Applied Research on English Language
Volume:4 Issue: 2, Aug 2015

This study reports on the development of a reading comprehension course based on Critical Pedagogy principles, and the result of its application on EFL learner's reading comprehension competence, their motivation to read English materials, their democratic attitudes towards their English classrooms, and also their attitudes towards the critical course. The present study is, in fact, a step forward to scrutinize the outcomes of the beginning phases of a dissertation which was intended to develop a tentative model of Critical Pedagogy for English language teaching practice in Iran. Sixty one sophomore students (in two groups) were the participants of the present study. One group was randomly assigned to the control group (n=31) who received instruction based on the conventional method of teaching reading comprehension practiced in most reading comprehension courses in Iran, while the other one made the experimental group (n=30) who received instruction based on the Critical Pedagogy course. Results of the statistical analyses comparing the participant's performance on pre- and post-tests regarding reading comprehension, a questionnaire on motivation, and a democratic attitude questionnaire which were administered before and after the treatment, besides the qualitative data from a semi-structured interview, suggested that despite some problem issues rising while practicing the principles of Critical Pedagogy, the developed course proved to have a significant positive impact on EFL learners’ reading comprehension ability, developing a positive democratic attitude towards their English classroom and also their motivation towards reading English materials. Students’ attitude towards the critical reading comprehension course was also discussed in terms of four emerging themes driven out of the qualitative data analysis. The most important message, however, may be the applicability of Critical Pedagogy principles in Iran, which had been reported by some researchers as impractical.

The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship among three important teacher variables and students’ L2 achievement. To this end, 105 high school EFL teachers from Shiraz and Hamadan were asked to fill out three sets of instruments: the reflective teaching instrument, (Akbari, Behzadpour & Dadvand, 2010), the Attitudes and Beliefs on Classroom Control Inventory (Martin, Yin, & Baldwin, 1998), and the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (Ardasheva & Tretter, 2013). Also, the scores of the English final exams of 2673 third-grade high school students were collected. The results of Pearson Product Moment Correlations revealed that there was a significant correlation between the above-mentioned three teachers’ variables and their students’ L2 achievement. The results also showed a significant difference between male and female teachers in the degree of perceptions of LLSs, while no significant differences were found between the two genders regarding their classroom management orientations and reflection. Moreover, running multiple regression analysis, it was revealed that among the teachers’ variables, reflection was the strongest predicator of students’ L2 achievement. Finally, based on the results of this study, some practical implications for maximizing students’ L2 achievement in English language classrooms are presented.

There has been considerable debate over what the sources of morphological variation in second language acquisition are. From among various hypotheses put forth on the topic, the feature reassembly hypothesis (Lardiere, 2005) assumes that it is the reconfiguration of features in the L2 which causes variation between the performance of natives and non-natives. Acknowledged as one of the most difficult elements of English grammar to be acquired by learners, the article system was the focus of the present study which aimed at attending to the acquisition of that system by Persian learners. This descriptive piece of research focused on how the article system functions in English and Persian, the similarities found across the two languages and the possible sources of difficulty for Persian learners in using English articles as related to their L1. The participants included Persian learners at three levels of grammatical knowledge. A group of English native speakers also took part in the study. A grammaticality judgment test and a translation test were conducted to collect data. Comparisons were made among the four groups, using ANOVAs. Based on the results, it is argued that the observed pattern of article use among Persian speaking learners can be best accounted for by the feature reassembly hypothesis.

Wedding invitations (WIs), as a uniquely socially and culturally constructed genre, provide a distinct opportunity to compare the sociocultural values of different speech communities as reflected in the textual content and organization of the different moves. Students can be exposed to this genre and its different moves using a genre-based pedagogy. Genre-based pedagogy can be used to provide the learners with an opportunity to study well-known genres in their first (L1) and second language (L2) and to be able to observe the common and distinctive moves from a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic perspective. This study was carried out to investigate the wedding invitations in American and Iranian societies through two complementary approaches: genre analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA). One hundred wedding invitation (WI) cards (50 from each society) were collected and analyzed comparatively. The findings from the genre analysis showed that the WIs of the two speech communities enjoyed both similarities and differences in their generic moves. Results of CDA indicated that traditional orientation, religious affiliation, masculine power and educational status were the most influential factors affecting WIs in both societies but the intensity of the effect of these factors were not similar in the two speech communities. The results of this study sheds light on sociocultural forces dominating Iranian and American language communities.

This study examined whether processing ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses (RCs) following a complex determiner phrase (DP) by Persian-speaking learners of L2 English with different proficiency and working memory capacities (WMCs) is affected by semantic priming. The semantic relationship studied was one between the subject/verb of the main clause and one of the DPs in the complex DP to see if, as predicted by Spreading Activation Model, priming one of the DPs affects the L2 learners’ preference. The results of a task using Rapid Serial Visual Processing showed that semantic priming does not affect the choice of the antecedent; rather, the L2 learner's processing is guided by syntactic information. A negative correlation was found between WMC and RC attachment preferences. The findings support the predictions of the chunking hypothesis for L2 learners.

The present meta-analysis was conducted to provide a quantitative measure of the overall effects of task complexity on Chinese EFL learners’ language production. Based on the strict inclusion criteria, 12 primary studies were synthesized according to key features. Eleven of them were meta-analyzed to investigate effects of raising the resource-directing task complexity. Results revealed that (a) there was an assortment of treatments and measures, (b) there was a small to medium positive effect for syntactic complexity (d=0.64) and small effect for lexical complexity (d=0.20), which lends support to the Cognition Hypothesis there was a small negative effect for accuracy (-0.18) and a close to negative effect (0.01) for fluency in writing, which partly confirms Skehan’s Trade-off effects, and (c) task modality (oral or written) did not make a significant difference on the overall effects on complexity and accuracy, while make a significant difference on fluency.