Iranian Journal of English for Academic Purposes
Volume:9 Issue: 4, Autumn 2020

Studies on the referents of I, we, and you (the tri-PP) in academic lectures across disciplinary supercommunities: Humanities (HS), Social Sciences (SS), and Natural Sciences (NS) are relatively not many. The few ones done limit themselves to commonalities in the referents across DSs. This paper thus appears the first of its kind to investigate individualities in the referents of the tri-PP in university lectures across the three disciplinary supercommunities. A 116, 000 corpus of undergraduate academic lectures audio-recorded from disciplines in the HS, SS, and NS in universities in Ghana was built for the study. The concordance tool in AntConc was used to search for the tri-PP and their variants in the corpus. The referents were identified based on contextual, co-textual and pragmatic indicators. The study revealed that there are referents of I, we, and you peculiar to individual Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. The referents for the tri-PP across the DSs were either metadiscursive or non-metadiscursive alluding respectively to participants in the discourse internal and external worlds.  The findings deepen our understanding on the metadiscursive and non-metadiscursive roles in academic lectures, and the “degree of mono-disciplinary homogeneity” (Hyland, 2000, p.10) with respect to the pragmatics of personal pronouns in academic lectures.

The present study investigated the English-speaking needs of Iranian English-majoring undergraduate and graduate students from their instructors’ perspectives. To this end, four Iranian English instructors from Shiraz University participated in the study by taking part in an unstructured interview on their students’ speaking problems, the magnitude of the problem, and the probable causes and solutions to the problems. The results revealed that the participants believed that there is a problem with their students’ English-speaking ability at all levels of BA, MA and Ph.D. Despite the instructors’ conflicting ideas, the findings indicated that students at BA and MA levels have more serious speaking problems. The causes of these problems were reported to be insufficient focus on improving speaking skills, the inefficiency of the preceding education and lack of any gate-keeping or post-admission speaking assessment. The instructors were in favor of introducing the speaking skill in the post-admission assessment and the EAP programs to solve the problem.

The role of language proficiency in EAP test performance is a hotly contested issue in the field, and, more specifically, disciplinary distance is assumed to mediate such a relationship. The purpose of this study was twofold: a) to investigate the role of English proficiency in teacher-constructed ESAP tests serving achievement purposes; and b) to examine whether with variations in disciplinary distance the role of language proficiency would fluctuate. To this aim, 110 English majors were given TOEFL followed by four ESAP tests: law and psychology as neighbor and chemistry and geology as non-neighbor disciplinary fields. Data analyses revealed that there were statistically significant differences across proficiency levels, and the participants took advantage of their proficiency stock more, and statistically so, when sitting for disciplinarily close rather than distant ESAP tests. Also, the positive effect of disciplinary adjacency was not bound to any linguistic thresholds. Except for geology, moderate to large positive correlations were found between proficiency and ESAP test scores. Findings and implications are discussed vis-à-vis studies addressing the role of language proficiency in EAP assessment in general and ESAP assessment in Iran in particular.

It is widely accepted that EFL teachers' pedagogical competence improves their teaching performance, which itself plays a key role in facilitating and enhancing student learning. The present study investigated the relationship between Iranian English language instructors’ pedagogical competences and their personal and professional backgrounds. In so doing, the construct validity of an initial 33-closed-ended questionnaire comprising four constructs of pedagogical competence, namely teaching attitudes, teaching skills, assessment strategies, and knowledge mastery was established through exploratory factor analysis was after being administered to 175 university instructors in Gilan, Iran. Next, to measure the relationship among the instructors' personal and occupational characteristics, namely age, gender, fields of study and university degrees with the constructs of pedagogical competence, the newly validated questionnaire was administered to 48 practicing university instructors at Islamic Azad and State universities. It was revealed that there were positive correlations among the constructs of teaching attitudes, teaching skills, assessment strategies, and knowledge mastery. Moreover, the results revealed significant positive correlations (strong, moderate, or low) among the four constructs concerning the instructors' gender, age, fields, and degree of study. Pedagogically, as teaching quality is a crucial factor in promoting effective learning, it would be truly beneficial if the instructors' perceptions of pedagogical competence are known for the purpose of making educational developments.

The recent developments in social sciences consider our understanding of the phenomena as meager and emphasize the chaos we may face in understanding the relationships among the variables of studies in language teaching (Larsen-Freeman, & Long, 2014). This study is an attempt to develop a model of EFL reading comprehension based on the pertinent factors reported in the literature. Thus, a default model of EFL reading comprehension encompassing first language reading comprehension and cognitive and metacognitive strategies together with their subcomponents was developed. To validate the model, the data gathered through convenient sampling from 280 male and female senior and junior students of Azad University of Shiraz were analyzed by AMOS. First, the model was checked by AMOS to see if the software can identify it. Then, the strength of each parameter was calculated and the non-significant parameters were discarded from the model. Finally, goodness-of-fit indices, comparative indices, and parsimonious indices were compared in the default and the revised model, all of which showed an improvement in the fitness of the revised model. A remarkable result was that the parameter from metacognitive strategies to EFL reading comprehension was discarded in the revised model, but the parameters from cognitive strategies to EFL and first language reading comprehension were maintained. This suggests that metacognition exerts its influence over EFL reading comprehension via cognitive strategies. The revised model can be useful for materials developers, teachers and examiners to have a better understanding of the variables contributing to EFL reading comprehension.

The present research study provided a detailed description of needs analysis (NA) of border guarding police cadets in relation to the English Education requirement. English taught for border guarding purposes is known as English for specific purposes (ESP). The main objective of the study was development of an ESP curriculum for police officers at Amin Police University (APU) in Iran. Researchers of the study utilized a Qual/Quan design (exploratory sequential mixed methods design) which contained collection of both qualitative and quantitative research data. The study was conducted at the faculty of Border Guarding of APU based in Tehran, Iran in the academic year of 2019. Participants of the study included 249 current BA cadets, ESP teachers, and graduate frontline officers, managers, and commanders. The data were gathered utilizing semi-structured interviews and a researcher-made questionnaire. Through NA, the researchers analyzed the learners’ factors, present situation, target situation, and specialist discourse of the population. The results of the study were used to design and to develop an ESP course curriculum for police cadets studying at the Faculty of Border Guarding at APU in Iran.

This study aimed to investigate the test types which English teachers and content instructors employ in the ESP exams. To do so, samples of the tests developed by the ESP teachers were collected. Moreover, semi-structured interviews were performed with both groups to gain insights into their attitudes towards testing. The results indicated that word-formation, translation, definition, multiple-choice, reading comprehension, and cloze test were the test types the teachers used. It was revealed that except for cloze tests, which were used only by the English teachers, other test types were used by both groups; the frequency of the test types, however, differed in the exams. It was also discovered that both groups of the teachers used multiple-choice tests most frequently. The results of the interviews showed that the English teachers preferred integrative and communicative tests, whereas the content instructors tended to use syllabus-based structuralist tests. The study concludes that the ESP teachers mostly favored pre-scientific and psychometric-structuralist approaches to testing and did not use communicative tests. The implications of the study pertain to the pivotal role of the ESP teachers’ awareness and evaluation of the students’ real needs for English as well as the teachers’ testing literacy in ESP courses.

Student Question Generation (SQG) is one of the learner-centered constructive learning techniques which might be a helpful too for engaging students in the learning and assessment processes and increase their interest in the learning materials. This study attempted to investigate the effect of this technique on ESP learners’ achievement in an English course and to study the learners' views on the efficacy of using this technique in teaching English. To reach the said aims, a mixed-method research design was employed to answer the questions. The research was conducted at Islamic Azad University in Hidaj with 60 participants (male and female) who were majoring at accounting and civil engineering and were divided into experimental and control groups. Data were collected through an achievement test which was administered at the end of the course and a focus-group interview held in experimental group class. Independent samples t-test was used to analyze the quantitative data, while the learners' responses were analyzed through content analysis. The results revealed that using SQG helped the students in learning the course materials significantly. The analysis of the qualitative data revealed seven themes related to the effectiveness of using SGQ, of which the most important ones were usefulness of the technique, creating a relaxed and cooperative atmosphere, and increased motivation. They further reported that their interest in the course increased, and the quality of their learning increased. Based on the results, some instructional implications are provided for the teachers, syllabus designers and researchers.

The inherent deficiencies of teacher-centered assessment have led many researchers to investigate the challenges and possibilities of alternative assessment. From among the various forms of alternative assessment, self and peer assessment have not been adequately scrutinized in the Iranian context. The present study examined the effect of three different assessment techniques, namely teacher, peer, and self-assessment, in writing tasks on a cohort of Iranian English learners’ writing motivation and self-regulation. Ninety-five female intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to three groups of self, peer, and teacher-assessment. Before the treatment, all the participants produced an argumentative essay while thinking-aloud and recording their voice, and completed the questionnaires. After the treatment, the participants once again completed the writing motivation and self-regulation questionnaires and wrote an argumentative essay, while thinking aloud and recording their voice. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected using questionnaires, interviews, and think-aloud protocols. Having analyzed the interviews qualitatively, and analyzed the writing motivation questionnaires results through a one-way ANCOVA test, the researcher concluded that self-assessment had an advantage over the two other techniques in promoting writing motivation. Similarly, the analysis of the coded think-aloud protocols and a one-way ANCOVA yielded support for the superiority of the alternative assessment particularly self-assessment in promoting the use of self-regulatory strategies. Implications for writing classes are discussed.

The article investigates the contribution of teachers’ practice of pedagogical competence to the high school students’ learning of English language in Rasht, Iran. Following a multi-method research in the quantitative research paradigm, first, a five-point Likert scale questionnaire of pedagogical competence was administered to 16 high school English teachers. Based on the teachers’ responses and, according to Hofstee Compromise Method, 12 of 16 teachers with the minimum and maximum acceptable percentages were divided to two equal groups of high practicing (HP) and low-practicing (LP) teachers of pedagogical competence. Next, randomly selected from 150 students from the teachers’ classes, 115 students were selected. Based on the homogeneity test, however, 67 students were selected for the experiment phase. Then, the students received the teachers’ three-month instruction that covered three lessons of the book ‘Vision’ taught at the third grade of high school. A posttest was administered to the students after receiving instruction. The results revealed a significant difference between the students in HP and LP groups with regard to English language learning; the HP group reported a significant progression from pretest to posttest as a result of the teachers’ practice of pedagogical competence. Some pedagogical implications, limitations of the study, and suggestions for further studies are presented.