Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Volume:5 Issue: 2, Spring 2018

Although the concept of ‘face’ has recently been the focus of attention in language pragmatics, face theory and research have dealt with individual rather than social aspects of human interactions (Arundale, 2013). In order to assess the epistemological and methodological dimensions of face in recent literature, this qualitative meta-synthetic study examines the concept of face in intercultural and multicultural communicative interactions. A total of 13 intercultural face studies published in two leading journals, Journal of Pragmatics and Intercultural Pragmatics, were identified and a thorough qualitative content analysis was conducted to identify the core themes and commonalities. The emerging themes portrayed the concept of face as culture and language specific, relational, interactional, and location-specific, co-constructed and negotiated by the participants in the ongoing discourse activities. Concerning the methodology adopted by researchers in the realms of pragmatics in general and face studies in particular, it is noted that most of intercultural face studies employed mainly audio and video interaction recordings, observations, interviews, and field notes and procedures like including linguistic ethnography, conversation analysis, and interactional sociolinguistic procedures were not used while it seems a more comprehensive understanding of face is achieved through ethnographic, conversation analytic, and interactional sociolinguistic studies in a range of different communicative contexts. The study nominates some methodological aspects of face for further studies in the intercultural pragmatics research area.

A fundamental aspect of teacher socialization and development is the construction and maintenance of vivid and strong professional identity. As a multi-layered and dynamic phenomenon, teacher identity is affected by diverse range of social and institutional factors. With an aim to add to growing literature on teacher identity, the current study examined the effects of language teaching policies on an English teacher’s identity development. Following narrative strategy which is the dominant paradigm in identity research, the stories of an English teacher obtained through semi-structured interview were examined. The teacher’s narratives and accounts of his teaching experiences were analyzed through constant comparative approach which produced five main themes: lack of teacher autonomy, the effect of macro political concerns on language teaching, movement towards Communicative Language Teaching, lack of resources, and inappropriate student placement strategies. The results indicated that every single language teaching policy shaped and reshaped the teacher’s understanding of himself.

Variations in rating the EFL learners’ oral performance are often attributed to the variations in the raters’ cognitive processes. Han’s (2016) 4-stage processing model was used to examine what cognitive processes expert and novice raters follow to rate a recorded response to the IELTS Speaking Task Two by using the IELTS rubrics. Novice and expert raters attended the 4-phase verbal protocol sessions in order to explore the cognitive processes underlying (a) their representations of IELTS speaking rubric, (b) qualitative assessment of a recorded sample response to IELTS Speaking Task Two, (c) quantitative assignment of ratings to the input and (d) revision of the assigned ratings. Qualitative data collection was followed by transcribing, segmenting, encoding, and analyzing the contents of the recorded verbal protocol reports. After content analysis, the four categories of (1) grammatical range and accuracy, (2) fluency and coherence, (3) lexical resources, and (4) pronunciation in IELTS speaking rubric were schemed into 80 themes. NVivo 8 and SPSS 19 were used to analyze the data qualitatively and quantitatively, respectively. Both qualitative and statistical findings showed that the L2 raters with a different range of expertise widely focus on different aspects of the spoken response input, have different interpretations, and apply different criteria when judging the verbal input. The findings of the present study may carry implications for rater training and validity of ratings. Expertise, as the findings of the study show, can exert an influence on the reliability of the ratings.

Teacher motivation is of paramount importance to the growth of any education system. Despite its significance, the topic has been largely overlooked at the expense of learner motivation research. To further investigate the issue, a questionnaire was developed to find the status of teacher (de)motivation and its underlying components within the Iranian context. The survey also examined the difference between male versus female, and English language versus non-English subject teachers in terms of their (de)motivation. The participants consisted of 509 secondary school teachers from 18 Iranian cities. The questionnaire content was grounded on a focus-group interview as well as a number of extant need-based motivational theories. Upon data collection, a Principal Components Analysis was conducted to identify the minimally optimum items of the so-called 'need-based teacher motivation inventory' (NTMI). The findings underscored English teachers’ low motivation, suggesting that secondary school English teachers were less dissatisfied with their school administration and colleagues, the work environment, and the job itself. However, they felt demotivated by meagre earnings, inequity in payment, lack of autonomy and recognition, poor contribution to decision-makings, inadequacy of in-service training programs, unfair opportunities for promotion, non-standard teacher evaluation criteria, and unappealing instructional materials. The results also showed no difference between female teachers and their male counterparts. Nevertheless, English-subject teachers were found to be less motivated. Iranian Ministry of Education seems to be in desperate need of restoring the dignity of its staff through investing in improved services, reasonable payment, and imparting the recognition that teachers deserve.

University students are mainly advised to master the words in West’s General Service List (GSL) and Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) in order to be able to read their academic texts easily and effectively. However, there are too many words in the two lists and a large number of them seem to be of less frequency in many academic disciplines; moreover, there are many important general and academic words which are missing in the two lists. The present study explored a corpus of psychology texts containing 3.4 million running words to work out the most frequent words used in psychology, a less investigated discipline. The corpus was analyzed by some text analysis software (TextStat and TextAnalys) and a list of 1587 most frequent word families was developed for psychology. The list included general English and academic words and no technical words of psychology. The frequency of GSL and AWL word families was investigated in the corpus to find out the GSL and AWL words highly frequent in psychology texts and also other high frequency words of psychology which are absent in the two lists. The results revealed that 1077 GSL and 95 AWL word families were of low frequency in psychology texts and there were 189 high frequency general and academic words which are absent in the GSL and AWL. The coverage of the developed psychology word list over the corpus was shown to be 2.2% higher than that of GSL plus AWL, although it contained 983 fewer words.

Mainstream L2 pragmatic research has shown that pragmatic fossilization is quite common among L2 learners at almost all levels of proficiency. This study examined the defossilizing effect of corpus-driven activities on 10 situationally-based pragmatic routines under two instructional conditions, i.e. input-based and output-based treatments. Participants were 33 advanced EFL learners in two classes in a private English language center. They received instruction in four sessions across two weeks. Before and after the treatment, a WDCT was administered for pretest and posttest purposes. The results of paired-samples and Independent Samples t-tests showed that input-enhancement and output-based instructions were effective in defossilization pragmatic routines which had a strong fossilization tendency among learners. Both treatment tasks led to significant increases in learners’ comprehension and production of the routines. The output-based group; however, significantly outperformed the input-based group in the production of the routines. The findings indicate that pragmatic instruction can debilitate the fossilization tendencies of pragmatic routines and that different instructional tasks have differential effects on the production and comprehension of pragmatic routines. The pedagogical implication of this study is that a combination of instructionally supported corpus-based tasks would be effective for enhancing EFL learners’ ability to comprehend and use routines appropriately in context.