IRANIAN JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS (IJAL)
Year:2004 | Volume:7 | Issue:2|Papers Count:5

The focus of the present study is the use of communication strategies in teacher talk in ESL/EFL classrooms. Communication strategies consist of adjustments made by speakers to the formulation of their talk in order to facilitate communication, and these are clearly a potentially important aspect of teacher talk. The study uses a mixed method design to investigate firstly the type and frequency of communication strategies and their patterns of relationship across teachers grouped in terms of language background and teaching institution; and secondly the type and frequency of strategy use in relation to the focus of talk across the different phases of a standard lesson. The participants were three native speaker and six non-native speaker teachers, across three different ESL/EFL instructional settings. The data consist of a total of twenty seven recordings, made up of three lessons with each teacher. The detailed examination of the database revealed that the participant teachers used both conversational modifications and lexical-compensatory strategies in their talk with students. The quantitative analysis showed that the two types of strategy occurred with different frequencies. No important differences were found between NS and NNS teachers. However, significant task-related differences were detected. Finally, a case study of three teachers revealed a relationship between the focus of talk and the incidence of communication strategies across the phases of the analysed lesson. The implications of these results are firstly that communication strategies are indeed a central element of teacher talk; secondly, that lexical-compensatory strategies and meaning negotiation strategies both contribute significantly to the construct; thirdly, that their use is important for both native speaker and non-native speaker teachers; fourthly, that they are used with significantly different frequencies and functions; and finally, that their use is influenced by teaching focus and activity type.

This research set out to examine the ideological import of a) a selection of internationally-distributed ELT textbooks to find out whether a recurrent ideological pattern could be observed in these books and b) the ELT books used in Iranian high schools to see if the ideological import of these books was different from that of the internationally-distributed ELT textbooks. To this end, the theory and procedures of critical discourse analysis (CDA), as expounded by Fairclough (1989), were applied to conversations in these textbooks and three dimensions of meaning - the social relations of textbook characters, their subject positions, and the content of the texts - were categorized and statistically analyzed. The analysis revealed that the internationally-distributed ELT textbooks tend to represent a particular discourse type - the discourse of Western economy and consumer society. Moreover, in the locally-produced ELT materials, due to the absence of certain topics and features, the preparation of the High school books appears to have been influenced by post-revolution norms and standards.

Being unpopular, writing courses tend to attract few students. One reason for this lies in the limitations inherent in traditional "one-shot" form of evaluation. With the dissemination of process studies, a portfolio, an ongoing index of student development, has found its place in composition pedagogy.Congruently, the attractions of technology in classrooms inspired the researcher to incorporate e-mail into an EFL writing class. The present qualitative research aimed at investigating in an electronic fashion the nature of student comments, their reaction to teacher comments, and their views on portfolio use. Twelve Iranian EFL learners doing their writing course with the researcher were required to make computer files of their works to be emailed to the instructor at the end of the study along with their own reflections on them. Descriptive analysis of the portfolios indicated a number of recurring themes, highlighted patterns of student reactions, and was suggestive of a general positive attitude toward portfolio use.

In order to test the effect of discourse organization on reading comprehension, two expository texts having an SPSE (situation- problem solution-evaluation) pattern were adminestered to a group of 30 undergraduate EFL students from Shahid Chamran University of Ahwaz who had been screened from among 100 students. These students had scored 60 and over from a language proficiency test having 75 items. The results of the study confirmed that the subjects had relatively more difficulty in recalling the evaluation and the solution sections, and in particular the details of 'solution', than other sections of the expository texts. It is concluded that in addition to language proficiency, other factors such as voice and cognition which contribute to the organization of text and hence to the comprehensibility of it are essential.

Genre analysis, as concerned with the study of how language is used within a particular setting, or by a particular discourse community, has been in limelight quite recently. The present study seeks to fill a small gap in the literature devoted to abstracts. It aims at examining the construction and tantalization of scholarly abstracts written by native speakers of English, native speakers of Persian as well as native speakers of other languages. Points of difference and similarity between the corpora and members of the discourse community are explored with special reference to such issues as generic organization, personal involvement, and first language interference. The findings indicate that the generic structures prevail across linguistic borders; yet, national proclivities of the disciplinary members also affect their output.