Iranian Journal of English for Academic Purposes
Volume:6 Issue: 1, Autumn 2017

The main purpose of the present exploration was to see if EAP syllabuses have been developed based on reading comprehension needs of undergraduate students. To this end, 656 undergraduate students, 75 graduate students, 150 post-graduate students, 75 content teachers and 30 EAP teachers of fifteen randomly selected academic disciplines filled in a needs analysis questionnaire. To triangulate the quantitative data, open ended questions, informal conversation, classroom observation and content analysis of the syllabuses were implemented. The results showed that all of reading comprehension needs were considered either ‘important’ or ‘very important’ and there were statistically significant differences among sub-skills and strategies of reading comprehension needs. Classroom observations showed that EAP classes in reality do not cater for undergraduates reading comprehension needs restricted to text translation and mother-tongue equivalents of general and specific words. More importantly, it was found that EAP syllabuses have not been fully developed based on reading comprehension needs of undergraduate students. Implications and suggestions for redesigning EAP syllabuses are discussed.

Listening comprehension plays a significant role in developing foreign language learning and it can be considered as a useful skill to gain sufficient comprehensible input. The current research sought to explore the effectiveness of using reactive/ performance versus intensive one on Iranian intermediate English learners’ listening comprehension ability. It was carried out at Kish English Language Institute in Tehran among 60 intermediate female learners with the age range of 10-19 through a quasi-experimental research design. The participants were assigned into two groups. First, the pretest was administered to each group. The test was taken from the book ‘Four Corners’. Then, one group was exposed to intensive performance and the other group received reactive performance. After ten sessions, a post-test that was the parallel form of the pretest, was administrated to the both groups. Finally, the data were analysed using an independent and paired samples t-tests. Results showed that teaching listening based on intensive performance had a significant effect on learners’ listening comprehension. The findings may have some useful implications for language teachers.

Teaching grammar has always been a problematic area of language teaching. While teachers spend a great deal of time and energy to teach, the students are not eager to learn as they find it a real chore. This study compared two kinds of activities for teaching grammar: games and traditional exercises. It sought to discover the effect of games on the students’ grammatical accuracy. For this purpose, 61 students of Nikshahr High School for Gifted Students were chosen to participate in the study. They were assigned to two groups: control and experimental. Prior to the study, all the subjects were given the Nelson Proficiency Test to ensure they were homogenous in terms of language proficiency. Then, the experimental group was set to use grammar games in the practice phase of their classes, while the control group practiced through traditional repetition, fill in the blanks, or multiple-choice exercises. Following that, to measure the effect of the treatment, the subjects were post-tested for grammatical accuracy. Then a series of paired- and independent-samples t-tests were conducted to evaluate the hypothesis of the study. The results indicated that there was no significant difference between the two groups although the experimental group had a small advantage over the control group.

Teaching experience exerts a remarkable influence on instruction quality. The present study explores the role teaching experience plays in EFL university instructors’ self-assessment (SA) accuracy and its congruence with students’ assessment of it. Furthermore, it delves into the instructors’ perceptions of how their SA of instructional effectiveness is altered as they obtain experience in their career. To this end, 106 EFL instructors’ SA of their instructional effectiveness was compared to that of their 630 students. To this end, two versions of a questionnaire were administered to the instructors and their students. The findings suggest that the highly experienced (Hex, with over 21 years of experience) instructors’ SA, unlike their relatively less experienced colleagues, i.e. less experienced (Lex, with 1-10 years of experience), and moderately experienced (Mex, with 11-20 years of experience), significantly diverges from their students’ assessment. The statements of thirty-three interviewed instructors shed more light on the reasons behind such divergence besides the probable causes of instructional effectiveness erosion among Hex instructors. They blamed the students’ and instructors’ getting no education on accurate evaluation of teaching, adverse conditions dominating the higher education such as lack of standard hiring and evaluation system, job-burn-out and bias. The findings of this research can potentially contribute to EFL university instructor assessment, professional development, and education.

Thesis acknowledgement is a written genre in which MA graduate students offer their gratitude to individuals, who have contributed to the completion of their study. The aim of the current study was to examine the thesis acknowledgements written by Iranian MA students in the field of Persian Language Teaching to Non-Persian Speakers (Amouzeshe Zaban e Farsi be Kharejian, AZFA) and TEFL in terms of their generic structures, linguistic choice, preferred authorial subject, and acknowledges. To this end, 41 (20 in AZFA and 21 in TEFL) thesis acknowledgement texts were selected. The corpus was analyzed with reference to Hyland’s (2004) generic structure pattern, Hyland and Tse’s (2004) linguistic choice framework, and Yang’s (2012) category of the acknowledges and subject types. The results showed that, on the whole, Hyland’s (2004) three-tier structure has been employed in both disciplines. However, five other moves/steps were discovered throughout this study, namely, praising God and His Prophet (PBUH), thanking God, blessing, closing/signing off. In both disciplines, the most acknowledged individuals were advisors. Both groups selected the first-person subject “I” to extend their thanks. Besides, both groups consented in using “nominalization” pattern as the linguistic realization of their gratitude. Although the texts analyzed demonstrated variations in the texts, the fixed conventions of theses genre systems suggest that teachers can help their students by raising their awareness of these conventions and showing them how to best construct their academic identity. Finally, additional studies are needed to complement this research.

EFL learners may advocate the desire to have a fulfilling experience while doing tasks rather than focus solely on finishing them. However, learner's perspectives have been virtually ignored in the classroom task implementation. Thus, the current study attempted to explore the perceptions of Iranian EFL learners towards listening pre-tasks in motivational and cognitive strategies instruction as a possible way to improve the quality of listening tasks experience. To this end, seventy-three EFL learners were divided into an experimental group (n= 37) who received both motivational and cognitive strategies instruction and a control group (n= 36) who received no strategies instruction. The data for the study were collected by means of a self-report task evaluation questionnaire, which assessed the participants’ subjective experience based on six subscales: interest/enjoyment, perceived competence, value/usefulness, effort/importance, felt pressure/tension and perceived choice during task-based activities of the listening comprehension. The data were enriched with the participants’ written comments, which were later content analyzed. Results indicate that the experimental group had more significant levels of positive experience related to the listening tasks than the control group. The findings of the study could be indicative of the efficacy of pre-task strategies instruction in addressing both motivational and cognitive aspects of listening pre-tasks and of how motivation and cognition interact to give shape to the unique subjective experience of EFL learners.

There is little understanding of the processes and means involved in teacher learning. Further research is needed to better understand what happens when teachers learn. Therefore, using sociocultural theory (SCT) as a theoretical framework, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teacher learning was documented and examined. To achieve this goal, an in-depth description of nine in-service EAP teacher's experience as they professionally learned was provided. The participating teachers’ learning was traced from an analysis of their current cognitions on EAP towards reaching a deeper understanding of the issues as mediated during dialogical interactions. Constant comparative analysis was used to analyze the data collected through observation, recordings and field notes. The findings showed that reaching an expert’s understanding involved the processes of externalizing current cognitions, verbalizing emerging understanding and full transformation in the individual’s thinking. Mediational moves (means of learning) were found to be contingent on teacher-learners’ learning needs. ‘Narrating’, ‘judgmental speech’ and ‘externalization’ were shown to provide space for using the potential of ‘speech’ and ‘others’. The findings of this study might promise some implications for teacher education.

This experimental study investigated the learners’ integrative acquisition of obligatory overt subjects and subject-verb clause agreement in English as an L2. In L1 acquisition research, correlations between superficially unrelated linguistic phenomena are analyzed in terms of integrative effects. For instance, in English L1 acquisition, there is evidence for an integrative appearance of subject-verb clause agreement and the decrease of incorrect null subjects. The developmental connection between these two specifications in L1 acquisition has been interpreted as setting the syntactic properties of the same cluster. Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994, 2013) have claimed that the acquisition of subject-verb agreement and non-pro-drop in adult L2 learners developmentally coincide in the same way as it does in child L1 learners. This is taken to indicate that UG parameters are fully accessible to adult L2 learners. Thus, the present research reported on Reaction-Time (RT) experiments investigating subject-verb clause agreement and obligatory subjects in 30 Persian learners of English in three proficiency levels, each level consisting of five early starters and five late starters. Our main finding was that the two phenomena do not covary in the Persian learners of English as L2 indicating that specifications of subject-verb clause agreement and obligatory subjects are acquired separately from one another, rather than through integrative resetting. Finally, it is suggested that L2 learners should be explicitly exposed to all parametric features and individual evidence of a syntactic cluster in the second language context.