FOREIGN LANGUAGE RESEARCH JOURNAL (PAZHUHESH-E ZABANHA-YE KHAREJI)
Year:2019 | Volume:9 | Issue:2 |Papers Count:14

This present research project aimed at investigating EFL teachers and learners' attitudes toward implicit and explicit instruction of pronunciation. To this end, 71 teachers and 88 learners completed a modified version of LAMP (Learner Attitudes and Motivations for Pronunciation) Inventory developed by Sardegna, Lee and Kusey (2014) and another questionnaire by Lee (2000). . The results revealed that learners had higher attitude than teachers toward pronunciation. Regarding learners' proficiency levels, the intermediate learners of English had the highest attitude in comparison with the beginners and the advanced ones. Moreover, both teachers and learners displayed high attitude toward implicit instruction of pronunciation. The study implies that teaching materials should be designed in a way that students are more encouraged to adopt implicit approaches to pronunciation learning. Teachers should also try to create more opportunities for students to effectuate implicit instruction in classroom settings. Accordingly, learners will be cognizant of and well-informed about what effective strategies to use while mastering correct and appropriate pronunciation.

The present study is based on the hypothesis of the critical period that considers complete language learning impossible after a certain age. Two groups of Iranian students who have learned German language at different ages are studied. The pronunciation of them during the rehearsal of the three German texts was evaluated by five native German evaluators. The goal was finding native speaker was among the two groups. According to many studies, it might be possible for early learner (under 12) to attain a native accent. Given that most of the students of the first group grew up in a German language context from birth, it was expected that some of them would be identified as native speakers. The question was raised whether among the adult learners a nativelike German pronunciation is found? Not only did any of the second-group students fail to be identified as native speakers, but in the first group, no one could be recognized by the raters as native speakers in all three texts.

Reflective teaching has proved to be one of the most important and influential approaches to teaching in second language teacher education. Although this approach has been the subject of numerous studies, in the majority of cases, such studies have been carried out cross-sectionally rather than longitudinally. To address this major problem, the present study, adopting a qualitative research tradition, investigated the development of the reflective practice among four novice English language teachers. The teachers were instructed in strategies employed for journal writing. Reflective journals were collected from each teacher within the time span of one year and were content analyzed. The results of the content analysis indicated that the participants' teaching practice improved gradually and developmentally in terms of both the type and depth of reflection. The findings urge the integration of the reflective practice, along with its tools and procedures, into teacher education courses/programs in different Iranian educational context.

We will examine common mistakes in the use of the definite article in Spanish. This element can play different roles such that it can denote noun, can have a possessive value, can make nouns, or can be the nucleus of nominal group, and can be deleted based on the speaker’ s intention and the common context with the listener. Unlike Spanish, definite article with such values do not exist in Persian; yet other elements instead of definite article in Spanish bear the responsibility in to express these characteristics in Persian. We study definite article in Spanish and we analyze the mechanisms of its replacement in Persian. The methodology is based on the analysis of learners' errors and statistical data. The data is the result of a questionnaire answered by Iranian students at different levels of familiarity with Spanish which indicate a high percentage of errors in Iranian learners when using definite article of Spanish in the nominal group. The goal of this research is to introduce ways to help learn Spanish.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and EFL learners’ success in summary writing. In this study, a sample of 80 upper intermediate students majoring in English translation were assessed by their English proficiency level, writing proficiency and their English vocabulary knowledge; then, they summarized an argumentative, a narrative and an expository text. The results of correlation analysis showed that while both breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge are significantly related to identification of main ideas, use of summarizing strategies and proper writing indices in the so-called texts summaries, the contribution of depth of vocabulary knowledge to summary writing is meaningfully stronger, than the effect of its size. Similarly, the regression analysis showed that depth of vocabulary knowledge is a better predictor than the breadth, in determining students’ summary writing success. Based on the findings, language teachers are encouraged to put more emphasis on depth of vocabulary knowledge of learners and familiarize them with summarizing rules.

This study tried to examine the effect of using dynamic assessment on EFL learners’ performance on selective and productive reading comprehension tasks. Sixty EFL learners out of 78 were selected based on their performance on a Nelson test at the elementary level; then, they were divided into a control and a dynamic assessment group. In both groups, the reading section of KET with 28 selective and 27 productive items was used as the pretest and the posttest. The participants in the dynamic assessment group benefitted from the interventionist kind of mediation in the form of taking a set of four tests, each one twice, before and after the mediation. Finally, two repeated-measures two-way ANOVAs and one MANOVA were run on pretest and posttest results of selective and productive tasks to answer the research questions. The primary finding was that dynamic assessment improved EFL learners’ performance on both types of tasks significantly. Conclusions and implications are further discussed.

The link between bilingualism and education is one of the key issues facing educators, psychologists and teachers today. The purpose of this study was to survey the attitude toward learning english language lessons course in secondary school students in chabahar city. This research is descriptive and causal-comparative. The statistical population of this study were consisted of all secondary schools in chabahar in school years 2013-2014. For this purpose, a sample of 240 students were selected by using of the stratified sampling method (120 Persian and 120 Baluch). Data collection was done by Gardner's attitude questionnaire. The collected data by Independent t-test and multivariate stepwise regression were analyze the data using spss software. The findings of this study showed that there isnot significant difference between monolingual and bilingualthe students’ attitude toward learning the English language. There isnot significant difference between male and female students attitude toward learning the English language. The results of regression showed that attitudes predict academic success.

In new approaches to foreign language learning, communicative competence is a major goal. The literature review shows that foreign language learners find it a formidable task to interpret figurative language. The linguistic theories derived from the realm of literature are deficient in applied instructional solutions to these problems. Thus the current research was an attempt to use the interventionist model of dynamic assessment to expand the competence of learners to interpret figures of speech. Dynamic assessment enjoys rich theoretical underpinnings in psychology and linguistics. To this aim 10 student majoring in English literature participated in a quasi experimental pre-test, post-test study. The regulatory scale of Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994) was adopted for intervention phase. Then, paired-samples t-test was used to investigate the effect of this intervention on interpretation of figurative language in writings of Edgar Allen Poe. The findings showed that the intervention promoted the competence of language learners significantly. These findings have implications for teachers of English literature, researchers in applied linguistics, language learners and syllabus designers.

، o investigate the effect of four different forms of strategy instruction on idioms comprehension and production, 120 female students were selected through convenience sampling and based on availability. The participants were divided into five groups, and each group was randomly assigned to one of the treatment (four experimental and a comparison) conditions. Each of the four experimental groups were taught one of the four lexical inferencing strategies including form-focused, monitoring, evaluating, and meaning-focused strategies, while the students in the comparison group received no such instruction. After 12 sessions of treatment, an idioms comprehension and production posttest was administered to the participants. The obtained data were analyzed using two separate One-way ANOVA procedures. The results showed that the form-focused group performed significantly better than the experimental and comparison groups. The findings suggested that form-focused strategy instruction can be used as an effective instructional tool to help learners enhance their idiom learning. These findings may have theoretical and pedagogical implications for language learning as well as materials development.

Assessment is no longer taken as a means of grading learners’ learning, rather it is a means of enhancing learning provided that an appropriate alternative can conducted. Among various alternative to assessment, formative assessment can be a platform for rendering various types of feedback to facilitate and enhance learning. To verify this acclaimed conjecture, ninety Iranian male EFL learners divided into two experimental and one control groups that the former two groups received two different types of feedback namely assessment-based metalinguistic feedback, and assessment-based explicit correction, while the control group received conventional instruction in a conversation course, respectively. One-way ANOVA and multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) of the collected data revealed outperformance by the metalinguistic feedback group over the control one, while the control group outperformed those who received explicit correction feedback. Along with the statistical data, monitoring the trend of classroom atmosphere revealed effectiveness of assessment-based intervention, though the room is suggested to be open for further investigation.

The two main characteristics of phraseological expressions, fixation and idiomaticity, not only can make the speaker who learns a language have difficulty in understanding the meaning, but also for native speakers, since the context in which they are used not always facilitate the translation. the expressions that are considered as a cultural and idiomatical characteristic of any languages and societies are not only an exception but they are a sum example of this kind of languages and cultures discrepancies. Meanwhile we sometimes observe that despite of cultural, geographical and languages discrepancies there are similitudes in some of the expressions and their usage. Therefore, this work focuses from the formal and semantic point of view in the comparative study of some daily used Spanish expressions and their equivalents in Farsi; The purpose of this comparison is to observe the differences and similarities in the way of making phraseological expressions in both languages.

This study was to look for the interaction effect of cultural intelligence and cultural identity on Iranian EFL learners’ use of English address terms. Therefore, 52 participants were divided into high and low cultural intelligence and cultural identity groups. Further, the participants took part in the study of the relationship between the constituent parts of CQ and English address terms. They were required to complete L1 Cultural identity questionnaire, Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) and test of English address terms. The results indicated no interaction effect of cultural intelligence and cultural identity on the use of English address terms. Moreover, the four components of cultural intelligence were proved insignificant in relation English address terms. The findings can inform of imminent obliterating L1 cultural identity among EFL learners. Broaching the subjects such as globalization and English linguicism, the study calls for the need for further inquiries to revise already established findings such as the role of home culture, L1 and attitudes towards target culture in EFL domain.

Teacher cognition and language education are important in general and also important in terms of language teacher education in particular. The purpose of this study was to investigate the English teacher education program and its effect on the cognition of novice/experienced English language teachers in Iran. The authors employed purposeful sampling to select 150 participants from five Farhangian University Branches in Iran. The researchers constructed and validated a computerized cognition questionnaire, suggesting there was a significant difference between the novice teachers' beliefs before and after instruction. However, the results of Paired-Samples t-test demonstrated no statistically significant difference between the experienced teachers' beliefs. The instructional material was the centralized content for all English language teachers studying at Farhangian university in Iran. An analysis of findings also indicated there was a significant difference between novice and experienced teachers’ knowledge after instruction. The present study may have some compelling implications for English Language and teacher educators, material developers, and syllabus designers in Iranian programs.

There has been a dearth of research on the EFL teachers’ cognition related to knowledge base and self-efficacy. This study investigated the relationship between teacher knowledge base and teacher self-efficacy and investigated whether English teachers’ experience can make a difference in affecting their sense of efficacy and knowledge base. By means of two multiple-choice Likert-type questionnaires, the data were collected from 160 Iranian EFL teachers. The participants were assigned into two groups including experienced and novice groups. Having the participants’ responses coded and then analyzed using the Spearman rank correlation coefficient and Mann-Whitney U test, it was found that teacher knowledge base noticeably predicted teacher self-efficacy and that the experienced group outperformed the novice group with respect to both teacher self-efficacy and teacher knowledge base. The current study highlighted the positive role of experience in the EFL teachers’ cognitions and practices in the Iranian context.