Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research
Volume:8 Issue: 2, Jul 2020

This article describes a collaborative and data-based reflective practice study carried out by two language teachers in a Japanese tertiary education context. This research utilized conversational analysis (CA) of audiorecorded classroom data which was subsequently discussed as part of a critical friendship. Both the inclusion of CA data and collegial discussion were in response to recent calls for increasingly data-led and dialogic reflective practice methods. In this study, the two teacher-researchers identified salient issues that they saw as incongruent with their stated teaching beliefs. They then collaboratively determined interventions to deal with the inconsistencies between their beliefs and their actual behavior and repeated the CA data collection and dialogic analysis phases. The two teachers found that the CA data and the opportunity to collaboratively interpret it provided valuable insights into their classroom practice while also offsetting the tendency for excessive self-criticism. This study provides a concrete example of a reflective practice approach that is both theoretically grounded and tied to bottom-up issues that are of interest to teachers.

Developing the appropriate linguistic and documentation skills in specialised domains is one of the greatest challenges in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses. Among other tools, corpora are intended as efficient resources students can use to improve and develop their thematic, terminological, and phraseological knowledge (Sánchez Ramos, 2020). Based on a non-experimental mixed-methods study, this paper reports the feasibility of a corpus-based approach to teaching medical translation at a postgraduate level. It analyses how a group of 40 postgraduate students at the University of Alcalá (Madrid, Spain) perceive the compilation of their own corpus and the usefulness of corpus management tools (CMTs) in solving thematic, terminological, and phraseological issues. The software LancsBox (Lancaster University) was used, which is a recently created CMT that incorporates automatic tagging, cutting-edge statistics information, and innovative visualization options. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of this data suggest that the ESP students were highly satisfied with the corpus-based approach. Our findings also reveal that postgraduate students incorporated CMTs during the whole course as documentation resources for their translation tasks, and they are willing to use them in their near future professional career. These results show the potential usefulness of CMTs and offer a way of integrating them into the ESP curriculum.

Despite teachers' mainstream practices in L2 writing classrooms addressing different dimensions of writing over time, much of the research on feedback in recent years has been of relative short duration and has mainly focused on accuracy. The current longitudinal study investigated the influence of sustained teacher written feedback on accuracy, syntactic complexity, fluency, content, and organization in an EFL context. Ninety-two learners were divided into four groups, receiving written corrective feedback, feedback on content and organization, multilateral feedback (i.e., on grammatical accuracy, content, and organization), and no feedback over a 3½-month period. They completed a pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test and wrote and revised eight interim expository compositions on a weekly basis. Results showed that the three treatment groups significantly improved in the dimensions on which they received feedback. However, only the groups who received feedback on content and organization improved in fluency. Importantly, the multilateral group improved in accuracy as well as fluency, content and organization. Theoretically, the findings endorse the language learning potentials of sustained writing as long as it is guided by teacher feedback. The findings provide empirical support for the influence of sustained feedback on expanding and consolidating learners’ explicit knowledge of L2 writing.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the perception of EFL teachers and learners on the fundamental principles and constructs of critical thinking, the main characteristics of a critical thinker, and strategies for reinforcing critical thinking ability. Semi-structured interviews with eight EFL teachers and ten learners, who were theoretically sampled from three different contexts of public, private, and seminary schools in Sabzevar and Qom, Iran, were conducted using the constructivist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2008). Using the MAXQDA software version 12, the data were analyzed based on the three levels of the open, axial, and selective coding of grounded theory. A model of critical thinking was proposed with ELT teachers’ and learners’ awareness as the core category and the characteristics of a critical thinker and strategies for reinforcing critical thinking ability as sub-categories. The results of the study revealed several pedagogical implications for EFL teachers to help their learners develop critical thinking skills, for EFL learners to think more deeply, solve problems better, communicate and collaborate more effectively, and for curriculum developers and syllabus designers to put certain critical thinking activities in textbooks and support in-service classes for teachers

Reflection and reflective practice have now become common terms used in teacher education and development programs worldwide. Reflective practice generally means that teachers subject their own beliefs and practices of teaching and learning English to speakers of other languages to a critical examination. The increase in popularity of reflective practice in the field of TESOL has also brought about an array of different definitions and approaches most of which however originate from the general education literature. Thus, Farrell (2015; 2019b) developed a holistic framework for TESOL teachers to reflect, that includes reflections on five different stages, the TESOL teachers’ philosophy, principles, theory, practice, and beyond practice. This paper outlines a case study of the reflections of a TESOL teacher through the lens of this framework for reflecting on practice. Overall, the results revealed that many of Lisa’s reflections in all five stages of the framework appear to be connected through two common themes: Teaching to students’ needs and goals and student engagement and rapport building.

The present study investigated the association between vocabulary size and depth of Iranian EFL learners at different language proficiency levels. Additionally, the extent that this relationship could be different for low- and high-word-frequency bands was probed. In so doing, the Word Associates Test (WAT), the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT), the monolingual Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and its bilingual Persian version were administered to 122 Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners (F=79, M=43) who had been classified into three language proficiency levels by means of administering the Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT). The findings indicated the following: (a) vocabulary size and depth had a significant correlation for the lower-intermediate students; (b) size and depth dimensions had a moderate association for the upperintermediate participants; (c) vocabulary size and depth were not significantly correlated for the advanced EFL learners; (d) the relationship between the higher-frequency bands of vocabulary size and vocabulary depth was significant for lower proficiency levels; and (e) the lower-frequency vocabulary size was not correlated with vocabulary depth for any of the proficiency levels. The results have implications for vocabulary depth instruction for higher language proficiency levels and suggest teachers, test developers, and materials designers to incorporate the dimension of word associations into the construct of word knowledge.

A formidable challenge facing many Iranian postgraduate English students is critically negotiating their course content which entails a well-developed strategic competence. This quasi-experimental study examined the effect of negotiated strategic awareness-raising (NSA-raising) on English Language Teaching (ELT) and English Literature (EL) postgraduate students’ general reading comprehension (GRC) and content retention (CR). To serve the purpose, a sample of 39 ELT and 32 EL students was selected through convenience sampling from a pool of 130 postgraduates at Islamic Azad University of Tabriz based on their pre-test scores. The sample was then randomly assigned to two control groups, with no strategic orientation, and two experimental groups receiving content-integrated NSA-raising during a ten-session treatment and based on identical teaching materials for each pair of ELT and EL groups. ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis analyses of the research data obtained from a standardized reading test tapping the participants’ GRC and syllabusbased achievement tests, along with quarterly administered progress tests, measuring their CR showed significantly higher levels of achievement in both experimental groups. The findings underscore the effectiveness of content-integrated NSA-raising for postgraduate English students.

English Language Teacher Education: A Sociocultural Perspective on Preservice Teachers’ Learning in the Professional Experience by Minh Hue Nguyen is an account of current issues on English teacher educators, researchers, curriculum developers, and pre-service teachers, demonstrating an application of sociocultural theory in researching pre-service teacher learning. The bonus with this book is in its extended conversations with pre-service teachers, their mentors, and academics, and their thought-provoking stories about the journeys of becoming teachers in Australia as well as the support inherent in institutional and policy contexts of English language teaching in Australia that influenced their learning.