Teaching English Language
Volume:8 Issue: 22, Autumn and Winter 2014

Dynamic Assessment (DA) is the integration of assessment and instruction into a unified activity which derives from Vygotsky‟s (1978) theory of the ZPD. An important strand of research that will solidify a central place for DA in the L2 domain is computerized DA (C-DA) that can be used to assess a large number of students simultaneously while observing the psychometric properties of testing. The present study aimed at designing and validating a test battery of C-DA of grammar for EFL learners named Computerized Dynamic Grammar Test (abbreviated as CDGT). The software reports three scores for a test taker: a non-mediated score, a mediated score and a learning potential score. A pool of 122 homogeneous BA and MA students from different universities participated in this study. The results obtained from the test takers‟ scores showed that C-DA is effective in helping students increase their performance and promote their learning development. Data analysis also indicated that C-DA is more effective for low achievers than for high achievers. A major implication of the study is that C-DA can be incorporated in informal and formal testing situations.

Among the prevailing channels for L2 teachers to develop professionally, in-service teacher education programs (INSTEPs), or «continuing professional development» (Johnson, 2004, p. 652), are echoed in the literature. The present study probed Iranian L2 teachers’ perceptions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of the current INSTEPs held by the Ministry of Education. More specifically, the researchers examined various aspects of English teacher development, including the teachers’ appraisal of the current teacher evaluation scheme and the alternatives adopted by the teachers in order to update their pedagogic content and support knowledge. Data were collected through a questionnaire developed for the purposes of this study and administered to a representative sample of Iranian L2 teachers (n = 1234) who participated in some formal teacher development events in Iran. The results indicated that self-reliance was practiced by the teachers and they highlighted the pressing need for improving their own general English proficiency. Further, the teachers voiced their dissatisfaction with the existing teacher evaluation system and worked for some alternatives. The findings may promise implications for planning and practice of the current Iranian INSTEPs and provide clues for further research directions.

This paper reports a study that examined the effect of web-based and collaborative corrective feedback (CF) on the use of English articles in the written mode. Sixty four Iranian learners of English were placed in the web-based CF, the collaborative CF, and the control group. During two treatment sessions, all participants were required to narrate their accounts of reading 2 fables in a fixed time span. The targeted forms used incorrectly in the narration of the web-based CF group were specified and sent back to participants as a hyperlink to a concordance file designed for this study. Later, the group was required to exploit concordances for self-correction using an online concordance website. Participants in the collaborative CF group revised their narrations collaboratively. The control group, however, received no CF. Results of repeated measures ANOVAs run on the data obtained revealed that although both web-based and collaborative CF improved learners'' L2 writing in terms of English articles significantly, web-based CF showed some superiority over collaborative CF. The findings also suggested, though implicitly, that participants assumed more responsibility and independence in revising their own writing as a result of the CFs given in this study.

As a follow-up to our previous study (i.e., Ahmadi, Ghafar Samar, & Yazdani moghaddam, 2011), we utilized dictogloss (DIG) as an output-based task and consciousness raising (CR) as an input-based task to explore the interaction between the effects of these tasks and EFL learners‟ multiple intelligences (MI) on the development of requestive downgraders. Prior to the experiment, 110 Iranian EFL learners were asked to participate in the study to help the researchers develop the instruments, i.e., a recognition and a production test. Also, 43 American native English speakers were employed to provide the baseline data for the development of the recognition test and the instructional materials. To carry out the study, the researchers matched 60 subjects in two groups based on their scores on the Oxford Placement Test (2004) and their inclination to interpersonal or linguistic intelligence. The groups were then randomly assigned to instructional conditions, namely the DIG and CR tasks. These tasks were utilized to implement the instructional treatment in eight sessions. The results revealed no significant differences between the participants in the DIG and CR tasks on the production and recognition measures. Due to the initial differences on the recognition measure, the pretest-posttest mean differences revealed that the DIG task was more effective in the enhancement of learners‟ recognition ability. While the effects of MI were not significant on pragmatic measures, a significant interaction in favor of learners with an inclination to interpersonal and linguistic intelligences was respectively observed for the participants in the DIG and CR tasks.

Since the 1970s, self-assessment in education has gained increasing currency and has been studied in a considerable number of quantitative studies. In line with this theoretical and experimental background, this study aimed at investigating the effect of self assessment on intermediate and upper-intermediate language learners‟ speaking fluency and accuracy in Iran. Thirty pre-intermediate and thirty upper-intermediate students participated in the study in a pretest-posttest control/experimental group design. The data were analyzed through ANCOVA test. The results indicated that self-assessment positively affected participants‟ speaking accuracy and fluency. Also, self-assessment had a greater effect on upper-intermediate learners than pre-intermediate ones. Moreover, speaking fluency benefitted more from self-assessment than speaking accuracy did. The findings can be applied by both EFL learners and teachers. Self-assessment impact on EFL learners‟ fluency and accuracy.

The study of subjectivity is especially relevant to psychoanalysis since it avoids social and political qualifications, and focuses on the structure of the narrative voice. In this respect, Kristeva‟s innovative psychoanalytic notion of melancholia, as an incapacitating desire not to let go of the Real m/Other, is applied in the present article to the ontological impasse of the impoverished figure of Samuel Beckett‟s The Unnamable (1958, 2003). It can be formulated as an ontological shade lingering within this precarious state, cast between life and death, and seeking the unnamable Thing which would be the real silence, corresponding at last to a voice of his own, the voice of voicelessness. Kristeva‟s solution for this suicidal predicament,adopted in this study, is an aesthetic resort to the poetical dimension of language retrieving traces of the dead m/Other, and the fundamental function of denegation at once affirming and rejecting the m/Other. A semiotic analysis of The Unnamable, considering, among others, the pronouns and commas will reveal a latent materiality in the text: formal derangement. We propose that, through the metaphorical dialectic of the semiotic process and the symbolicrepresentation, the unnamable-reader achieves, on a trans-symbolic scale, a melancholy sublime, the jouissance of formlessness before the unpresentable presence of the m/Other. This will yield our interpretation of the unnamable as an idealized subject-in-process (sujet-en-process) in terms of a pure flow of words: novel as mere „going on.‟ Therefore, the study presented here is an attempt to bring together the Beckettian destitution of the novel and Kristeva‟s black sun through a jouissant dynamism of signs undermining the laws of the very language in which they are continuously generated.