Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Volume:4 Issue: 2, Spring 2017

Testing has been so intrinsically bound to today‘s modern life whose foregone consequences are often taken for granted and is accepted widely as unavoidable side effects or sometimes even desired effects of an inevitable social event. The aim of this study is to investigate the aspects of the impact of Iranian B.A. University Entrance Exam on the lifeworld of the students who are about to take it. To this end, the analysis was conducted using Habermas‘s Social Theory. There were 349 fourth-grade students participating in the study from four different provinces including Zanjan, Alborz, Mazandaran and Shiraz. The data was gathered using a researchermade questionnaire and a semi-structured interview with 10 students as well as classroom observation in two subsequent years qualitative and quantitative analyses of data revealed that the exam is regarded as an inevitable social practice by the participants whose life world is exploited and manipulated by the exam as a part of the system. The pressure for result-based accountability placed upon the test takers, on the other hand, leads to creation of some specific norms, provides system control tools, enhances instrumental rationality and establishes the social order of its own. The implications for language testing and teaching are discussed.

Differences in nonnative speakers’ pragmatic performance may lead to serious communication problems. Although previous research has investigated different types of request strategies employed by English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) learners, little is known whether they use different or similar types of request strategies in the faculty context. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate cross-cultural variation in the use of request strategies by EFL/ESL learners to their faculty. To this aim, the request strategies elicited from 38 intermediate Iranian EFL learners in Iran, 24 intermediate ESL learners in England, and 16 British native English-speaking teachers were examined. A discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit the EFL/ESL learners’ request strategies to the faculty. Frequency findings suggested preference for the use of conventionally indirect request strategies to their faculty by the participants. Moreover, chi-square results indicated that their first language (L1) had no effect on the choice of request strategies employed by such learners to their faculty. Conclusions are that EFL/ESL learners generally use more negative politeness strategies to mitigate their requests to their faculty.

EFL learners’ difficulty in effectively learning and using phrasal verbs and lexical collocations might be attributed to the purely product-oriented teaching and assessment techniques used in public schools. This study aimed to investigate the impact of oral questions and written quizzes as two formative assessment (FA) techniques on Iranian learners’ learning and retention of phrasal verbs and lexical collocations. The research sample comprised 75 male intermediate EFL high school students, in Marand, East Azarbaijan, Iran, who were selected out of 90 grade four students based on their performance on a Nelson Proficiency test. The three intact classes, each with 25 participants, were randomly assigned as experimental group 1 (EG1) for whom we employed oral questions, experimental group 2 (EG2) who received written quizzes, and the control group (CG) with no process-oriented assessment. After the eight-week treatment, the one-way ANOVA analysis of the three sets of scores obtained from the pre-test, the immediate post-test, and the delayed post-test revealed that EG1 and EG2 outperformed the CG supporting the facilitative role of process-oriented assessment. The findings offer pedagogical implications with regard to FA that will be discussed.

Teacher education programs are ought to deal with the issue of language proficiency. Moreover, finding appropriate framework to help prospective teachers with different learning styles to transform the acquired knowledge and skills into actual teaching practice is highly promising. Task Based Instruction (TBI) might pave the way for such transformative learning. This study attempted to testify this hypothesis. To this end, among 105 available EFL teacher trainees, who were instructed through the TBI, 76 trainees in four experiential learning styles (n = 19), were selected for further analysis. There was no control group in this study. The trainees were first selected through convenience sampling; they were then administered to experiential learning style inventory. Through a mixed-method design, the TBI and experiential learning style effects on trainees‘ reading skills and transformation of the acquired skills were examined. A wide range of qualitative and quantitative instruments were implemented in this study. The results of the questionnaires, tests and observation checklist were analyzed quantitatively. For interview results, both quantitative (percentages) and qualitative analysis were employed. The results demonstrated that the TBI had a significant effect on trainees‘ reading skills; the transformation was also observed. However, no significant effect of experiential learning styles was observed. At the end, some recommendations are provided.

Different from one-way provision of knowledge in transmission-based approaches, recent approaches to teacher education consider learning as a consequence of teachers‟ active engagement in social practices. Prior studies have provided important insights into how sociocultural theory (SCT) works in L2 teacher education. However, issues remain about the content and effectiveness of teacher education programs informed by the tenets of SCT on novice teachers‟ learning. Addressing this gap, the present study set out to investigate the microgentic development of four novice EFL teachers during dialogic mediations with a teacher educator in some one-to-one development sessions based on samples of their actual teaching practices. Mediations were dialogic, graduated, and tailored to the needs of the teachers (i.e., from implicit to explicit) within each individual‟s zone of proximal teacher development (ZPTD). A total of four hours of video-recorded teacher-teacher educator post-observation talk was analyzed. Results proposed a highly dialogic interaction with an approximately equal participatory role. Findings demonstrated that novice teachers‟ agency and externalization of their thoughts in a supportive and interactive environment can result in their development. Finally, teacher educators were asked to include strategic mediation in teacher education programs and provide teachers with graduated assistance within their ZPTD.

In spite of the crucial function of the politeness markers in the appropriate communication of the language learners, teachability of these markers has not received due attention in the pragmatic studies. Drawing upon House and Kasper’s (1981) influential taxonomy of politeness markers, the present study addressed teachability as well as the underlying process or microgenetic development of these markers in an EFL context. A population of 56 undergraduate participants underwent instruction through consciousnessraising (C-R) tasks for nine sessions. The data were obtained through repeated measurements during the first, third, fifth, seventh, and ninth sessions. The findings highlighted the effectiveness of the politeness markers instruction and suggested that the learners’ heavy reliance on some structures like “please” and consultative devices such as “willingness” and “ability” structures at early stages of data collection was mostly due to their unawareness of other politeness structures. This reliance decreased over time and was replaced by “play-downs” especially “progressive aspect past tense” structure in the course of the instruction. Likewise, a wider range of simple politeness markers such as hedges, understaters, and downtoners which were absent in the learners’ early data increased steadily in their subsequent data. The findings highlight the acquisitional difficulty of pragmatic features and provide researchers, practitioners as well as language learners with information concerning the acquisitional sequence and order of pragmatic features in an EFL instructional context.