Teaching English Language
Volume:7 Issue: 20, Autumn and Winter 2013

In the present study an attempt was made to focus on pragmatic instruction and feedback as a kind of discriminatory factor. To teach English compliment and compliment responses, this paper evaluated the relative effectiveness of input-based instruction involving 132 Iranian EFL learners at intermediate and advanced levels. The main purpose of the study was to investigate to what extent instruction affected learners’ knowledge and ability to use compliment strategies. Students were divided into three groups: explicit, implicit and control. They were taught common strategies regarding how to compliment and respond to it. Whereas the explicit groups received instruction by means of explicit feedback on the use of appropriate compliments, the implicit groups were provided with instruction plus implicit feedback. The results of the data analysis based on the pre-tests, post-tests and follow up tests including discourse-completion tasks and self-assessment tests indicated that although instruction had a positive effect on the development of students’ socio-pragmatic competence of both explicit and implicit groups, the explicit group did better. The study may have some implications for Effects of instruction on EFL learners’ pragmatic development teaching compliment forms which have been forgotten somehow in EFL classrooms today.

Second language acquisition (SLA) literature is replete with studies exploring the effect of teachers‟ corrective feedback or comments on the improvement of students‟ writing accuracy, with little attention paid to the true nature of the process of revision. This case study was intended to understand the type and nature of revision that writing teachers required students to make to their drafts based on the feedback they were provided. A second aim of the study was to reveal how students evaluated teacher's comments and what problems they faced in revising their writing drafts. A close scrutiny of four university teachers‟ comments on the papers of 32 student-writers reveals that writing teachers provide, to a large extent, common and identical comments which mainly deal with language-bound errors and problems. They hardly seem to expect students to re-examine the text beyond its surface level. In the current study, almost 97 per cent of teachers‟ comments directed students‟ attention to low level skills such as punctuation, spelling and grammatical structure. Teachers‟ comments did not seem to communicate to student writers the meaning of revision anything more than editing or proofreading. The results also indicated that students did not attribute any other meaning to revision than tidying-up or copy-editing. The problems students faced while revising are discussed and some pedagogical implications are offered.

Assessment, as a key component of education, has long been a matter of concern to teachers and it receives even more significance when perceived from the view point of ethics. The combination of the two concepts, i.e. ethical assessment, is difficult to define and complicated to measure. But prior to all these comes how teachers perceive it. The present research reports on a study of English teachers‟ perception of ethical assessment. Following Green, Johnson, Kim, and Pope (2007), 108 English teachers were asked to state their opinions about ethicality or unethicality of 40 prevalent assessment practices classified into seven themes: test preparation, communication about grading, multiple assessment opportunities, test administration, grading practices, confidentiality, and neutrality. The findings suggest that respondents displayed consensus on only two fifth of the scenarios. To delve into the reasoning behind participants‟ choices, 2 participants were interviewed for each scenario and the findings, also, were thematically compared with those reported in literature.

This study explored the relationship between the use of oral communication strategies (OCSs) and multiple intelligence(s) (MI) of Iranian EFL learners. In addition, it investigated what type of intelligence(s) could act as the best predictor of OCSs. To these ends, Nakatani's (2006) Oral Communication Strategy Inventory and Armstrong's (1994) MI Inventory were used to collect data from 120 homogenous intermediate EFL participants selected from a larger sample at Shahrekord and Arak universities. The data were analyzed descriptively and inferentially using correlation and multiple regression procedures. Results showed that among strategies for coping with speaking problems, the participants perceived themselves higher at 'message-abandonment', 'nonverbal', and 'message reduction and alteration' strategies, and among strategies for coping with listening problems, they perceived themselves higher at 'word-oriented' and 'nonverbal' strategies. Also, logical intelligence was the leading intelligence type and musical intelligence was the least common type of intelligence. Moreover, there was a positive relationship between spatial intelligence and OCSs, with the spatial intelligence as the best predictor of the use of OCSs.

This study aimed at uncovering the extent to which individual and collaborative learning and practicing English letter writing via short texting (SMS) affect Iranian student's English letter writing ability. Accordingly, 60 intermediate university students who managed to complete the second stage of a letter writing test (Hulteinus, 2010) were divided into two groups, collaborative and individual, to learn 30 English letter writing features in ten virtual sessions through the medium of short texting; that is, three new notes per session. Using SMS, the first group of learners, divided into 10 triple groups, received the didactic materials from educational center (i.e., intelligent server) and then learned and practiced them collaboratively, while the learners in the second group received the same content from the same channel, but practiced it individually. Finally, the students took part in a test of letter writing, namely, a battery composed of three subtests, the data of which were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics. Also, to study the participant's attitudes about individual or collaborative ways of practicing English through SMS, they were required to answer a Likert type attitude questionnaire. Analyzing learner's performance in the test battery indicated that the learners who practiced learning content (English letter writing notes) with their peers outperformed their counterparts in the second group who learned the materials individually. In addition, although both groups displayed favorable attitudes towards collaborative learning and the application of SMS as a medium, the amount of tendency for mlearning was higher among the learners of the collective group.

Introducing alternative modes of assessment is but one response to the recent call for democratic and ethical language assessment. Yet, despite the recent emphasis in the discourse community and the rise in publication on alternative assessment, these new forms of assessment still need to be explored further. This study is a two-fold attempt: first, to investigate teachers‘ attitudes and beliefs about different aspects of traditional testing and alternative assessment, and second to delve into their ethical orientation and to examine views on language testing apropos of their general ethical viewpoints. A questionnaire was developed and used to collect Iranian EFL teachers‘ views on language testing and ethics in general (N = 153). The results indicated that despite its agreed-upon disadvantages, an obstinate stigmatization and refusal of traditional testing may still seem a practice at odds with the common sense. In fact, until a better proposal can be offered, alternative assessment and traditional testing can best be regarded as supplements rather than substitutes.