Interdisciplinary Studies in English Language Teaching
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Jan 2021

The present study investigated Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ perception of school climate and its relationship with their conception of effective teaching. A body of 147 teachers selected through purposive and snowball sampling strategies answered Oderand and Eisenschmidt’s (2016) questionnaire about school climate and effective teaching. Data were analyzed using factor analysis, which produced three factors to explain teachers’ perception of school contextual factors and three for their conception of effective teaching. The results indicated that teachers’ perception of school contextual factors to some degree correlated with their approach to teaching in the classroom. The study highlights the fundamental role of school senior management in helping teachers to apply appropriate teaching approaches

Listening has recently attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners worldwide (Renandya & Hu, 2018), and research into L2 listening strategy use has recently tended to focus on metacognitive strategies (Lynch & Mendelsohn, 2020), This study investigated the comparative effect of L1/L2-mediated metacognitive intervention (MI) on the IELTS listening comprehension performance and metacognitive awareness of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Iran. The participants were 540 upper-intermediate EFL listeners in three groups, ranging from 17 to 28 years of age. The experimental groups (Ex1=180 / Ex2=180) went through a guided lesson plan in metacognition in English and Persian for twelve weeks, which focused on planning, monitoring, and evaluation. The control group (CG = 180), also instructed by the same teacher, listened to the same texts without any guided attention to the process. The MALQ and an actual IELTS test were used before and after the intervention to track the changes in metacognitive awareness and listening performance. The overall results showed that MI caused a considerable variance in the listening performance and the metacognitive awareness of learners in both experimental groups. The Post Hoc multiple comparison results of the three groups also illustrated that the medium for the delivery of the metacognitive intervention (L1) assisted the listeners in experimental group one, who went through L1-mediated metacognitive intervention, to outperform their peers in experimental group two, who were taught in L2, and the control group, who were taught conventionally.

Errors are an important feature of development in a second language as they indicate the state of learners' knowledge. This study investigates the gravity of the lexical errors made by Iranian advanced EFL learners from the perspective of their peer advanced EFL learners. Sixty advanced Iranian undergraduate students who were majoring in English Language and Literature at Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran, Iran, took part in this research. The participants, who were selected through purposive sampling, were given a questionnaire containing eleven lexically erroneous sentences extracted from their fellow advanced students’ writings. They were required to judge those sentences in terms of their acceptability and intelligibility. The results indicated that the students considered mis-ordering as least acceptable type of errors (mean:1.78) and calque (i.e., translation from L1) the least intelligible type (mean: 2.46). The results further showed that there was a strong positive correlation between acceptability and intelligibility ratings of the errors by the advanced EFL learners, meaning that the more acceptable the errors, the more intelligible they were. The findings of this study can help improve our understanding of EFL learners’ problems; they can also inform EFL teachers’ instructional planning and remedial practices, especially in the English as an international language paradigm.

Peer review is carried out in academic journal boards in somewhat different ways to serve the purposes of a particular journal. Through the peer review process, reviewers in academic journals scrutinize and deeply analyze the quality of academic works before the publication. As an ‘occluded’ genre (Swales, 1996), getting access to the content of peer reviews in journals is too difficult. To shed light on the process of peer review, we investigated the reviewers’ perceptions and understandings of peer review in Applied Linguistics journals published in Iran. To this end, we developed an open-ended questionnaire and sent out it to the editorial board reviewers of Iranian certified journals active in publishing on different aspects of applied linguistics. Sixteen reviewers participated in the study by filling in the questionnaire and returning it back. The collected data were analyzed through thematic qualitative data. The results of the study indicate that the reviewers are all active agents in reviewing the manuscript and consider both conceptual, methodological, and mechanics of writing. The implications and recommendations are discussed in light of the findings.

Recent research has heralded the role of social interaction in learning a second language. While earlier cognitive approaches to language learning attracted attention to individual factors involved in the process, social approaches regard learning as a pluralistic attempt which is materialized through participation. This shift in focus is important because it entails the study of language learning as it occurs in its natural habitat of social interaction rather than limiting it to formal educational settings. Mainstream SLA research has suffered from this limitation, with most studies in the field opting for experimental or quasi-experimental designs. Although informative in many respects, such studies lack the ecological validity to explore how learners approach the task of language learning in the real world. To address this issue, the study of language learning in the wild (outside formal educational settings) has gained momentum. The present study takes a similar approach to explore the affordances online learner-learner interactions may offer for language learning. Rather than tracking and measuring learning, it seeks to understand the potentials such interactions may have for language learning particularly because they happen in the absence of teachers. It builds upon data collected from video calls among Japanese and Taiwanese learners of English, transcribed and analyzed with a conversation analytic lens. The findings indicate that online interactions outside classroom provide learners with opportunities for extended negotiations for meaning, besides being a space for developing awareness for how interactions are structured in conversations taking place in the real world.

Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this study analyzed two different sub-corpora including Non-Native English-Speaking (NNES) and Native English-Speaking (NES) sub-corpus. There were 60 research articles from soft sciences including Applied Linguistics, Sociology, Economics and hard sciences including Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Biology. To examine the frequency of stance and engagement markers in the two sub-corpora separately, MAXQDA software was utilized. Several Chi-square tests were run to investigate the differences found in the frequencies of the two groups. The results demonstrated that writers of different fields of study and from different cultural backgrounds exerted varying degrees of authorship and interaction in their texts. Regarding disciplinary variation, it was found that the researchers in soft disciplines used more stance and engagement markers than the ones in hard disciplines. With regard to cross-cultural variation, native academic writers preferred to draw more on interactional markers than non-native Iranian academic writers. The findings of the present study offer implications to academic writers from different fields of study and different cultural backgrounds so that they become cognizant of their own presence in texts and their interaction with readers based on the use of stance and engagement markers. The results can also be implemented in EAP/ESP courses and syllabi.

Maximizing learning opportunities has long intrigued teaching practitioners and researchers. Therefore, a lot of studies have been conducted on different instructional methodologies to help language learners with utilizing their learning chances. The present comparative study aims at investigating the effects of two instructional procedures, namely Critical Pedagogy (CP) Based Teaching and Task- Based Language Teaching (TBLT) on oral proficiency and storytelling skills of the participants. Thus, 30 Iranian male EFL learners, who were all rated at A1 level on Quick Placement Test (Cambridge, 2001), were selected. All of the learners who aged from 13 to 15 years old were randomly assigned into two research groups of CP and TBLT through convenience and purposive sampling. Pretest/posttest research design was conducted to trace any significant effects of two instructional procedures on storytelling skills and oral proficiency level of the learners before and after 12 sessions of treatment in each research group. Although the results of independent t-tests and effect size indicated impact of each instruction type on learners’ storytelling skills and oral proficiency level, the results failed to show any significant difference between Critical Pedagogy Based Teaching and Task- Based Language Teaching. Implications of the study were also discussed further and suggestions for more research were proposed.