فهرست مطالب

Applied Research on English Language
Volume:6 Issue: 3, Jul 2017

  • تاریخ انتشار: 1396/04/05
  • تعداد عناوین: 6
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  • Azar Najafi Marboyeh, Seyyed Ayatolla Razmjoo Pages 267-290
    The complexity of self-regulatory strategies has been challenging to educational researchers who seek to find proper interventions that benefit students and teachers. This study has employed the Self-Regulatory Strategy Development (SRSD) model of instruction to help students monitor, evaluate and revise their writing. SRSD would be beneficial for adult students with learning disabilities in the procedure of essay writing. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as a cognitive-behavioral dysregulation is a consequence of deficits in self-regulatory process. Many students with learning disorders such as ADHD have trouble in the mechanics and process of writing. The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of SRSD on the essay writing of EFL undergraduate students. This study tried to evaluate the effects of SRSD intervention on the essay writing of ADHD and NON-ADHD students. To fulfill the mentioned objectives, 126 EFL undergraduate students who enrolled in essay writing course at Tehran Azad University participated in this study. The results indicated that SRSD instruction had a significant effect on the essay writing of the EFL undergraduate students. Likewise, ADHD students could achieve a significant improvement after receiving SRSD intervention.
    Keywords: Attention Deficiency Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), self-regulation, Self-Regulatory ýStrategy Development (SRSD), Essay Writing
  • Gholamreza Zarei, Bahareh Toluei Pages 291-318
    This classroom-based study sets out to study the relationships that EFL learners would form in peer responses in an EFL writing class. It examines Storch’s (2002a) patterns of peer interaction when intermediate learners are paired with partners of different L2 proficiency levels. To discover the factors that could affect the nature of peer interactions, at first a proficiency test of TOEFL was administered and thus the participants were distinguished based on their scores, into the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. Further, the participants were asked to choose a partner and review each other’s writing in pair while being audio recorded. To examine learners’ behaviors from the perspective of participants involved, they were interviewed individually after the recording session. As the focus was on intermediate partnership, the data of 12 intermediate students (i.e. 6 pairs) interacting with an advanced, intermediate or beginner partner were analyzed. The findings showed that although proficiency levels narrowly affected the participants’ performances in peer responses, they did not determine them. The study revealed that it is not just the actual proficiency levels but the relationships that learners form, the roles that they adopt, and their partner’s behaviors as the factors which shape the dyadic talk. It was further found that the partners’ roles are shaped by their positioning in relation to their peers and the issues on which learners focus during their engagement in the task.
    Keywords: Peer Response, Patterns of Interaction, Collaborative learning, Proficiency Level, Writing
  • Rasoul Mohammad Hosseinpur, Reza Bagheri Nevisi Pages 319-338
    Individual learner differences play an integral role in second language acquisition and interested researchers and practitioners cannot get a full appreciation of second language learning if they ignore these significant variables. This study investigated how willingness to communicate (WTC), learner subjectivity, and anxiety in learning the L2 correlate with Iranian students’ English pragmatic knowledge. To this end, a total of 140 participants received instruction on request strategy types and their internal and external modification devices for seven weeks through consciousness-raising tasks. The data were obtained through WTC questionnaire, learner subjectivity questionnaire, foreign language classroom anxiety scale, and discourse completion test. The findings indicated that WTC and learner subjectivity correlated positively with the participants’ L2 pragmatic competence. However, no relationship was observed between the learners’ anxiety and their pragmatic achievement. The results suggest that some personal characteristics such as WTC and learner subjectivity are significant contributors to success in acquiring L2 pragmatic knowledge.
    Keywords: Willingness to communicate, learner subjectivity, anxiety, request, pragmatic competence
  • Akbar Hesabi, Zahra Amirian, Javad Nazari Pages 339-362
    The present study investigates the implantation of political science terminology approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL) in the Hamshahri corpus made up of news text from Hamshahri newspaper and their acceptability among MA students of English translation studies (ETS), English literature (EL), and Political science (PS). To conduct this research the frequencies of the political terms approved by the APLL with their competing terms were compiled from the corpus. For analyzing another group of terms without competing terms, 90 MA students were purposively selected from the abovementioned majors. Accordingly, a 60-item 5-point Likert Scale questionnaire (including 60 political terms) along with an open-ended question were administered. The implantation coefficients (IC) of the first group of the terms with competing terms indicate that the factors such as conciseness and derivative capabilities result in higher IC. The descriptive results indicated that around two third of the ETS and EL students agree with the APLL-approved political science terms, while less than half of the PS students accept these neologisms. Moreover, the Chi-Square test (value of 92.000, p= 0.000
    Keywords: APLL (Academy of Persian Language, Literature), Acceptability, Neologism, ýTerminology, Implantation
  • Seyyed Mohammad Ali Soozandehfar, Rahman Sahragard Pages 363-386
    Reconciliating the logics of Post-method Era, Critical Pedagogy, and Sociocultural Theory in its conceptual framework, this study postulated Iranian EFL teachers’ socio-pedagogical identity as comprising conformity, criticality, and conformity-criticality mediation in order to explore and model the different aspects of Iranian EFL teachers’ “transformative teaching self,” probably contributing to their pedagogical ZPD and sociocultural identity development. To this end, Systematic Reflexive Constructivist Grounded Theory was utilized as the methodology of this 63-participant study managing both the data collection procedures, i.e. interview, focus group, observation, field notes, and document analysis, and the data analysis procedures, i.e. tabulation, open coding, initial memoing, axial coding, intermediate memoing, selective coding, advanced memoing, and theoretical sampling. The findings of the study were put into a putative model, delineating Iranian EFL teachers’ transformative teaching self at its core, which can constantly stimulate the teachers’ three interactive triplex identity types, i.e. conformative, critical, and mediational identities. Finally, this study entailed some implications such as updating teachers’ knowledge of mediational identity, professional retraining about mediation, encouraging teachers to achieve an understanding of their transformative teaching self, and preparing them to be efficient transformative teaching learners and practitioners of the model in this study.
    Keywords: Transformative Teaching Self, Mediational Identity, Critical Identity, Conformative ýIdentity, EFL, Learning Teaching
  • Farahman Farrokhi, Simin Sattarpour Pages 387-410
    This study aimed at examining the main and interaction effects of increased intentional reasoning demands, planning time, and also language learning aptitude on syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) of 226 EFL learners’ performance on letter writing tasks. The participants were first randomly assigned to three experimental groups to be given a task with differing degrees of reasoning demand (low, medium, and high) to each group. Then, within each reasoning group, we reassigned an equal number of high- and low- aptitude learners to Planning and No-planning groups by random stratified sampling. The results revealed that (a) increasing task complexity with regard to the amount of intentional reasoning demands resulted in greater lexical and syntactic complexity and less fluency while no significant effect was observed on accuracy; (b) increasing task complexity through planning time led to significantly lower syntactic complexity and fluency; (c) reasoning demands and planning time had a significant interaction effect on accuracy; and (d) the interaction effect of language aptitude was significant with neither planning nor reasoning factor, but a three-way interaction effect was found on accuracy. The findings are discussed in relation to cognitive task complexity (CTC) models which were the main impetus for this study.
    Keywords: Cognitive Task Complexity (CTC), Planning Time, Intentional Reasoning Demands, ýLanguage Learning Aptitude