Teaching English as a Second Language Quarterly
Volume:7 Issue: 3, Autumn 2015

The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context.The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating unaccusatives were common errors among Iranian English Majors. Level of language proficiency was a significant factor in the learners’ performance at both comprehension and production levels. There was a statistical significant correlation between the participants’ performances in the causativization and passivization errors with non-alternating verbs.The obtained results made it clear that language learners encounter serious problems in the acquisition of the verbs, and that more exposure to language input, explicit teaching of the verbs structures, and practice in different contexts can improve the situation.

English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) uses the results of needs analysis for curriculum development and materials production. ESAP courses should be based on students’ academic needs. Consequently, the present study investigated the English language needs of Iranian undergraduate students of Law. Participants included 218 undergraduate students, 33 graduate students, and 10 content teachers of Law (for short, content teachers) from three universities in Karaj, Iran. Data were collected quantitatively, using researcher-made questionnaires. IBM SPSS (version 22) was used to analyze the data. Statistical tests including Mann Whitney U and Kruskall Wallis were used to analyze the data. The results of questionnaire analyses showed that “general vocabulary”, “technical vocabulary”, and “using general bilingual English-to-Persian dictionaries” were regarded as the most important target needs, and “grammar”, “pronunciation”, and “guessing the meaning of the words from suffixes and prefixes” were perceived as the present needs of BA students. The results of data analyses revealed statistically significant differences among the responses of BA students, MA students, and content teachers regarding target needs. Follow-up post hoc analyses showed that the differences lay between BA students and content teachers as well as between MA students and content teachers. Further analysis of data showed statistically significant differences of present needs between BA students and content teachers. The findings of this study suggest that the development of ESAP courses for BA students of law should draw on more general English of BA students of law, enabling them to develop reading skills to fully understand legal academic English texts.

The present study probed 250 English as foreign language (EFL) learner's de-motivation by investigating its role in student's burnout, i.e., a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in situations that are emotionally demanding or stressful. It also sought to examine the indirect impact of de-motivation and direct impact of burnout on language achievement among Iranian English learners. To do so, a two-phase study was designed. The first phase comprised an array of different steps to validate the Persian version of the 'de-motivation scale' designed by Sakai and Kichuki (2009). It measures six constructs: teachers, characteristics of classes, experiences of failure, class environment, class materials, and lack of interest. In the second phase, the researchers utilized the validated questionnaire along with the student version of Maslach Burnout Inventory (Schaufeli et al., 2002) to explore the relationship among student's de-motivation, their burnout, and achievement. The latter scale measures three dimensions of burnout, namely, emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and academic inefficacy. The results of reliability estimates and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated acceptable reliability and validity indices of the Persian version of 'demotivation scale'. The findings of the second phase yielded via structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that student's de-motivation positively predicted student's burnout with 'class material's and 'lack of interest' having the highest influence. Burnout in turn was found to negatively influence language achievement.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of two strategies of explicit teaching of economic terms on learner's vocabulary learning and retention. In the first explicit strategy, known as 'etymological elaboration', the focus was on presenting conceptual metaphors through 'identify-the-source' tasks, that is, providing the learners with the source domains underlying the metaphors, i.e., the literal meaning of the concepts. In the second explicit method, using 'identify-the-meaning' tasks, the metaphors were instructed by means of the context-based definitions. To be sure if there is any effect for the explicit teaching of metaphors or not, a third group was selected to function as the control group. In this group, the economic texts were taught in the traditional way, that is, by translating the texts into the learner's first language, i.e., Persian. The participants were three intact groups of university students majoring in Economics at Isfahan University, Isfahan, Iran. The results of the study demonstrated that the learners in Experimental Group 1 outperformed those in Experimental Group 2 and Control Group in vocabulary and retention tests. The study concluded that making students acquainted with the literal meaning of the conceptual metaphors, i.e., their underlying source domains will help them in learning and retention of technical economic terms.

Over the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in the study of interactional metadiscourse markers in different contexts. However, not much research has been conducted about discourse of journal author guidelines, especially the use of meta-discourse markers in this genre. Therefore, this corpus-based study had three main aims: 1) to delve deep into the types, frequencies and functions of stance and engagement markers based on Fu’s (2012) interactional metadiscourse taxonomy, 2) to compare the distribution of stance and engagement features in journal author guidelines and 3) to investigate whether there is a significant difference between macro/micro interactional metadiscourse markers in journal author guidelines. A corpus of 280 author guidelines produced by seven leading international academic publishers in eight academic sub-disciplines in the humanities and social sciences was compiled and analyzed. The results of the analysis showed that engagement features (reader-oriented) enjoyed higher frequency of use in journal author guidelines. Moreover, the difference between the frequency of stance and engagement features was statistically significant. Furthermore, differences reported between macro and micro interactional metadiscourse were statistically significant. The extensive use of macro interactional metadiscourse markers indicated a high degree of interactionality of journal author guidelines. The present study gives us considerable insight into the dialogic nature of a totally neglected academic genre.

The present study was an attempt to examine how questioning was treated by EFL instructors and learners at a private language center in Yasouj, Iran. This study also intended to explore the types of questions posed by the EFL instructors and learners in different course levels and to scrutinize the extent to which the instructors’ classroom behaviors were geared towards enhancing the learners’ capacity to raise English questions. To accomplish such objectives, classes, from the same institute and with different levels were selected to be carefully observed. The researchers utilized a checklist of question types along with observation field notes to obtain a numeric summary and an in-depth description of the participants’ intended behaviors in the classrooms. The analysis of the numeric data through descriptive statistics and one way ANOVA along with content analysis of the observational data indicated that the instructors teaching in classes with lower proficiency levels practiced questioning more substantially and, unlike their peers teaching in higher levels, mainly resorted to display questions to achieve their pedagogical objectives. Seldom did the learners, regardless of their proficiency levels, venture to phrase English questions, and often appeared anxious and resorted to their first language when they were to pose questions. Further, the instructors’ classroom behaviors hardly intended to enhance the learners’ capacity in asking English questions. This study bears the implications of the findings for language instructors and learners in the context of EFL teaching and learning.