Journal of English Language Teaching and Learning
Volume:8 Issue: 18, Fall-Winter 2016

The prevailing pattern of classroom interaction is a tripartite exchange structure known as IRF (teacher initiation, student response, teacher follow-up/feedback; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). Although it has its own contributions to classroom discourse, it has been criticized on several grounds, particularly for affording minimum learner participation opportunities (Kasper, 2001). An alternative practice has been promoting learner initiation and agency through moving out-of-IRF. However, when the form of interaction is teacher-fronted, IRF becomes the centerpiece and moving out of it tends to be difficult. This paper aims at exploring first what learners need to take initiatives and exercise agency in teacher-fronted interaction, and second how teachers can play a facilitative role in this process. Conversation analytic study of an EFL teacher’s naturally-occurring interaction with learners during a homework review activity demonstrates how the teacher’s extended wait-time practice affords a learner the interactional space needed to initiate a question and voice her locus of trouble. Moreover, the teacher's consistent extended wait-time practice after the learner’s initiation functions as an invitation bid for other learners to orient to the trouble and successfully negotiate it in their learner-learner interaction. Extracts of this study portray learners’ management to drive their own learning.

One of the main ways to acquire unfamiliar words is to make guesses about words meaning. This study investigates the comparative effects of pictorial annotations and morphological instructions on Iranian EFL learners’ lexical inferencing ability. Considering homogeneity issues using PET (Preliminary English Test), the researchers assigned the participants into two experimental and one control groups. All groups took a vocabulary self-report test before the treatment. The treatment contained 6-weeks long reading texts tasks with 40 underlined and boldfaced target words. Groups differed as one experimental group was taught mainly through the annotated pictures technique while the other experimental group through the aid of morphological analysis of unknown words and the control group receiving the traditional root vocabulary learning technique. The results of a one-way analysis of variances (ANOVA) between the self-report vocabulary test and a piloted researcher-made lexical-inferencing post-test revealed no significant difference in performances of morphological instruction group and control group. The results also indicated that the pictorial annotation group significantly outperformed the morphological group on inferring the unfamiliar lexical items. It can be concluded that the outcomes of this study may provide insights to EFL teachers as well as students on how to best approach guessing target words while reading a text.

The present study aimed to examine and compare the impact of teaching economic terms through etymological elaboration with three more conventional methods of vocabulary instruction in ESP courses in Iran, that is, teaching through contextual definitions, L1 translation, and implicit instruction on the learner's general comprehension of economic texts and their understanding of author's opinion. As for general comprehension, the performance of students on the reading comprehension test was not affected by vocabulary instruction method in the four groups. In other words, it seemed that there was no causal relationship between the vocabulary instruction method and general reading comprehension. Regarding author's opinion, the results showed a superiority of etymological elaboration over contextual definition, translation, and implicit instruction.

This study sought to examine the relationship between the use of formative assessment strategies and the Iranian EFL teachers’ sense of self-efficacy. Moreover, this study investigated the relationships and interactions between the EFL teachers’ use of formative assessment strategies, their gender, level of experience, and sense of self-efficacy. This is a descriptive ex post facto design study which employed a three-part questionnaire, including demographic information, teachers’ formative assessment strategies, and teachers’ sense of self-efficacy. In order to collect data, sixty-one EFL teachers, including thirty-one female and thirty male participants who were selected through convenience sampling, completed the questionnaire. Multiple statistical strategies were employed to analyze the research questions of the study. The findings of Pearson’s and Spearman Rho correlation indicated that the EFL teachers’ use of formative assessment strategies was positively correlated with their sense of self-efficacy. However, the results of eta correlation coefficients revealed that there was no statistically significant relationship between the teachers’ implementation of formative assessment strategies and two other variables of gender and level of experience. Finally, the results of a three way factorial Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) evinced that there was no statistically significant interaction between the teachers’ use of formative assessment strategies, teachers’ sense of self-efficacy, their gender, and level of experience. Therefore, when the teachers become more aware of the ways to implement formative assessment strategies to inform instruction, their sense of self-efficacy can increase. This study has some implications in language testing, English pedagogy, and syllabus design and materials development.

The researchers in this study aimed to demonstrate how impossible it could be for a language teacher to take fixed, systematic routes of action in recent Action Research designs. This was instantiated in an L2 (here, English) 'essay writing' course among some Persian speaker university students majoring in Hygiene Sciences (Family and Environment). Evidences regarding individualistic progress of students in 1)selecting a topic for their writing assignments, and 2) initiating talk on their selected topics are discussed to verify how complex it was to undertake the "process" and "catalytic" trustworthiness check of the present study via fixed action plans.

Cross-cultural analyses of speech acts are among the hot topics in contrastive studies and up to now various researchers have explored this very issue. Despite the ample studies in this field, the speech act of congratulation, especially the subject of ‘birthday congratulation’ remains untouched. The study investigates the possible effects of being an Iranian or an American typical Facebook user upon the kind of the category which is drawn upon to send an addressee a birthday congratulation note on Facebook. The data collected are 120 birthday congratulation notes issued by 60 Iranians and 60 Americans on Facebook. Seven dominant categories emerged from the study namely ‘Illocutionary Force Indicating Device’ (IFID), ‘Blessing Wishes’, ‘Divine Statements’, ‘Poem and Pieces of Literature’, ‘Endearments’, ‘Felling Expressions’ and ‘Compliments’. Moreover, the possible significant differences between the two groups within these categories were explored. The paper concluded that, in five categories, the differences between the two groups proved significant where the two categories ‘IFID’ and ‘Blessing Wishes’ did not show any significant differences.

This study examined the effect of two different authentic topic-familiar rhetorical L2 listening tasks (expository and argumentative) differing in reasoning demand on the listening comprehension scores of a number of Iranian EFL advanced learners. Sixty homogeneous advanced learners were recruited based on their performance on an English Language Proficiency test (Fowler & Coe, 1976). Then they took a researcher-made test of the two rhetorical listening tasks. The results showed statistically insignificant effect of topic-familiar rhetorical listening tasks on the participants’ listening scores. However, learners’ performance on familiar expository tasks was statistically, though not meaningfully, better than their counterparts’ performance on the argumentative tasks. It was also shown that general, vague topic familiarity cannot exclusively help affect listening quality, but it seems different rhetorical listening tasks would expose more cognitive and linguistic complexity demands on the participants’ performance. The main implication would be that Iranian advanced language learners need more precise instruction on different rhetorical tasks in conjunction with elaborated social and cultural background knowledge of topics. In addition, participants’ general proficiency level should be cautiously construed as their proficiency in listening skill, too.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the manifestation of teaching expertise of EFL teachers in Iranian formal educational context. More specifically, it was intended to study how teachers of English in Iranian high schools and General English instructors in a state university manifest features of teaching expertise. The study also compared the expertise features of novice teachers with those of experienced ones in both high schools and university. To achieve these goals, through a qualitative research, 10 high school teachers and 10 university instructors were purposively selected to be observed and interviewed. Each group consisted of 5 novice and 5 experienced teachers. After 2-3 sessions of observation (which functioned as the main source of data) and one session of interview with all participants, an attempt was made to extract cases or instances of expertise in their teaching practice. These instances were later categorized into 6 types of expertise: expertise in management, motivational expertise and providing guidance and feedback, instructional expertise, content knowledge expertise, expertise in making connections between subjects of study, and expertise in dealing with challenges. A table consisting of these expertise types and all those instances or cases of expertise (extracted from the observation reports and also the literature) was designed. The data for each teacher was analyzed closely again and those cases which were present in their teaching practice were checked in the table. The next step was to look carefully at the patterns of expertise in each group of teachers. The analysis of the collected data revealed that teaching expertise was manifested almost similarly in the teaching practice of the four groups of teachers. Three groups i.e. experienced high school teachers, and novice and experienced university instructors exhibited 100% success in at least one type of expertise, namely making connections between subjects of the study. This aspect of expertise in novice high school teachers proved to be just 60%. Experienced university instructors formed the only group who achieved perfect performance (100%) in two types of expertise, namely, content knowledge expertise and expertise in making connections between subjects of study. And novice high school teachers formed the only group who did not achieve perfect performance in any of the teaching expertise types.

The second half of the twentieth century can be called the age of individualization when individual values and differences are recognized and respected. Intelligence is among the various aspects of individual differences which affect education and language learning. As such, the present study aimed at investigating the relationship between Multiple Intelligence and Reading Comprehension Abilities of Iranian EFL learners. For the purpose of study, 117 senior English students were randomly selected. After administering two types of instruments including MIDAS Adults (Shearer, 1996) and Reading Comprehension Section of TOEFL (2005, Longman), the data were collected and analyzed. The results indicated that all types of the learners’ MI profile have significant relationship with the reading comprehension scores and the Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence is the most significant predictor of the learners’ reading comprehension abilities, while Visual-Spatial and Interpersonal Intelligences are the second and third predictors of the learners’ reading comprehension respectively. Furthermore, Intrapersonal and Kinesthetic Intelligences could not predict the reading comprehension of the learners.