UNIVERSITY TEXTBOOKS, RESEARCH AND WRITING
Year:2014 | Volume:18 | Issue:32|Papers Count:6

This is a research on the effectiveness of textbook organization, advance organizer, and instructional objectives on the level of comprehension, study speed, and student's attitude to text. The subjects were 112 students (62 female, 50 male) who were selected through multi-stage cluster sampling from the Humanities colleges of Tehran public universities; each subject was randomly assigned to one of the experimental groups. The research tools include: 1) various texts, 2) comprehension test, 3) a questionnaire on the student's attitude to text. Moreover, the study speed has been calculated and Multivariate Analysis of Variance was applied for data analysis. The findings showed that organized- rather than non-organized texts significantly increased the level of comprehension in students. Moreover, inclusion of instructional objectives and advance organizer in texts that were developed according to organizational criteria increased the level of comprehension in students; but in those texts that lack organizational criteria, the inclusion of these variables cannot offset the negative effect of the text's organizational defect on student learning. As such, applying organizational criteria to the main text, with or without advance organizer and instructional objectives, significantly increased study speed of students, but made no significant difference on the student's attitude to text in any experimental group. Based on the research findings, our main suggestion is that to develop more comprehensible textbooks, the best way is to use organized textbook patterns.

This research uses descriptive-analytic method for the identification, comparison, and analysis of subject trends of the university textbooks for Instructional Technology in Iran and other countries. Using purposive sampling method, 22 Latin books and 22 Persian books have been selected from the list of all the domestic and foreign published books under the title of "instructional design" and "instructional technology". Data gathering has been carried out by a researcher-made checklist, the reliability of which has been verified by a second encoder, and in order to determine its validity, a checklist has been presented to the experts of Instructional Technology, and after being modified according to their viewpoints, the final version of the checklist was at hand. Frequency and average percent have been used in order to describe the collected data. The findings showed that the Persian books often focus on the traditional subjects of Instructional Technology, including the behaviorist models of instructional design and ignore subjects such as: constructivist models; the political, social, philosophical, and psychological foundations; the domain of instructional design and the relevant theories; the instruction theories; technology and performance improvement as a new area. On the contrary, the dominance of constructivist approaches in Latin books reflects that these models followed a historical development in this field. Identification of the gaps in the content of the specialized books of Instructional Technology field will show that authors should pay more attention on the ignored areas and less-studied subject trends, because focusing on those subjects that have gaps in their content will balance the topical distribution of the books and paves the way for the development of the field.

Since Arabic grammar (including both morphology and syntax) is the most important Arabic course for the students of Persian Language and Literature (PLL), and since these students, even at PhD level -in spite of passing 10 units of Arabic grammar in BA and MA levels (respectively in 8 and 2 units) -fail to solve the easiest Arabic grammatical problems, the present research aims to study Arabic grammar teaching to the MA students of PLL through survey method, questionnaire and interview. The research statistical population includes PLL professors and MA students of Tehran University, Allameh Tabataba'i University, and Shahid Beheshti University. This research deals with the quantity of two variables: "quality of the grammar textbook" and "the extent to which proper teaching strategies are applied by the professors". The findings show that from the viewpoint of the most students, the relevant grammar textbook (namely, Sharh Ibn Aqil, means "Account of Ibn Aqil") is of poor quality, and the professors apply proper strategies for teaching grammar at a low level.

The present study examined the undergraduate and graduate TEFL curricula of Iran’s higher education (known as Sarfasl) based on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (BRT) to find out the degree to which levels of BRT were reflected in the curricula. To this end, content analysis was carried out to determine the frequency and proportion of the objectives associated with knowledge and cognitive dimensions. The results revealed that in both undergraduate and graduate curricula, the proportion of lower-order thinking skills (i.e., remember, understand, and apply) was emphasized more than the higher-order ones (i.e., analyze, evaluate, and create) in general. The results also showed that the most frequent objective in terms of knowledge domain was the category of understand in both curricula. With regard to knowledge dimension, conceptual knowledge occurred most often, confirming that acquiring knowledge acts as a benchmark in educational quality assurance for curriculum designers. In addition, we found that the metacognitive-related categories were mostly missing and understand/conceptual category had a dominant role in both curricula. The findings imply that the existing curricula need to be re-structured to reflect critical thinking including both knowledge and cognitive domains to facilitate learner autonomy.  

The selection of an appropriate textbook has an important role in every language teaching program, especially in teaching foreign language programs. There are several ways for textbook selection among which is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach that has been followed by many analysts. Through CDA, instructional texts can be studied in order to help educators discover the ideologies that have been applied in the textbooks. In this regard, the present study analyzed a textbook, titled Today's Persian for Foreign Students (Vol. 2). This research used CDA framework of van Leeuwen (1996) - modified briefly by Yarmohammadi and Seif (1383SH/2004AD) - and van Dijk's CDA framework (2003) to uncover the hidden ideologies of the selected texts. For this purpose, based on these two CDA frameworks the discursive features of the texts were identified. The results of the analyses showed that the author of the textbook used details and descriptions that are features of van Dijk's framework. The frequent application of these features might be attributed to the fact that the book was written for elementary learners; therefore the author of the textbook attempted to avoid complicated statements and concealments, and used sentences that have the intended details and descriptions as much as possible.

The philosophy of research methodology, as a basic concept, has been welcomed by researchers in the recent years, but unfortunately the contribution of academic literature in this emerging area is very poor. A book, under the title of Philosophy of Research Methodology in the Humanities, written by Dr Mohammad Taqi Iman is one of the rich books in this area and has many advantages and innovative points; but there are some deficiencies in its structure and content that the present article aims to introduce for later modifications of the book.The results of this research showed that the concept of "philosophy of research methodology in the humanities" should be clearly described in the introductive section of the book where there is no any word about it. Another deficiency of the book is that there are some discussions that are irrelevant to the philosophy of research methodology in the humanities; this deficiency is the logical output of not precisely defining "the philosophy of methodology". The formal-structural-content edition of the book, specially solving the problems caused by the separation of the main book, and the revision of some charts are other modification suggestions that are proposed by this research.