Journal of Language Horizons
Volume:2 Issue: 2, Summer and Autumn 2018

The present study explored the role of concordancing in learning lexical and grammatical collocations under two conditions, with and without output. It also set out to rank lexical and grammatical collocations in terms of the degree of the challenge they might impose on L2 learners. A total of 45 Iranian intermediate learners of English were randomly divided into an output, a non-output, and a control group. Learners received a six-session treatment in three different conditions; the output group was required to perform a story-writing task by searching for the collocations in concordancing. The non-output group only searched for collocations in concordancing without performing the tasks. The control group performed the tasks without having access to concordancing. The results of the pretest, as well as immediate and delayed posttests, analyzed by separate one-way ANOVAs indicated that the experimental groups outperformed the control group in learning collocations under the influence of concordancing. However, the achievement of the output group was superior to and more lasting than the non-output group. Findings also demonstrated that lexical collocations posed more challenge on all learners.

Although there has been a plethora of research endeavors investigating emotional intelligence (EI) and corrective feedback (CF) in language learning, the role of the EI in the CF is yet to be settled. This mixed-methods study was hence an attempt to bridge this gap by exploring the role of EI in the perception and practice of CF by EFL teachers. For this purpose, 12 teachers participated in this study. EI was measured via Bar-On EQ-i; CF perception was elicited through a semi-structured interview; and CF practice in the classroom was examined through an observation checklist. The results of the qualitative and quantitative data analyses indicated that both high- and low-EI teachers preferred teacher-correction compared to self-correction or peer-correction; however, the type of CF varied according to their EI. Whereas high-EI teachers favored elicitation, repetition, self-correction, recast, clarification request, and peer-correction, low-EI teachers appreciated explicit correction, recast, metalinguistic feedback, and denial CF types. Furthermore, high-EI teachers’ perceptions corresponded to their practice in implementing all CF types, while only the metalinguistic feedback was in harmony between perception and practice in low-EI teachers. The findings are discussed in light of the importance of EI in implementing CF.

Most of the studies on semantic prosody have mainly focused on the recognition of positive, negative, or neutral load of the meaning inferred from the node and its co-occurrences from corpus-based perspectives. However, this study aimed at delving into the teaching and learning aspect of semantic prosodies within the classroom setting. To this end, 76 Iranian undergraduate university students majoring in English translation were randomly selected. Receptive Semantic Prosody Test (RSPT) was administered as a pre-test to assess the students’ initial knowledge of the semantic prosodies. Then, the students were assigned to three groups: two experimental (L1-based and L2-based) and one control group. The experimental groups went through a seven-week instructional period and received explicit output task instruction on semantic prosodies for 30 minutes at the end of their regular class hour, while the control group was exposed to the same output tasks to complete based on the presented contextual clues only, and no such explicit instruction was provided to them. Finally, RSPT was administered again to see how effective the output task instruction had been with regard to the semantic prosody learning. The comparison of the two approaches to learning semantic prosody demonstrated that L1-based instruction was more effective, and EFL learners were generally more receptive to L1-based output task instruction. The study further implies that both L2 teachers and learners can ill afford to turn a blind eye to the important and undeniable role L1 use plays in learning L2 vocabularies in general and semantic prosodies in particular.

In this study it was attempted to investigate whether different CF strategies, including implicit, explicit, and emergent CF, can differently affect the accuracy and fluency of oral production among Iranian EFL learners. In addition, it explored the learners' attitudes towards how they felt about the CF types applied in the classroom. For these purposes, the researchers selected 54 homogeneous pre-intermediate learners on the basis of the PET results and randomly assigned them into three experimental groups: the Implicit group, the Explicit group, and the Emergent group. While the Implicit and Explicit groups received just implicit feedback and explicit correction for their erroneous oral production, respectively, the Emergent group took CF from implicit to explicit. Oral narrative and picture description tasks and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the quantitative and qualitative data for the study. The results of inferential statistics indicated significant differences among the feedback types in both past-tense and future-tense accuracy. Moreover, the Emergent group had a better performance compared with the other groups with respect to accuracy. However, no significant difference was revealed among the feedback types with respect to fluency. The results of the content analysis also indicated that the learners mostly preferred to receive emergent feedback and participate in the process of error correction. The findings of this study can raise researchers', teachers', and teacher trainers' awareness of the function of various CF types.

Since scoring oral language proficiency is performed by raters, they are an essential part of performance assessment. One important feature of raters is their teaching and rating experience which has attracted considerable attention. In a majority of previous studies on rater training, extremely severe or lenient raters, benefited more from training programs and thus results of this training showed significant severity/leniency reduction in their rating behavior. However, they mostly investigated the application of FACETS on only one or two facets and few have used a pre, post-training design. Besides, empirical studies have reported contrasting outcomes, not showing clearly which group of raters does rating more reliably than the other. In this study, 20 experienced and inexperienced raters rated the oral performances produced by 200 test-takers before and after a training program. The results indicated that training leads to higher measures of interrater consistency and reduces measures of biases towards using rating scale categories. Moreover, since it is almost impossible to completely eradicate rater variability even if training is applied, rater training procedure had better had better be regarded as a procedure to make raters more self-consistent (intrarater reliability) rather than consistent with each other (interrater reliability). The findings of this study indicated that inexperienced and experienced raters’ rating quality improved after training; however, inexperienced raters underwent higher consistency and less bias. Hence, there is no evidence that inexperienced raters should be excluded from rating solely because of their lack of adequate experience. Moreover, Inexperienced raters, being more economical than the experienced ones, cost less for decision-makers for rating. Therefore, instead of charging a bulky budget on experienced raters, decision-makers had better use the budget for establishing better training programs.

In the absence of ample practical studies which explore how ELT teachers perceive teaching with respect to various hypotheses associated with globalization, namely homogenization, polarization, and hybridization, and how their practice reflects the tenets of the global flows, this study was conducted to address these neglected issues. Three main aspects of language teaching, mostly affected by various orientations towards globalization and, in consequence, ELT- namely the primacy of native speaker variety, the appropriateness of Western-led methods, and the appropriateness of Western-led materials- were the focal points of our study. Twenty teachers, selected through criterion-referenced sampling technique, participated in this research. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and classroom observations accompanied with field notes. The thematic analysis of data revealed that the only area less affected by the tenets of the Global English is ELT teaching methods. Our teachers seemed to be aware of the ideas promoted by critical scholars of World Englishes as to the need to adapt teaching methods to the peculiarities of distinct contexts. On the other hand, our teacher participants favored monocentric adherence to the English variety and Western-led English materials. Altogether, the data of the interviews and observations corroborate the lack of awareness of our teachers of the imperialistic features of Global English. These findings have implications for the design of teacher training courses.