Research in English Language Pedagogy
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Summer-Autumn 2013

As oral skills are increasingly seen as a high priority, phonology and pronuncia tion teaching are occupying a central position in the teaching and learning of other languages. The present study is an attempt to shed some light on identifying and exploring the diffculties of Iranian EFL learners in phonology and pronunciation. To achieve this goal, 3 male language learners (elementary, intermediate, and advanced) were randomly selected and were required to articulate 3 different types of material. Having analyzed the data, the study revealed that, first, pronouncing /ɪə/ as /eə/, /æ/ as /e/, /ɑ:/ as /ɔ:/, /ʊ/ as /u:/, /aɪ/ as /ɔɪ/, /ɪ/ as /i:/, /əʊ/ as /ɔ:/, /w/ as /v/, /ð/ as /d/ or /z/, /θ/ as /t/ or /s/ and /ŋ/ as /ng/ and mispronouncing /ɒ/, /ʌ/, /ɜ:/, /ə/, /ɔɪ/, /eə/, /r/ and /aʊ/ are the most frequent errors among Persian-speaking learners. Second, the study indicated that the speed of reading was inappropriate for all the beginning, intermediate, and advanced learners. Keywords: phonology, pronunciation errors, speed of reading.

This study examines the impact of syntactic priming on the production and retention of indirect questions by Iranian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Eighty learners participated in two experiments investigating the impact of syntactic priming on oral production and retention of indirect questions. Experiment 1 showed that priming resulted in increased production of the target structure by the Experimental groups as compared with production by the Control groups. Experiment 2 showed that the rate of production of the target structure remained significantly higher for participants in the Experimental groups one day later.

Framed in a cognitive approach to task-supported L2 vocabulary learning, the present study used a pedagogical approach to investigate the relative effectiveness of tasks with different involvement loads on the vocabulary knowledge of Iranian EFL learners. The goal was to investigate the way that the construct of involvement load is related to the Input Hypothesis (Krashen, 1985) and the Output Hypothesis (Swain, 1996) to see whether the involvement load or input/output-orientation of tasks is the determining factor in task effectiveness. A quasi-experimental design with a pretest-treatment-posttest sequence was used in this study. The participants were 127 university students from four General English classes at Islamic Azad University, Mobarakeh Branch, who were assigned to four instructional groups. Contrary to the predictions of the Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001), the results of the study indicated that involvement load is not the only determining factor in task effectiveness, but input/output-orientation of tasks is also a decisive parameter in task effectiveness. While Laufer and Hulstijn’s proposal is a valuable first step towards building a theory of vocabulary learning, the results of the study indicated that involvement index may well not function independently of the task type, i.e., input or output orientation of a word-focused task.

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of CA- based vs. EA- based error correction on the improvement of the EFL intermediate learners’ Lexical Errors of writing. Forty intermediate students, all males, studying in an English Language Institute in Golpayegan participated in this study. After detecting the participants’ errors, the lexical errors were classified into two categories, EA- based and CA-based errors. The errors which were because of the infuence of L1 on L2 were classified as CA-based errors and the errors which were because of the lack of target language proficiency were classified as EA-based errors. Then, the Wilcoxon Test was used to investigate the effect and the improvement of learners’ lexical errors by EA-based and CA-based error correction. The results of the study showed that there is no significant difference between EA-based and CA- based error correction in the improvement of the participants’ lexical errors.

By the emergence of new approaches to teach a second language, finding a good method to teach idioms has been the main concern of some researchers (e.g., Elena & Moreno, 2001 Cook, Fazly, & Stevenson, 2007). To the researcher›s best knowledge few studies have been conducted to examine the effect of different methods of teaching idioms to EFL learners. As a result, this study was designed to investigate the effect of teaching the etymology of idioms and using movie clips containing idioms, as two methods of teaching, on the quality of L2 learners› idiom learning. Serving this purpose, teaching idioms through their etymologies and movie clips and also learners› attitudes toward s using such methods (through using questionnaires) were taken into consideration. After administering a standard language proficiency test (OPT), 90 intermediate, out of a pile of 154 L2 learners, were selected and assigned to three groups randomly, two experimental (one etymology and one movie clip group) and one control group. All the groups were given two idiom multiple-choice tests, one as the pre-test and the other one as the post-test. In one experimental group (A), idioms were taught together with their etymologies and in the other experimental group (B), the same idioms were taught by displaying movie clips containing the idioms, while the control group (C) followed the traditional class activities using synonyms and antonyms. The results of one-way ANOVA and post hoc tests revealed that the participants in etymology and movie clip groups had better performance in post-test than in pretest. Moreover, the results of Chi-square revealed that, on the whole, L2 learners had positive attitudes towards using etymology and movie clips in idiom learning.

This study was an effort towards examining the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ language proficiency and their metaphorical competence. The were 120 Iranian EFL learners studying at SADR English Language Center within the 19-25 age range. The EFL learners’ English proficiency from Elementary to Advanced which was determined by the OPT. Afterwards, the students were administered a researcher-made test assessing their metaphorical competence. The test consisted of ten concepts with each concept containing metaphors together with their Persian equivalents written in English. Having scores in hand, the researcher was able to see whether there were any significant relationships between the students’ language proficiency and their metaphorical competence. The researcher used the SPSS software package to calculate degree of correlation between participants’ language proficiency and their metaphorical competence. Using the Pearson Correlation Coefficient formula researcher used the statistical procedure of one-way ANOVA to determine the relationship between learners’ metaphorical competence and their language proficiency. The findings revealed that the more proficient the EFL learners in English language, the more metaphorically competent they would be.

The necessity of conducting more studies addressing the development of pragmatic profciency and strong pragmatic awareness for English language learners has made the role of instruction and feedback in teaching pragmatic knowledge of utmost importance. The present study evaluates the relative effectiveness of four types of instruction for teaching some pragmatic markers including topic change markers, mitigation markers, interjections and hybrid basic markers to 75 advanced Iranian learners of English: explicit instruction only, explicit instruction with metalinguistic feedback, structured input instruction only, and structured in- put instruction with metalinguistic feedback. Treatment group performance was compared with control group performance on pre-tests, post-tests and follow-up tests that contained an open-ended discourse completion test and a multiple-choice pragmatic listening comprehension test. The results of the data analysis revealed that students› ability to comprehend and produce pragmatic markers improved significantly in treatment groups and that pragmatic interlanguage is permeable to instruction in EFL settings. However, there were statistically significant differences among the four treatment groups regarding awareness of different pragmatic markers and their appropriate use. These findings give us some useful insight on the teachability of pragmatic markers and the role of instruction and feedback in the classroom to develop pragmatic competence of EFL learners.

In the introductory stages of language learning, students are exposed to parative forms explicitly taught in their textbooks. As Knoch (2004) mthis is accomplished by teaching the comparative form of the adjective generally directly followed by a than clause. This study aimed to compare between native and nonnative material developers with regard to the coverage of comparative forms. In doing so, two corpora of high school changes were developed and juxtaposed. The data were gathered books and converting them into computerized forms. The data by the frequency percentages of the forms and further examined and compared as well. The results revealed that there was a significant difference corpora with regard to the coverage of comparative forms.