeed contradictory. The present study seeks to find an answer to the question of whether standard cloze (with different text difficulty levels) is a valid measure of EFL reading comprehension (with IELTS Reading Paper as the criterion). 76 junior and senior students majoring in English Language and Literature at Urmia University participated in the study, where they sat 3 versions of standard 5-th deletion rate cloze tests as well as the Reading Paper of an Institutional IELTS (UCLES, 1995, 1997). While the results are in accordance with most previous research findings that cloze is a valid measure of EFL reading comprehension, serious problems are identified and discussed on the appropriacy of such a validation technique as correlation.

This study accounts for the acquisition of the consonant clusters of English syllable structures both in onset and coda positions by Persian EFL learners. Persian syllable structure is "CV (CC)", composed of one consonant at the initial position and two optional consonants at the final position; whereas English syllable structure is "(CCC) V (CCCC)". Therefore, Persian EFL learners need to resolve the conflict between what they know (L1), and what they are learning (L2). Optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993) claims that the knowledge of language consists of the universal set of structural descriptions and a language-particular ranking of constraints. It provides an explicit account for not only why learners have difficulty with specific EFL structures but also how they resolve it.40 participants of two levels of English proficiency participated in this study. The data were collected via two tasks.The first task was a sound comprehension test and the second was a production test. The analyzed data revealed that all the learners had difficulties in performing initial consonant clusters in English; however, the lower level learners significantly had more deficiencies. It is worth mentioning that those coda clusters composed of more than two consonants are more difficult than those composed of only two consonants. This study also revealed that epenthesis was more frequent in onset positions while deletion and substitution were more frequent in coda positions. Based on the findings of the study, English instructors and material developers can estimate the degree of difficulty of consonant clusters and provide the needed time and material for teaching them.

It is well documented that language learning success or failure is influenced by the affective side of the learner. Self efficacy and anxiety are among the affective factors influencing language learning. This study first explores the relationship between EFL learners' self-efficacy in reading comprehension and their reading anxiety. Secondly, it explores the relationship between EFL learners' self-efficacy and their reading achievement. It also investigates whether high self efficacious EFL learners experience higher anxiety than low self-efficacious EFL learners and whether high self-efficacious EFL learners perform better in reading or not.150 sophomores majoring in English literature at three universities participated in the present study. Two instruments were used in this study: a) an author-designed scale on EFL learners' self-efficacy in reading comprehension, b) the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) developed by Saito et al, The Pearson formula and an independent T-Test were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that there was a significant negative correlation between the participants' reading self- efficacy and their reading anxiety. The results also showed that high self efficacious participants achieved higher scores in reading comprehension course than low self-efficacious participants. The findings of the study draw the attention of EFL teachers to encourage their learners seek ways to reduce their anxiety in reading L2 texts by improving their self-efficacy.

This article examines the ideological prompts present in the imported instructional English textbooks in Iran and the learners’ attitudes towards English. Further, the instructors’ awareness of these ideologies was examined through a questionnaire. To find the ideological values, a content analysis of conversations, texts, and pictorial prompts in Spectrum and True to Life English textbook series was conducted and the extant ideologies were categorized and statistically analyzed. The results showed that imported textbooks tend to represent particular ideologies and cultural values. The most prevalent ideologies were hegemony of English, sexism, and cultural stereotypes. To discover the learners’ attitudes towards English, a 35-item questionnaire was developed, piloted and distributed by the researchers. The results showed that institute learners and high-school students have different attitudes towards English. Finally, language teachers’ awareness of ideologies in the textbooks was also examined. It was found that institute teachers are aware of the ideologies but they were not very much concerned with teaching or raising awareness about them.