Iranian Journal of English for Academic Purposes
Volume:5 Issue: 2, Summer 2016

The present study sought to investigate the effect of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) on upper-intermediate EFL learners’ writing ability. Thirty-two EFL learners were selected based on their scores on a placement test and were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. In addition to the placement test, a five-paragraph essay writing test was administered to assess the participants’ writing ability through the use of a standardized rubric consistingof five categories of critical response, development of ideas, structure of response, word choice, and mechanics.The three-stage treatment which was based on the frameworks of Wallace (1992), Fairclough (1989) and Ivanic and Simpson (1992) was offered to the experimental group in twelve sessions. The result of independent samples t-tests did not show any significant effectof the treatmenton the participants’ overall writing ability; however, when the categories were considered separately, the result was statistically significant in terms of critical response. The major implication of this study is for writing instructors who need to consider critical attitudes of the EFL learners as an important factor in their instruction.

The primary foundation of teacher evaluation is establishing standards for assessing the optimal characteristics of qualified teachers. The present study aimed at exploring standards of professional competence of adult-level Iranian EFL teachers in the private sector and developing a questionnaire to assess their professional competence. To this end, initially, the members of the professional community including teacher trainers, supervisors, teacher educators, and teachers themselves were selected and interviewed to set standards through adapting TESOL (2003) standards of professional EFL teachers. Content analysis of the interviews showed that the members of the professional community recognized 38 performance indicators out of 65 performance indicators suggested by TESOL (2003) as appropriate, inclusive, and necessary to evaluate Iranian in-service EFL teacher's professional competences in the private sector. Then, a self-assessment questionnaire was designed to evaluate the professional competence of Iranian EFL teachers in the private sector. The questionnaire was administered to 344 EFL teachers in order to examine its reliability and construct validity. The results indicated that the aforementioned questionnaire is a valid and reliable measure of the professional competence of Iranian EFL teachers in the private sector. Researchers hope the emerged standards and the newly-developed instrument would be eventually implemented at national level to secure consistency in EFL teachers’ quality assurance in the private sector.

Practicum is a significant component of teacher education which links theory to practice and prepares student teachers for their job. The purpose of the courses, as defined within the Curriculum of Teacher Education at Farhangian University, is to prepare student teachers for their teaching career by observing and analyzing the real situation at schools and relating it to their theoretical findings. The present study was an attempt to conduct a critical needs analysis in which teachers and learners voiced their concerns, problems and needs in practicum courses. It mostly focused on student teachers’ voice since they are the most powerless in this educational setting. It intended to look for distinctive features of the practicum courses (four courses) presented at Farhangian University. To this end, the study investigated the achievement of the course objectives, stated in the curriculum for practicum, and the fulfillment of students’ needs from stakeholders’ perspective. Findings revealed major problems with these courses including (a) lack of trainingin action research, lesson study, critical thinking, and reflection skills for all members of practicum, (b) insufficiency of flexibility in teaching methods, resources and materials used by cooperating teachers at schools to act as a role model for student teachers, (c) lack of cooperation between schools and university, and (d) lack of proper supervision by teacher educators, to name a few. Findings of the study would raise TEFL curriculum developers, teacher educators, and cooperating teachers’ awareness of student teachers’ needs in practicum courses.

Taking the position that writing can be an important skill to foster knowledge building pedagogy, this article explores vocabulary as a supportive tool for this purpose. Having this in mind, a compilation of conceptually loaded vocabularies pertaining to seven discourse communities was developed, two of which were given to a group of L2 writers to investigate the implications of phraseology for content richness in foreign language writing. Sixty-six essays composed by 33 language learners preparing for two tests of English for General Academic Purposes, namely IELTS, and TOEFL, were investigated before and after receiving these concept-carrying lexical items. The study revealed that novice writers of academic essays could enhance the quality of essay content with the help of vocabularies which carry concepts and ideas.Retrospective interviews using stimulated recalls indicated that EFL writers had virtually no access to vocabularies needed for presenting most of concepts and believed that these lexical items would help them write better. So practical are these collocations for both making up content deficiency in academic writing and meanwhile assisting learners in broadening their topical knowledge scholarship that syllabus designers and EFL instructors can utilize them for higher pedagogical yields.

Epistemic modality devices are believed to be one of the prominent characteristics of research articles as the commonly used genre among the academic community members. Considering the importance of such devices in producing and comprehending scientific discourse, this study aimed to cross–culturally and cross-linguistically investigate epistemic modality markers as an important subcategory of hedges in linguistics research articles. To this end, three corpora of research articles written by Anglo-American and Iranian writers in English and Iranian writers in Persian were examined. The frequency occurrences of the markers were counted functionally. The data were analyzed using Mann-Whitney tests. The findings revealed that there were significant differences between all three corpora with respect to the total relative frequency of epistemic modality markers. That is, native English texts contained the highest proportion and native Persian texts included the lowest proportion of epistemic modality marker, and non-native English texts were placed in between. Furthermore, the statistical analysis of the data for each category of epistemic modality markers showed that the text groups differed significantly in containing some specific categories, but not the others. The possible interpretations of the results as well as some implications of the study have been discussed.

The present exploratory mixed methods study aimedto develop a scale for assessing critical thinking (CT) ability of Iranian EFL learners. The study wasconducted in three phases. In phase one, the features of CT components were examined in the writingsof 120 participants. A holistic and an analytic scale were developed based on their performance in exploiting the components of CT and the features of CT components.In the second phase, the language learner's new writing samples (N=110) were analyzed to examine to what extent they could employ the CT components.Also, the reliability and validity of the newly developed scale was calculated. Factor analysis revealed that the scale measured the four constructs of clarity, fairness-breadth, depth- significance-logicalness, and accuracy-precision-relevance.In the final phase, the researchers implemented the newly developed scale on a new group of learners (N=33)to observe the degree the scale couldassess the CT ability of language learners.

The current study is an attempt to investigate the impact of decision-making (selecting and matching) tasks and production (creation of sentences and completion of sentences) tasks on the collocational knowledge of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, sixty EFL learners were divided into two experimental (decision-making and production) groups. To determine the effects of the tasks, the participants in the two groups were given the collocation pre-test aiming at examining their existing knowledge of collocation. After being exposed to the treatment, they were given the collocation post-test to measure the learners’ gained knowledge. The results of the paired-samples t-test revealed that both groups had manifested significant enhancement in their knowledge of collocation after the treatment. Furthermore the results of the independent-samples t-test indicated that the production group performed better than decision-making group. In other words, production tasks were more effective in increasing the collocational knowledge of the participants.

The current study attempted to investigate the effect of Systemic-Theoretical Instruction (STI) on English-language learners’ acquisition of the concepts of modal verbs through exploiting metaphors. To this end, the effect of the main treatment of the study, i.e. Concept-Based Instruction (CBI) was investigated through conceptual metaphors, in two gender (male vs. female) and language proficiency (Elementary vs. Intermediate) groups. To inspect the acquisition of modality concepts, the participants were given a pretest and a posttest. The results were statistically analyzed through independent sample t-test and Pearson Correlation Coefficient. The results of the inspection in learning modality revealed that participants in the Experimental, Intermediate and Female groups outperformed their counterparts in the Control group in the modal test. Further, the investigation of cognitive awareness on the concepts of modality and its development revealed that the learners’ definitions on the concepts of English modal verbs were theoretically functional before STI, while they were semantically based after STI.