Research in English Language Pedagogy
Volume:2 Issue: 1, Summer-Autumn 2014

Reading is a cognitive activity involving skills, strategies, attentional resources, knowledge resources and their integration. The reader’s role is to decode the written symbols to allow for the recovery of information from long-term memory to construct a plausible interpretation of the writer’s message. Various number of reading models have been proposed by researchers among which some focus on motivational and emotional aspects of reading. Others highlight the cognitive aspects of reading. In this study, the models characterizing reading in terms of cognitive aspects are revieweded, and different viewpoints on the reading process are described. This may help EFL/ESL teachers to improve their understanding of the reading process, update their perspectives on teaching reading tasks which in turn might result in more efficient learning by not putting too much cognitively demanding reading tasks on EFL/ESL learners.

This study identifies and analyses the common errors in writing skill of the first year students of Azad University of South Tehran Branch in relation to their first language (L1), the type of high school they graduated, and their exposure to media and technology in order to learn English. It also determines the categories in which the errors are committed (content, organisation/discourse, vocabulary, mechanics, or syntax) and whether or not there is a significant difference in the percentage of errors committed and these categories. Participants of this study are 190 first year students that are asked to write an essay. An error analysis model adapted from Brown (2001) and Gayeta (2002) is then used to evaluate the essay writings in terms of content, organisation, vocabulary, mechanics, and syntax or language use. The results of the study show that the students have greater difficulties in organisation, content, and vocabulary and experience less difficulties in mechanics and syntax.

Resilience as a psychological emotional mechanism is employed by the individuals when they are in stressful irritating situations to be able to resume their previous productive mental activities. It is a vital coping activity when students go through upsetting events, psychological breakdowns, academic failures, suffocating educational atmospheres, and undemocratic teaching techniques. The essential elements of such a construct can be diverse based upon a whole prism of cultural specificities. The crux of the matter is that resilience is immensely influenced by social parameters and significant others who are in interaction with the students. The objective of this study is to investigate the predictive relationship between perceived social support (social support of family, significant others, and friends) and resilience in English language learners. To this end, 200 EFL learners studying at university level participated in the study. The data were gathered through two questionnaires and multiple regression analysis was run as a statistical procedure to analyze the data. The results of the study indicated that social support of family, significant others, and friends significantly predicted resilience. The implications of this study pointed to the importance of significant others, and social support from teachers, family and friends in providing EFL learners with effective copying skills manifested as resilience in confrontation with unwelcoming stressful tasks and challenges in the process of language learning.

The present study examined the effect of genre-based tasks on EFL learner's speaking performance and probed whether genre-based tasks may empower EFL learners to perform better on speaking tests. A further concern of the study was to explore whether the effect of genre-based tasks on speaking ability of EFL learners varied across different age groups, i.e. teenagers (13-16 years old) and young adults (24-27 years old). To this end, some generic based consciousness-raising tasks (CRT) were adapted from the model proposed by Benedict (2006) to develop control of a genre used as the treatment procedures. Two different speaking tests of different genres (e.g. recount, report, review, etc.), used as pretest and posttest, were administered to 120 senior university students majoring in English language translation. The results indicated that consciousness-raising tasks significantly affected EFL learner's speaking performance. However, the effect of generic-based CRTs did not vary across different age groups. Overall, the findings provided empirical support for the facilitative effect of generic-based consciousness-raising tasks on speaking performance of EFL learners. The findings may promise implications for EFL speaking syllabuses and provide guidelines to designers to accommodate the insights derived from the genre-based instruction perspective.

Writing has always been considered an important literacy skill for foreign/second language learners. The Internet provides such unique applications for the writing skill as weblogs, wikis, and social networking websites. Up to now researchers have put their focus on the learners’ performances in the traditional paper and pencil environment or wikis and blogs it is time to also consider learners’ performances in the social networking websites. In this respect the purposes of the present study were to (a) to identify the most frequent Iranian learners’ errors in the virtual environment of social networking websites, and (b) compare the learners’ performances in the traditional and virtual environments. With respect to the requirements of the research questions, this study had two phases of data collection. For the first phase, the researchers selected 30 Iranians, male and female, aged 18 to 21 from one of the social networking websites and collected a 3200-word corpus from among their comments and wall posts. All of the learners were students of Computer Engineering and IT. For the second phase of the study, another 3200-word corpus were collected from 30 Iranians, male and female, aged 18 to 21, who were studying Computer Engineering and IT at Sheikhbahaee University. They were asked to write an essay on an assigned topic. The analysis of the results revealed that three most Iranian participants’ errors were verb forms, diction, and prepositions in the virtual environment. Based on the results of the t-test, Mann-Whitney, and Chi-square tests interesting similarities and differences were observed within and between error groups in each corpus.

Conversations contain spontaneous use of routine formulas which lets speaker sinteract with each other to express opinions. Gambits, as one of these formulas, act as an opening remark and help speakers to maintain the smooth flow of an everyday conversation. The lack of mastery of using gambits in maintaining the conversation leads to breakdowns in speaking. This paper aimedat comparingthe use of different categories of gambitsby native speakers of English and Persian. Toachieve this end, a corpus of 40 hours from Persian Native Speakers (PNSs) and English Native Speakers (ENSs) with an equal number of participants was selected through recordings of conversations from different TV Channels. Following the literature, the frequency of gambit tokens was counted and their functions were classified. Chi-square test revealed significant differences between PNSs and ENSs regarding the occurrences of gambit categories. The findings of this study can have implications for language learners and practitioners in the field. The present research demonstrates to language learners the need for learning gambit expressions as elements to improve the quality of their speaking and also to use the language in meaningful interaction with others.

This study aimed at investigating the effect of graphic organizer strategy on improving Iranian EFL learners’ vocabulary learning. Fifty students participated in this study which lasted for one academic semester. The students were divided into two groups: one experimental group in which students were taught new vocabulary items through graphic organizers in form of clusters and pictures, and one control group whose students were taught the same items through traditional instruction. At the beginning of the program, the researchers conducted Cambridge Mover Tests in order to assure the homogeneity of the students’ proficiency level. A pretest was subsequently administered on learners’ vocabulary knowledge. Then the intervention commenced. At the end of the sessions, one posttest was conducted for measuring effectiveness of the treatment. Then the researchers analyzed the gathered data. Because there were two groups in this study, the researcher used t-test for analysis, paired t-test for comparing the results within groups, and independent t-test for comparing the results between groups. The results showed that graphic organizers were indeed conducive to L2 vocabulary learning by the learners.

This study scrutinized the interaction between linguistic and strategic variables in reading comprehension test performance of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, the interaction among the participants’ reading comprehension test performance, use of test-taking strategies, and level of language proficiency was analyzed. The participants comprised 286 students who answered a reading comprehension test and a test-taking strategy questionnaire. In addition, 25 students participated in a retrospective interview at the end of the study and described their strategic processes of test taking. The findings manifested a significant interaction among the use of test-taking strategies, level of reading proficiency, and test performance of the examinees. The more proficient test takers used the strategies more frequently than did the less proficient test takers. The qualitative findings also confirmed the quantitative findings and revealed the underlying nonlinguistic reasons for the differences in the frequency and type of the strategies used by the test takers. The findings reflected that the observed scores did not manifest true ability of language learners, and true score should be calculated with regard to nonlinguistic variables, particularlytest-taking strategies. The findings provide empirical support for Bachman’s classical true score measurement theory and Bachman’s framework for the factors affecting test performance.