Teaching English Language
Volume:6 Issue: 18, Autumn and Winter 2012

The purpose of this study was to investigate some core issues of ELT curriculum implementation in Iran undertaken by policymakers in practice, i.e. teachers. The core issues include: the efficiency of communication channels between ELT planners and implementers, the extent to which ELT textbooks are believed to meet students’ cognitive and affective needs, the criteria English teachers are evaluated with and by whom, the extent teachers follow officially-approved teaching and testing practices, how ongoing professional support is provided to the teachers, and if context-based feedback of implementers is processed by planners. To collect data, structured interviewswere conducted with 22 head teachers and open-ended questionnaires were administered to 672 teachers in 13 provinces. Results indicate that problems pertaining to evaluation policy, methods and techniques policy, in service training policy, and communication policy at practice level widen the gap between ELT planners’ rhetoric and implementers’ practice. It is argued that as long as curriculum implementers are not involved in setting ELT policies, the distance between these two groups will keep on growing.

The major objective of this study was to construct and validate an English Language Teacher Prejudice Scale (ELTPS). To this end, 180 English language teachers in private language institutes in Mashhad, Iran were asked to participate in this study. Rasch model was employed to substantiate the construct validity of the scale. The results of analyses exhibited that the whole scale was uni-dimensional and only one item misfitted. Rating scale statistics showed that the middle category of ‘No idea’ was redundant and should be removed from the scale. Some suggestions are made to fully validate the scale and use it in language education.

Drawing on language teacher cognition research and using a mix-method research design, the present study tried to offer a conceptual framework for the pedagogical knowledge base in English Language Teaching (ELT). The aim was to see what categories of knowledge Iranian English language teachers use in their teaching. Stimulated recall interviews were used with 6 practicing EFL teachers to map out the categories and units of pedagogical knowledge that they drew upon in their teaching practices. At the same time, semi-structured interviews were carried out with 10 Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and 10 experienced EFL teachers to probe into their judgments and opinions regarding the important domains of pedagogical knowledge for English language teachers. Overall, the findings pointed to a 7 component model of pedagogical knowledge in ELT. The components of this tentative model included Knowledge of Language, Knowledge of Teaching, Knowledge of Learning, Knowledge of Classroom Management, Knowledge of Students, Knowledge of Culture, and Knowledge of Context. The implications of these findings for teacher education programs are discussed at the end.

The main concern of the present study was to investigate the effects of content, formal, and linguistic schema-building activity types on EFL learners’ listening and reading comprehension. To this end, 60 Elementary learners in four groups of 15 members each participated in this study. Three groups acted as experimental groups and received content, formal, and linguistic schema-building activities, and one group acted as control group, receiving no schema- building treatment. Two separate one-way ANOVA procedures were used to analyze the participants’ scores on the listening and reading comprehension posttests. The result revealed that although there were no significant differences among the effects of schema-building activity types on both listening and reading, the experimental groups outperformed the control group participants. The findings may have implications for EFL learners and teachers.

Corrective feedback studies have proved more useful when coupled with a consideration of personality type factors. This study compared the effects of two different corrective feedback (CF) treatments on 60 Iranian learners’ use of past tense. Also, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) was administered to determine the participants’ personality types, i.e., introversion and extraversion. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups of prompt, recast, and control with approximately equal number of students from each personality type. In the two feedback groups, teachers consistently provided corrective feedback, i.e., recasts and prompts, in response to participants’ errors duringthe activities, whereas the control group only faced the placebo. Comparisons of the group means from both the immediate and delayed post-tests through a two-way ANOVA revealed that the CF conditions had a positive effect on the participants’ grammatical accuracy. However, no significant relationship was seen for personality types and the interaction factor. Post-hoc analyses for both immediate and delayed tests revealed more significant gains by the prompt group as compared to the recast and the control group. The recast group also proved significantly better than the control group.

Production of speech acts and the strategies akin to their production by foreign language learners are key to understanding the development of interlanguage pragmatics. The speech act of apology has received great attention in interlanguage pragmatic studies due to its frequent use in spoken communication and its pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic variations across languages and cultures. This study aimed to determine what strategies are used by EFL learners in the Iranian context to produce the speech act of apology. Data for the study were elicited through a written discourse completion task from two groups of lower- and higher-proficiency learners studying English at a language center. Consistent with many previous findings, the results revealed that when apologizing all participants considerably preferred “direct apology strategy” to other strategies. By contrast, the indirect strategies of “offering promise of forbearance” and “expressing concern for the hearer” were used the least frequently. The findings did not substantiate any meaningful effect on the appropriateness of EFL learners’ apologies in terms of their proficiency. This study suggests that (1) there is a gap between L2 learner's linguistic development and their pragmatic development, (2) incidental exposure to speech acts is not sufficient for pragmatic development, and (3) there is a need to increase EFL learner's pragmatic awareness.

Aristotle always wished to provide his interlocutors, and posterity, with an account of how the good person should live, and how society should be structured in order to make such lives possible. The Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, which are among Aristotle's books of practical philosophy, are straightforwardly concerned with such questions. Aristotle believes that a city state should have eudaimonia, happiness, as its goal, and considers the ideal constitution as one in which every citizen achieves eudaimonia. Sir Thomas More's Utopia, also, in its Book 2, gives an account of an ideal state. This essay will putAristotle's Ethics and Politics under close observation and apply Aristotle's philosophical attitude expressed in these two works to Utopia in order to figure out: (a) are the Utopians happy in Aristotelian terms? (b) is the Utopian constitution an ideal one—in which every citizen achieves eudaimonia?