Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Winter 2014

This paper examined an influence of two different narrative tasks on the grammatical complexity and lexical diversity of an oral performance of secondlanguage (L2) learners. The participants (N=90) were presented with two tasks with six pictures in each. One of the tasks contained both foregrounding and backgrounding events on it, but the second one had only the backgrounding event. Backgrounding events language refer to the main theme of the story, and foregrounding events refer to the supportive materials that elaborate on the side events taking place in the task. The complexity and diversity of the language in the oral production of the two comparable groups who were presented to foregrounding and backgrounding events were examined in a between subject design. The results showed that L2 performance was affected by the type of the task. Syntactic complexity and lexical diversity were increased by the participants who were given the task with both of the events on them. We reason that the task with backgrounding event on it leads participants into attempting more to talk about the events happening in the background, hence producing more complex and at the same time more diverse.

This study is an attempt to investigate the Iranian TOEFL/IELTS teachers’ written feedback practices and their perception of written feedback in writing classes. The examination of the questionnaires given to 30 TOEFL/IELTS writing teachers and the analysis of their written feedbacks on 300 students’ essays indicate that although the majority of the teachers believe that they should provide feedback on the language (i.e., spelling, grammar, vocabulary, capitalization, and punctuation), organization (i.e., cohesion, coherence, and unity), and content of students’ essays, most of their written feedbacks are concerned with the language of their students’ essays. In fact, a discrepancy was found between the teachers’ perception and their practice in the provision of feedback. In addition, although the majority of the teachers believed that they should give indirect feedback on their students’ writings, most of their written feedbacks were direct. This lack of harmony between the teachers’ perception and their practice in providing written feedback calls for more attention.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of peer-feedback and teacher-feedback on form and content revision in high and low proficient Iranian EFL learners’ writings in comparison with self-revision in control group. For this purpose, six intact EFL classes were selected from available classes at Islamic Azad University, South Tehran Branch and Kish Language School with 180 learners aged about 20 in high and low proficiency levels. One group in each proficiency level received peer-feedback, another teacherfeedback, and the other was instructed to self-revise. The findings showed that there was no significant difference between the effects of teacher- and peerfeedback groups on the frequency means of preposition errors in the high or the low proficient groups. However, each of these experimental groups differed significantly from the no-feedback control groups. In spelling errors, while in the low proficient group, both the teacher- and the peer-feedback groups outperformed the no-feedback control group; in the high proficient group, the no-feedback control group managed to do as well as the peer-feedback group and only the teacher-feedback group managed to outperform the control group. In content revision, there was no significant difference in the high proficient learners’ text revision among any of the three groups. However, although there was a significant difference between the experimental groups in the low proficient learners, neither of them differed significantly from the control group, indicating that self-revision was as effective as both the teacher- and peerfeedback. The findings suggest that the effect of feedback is not straightforward to interpret.

Hedges are recognized to be of great significance in research articles since they are the tools to which the academic writers resort in order to give an appropriate representation of their findings. Many variables such as language, discipline, culture and language proficiency can influence the frequency of hedges in research articles. This study, however, focuses on the role of gender in the frequency of hedges and aims to investigate whether there is any difference between Iranian males and females in the use of these devices. To this end, 60 applied linguistics research articles by Iranian females and males from well-organized journals were randomly selected and the analyses of the hedges were based on Hyland’s (1996a) model. The results of this study showed that there is a significant difference between males and females. Men make use of more hedges than women. Moreover, the findings showed that the discussion section of the articles included more hedges than the introduction section.

This study was an attempt to explore the Iranian university students‟ views about the rather controversial question of who should teach ESP courses among EFL teachers and the specialists-in-the-field in Iran. For this purpose, 120 undergraduate students majoring in accounting, business management and industrial management were selected from among university students. The members of each major were divided into two groups of A and B, the former being taught their ESP course by an EFL teacher, the latter by a specialist-in-the-field instructor. Although different items of the research instrument (questionnaire) addressed diverse aspects of teaching method such as teacher knowledge, functions and techniques, the study was based on the following major research question: Which ESP instructor teaches more satisfactorily and effectively from students‟ point of view: the EFL teacher, or the specialist- in- the- field instructor? A survey questionnaire consisting of 35 items related to the ESP teachers‟ knowledge, functions and techniques used in the classroom was designed to collect the required data for the study. The data gathered was then subjected to both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses. Comparison of the total mean scores of the two groups for each major revealed that the students‟ rate of satisfaction with the EFL teacher was significantly higher than that with the specialist-in-the-field instructor. The study also offers some pedagogical recommendations for ESP practitioners.

The present study, whose main aim was to investigate the relative importance of a pre-selected set of situational factors which seem to motivate learners to engage in English for medical purposes reading, was carried out at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in Iran during February - June 2007. A total of 339 students from various fields of study including medicine, dentistry, pharmacology, nursing, midwifery, medical library, medical records, nutrition, health information management and environmental health participated in this study. A questionnaire consisting of twenty-six items on a five-point Likert scale was distributed among students to collect data. The collected data were then analyzed, using simple linear and stepwise regressions. The results showed that the situational factors of motivation with a focus on reading skills, content of EAP textbooks, requirement assigned by EAP teachers, ease/difficulty of EAP textbooks and practitioner of EAP courses significantly contributed to motivating students to engage in EAP reading(p