Teaching English Language
Volume:9 Issue: 23, Spring and Summer 2015

Research in academic writing has revealed a strong tendency on the part of writers to interactively communicate their stance with their readers. This study targets the stance component of writer-reader interaction by integrating Hyland’s (2005b) and Hyland and Tse’s (2005) frameworks to investigate psychology and sociology English research articles; the former for lexical stance markers and the latter for grammatical evaluative that construction. The corpus included 100 English research articles published during 2012-2014, 50 from each field, yielding a total number of 922,400 words. The data were first analyzed by AntConc (Anthony, 2014) and, to ensure maximum reliability, a crosscheck was carried out by the researchers to discard the anomalies. Moreover, chi-square was run to compare the results. The results suggested remarkable similarities and significant differences between those disciplines. Based on the findings, some implications are drawn with plausible applicability in academic writing and EAP syllabus design. Finally, suggestions are put forward for future research.

Prompted by the interaction hypothesis and focusonform instruction, corrective feedback has received much attention in recent years within the interactionist framework. This study investigated the effects of three types of written corrective feedback (i.e., recast without saliency, recast with saliency, and metalinguistic feedback) on Iranian high school EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy of two structures in English: conditional sentences and relative clauses. To this end, four intact classes, comprising 104 low-intermediate Iranian high school EFL learners, were selected and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The three experimental groups received recasts without saliency, recast with saliency, and metalinguistic feedback in written picturedescription tasks/activities. Grammaticality judgment tests were used as the instruments to collect data on the participants’ grammatical accuracy of the two structures in a pretest-posttest control group design. ANCOVA and MANOVA showed that using written corrective feedback significantly improved the participants’ grammatical gains in the experimental groups. Moreover, metalinguistic and recast with saliency feedback (i.e., explicit feedback) was more effective than the recast without saliency feedback (i.e., implicit feedback).Furthermore, there was a significant differential effect of metalinguistic feedback for the type of grammatical structure. The study concludes with several pedagogical implications.

Mobile-game (m-game)-enhanced learning offers beneficiaries a modern and attractive window of opportunity to practice and learn language skills and sub skills. Through grafting m-games onto the blended module of second language (L2) vocabulary teaching, this study endeavored to help educators to see if an m-game-enhanced didactic platform is applicable for L2 teaching and assessment. One-hundred fifty two females and males from four classes at Ahvaz Jundishpur University of Medicine were selected through purposive sampling to participate in this study. To embrace triangulation, data were aggregated via of formative and summative assessments of the participant's performance, attitude questionnaire, as well as a semi-structured interview. After participating in Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT), the participants answered the preresearch questionnaire. Afterwards, for a period of an 18 blended-session course, they were taught the materials by their instructors inside the classroom and then practiced them through the m-games individually or collectively in dyads in the extramural setting. At the end of the course, participants took part in summative tests of English Vocabulary Recognition and Recall (EVRR) followed by the interview with the instructors. For data analysis, descriptive statistics as well as Olkin and Finn, Spearman correlation, and paired samples t-test were run. Descriptive and inferential analyses showed the tendency of the participants and instructors towards collective m-game-enhanced practicing and the prediction power of formative assessment ensued from it on the one hand and accordingly the statistically significant effect of the manner of m-gaming on the anticipatory power of the formative assessment on the other. As a consequence, the findings underscored the urgent need for collaboration in the process of mgame-enhanced L2 vocabulary learning and assessment.

The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between conceptions of linguistic politeness and data collection preferences. Respectively, the study tried to design and validate a measure of Conception of Linguistic Politeness(CLP) based on Scollon and Scollon’s (1995) model as well as a measure of Data Collection Preferences (DCP). To this end, a total number of 502 individuals completed the CLP scale, and 199 participants filled out the DCP scale.The construct validity of the scales was checked using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) method.The results of the scales indicated that, the participants of the study tend to use deference politeness systemand answer the implicit items more than the explicit ones in research. Furthermore, the relationship between the two scales suggested that the more polite Iranians’ linguistic conceptions get, the more they prefer to answer the implicit items in research. In the end, the results were discussed and the implications were presented.

This study's main purpose was to elicit speaking strategies employed by Iranian Learners of English across proficiency whilst they noticed a gap / hole in theirinter language repertoire amid a conversation compensating for their lack of fluent speaking ability. Therefore, initially 30 EFL learners, at different levels of proficiency, participated in the first phase of the study. Based on the EFL learner's elicited viewpoints, both via group and one-on-one interviews, a 25-item speaking strategy questionnaire was developed and subsequently distributed amongst 156 EFL learners to fill out. In order to decide on a subset of frequent responses and eliminate the redundant ones, factor analysis was applied and 6 components were extracted. The components fell on a continuum of noticing the gap, noticing the hole and noticing the gap/hole strategies. This representation unfolded speaking gap filler strategies. In addition One-wayKruskalWallis was run in order to determine the effect of proficiency levels onspeaking strategy use. The outcome revealed a significant difference onlanguage strategy use across proficiency.

The rise of sociocultural theory has pushed up the value of dynamic assessment as one of the alternatives to traditional testing. The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners’ self-assessment and self-rating of their writing ability and the effect of dynamicassessment-based course on their accuracy, and (b) the interrelationships among teacher rating, self-assessment, and self-rating in the writing performance of twenty two engineering students taking a writing course as part of a general English course. Conducting descriptive statistics, correlational analyses, and t-tests revealed that the participants overrated their writing ability as measured against teacher rating before their exposure to the dynamic-assessment-based course. While they got close to each other after dynamic assessment and high correlations among all participants’ self-rating, self-assessment, and teacher ratings proved the impact of dynamic assessment. The results suggest that dynamic assessment could help Iranian EFL learners to get a better awareness of their criteria for writing evaluation, and subsequently they become more accurate in assessing their own writing ability, and this is a step forward in education.

The present study evaluated five current international ELT series regarding inclusion of grammar and vocabulary consciousness raising activities. Drawing upon Willis and Willis (1996) and Graves and Taffe (2007), a Likert-scale questionnaire was developed and validated which was completed by 90 Iranian EFL teachers and 170 Iranian EFL students, forty of whom (20 teachers and 20 students) also sat an interview. The results of inferential statistics (i.e. Independent Samples t-test and Chi-square analysis) revealed there was no significant difference between the responses of the teachers and students in this respect. That is, the results of the questionnaire combined with content analysis of the interviews and subjective evaluation of the researchers indicated although the ELT series incorporated different kinds of grammar and vocabulary activities, they did not include some of the major grammar and vocabulary consciousness raising activities (e.g., making generalizations, cross-referencing, reconstructing, discussing word choices, researching about vocabularies, etc.).