Issues in Language Teaching Journal
Volume:9 Issue: 2, Summer and Autumn 2020

This article was intended to investigate and compare the impact of three types of verbalization within Systemic Theoretical Instruction on the L2 learners’ knowledge of past voice. To this end, four EFL intact classrooms from a high school in Iran were chosen and randomly assigned to one control and three experimental groups. The experimental groups received their respective treatment, that is, communicated thinking, dialogic thinking and, communicated plus dialogic thinking while the control group received instruction about the same target structure, here, passive voice through a deductive lesson. The first part of the result proved that STI in its all conceptualizations was an effective pedagogical option. The result also showed that communicated and communicated plus dialogic procedures had an advantage over the dialogic one both in the immediate and delayed posttests. This finding could be attributed to the unique nature of communicated thinking combining the mediation through concepts of STI with the mediation through interaction of dynamic assessment.

Recent interdisciplinary studies have revealed that hope plays a key role in academic achievement and job performance. Due to the paucity of research on the interface of hope and second or foreign (L2) language teaching, for the first time, this paper sets out to develop a categorical conceptualization of hope for teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). While an exploratory mixed-methods research was designed, using observation and in-depth interviews, grounded-based qualitative data were obtained from experienced Iranian EFL teachers until the theoretical saturation of data was achieved. Thirty-eight items linked to seven main categories were identified. To judge the validation of the qualitative findings, a 38-item questionnaire of hope for EFL teaching was designed and then piloted. Next, to test the generalizability of the piloting-phase findings, the modified 35-item questionnaire of hope for EFL teaching was administered to a convenience sample of 228 EFL teachers from three Iranian provinces of Tehran, Chaharmahal Bakhtiari, and Isfahan. Statistical analyses of the testing data confirmed that 35 items are attached to seven broad underlying components of hope for EFL teaching. Therefore, the main factors, including interpersonal relationship, social purpose, goal-setting, emotion, certainty, source, and anticipated effort were confirmed. Further, the explanatory power of all the items involved in developing hope for EFL teaching was tested and estimated. The findings can shed more light on developing educational interventionist programs which can lead EFL teachers into higher levels of hope for EFL teaching.

This study explored the research methodology and research orientation of the papers published in seven world-leading applied linguistics journals from 1980 to 2019. To that end, a corpus including 3491 papers from seven applied linguistics journals was investigated. The papers were examined for their research methodology based on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods methodologies and their research orientations based on ten research orientations that were the main focus of applied linguistics studies. The research orientations were obtained from the topics of special issues of the applied linguistics journals. The papers were extracted and analyzed for their research methodologies and orientations according to the three research methodology types and ten research orientations. The results of the study indicated that from 1980 to 2000, the dominant research methodology was quantitative one, while from 2001 to 2019, the qualitative research methodology had an increasing trend of being used by applied linguistics researchers. Moreover, the results of the current study showed that from 2010 to 2019, the applied linguistics researchers showed positive attentions to use mixed methods methodology in their research studies. Furthermore, the corpus analysis from 2000 to 2019 indicated that teaching, teachers, and assessment issues started to show an increasing trajectory of being addressed in the applied linguistics papers. Thus, this study's findings can help the researchers, especially the less experienced ones, refine their knowledge about what has already been done in the field to focus their research studies on the less-examined issues.

While a growing body of research has attempted to analyze how voice is deployed in argumentative writing, much work remains to be done in instructing voice elements. Therefore, the present study examined the effect of instruction based on Martin and White’s (2005) Engagement framework and Hyland’s (2008) interactional model on voice construction. To this end, a control group (20) and two treatment groups (40) were selected. The treatment groups received sessions of teaching voice elements, each based on a different model. The gain score analysis and the SPANOVA were employed to analyze the change in the use of voice elements between the treatment groups and the control group after the treatment. The results indicated that EFL learners could benefit from instruction in both treatment groups. However, learners who were aware of voice based on the Engagement framework could construct more considerable defensive voice in making an argument challenging. Findings from this study could provide implications for teaching by broadening instructors’ knowledge of voice to cultivate learners’ awareness of voice and help them to employ it effectively in IELTS writing task 2. 

In this study, the researchers intended to screen English language learning perceptions on four relational contexts including language learners’ family members, English teachers, classmates and their best friends. To this aim, a group of Iranian adolescents (no=38), with an age range of 12-16 were randomly selected from three language institutes located in Sabzevar, Khorasan Razavi. The researchers distributed a modified version of a validated questionnaire by Taylor (2010) titled Quadripolar Model of Identity (TQMI) to investigate variability of the learners’ perceptions for 1)learning English with regard to four relational contexts above and 2) their insights over two conceived selves including public and imposed self. Findings indicated that within diverse characterizations of personality types, the preferences for including “family members” in the learning processes and future functioning were conspicuous. As to respondents’ preferences towards achieving their goals in learning English regarding their two selves (public and imposed), it became clear that the level of imposing on the part of “language teachers” and “families” on the learners was roughly the same in both present and future self categorization presentations and in the public self, again family members had more rates. Finally, the results from the data on the relationship between two aspects of identity (imposed vs. public), and language learning success, measures represented a significant relationship for only imposed identity indicators. Implications for overall recognition of other-related people in the language learning processes were discussed in the end.

Considering the indispensable role pragmatic knowledge plays in not only comprehending L2 materials, but also in making and maintaining proper communication, and the fact that Iranian EFL learners are primarily exposed to the target language through textbooks, this research intended to discern how frequently and appropriately Politeness Markers (PMs), Speech Acts (SAs), and Language Functions (LFs) are being incorporated in newly-published Iranian high school English textbooks: Prospect and Vision Series. Furthermore, the study set out to investigate the possible relations between the level of the textbooks and the frequency of pragmatic components being included. To this end, 172 conversations of the aforementioned textbooks were thoroughly analyzed to determine the frequency of the PMs based on House and Kasper (1981) taxonomy, the frequency of SAs based on Searle's (1979) paradigm, and the frequency of LFs according to Halliday’s (1978) framework. Findings revealed that Committers were the most frequently-used PMs, Representatives and Directives were the most commonly-used SAs, and Informatives enjoyed the highest frequency among LFs. The results also indicated that these pragmatic components were not equally distributed throughout the conversations and no significant relationship existed between level of the textbooks and frequency of the pragmatic elements. In addition to the consciousness-raising dimension of the study, material developers might be able to appropriately represent and include pragmatic information into their materials. Moreover, teachers might also be able to amend and modify their adopted approaches to foreign language teaching and adjust them to accommodate potential learner styles and their preferences.

This paper focuses on errors made by Persian learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) when producing English headless relative clauses (RCs). Although English does not allow interrogative structure in headless RCs, Persian EFL learners tend to produce them in the interrogative form. In the course of the present research, potential sources of this error were explored, and eventually the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) showed to have more explanatory power, and made up the theoretical framework of the research. The oral and written corpus of the study was obtained in the course of two years through diverse sources from 137 female and male Iranian participants. The collected, naturally-occurring data yielded a pool of 126 ill-formed RCs, consisting of 85 (67.46%) ordinary headless, 25(19.84%) headed and 16 (12.69%) free headless RCs. Scrutiny into the data led to recognizing systematic errors in two main types (headless RC in subject or object position) and two subsidiary types (headless RC in subject position including copula verb) of English headless RCs. These systematic errors can be attributed to markedness differential hypothesis, not in the sense that the forms are different across the two languages, but because of the wider functionality of interrogative and declarative forms in English headless RCs, compared to Persian. This study calls for linguistic analysis of other facets of such systematic errors, more collaboration of linguists and language pedagogues to recognize and address learning problems, and studies on educational solutions for related problems.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed all universities to offer all programs online, but not all instructors were prepared for such an abrupt transformation. Online education can be very challenging both to the instructors and the institutions and has several subtleties that make it quite different from the face-to-face programs. There exists an urgent need for studies examining the effectiveness of such programs being offered amid the pandemic in comparison with the same courses held face-to-face. As a result, the present study was an attempt to compare the effectiveness of an online EAP course with that of the same course being offered face-to-face in terms of its three components, namely vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension. Sixty-eight students in two groups of online and face-to-face classes took part in this study with a pretest-posttest design. While the two groups were not significantly difference at the onset of the study, the results of the SPANOVAs run showed a significant difference in the case of the grammar component, but not the other two, with the face-to-face group outperforming the online one. The follow-up interviews revealed that learners in online classes often have little interaction with their instructors and peers, and teachers cannot keep learners engaged and active during the class as it is often conducted in the form of a monologue lecture. All this indicates that an online program is not a translation of a face-to-face curriculum into an online format, but it enjoys numerous intricacies that need to be considered by all those involved.

Much uncertainty still exists about the possible role of myriads external and internal mediating variables such as language backgrounds and ethnicities in the process of corrective feedback (CF). To address the issue, 79 monolingual Persians and 79 bilingual Turkmens aged between 13 and 18 from two language institutes in Golestan Province, Iran participated in the study comprising three experimental and a control group each. Pretests revealed the learners’ grammatical errors based on which the experimental groups were provided with different strategies of metalinguistic CF, namely mid-focused oral metalinguistic CF (OMCF), written metalinguistic CF (WMCF), and oral/written metalinguistic CF (OWMCF) on their five most recurrent grammatical errors while the control groups received none. Following significant Kruskal-Wallis test results, the Conover’s pairwise comparison test was employed to exhibit differences among CF strategies. In monolingual Persians and bilingual Turkmens, all the experimental groups significantly outperformed the control groups. Mid-focused OMCF and OWMCF had significant effects on the reduction of Persians’ errors, but for Turkmens, all the CF strategies exerted a significant reduction of errors. The effectiveness rank of the CF strategies investigated through Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) selected OMCF as the best strategy for monolingual Persians while for bilingual Turkmens, WMCF ranked first. This ranking was highly stable for 10000 iterations changing the weights up to 50%. The outcomes of the research might be of help to EFL learners, EFL teachers of bilingual learners, syllabus designers, and materials developers, while opening doors to further pertinent studies.

Teachers’ quality of work life (QWL) is an umbrella concept that refers to the degree of satisfaction a teacher experiences with respect to his or her job and the overall work situations which are influenced by three factors of organizational support including participation in decision making, fairness of rewards, and growth opportunity. The present study examined the relationship between perceived organizational support (POS) and QWL among secondary school teachers of English as a foreign language. To this end, employing a descriptive correlational method, the researchers selected a number of 173 male and female teachers who were selected via probability multistage cluster sampling from among a population which consisted of EFL teachers at secondary schools in Tehran (N=1826), Iran. Data collection instruments included an attitude survey based on Allen, Armstrong, Reid, and Riemenschneider (2008) model of POS as well as Walton’s (1973) QWL questionnaire. Pearson correlation and multiple linear regression were used to analyze the data. The relationship between POS and QWL was found to be .71. In other words, the three dimensions of POS could affect the QWL by 71 percent. More specifically, the three dimensions of participation in decision making with 21.4, fairness of rewards with 24.7, and growth opportunity with 64.1 percent could be used to predict the QWL. These findings are important in that they demonstrate that POS is significantly related to the QWL of EFL teachers which can in turn significantly affect the performance of these teachers at schools.

The present study scrutinized the role of data-driven learning in recognizing and producing collocations by high- and low-intermediate learners of English. Moreover, the influence of secondary effect (or transfer of training) on learning secondary collocations (collocations not provided in concordancing but embedded implicitly in tasks) was examined. The learners’ attitudes towards the effect of concordancing on learning collocations and their attitude change over time were also elicited through a questionnaire. A total of 40 Iranian learners were randomly divided into an experimental and a control group. Each group was further subdivided into high- and low-intermediate learners. The experimental group received a 10-session treatment in which they had access to concordancing to perform the paraphrasing tasks. The control group was taught the same collocations in a traditional explicit way. Results revealed that the high-intermediate learners benefitted from concordancing in both primary and secondary learning of collocations more than the low-intermediate learners. Both high- and low-intermediate groups appreciated the positive role of concordancing in learning collocations and stated that their attitudes towards concordancing changed positively over time.

Teacher assessment literacy plays a pivotal role in teacher education programs; however, there seems to be a lack of either assessment literacy or its implementation. Using an online assessment course, including both theoretical and practical issues, this mixed method study examined 16 teachers’ (8 in-service and 8 pre-service) assessment literacy and the extent to which they implement this knowledge. The quantitative part explored participants’ assessment literacy, while the qualitative phase examined the validation of the quantitative results as well as the implementation of assessment literacy in the practical realm. Data were collected via valid and reliable questionnaires, one of which was adapted from Mertler (2003) and the two others were developed by the researchers, along with a practical assessment project. The results indicated that though in-service teachers at their entry behavior were more assessment literate due to their experience, they were at lower degree of assessment literacy at their eventual behavior in comparison with pre-service teachers. The qualitative analysis explored the lack of teachers’ preference for the use of assessment literacy in their classroom practice. The study suggests the inclusion of both theoretical and practical dimensions of assessment literacy in teacher education programs and it proposes doing an in-depth investigation into the difficulties that hinder teachers from putting their theoretical assessment knowledge into practice.