Research in English Language Pedagogy
Volume:7 Issue: 2, Summer-Autumn 2019

Speaking assessment is quite challenging as there are many factors in addition to speakers’ ability contributing to how well someone can speak a language. In this study, 40 male and female upper intermediate EFL learners, with age range of 15-26, selected through ECCE test. They performed four different types of speaking tasks (explaining, problem-solving, story-telling, and picture-describing). These tasks were rated by two raters using two scoring holistic and analytic. The one-way repeated measures ANOVAs, paired-sample t-tests and Pearson Product Moment Correlations illustrated that the task types and rating methods didn’t have any significant effects on learners’ speaking scores as far as problem-solving, explaining, and picture-describing tasks were concerned. Yet, the rating methods represented to have some effects on story-telling task. The findings also indicated a significant correlation between holistic and analytic ratings of the problem-solving, picture-describing and story-telling tasks while the reverse was true for the explaining task.

This paper aimed to explore the ways in which three Moroccan ELT textbooks currently used in second year Baccalaureate public high schools represented gender. It also aimed to identify the extent to which these textbooks succeeded in avoiding instances of biased and stereotypical gender representations of female and male figures. The study was conducted based on the theoretical framework of the Standards-Based Approach. It adopted content analysis as the main instrument for data collection and analysis that combines both quantitative and qualitative techniques. The findings indicated that these textbooks contain instances of biased gender representations regarding frequency of appearance, visibility, space, firstness and occupations attributed to female and male characters in texts, dialogues, exercises and images. The paper concluded with a set of implications suggesting ways in which gender inequalities could be avoided in future Moroccan ELT textbooks.

The present study sought to identify the similarities and/or differences between texts written by Iranian university students of English teaching major and those written by English natives in terms of syntactic complexity. To this end, an automated computational web tool, namely Coh-Metrix was used to scrutinize a corpus containing 83 text excerpts extracted from 10 dissertations written by Iranian Ph.D. students as well as a comparison corpus including 94 text excerpts selected from 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by English native speakers in terms of four specific measures representing syntactic complexity. The results indicated that among the four measures, Mean Number of Modifiers and Sentence Syntax Similarity functioned as distinctive factors differentiating between the first language (L1) and second language (L2) texts, whereas Left Embeddedness and Minimal Edit Distance were found to be similar between the two corpora. The findings may have several implications for EFL practitioners.

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) is considered as a valuable frame for describing and understanding technology integration into different educational settings, including English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. There is an accumulated body of literature on TPACK among teachers engaged in different areas of education. However, few studies have addressed the assessment of TPACK through students’ perspectives in EFL settings. To address this gap, the purpose of this study was set to assess Iranian EFL students’ perspectives regarding their teachers’ TPACK. A total of 148 Iranian EFL students participated in this survey study. The data were collected through administering a previously validated TPACK questionnaire to the participants of the study. The findings obtained from the survey indicated that most EFL students perceived that their EFL teachers excelled in four components of TPACK such as technological knowledge (TK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), content knowledge (CK), and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), but the teachers were perceived to be relatively less proficient in the other three components of the scale such as technological content knowledge (TCK), technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK), and TPACK. The results suggest that Iranian EFL teachers may require further training in these latter elements of the TPACK to gain the required proficiency to integrate technology more effectively into their language classrooms.

The study was intended to provide a description of the attitudes of English-major students towards the teaching methods in translation courses to find out more about the quality and relevance of such methods to students’ needs, concerning the necessary educational resources provided in the methods of teaching. Accordingly, a multi-item Likert-scale questionnaire containing 32 items was developed based on the principles applied in the traditional, complex and modern methods of teaching translation in order to collect the required data for the study. Cronbach’s alpha was administered for estimating the reliability of the items which was .939. Besides, experts’ judgments and item analysis were used for the coverage and relevance of content and construct validity. To collect thedata, 100 questionnaires were distributed among participants to obtain their responses for each item. The responses to the items were stored as numbers. Moreover, the frequency tables were then extracted via descriptive statistics of SPSS software to generate the summary of the participants’ responses to the items, based on which the final data analysis and reports were provided. The results showed that although all the methods were common, the modern methods were the superior to the other methods and emphasized the necessity for further incorporation of teaching principles for assuring the quality and relevance. The results of the study would be helpful for students and instructors in translation studies by enabling them to find out how the features of teaching methods might lead the students with various attitudes in learning how to translate.

This study attempted to examine visual and verbal characteristics in Touchstone textbook series. For this purpose, four reading comprehension texts with similar topics were selected from the four Touchstone textbooks. Seven pictures accompanying the four texts were analyzed based on Kress and van Leeuwen’ssocial semiotics, and the four texts were analyzed with reference to Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. The results depicted fairly high functionality of the visuals in Touchstone series as well as their humanistic communicative trends. Moreover, it was found out that the pictures supported the linguistic text, there by helping learners to comprehend the textual content. The findings also showed that increase in text difficulty made for the occurrence of material and relational processes. Lastly, the results of verbal analysis suggested that reading comprehension texts of Touchstone series chiefly describe real world experiences and actions rather than behaviors, thoughts, or feelings. Based on the outcomes, it can be concluded that the visuals are pertinent to the linguistic passages and help the learners to get a better understanding of the texts.

This study aimed to describe the development and validation process of a listening questionnaire designed to assess strategic competence in listening comprehension. The 34-item Cognitive and Metacognitive Listening Strategies Questionnaire (CMLSQ) was administered to a relatively large sample (N=397) of L2 learners. The results of the 370 completed questionnaires were subjected to exploratory factor analysis to identify the underlying structure of the questionnaire, and to a confirmatory factor analysis to examine the validity of the model as a good fit for the data. Based on the results of exploratory factor analysis, a three-factor model underlying metacognitive strategies and a five-factor model underlying cognitive strategies were hypothesized. These models were then evaluated through confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS 18. The results indicated that the current models and their parameters well fit the data gathered from the questionnaires.

Pragmatic assessment has recently opened up a new line of inquiry for many interested researchers within the realm of L2 pragmatics. Accordingly, different methods have been proposed to assess pragmatic competence. Drawing on request speech act, this study aimed at comparing and contrasting Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT), Oral Discourse Completion Task (ODCT), and Role-play with the natural method in terms of five dependent variables: length, repetitions, omissions, inversions, and exclamation particles. To this end, 27 intermediate level EFL learners were asked to make two requests with contextual features of low-status, low-imposition, and two requests with contextual features of high-status, low-imposition using each of the three elicitation techniques. Having recorded the natural talk-in interactions of all students and teachers over 15 weeks, the researchers transcribed the gathered data for further in-depth pragmatic analysis. To analyze the data, Chi-Square and binominal tests were run. The findings indicated that role-play yielded the data closest to the natural method in terms of the dependent variables and the differences between role-play and the natural method were less significant than those inherent in WDCT and ODCT. The study implies that more authentic and natural data can be elicited by incorporating features of the natural method into the other pragmatic data collection procedures, namely, WDCT and ODCT.

This study examined the comparative impacts of convergent and divergent tasks while employing critical thinking techniques on EFL learners’ writing. Accordingly, 60 male and female learners were chosen from a group of 90 learners based on their scores on a sample PET previously piloted in one of Tehran’s language schools. The learners were then randomly put into two experimental groups: 30 learners undergoing convergent tasks and 30 learners receiving divergent tasks. Both groups were exposed to critical thinking techniques. After the treatment, a sample PET writing section was administered as the posttest to both groups with their mean scores being compared; the results showed that neither group outperformed the other significantly. This result probably indicates that the critical thinking instruction was more of an influential factor compared to the variability of convergent and divergent tasks, thereby consolidating further the notion that critical thinking instruction is a highly influential factor in ELT.

This study intended to explore the linguistic and rhetorical features of written narratives produced by language learners of different levels of proficiency. A large and comprehensive number of linguistic and rhetorical features were analyzed adopted from Hinkel (2002). Learners from a mixed-age group in a private language institute in Iran took part in this study. Three levels of B1, B2, and C1 learners were assigned into two conditions: Differentiated Instruction (DI, N = 84) that received individualized writing instruction according to each writer’s needs and skills and Traditional Instruction (TI, N = 76) that presented the features followed by some exercises. Results revealed that both C1 and B2 learners used more accurate linguistic features, while only C1 learners were successful in employing rhetorical features. In TI, however, C2 learners implemented a restricted number of linguistic and rhetorical features. Significant differences were found between DI and TI groups in each proficiency level. A comparison of the effect sizes, however, indicated that DI was less effective in the case of rhetorical features.