TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE QUARTERL (JOURNAL OF TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS)
Year:2012 | Volume:4 | Issue:1 (66/4)|Papers Count:7

This study aimed to investigate how Iranian EFL learners performed in producing sentences containing idioms and whether they had any problems in producing such sentences. This query, subsequently, raised the question of whether idioms influenced the participants’ grammaticality judgment on idiom-containing sentences. For this purpose, firstly, the writings of 24 learners were investigated for a period of one term and the problematic features of idioms were detected; proportionately, grammatical errors outnumbered the others. Secondly, 35 participants were tested on a 40-item grammaticality judgment test containing 10 items for each sentence type – with-idiom grammatical, with-idiom ungrammatical, without idiom grammatical, and without-idiom ungrammatical sentences. Comparing the mean scores and the results of the paired-samples t tests indicated that idiomaticity might influence the grammaticality judgment of EFL learners. Some implications of the research results are provided at the end.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the mental representation of cognate and no cognate translation pairs in languages with different scripts to test the prediction of dual lexicon model (Golan, Forster, & Frost, 1997). Two groups of Persian speaking English language learners were tested on cognate and no cognate translation pairs in Persian-English and English-Persian directions with lexical decision task through masked priming. The findings of the study showed a high level of priming only for cognates with L1 primes. This supports dual lexicon model in the sense that it confirms the role of orthography in establishing shared lexical entries for cognates. No cognates showed a different pattern from what is predicted by this model.

The present study examined email communication practices of two groups of students in Iran and the United States to uncover the probable differences between Iranian and American email communication norms. The study also aimed at investigating how power distance in academic centers influences students’ choices of communication strategies in email writing. The use of two politeness strategies namely “indirectness” and “message length” and some common politeness conventions including opening and closing protocols were observed in Iranian and American emails. The findings showed that both Iranian and American students’ choices of opening and closing protocols alter as the students’ institutional distance from the person to whom they write changes. Also, differences were found in the use of politeness strategies in American and Iranian email messages. The study concluded that Iranian students probably resort to their L1 social and cultural norms in their email communication, particularly, in their status equal communication.

This study was an attempt to investigate whether teaching critical reading strategies had any significant effect on intermediate EFL learners’ vocabulary retention. To fulfill the purpose of this study, 72 male and female students within the age range of 17 to 32 years studying at Farzan and Farzanegan language schools in Tehran at intermediate level were selected from a total number of 114 participants based on their performance on a piloted PET (2009) and a piloted teacher-made vocabulary recognition test and assigned to the experimental and control groups of 36 participants each. The same content (eight reading texts) was taught to both groups throughout the 19-session treatment with the only difference that the experimental group was taught critical reading strategies while in the control group the common comprehension-based approach was applied. At the end of the instruction, the piloted vocabulary retention post-test parallel to the vocabulary pre-test was administered to the participants of both groups after an interval of two weeks. Finally, the mean scores of both groups on the post-test were compared through an independent samples t-test which led to the rejection of the null hypothesis. Thus, teaching critical reading strategies proved to have a significant effect on intermediate EFL learners’ vocabulary retention.

The present study investigated the potential of implementing reading strategy instruction in raising learner readers' awareness of reading strategies, extending the range of strategies they employed and enhancing their reading comprehension ability. To conduct the study, 90 female pre university students majoring in Natural Sciences were selected based on a convenient sampling procedure. After the students' existing strategy awareness and use were determined, the researchers started to teach them reading comprehension strategies explicitly. During this period of instruction, the students' strategy use was improved and reviewed at regular intervals through review exercises and interviews. To collect the necessary data, two types of instruments were employed, a reading comprehension test and two questionnaires. A group of 53 students (experimental) was taught to employ reading comprehension strategies in reading some English texts during a period of 15 sessions while the other group of 37 students (control) was taught reading comprehension traditionally. The findings of the study pointed to the problematic nature of reading strategy instruction. While strategy training appeared to raise students' awareness of reading strategies and could encourage strategy use by some students, some strategies were found to be harder to be acquired. Moreover, the reading strategy instruction was not able to enhance the students' reading performance significantly based on the results of a reading comprehension test given to the participants at the end of the program.

This study was an attempt to explore the role that the increased perceptual saliency of L2 input features or output flaws and hereby promoting L2 learners’ noticing (through planned instructional activities) can play in the learners’ use of correct English intonation patterns. The participants were 80 Iranian EFL students attending four intact classes, two low-intermediate and two upper-intermediate levels, in a language institute in Shahrekord. The classes at each level were assigned to control and experimental groups. The experimental groups received the noticing-enhancing instruction while listening to native speakers' English audio-recorded on a CD and through in-class intonation assessment tasks, repeated activation of intonation patterns in both L2 input and output, metalinguistic explanations, picture descriptions, and interactive role-playings. An English native-speaker instructor was then hired to rate the learners’ audio-recorded data at both pretest and posttest times. The results of the statistical data analysis demonstrated that both the ‘noticing groups’ achieved significant improvement from their pretests to their posttests. Complementary gain score analysis indicated that the attainment of the lower-level group was relatively more than that of the higher-level group, perhaps due to the fact that they initially had more room for improvement. It is finally discussed that selective attention, or noticing, can influence the processing of the commonly neglected aspects of L2 input and thus leads to more learning. The findings also suggest that L2 practitioners include in their pedagogy activities that aim to increase the prominence or saliency of such intrinsic features of L2 input and communication in order to make them available for processing and internalization.

This study intends to evaluate Interchange series (2005), which are still fundamental course books in the EFL curriculum settings, in terms of learning objectives in Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (2001) to see which levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy were more emphasized in these course books. For this purpose, the contents of Interchange textbooks were codified based on a coding scheme designed by the researchers. The coding scheme was based on Bloom's Revised Taxonomy of learning objectives. The reliability of the coding scheme was also tested through two kinds of reliability analysis, namely, inter-coder and intra-coder reliability. The data were then analyzed and the frequencies and percentages of occurrence of different learning objectives were calculated. The results of the study revealed that Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS), the three low levels in Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, were the most prevalent learning levels in these books. Moreover, a significant difference was also found among the course books in their inclusion of different levels of learning objectives. The other result of this study was the total absence of metacognitive knowledge. All in all, it was found that Interchange series cannot make learners critical thinkers. As a final point, some implications for teachers and course book/text book developers are recommended.