Teaching English Language
Volume:9 Issue: 24, Autumn and Winter 2015

Teachers’ capability in shaping learner contributions (SLC), as a part of Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC), has been evidenced to play a key role in opening up precious opportunities for learners’ involvement, and consequently learning. Yet, very few studies to date have explored how teacher education programs (TEPs) can develop teachers’ capability to SLC. To fill up this lacuna, a TEP, founded on the principles of dynamic assessment (DA), was implemented with four EFL teachers serving as participants. In so doing, initially twelve hours of video- and audio-recorded data of the teachers were analyzed to identify the samples in which they missed the opportunity for SLC. Then one-on-one DA sessions were held with each of the teachers, during which the teacher educator tried to assist them to develop a deepened insight into the strategies they adopted to shape their learners’ contributions. In such dialogic context, the feedback was calibrated to create and nurture the zone of proximal teacher development (ZPTD). After instructional sessions, conversation analysis of the teachers'' regular classrooms indicated a rise in the total frequency and variety of the SLC strategies employed. Furthermore, it was found that teachers'' type of development differed greatly from one another. Results are discussed and some pedagogical implications are presented.

Teachers'' professional identity, professional vitality and creativity are three major factors that appear to affect teachers'' professional life in EFL contexts. The main purpose of this study was to scrutinize the network of associations among these three variables and their respective subscales. Participants of this study were 300 Iranian EFL teachers from secondary school. We used teacher''s professional identity questionnaire developed by Beijaard, Verloop, and Vermunt (2000), a modified version of professional vitality; one of the sub-scale of Skovholt Practitioner Professional Resiliency and Self-Care Inventory (2010) and creativity style questionnaire developed by Kumar & Holman (1997), to measure the variables. The results of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis confirmed the hypothesized model of relationships among the study variables. The final model of the network of associations among variables also revealed significant correlations among various subscales of the study. The findings of this study have various implications for language teachers and psycholinguistic researchers.

After the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Applied Linguistics took a social turn and made the sociocultural perspective its primary point of investigation, SLA researchers became more interested in the link between identity (class, culture, race, gender, sexuality, etc.) and language learning. Hence, the present study aimed at identifying the impact of identity aspects on the Iranian learners'' English language achievements of the students of Medicine at Yasuj University of Medical Sciences (YUMS). Likewise, the study attempted to find the impact of demographic factors on language achievement and aspects of identity among Iranian EFL learners. To fulfill the objectives and find answers to the posed questions, a questionnaire representing aspects of identity and consisting of 45 Likert items (personal: 10 items social: 7 items collective: 8 items relational: 10 items special: 10 items) was distributed among 76 language learners majoring in Medicine at YUMS. Both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were run on the data. The results demonstrated no significant relationship between language achievement and the aspects of identity. To be exact, the present paper revealed that none of the identity aspects was a predicting variable for language achievement in the Iranian academic context. Among the demographic factors, only gender could account for two aspects of identity, namely, personal and relational identities. Evidently, the results were local not universal.

While several researchers have studied discourse markers to determine their roles in language skills, still research needs to address these devices in relation to second language learners writing proficiency Hence, the present study had two main goals: identifying the usage of discourse markers used in Iranian writing compositions without instruction, and describing how treatment of discourse markers functions in learners’ writing.. Participants in this study were 60 upper-intermediate and intermediate learners studying English as the second language at Safir, Qazvin branch. Descriptive composition writing was assigned to students to write on the topics, selected by the researchers and based on Fraser''s (1990, 1999) taxonomy of discourse markers. The results indicate that within the explorative section, with the proficiency level rising, the frequency and the type of the discourse markers used subconsciously without the treatment rise. At the same time, the treatment and discourse marker awareness among the learners can be of significant value in both the quality and quantity of discourse markers. Of course, the type of the treatment must be adjusted to the proficiency level of the learners. This is in keeping with the previous research that reported a positive impact of instruction of DMs on success in language writing (Feng, 2010).

Building upon Fairclough''s (1989) stages of critical discourse analysis, i.e. the micro level text (discourse) analysis, and the macro level processing (ideology) and social (power) analyses, the present paper foregrounds some ideological facilitators of institutional power enactment, which are multimodal interruptions of professors in the last parts of M.A viva sessions. These verbal and nonverbal interruptions or discourse types are taken-for-granted by all the academic people, and these beliefs are ideologically held and transferred to others, since they are legitimately and naturally re-produced, though having the form of a coercive power. This paper presents a new understanding of power, by urging that power in the present study is both non-modern and coercive, as opposed to Van Dijk (1996), discussing the features of a modern power as being ''persuasive and manipulative'' rather than ''coercive or incentive.'' The data consisted of four main themes: (1) Verbal & nonverbal commands; (2) Interruptive comments and explanations; (3) Gatekeeping power including (a) Time management, and (b) knowledge management; and (4) Interruptive activities. This paper has implications for applying CDA in higher education and especially in face-to-face oral exams as opposed to blind peer reviews, where the coercive power takes the place of collaboration.

Dynamic Assessment (DA) refers to a range of approaches that incorporate mediation into the assessment procedure (Poehner, 2008). Although DA has been applied to some areas of second language pedagogy, its effect on speaking skill seems as if to be less attended to, hence the present study aims at investigating the effects of this assessment procedure on the Iranian advanced EFL learners speaking skill proficiency. To this end, 40 homogenous advanced EFL learners were divided into three groups. They were assigned to two DA groups and one Non-DA group. As the pretest, the participants of the three groups were interviewed to assess their speaking proficiency. Next, the Non-DA group participants were given specific topics as discussion topics and were required to discuss them in the class without any DA based intervention. The first DA group''s participants were assessed and given the required assistance through interaction based DA procedures, while the second DA group received DA based intervention following Lantolf and Poehner (2011) scale to assess and assist the participants’ speaking proficiency in their discussions. The results of two Matched Samples t-test indicated that: (a) interactionist model of DA had statistically significant positive effect on IranianEFL learners’ speaking ability; (b) interventionist model of DA had statistically significant positive effect on Iranian EFL learners’ speaking ability. Furthermore, the results of ANCOVA indicated that the three groups, namely, interactionist DA, interventionist DA, and non-DA had statistically significant effects on Iranian EFL learners’ speaking ability with the interactionist DA group outperforming. The findings of this study can shed light on the comparative efficacy or inefficiency of the DA based assessment procedures in the realm of foreign language teaching and testing.

Literature abounds with genre analysis studies on different sections of Research Articles in various languages and fields; however, scant attention has been given to Persian articles. Hence, this genre-based study analyzed the rhetorical move structure of conclusion sections in three different disciplines: applied linguistics, psychology, and Persian literature. A corpus with 30 articles from leading international and Persian journals was devised. This corpus was analyzed for the move structure based on Yang and Allison''s (2003) framework. After analyzing each article, the major moves were extracted and the frequencies were calculated and compared. Although the cross-disciplinary and cross‐linguistic analyses unfolded significant variation regarding Move 2, they revealed no marked differences in conclusion sections of the articles on psychology and applied linguistics. However, Persian literature articles displayed more variation, which, in turn, may suggest that in the Parisian articles, writers follow a standard of their own for writing conclusion sections.The study has pedagogical implications for academic writing courses.