JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDIES
Year:2010 | Volume:1 | Issue:4|Papers Count:8

The present study was conducted to compare the effect of individual and group pre-task planning on EFL learners' accuracy and complexity in speaking. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 60 intermediate female learners at the first grade of high school were chosen by means of a sample Preliminary English Test (PET) and randomly divided into two experimental groups of 30 students, the individual and the group pre-task planning groups which were provided with 15 tasks (personal, decision-making, and narrative tasks) over 16 sessions with the last one devoted to the posttest. The students in both classes were given the same planning time (two, three, and five minutes depending on the task complexity) but in one group, the participants carried out the task individually and in the other, they performed in groups of five. After the treatment, the two groups were given a posttest on a narrative task. After the planning time, all students were asked to discuss the task and the accuracy and complexity of their speech were measured. The results of the Mann-Whitney test indicated that whereas the individual planning group outperformed the group planning group in terms of speaking accuracy, the group planning learners performed significantly better than the individual planners in terms of complexity.

Plagiarism is considered to be a very serious offence in most academic communities, particularly among Western academia. There has been much discussion regarding the influential factors which result in plagiarism, such as ignorance and cultural attitudes. In the case of EFL/ESL students, it has been suggested that acts of plagiarism are often committed because students lack the proficiency to produce the academic discourse necessary to clearly express themselves. The current study was conducted to investigate what Iranian TEFL students consider as plagiarism. To do so, a survey was conducted among fourth-year undergraduate and first-year graduate students of TEFL. The results of the survey suggest that Iranian TEFL students believe direct copying of material to be an academic transgression but tolerate closely paraphrased texts. The study offers the conclusion that although plagiarism occurs frequently in the material submitted by TEFL students mainly in the form of closely paraphrased texts, it is probably due to a lack of understanding of the principles of plagiarism, rather than a deliberate act of deception.

This study aimed at investigating the impact of utilizing CALL on EFL learners' foreign accent reduction. To this end, 62 participants out of 100 undergraduate freshman English students at Islamic Azad University Central Tehran Branch were selected based on a piloted sample PET and a text-to-read. The selected participants were then nonrandomly assigned to an experimental and a control group, each containing 31 participants. The control group followed teacher instruction on pronunciation (Focus on Pronunciation 2 book and its CD). However, the experimental group received pronunciation instruction through CALL including the use of accent reduction software (Pronunciation Power 2) both inside and outside the class and e-learning by means of conducting group chats via Skype, receiving feedback by email, and doing some online exercises to practice pronunciation. Reaching the end of the semester, both groups took a posttest through the speaking section of the PET and a text-to-read. The results of the study revealed that the experimental group significantly performed better on the posttest following the utilization of CALL applications.

Researchers have suggested that interactional feedback which is between teacher and learner during their writing is associated with L2 learning because it prompts learners to notice L2 forms. This paper reports a classroom-based study that investigated the role of feedback in socio-cultural theory. In this study, 12 EFL learners performed on three writing tasks and were provided with a three-stage procedural corrective feedback which started with metalinguistic implicit feedback and moved to metalinguistic implicit-explicit feedback and finally explicit correction by the teacher. Feedback was provided to learners in response to their written problems with past tense forms, subject-verb agreement, and countable and uncountable nouns. Learners' noticing of their written errors was assessed through verbal recall protocols based on their journals. Their attitude towards the procedural feedback was also checked through their reports. The findings suggested that despite being at the same level of proficiency as determined by the placement test of the language school, each learner noticed the errors at one of the three stages of the implicit-explicit feedback based on his/her ZPD.

This study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between EFL teachers' emotional intelligence (EI) and their effectiveness in managing young learners' classrooms. A total of 25 female teachers of Kish Language School in Tehran expressed their willingness to participate in this study and a briefing session was conducted for them. Two sessions of each teacher's classes were observed by two raters who used the Murdoch (2000) checklist to score the effectiveness of each teacher's teaching once their inter-rater reliability had been established. At the end of the two observation sessions, the Bar-On EQ-i was administered to each teacher to test her EI. To find out the relationship between the two variables of this study, that is the teachers' EI and their effectiveness in managing young learners' classrooms, a Pearson correlation was carried out. The result showed that EFL teachers' EI had a significant relationship with their effectiveness in managing young learners' classrooms. Furthermore, a subsequent linear regression analysis also demonstrated that teachers' EI was a significant predictor of their effectiveness in managing young learners' classrooms.

The purpose of the present study was to discover which of the two reading strategies, concept mapping or summarizing, is more effective on ESP learners' reading comprehension of EAP texts. To fulfill the purpose of the study, a sample of 94 undergraduate students of accountancy sat for a standardized sample of Key English Testing (KET). Sixty-two students whose scores fell one standard deviation above and below the sample mean were selected and randomly divided into two equal groups. One group practiced concept mapping and the other group summarizing. A researcher-made reading posttest was finally administered to the students in both groups and the mean rank scores were compared by a Mann-Whitney test. The results led to the rejection of the null hypothesis, indicating that concept mapping had a significantly higher effect on the reading comprehension of EAP texts. The implications of the study for EAP readers and teachers as well as EAP textbook writers are discussed.

The present study adopts the perspective that metacognitive strategy instruction is bound to occur inside the classroom especially on oral tasks. Accordingly, the researchers investigated whether metacognitive strategy instruction prior to oral tasks was more successful than conventional ways in improving EFL learners' oral proficiency. To this end, 56 participants studying in a language school in Tehran were selected based on their performance on the Preliminary English Test, an interview, and the Strategy Inventory of Language Learning (SILL). The participants were assigned into control and experimental groups. The control group practiced oral tasks following a warm-up. The experimental group, however, practiced oral tasks after receiving metacognitive strategy instruction. A MANOVA comparison of the mean ratings of the two groups on the posttest interviews and the posttest SILL demonstrated a significant difference between the oral proficiency and metacognitive strategy use of the two groups. This result indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group leading to the conclusion that instruction on metacognitive strategy use prior to oral tasks had a significantly higher impact on EFL learners' oral proficiency and metacognitive strategy use as compared to the only warm-up preceding oral tasks.

This study was conducted to identify and compare the strategies applied by two native Farsi translators in rendering the culture specific items (CSIs) of a literary text titled Savushun in their English translations. In this study, CSIs refer to the materials, social customs, religious concepts, and traditions available in one language and culture but nonexistent in the other language and culture. Aixela's proposed strategies of translation of CSIs (as cited in Alvarez & Vidal, 1996) were taken as the model of this study and 191 extracted CSIs from the original novel were categorized accordingly. The researchers compared the two translated versions, one of them titled Savushun translated by Ghanoonparvar (1990), and the other one translated by Zand (1991), titled Persian Requiem. The results of the comparison revealed that while the most frequently used strategy by Ghanoonparvar was extra-textual gloss, Zand was keen on using linguistic translation. Furthermore, neither of the translators used a single strategy in rendering CSIs under a specific subcategory and both had different trends towards using conservative or substitutive strategies.