Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Volume:9 Issue: 1, Winter 2022

Teacher training programs play a vital role in developing student-teachers’ understanding of their professional selves as an effective factor in successful teaching. Though the number of studies regarding the effects of teacher education on foreign language teachers’ self-images continues to proliferate, little attention has been paid to Iranian EFL student-teachers, particularly females, in terms of future images of professional selves being developed during their training at Teacher Education University. Using the Possible selves theory (Markus & Nurius, 1986), the present qualitative study explores and compares the future professional self-images of EFL student-teachers at Iranian Teacher Education University. Eight female student-teachers in the first, third, and last year of their studies from several female teacher education colleges around the country accepted to participate in the interviews. They were asked to discuss their desired and feared selves, as well as their plans for achieving or avoiding these selves, respectively. In-depth phenomenological interviewing was adopted to collect the data. Before fieldwork experience, student-teachers’ hopes and fears were mostly geared to classroom routines, while by the end, their statements were predominantly theory-based and sophisticated. Most student-teachers made reference to some plans for attaining their desired professional self-images and avoiding feared ones. The study put forward some implications for teacher training and education programs.

The variability of the professional knowledge and skills required for diverse pedagogical contexts makes second language teaching effectiveness a complicated issue and teaching ineffectiveness a common concern among EFL practitioners. Notwithstanding the scholarly consensus on this matter, the roots of teaching ineffectiveness have remained contentious. Hence, we conducted a case study deploying collaborative critical reflection (CCR) to diagnose the possible roots of the participants’ teaching ineffectiveness using Saphier, Haley-Speca, and Gower’s (2018) skillful teacher framework. To this end, two EFL teachers were selected as the participants of the study and were guided to utilize their selves, and colleagues as professional development (PD) resources. Video-recorded classroom observations guided the subsequent reflections and a focus group collaborative discussion. Then using a retrospective lesson- objective interview and a retrospective lesson plan, we elicited the teachers’ thinking types while planning. The analysis of multiple sources of data through multiple methods and by multiple investigators revealed teachers’ erroneous and over self-evaluation, teachers’ non-reflective practice, faulty thinking for lesson planning, and the discrepancy between their intentions and actions as the possible roots of the observed teaching infectiveness. The findings of this pathology, shedding light on the professional development path, might benefit EFL theoreticians, teacher educators, and teaching practitioners.

Pre-listening activity has a considerable role in improving listening comprehension. This research examined the effects of bottom-up and top-down pre-listening activities on Iranian EFL students’ listening comprehension. It also investigated the potential interaction effects of language proficiency and gender with the treatments. Using the TOEFL (PBT) test, 270 learners were selected and grouped into three proficiency levels of elementary, intermediate, and upper-intermediate. At each level, 90 subjects were randomly distributed to one control (CG) and two experimental groups (EGs), each consisting of 30 learners. After giving the pretest, vocabulary preparation as a bottom-up pre-listening activity and content-related support as a top-down pre-listening activity were given to the two EGs for the treatment, but the learners in the CGs were demanded to listen to the audio tracks and go straight into the listening tasks without any pre-listening activities. The research lasted for six weeks and 12 sessions. At the end of the experiment, the posttest was given to the subjects to measure the effects of the treatments. The results revealed significant differences between the learners’ pretest and posttest performance. The analyses of the data confirmed the positive impact of both types of pre-listening activities on the listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners based on their proficiency levels. Further analyses revealed the interaction effects between proficiency levels and treatments. However, there was no interaction effect between the learners’ gender and the treatments. The findings of the study could help practitioners in the field to assign more practical tasks to improve the listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners.

Satisfaction of online students is one of the important issues of online education, and identifying the predictors of satisfaction can improve the effectiveness and success of online education. This study thus aimed to investigate online students’ and instructors’ perceptions of the influential factors such as motivation, e-readiness, and barriers for online satisfaction and to determine the contribution of these factors to satisfaction. The participants were 114 online graduate students of TEFL and 5 online instructors at Iran University of Science and Technology. Four questionnaires on learning barriers, motivation, e-readiness, and satisfaction along with 4 open-ended questions were administered in this descriptive study. The results revealed that most of online students were satisfied with the online graduate program of TEFL as online instructors provided students with lesson summary and class material prior to the session, had interaction with students through social networks, and held the online classes after office hours. The results also showed that online students' motivation was mostly instrumental, and some were not completely ready for online education. The results of multiple regression analysis also indicated that the contribution of motivation to satisfaction was higher than that of readiness and barriers. Online instructors need to solve students’ educational problems to make them ready for online instruction and to foster students’ motivation, which are influential in enhancing their satisfaction with online learning programs.

Inspired by the works of scholars who have done great efforts to improve study quality in second language (L2) papers in the recent decade (e.g., Hu & Plonsky, 2019; Larson-Hall, 2012, 2017; Plonsky, 2013; Norris, 2015), this paper aims to capture the perceptions of Iranian authors around issues of quality that have been emphasized by publication manuals (e.g., APA, 2010; Wilkinson, 1999) and recommendation (e.g., Norris et al., 2015). The triggering idea behind the study was that in order to adhere to standards of quality, authors, first, need to perceive the issues highly-associated with the concept. Accordingly, a questionnaire of quality developed by Larson-Hall and Jahanbakhsh (2020) was used to capture respondents’ perceptions. Out of the 1029 authors who had published quantitative papers in 10 Iranian journals from 2015 to 2019, 885 authors could be contacted and 128 answered the questionnaire. The results showed that respondents saw fundamental issues like random sampling, reliability, validity, checking normality, and reporting inferential statistics as the most highly-associated features with quality while the concerned issues by scholars, like generalizability in convenience samplings, use of delayed posttest, reporting non-significant results, and importance of visual presentations are less acknowledged. Moreover, using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), it was revealed that a path of perception exists which starts from sampling issues and going through design and statistical to reporting practices. It was recommended that authors take the issues of study quality more seriously in both their works and the context of education.

The present study sought to explore whether the incorporation of the integration of technology and project-based learning into the mainstream English teaching classrooms contributes to the development of critical thinking and problem solving, as two skills essential for 21st century English learning. To accomplish such an objective, 35 Iranian learners of English were assigned to an experimental and a control group in a quasi-experimental study. Along with benefiting from a multi-skill textbook-oriented language instruction, which was the conventional teaching method of the class, the participants in the experimental group dealt with a variety of small- and large-scale technology-aided projects. The control group’s participants, on the other hand, received a multi-skill textbook-oriented language instruction in the absence of any technology-aided projects. The comparative analysis of the control and experimental groups’ performance on the critical thinking and problem solving pre- and post-treatment measures revealed a significant impact for the study treatment in improving the participants’ critical thinking and problem solving in English learning classes.The findings of the current study may be beneficial to those interested in exploring the contribution of technology to the modern educational system. Material developers and syllabus designers could also use the results of the study to augment their instructional packages for technology-assisted project based English learning.

Despite the increasing attention of researchers to digital multimodal composition in recent years and the importance of self-efficacy beliefs in the development of writing ability, the instruction of writing skill has still remained traditional in Iran. The present mixed-methods study was conducted to examine the joint effect of digital multimodal composition and self-efficacy on the writing ability of Iranian EFL learners. In so doing, two intact groups including 59 sophomore students at a university in southeastern Iran participated in the study. The participants were assigned into two comparison groups of multimodal (n = 30) and monomodal (n = 29) compositions. The multimodal group composed five digital essays while the monomodal group produced five paper-based essays during the semester. Moreover, both groups’ self-efficacy beliefs were assessed through Second Language Writer Self-Efficacy Scale after they finished composing their essays. At the final stage of the research, semi-structured interviews were run to elicit the participants’ perception about digital multimodal composition. The result of two-way MANOVA revealed that the multimodal group outperformed the monomodal group in terms of content, communicative achievement, and organization, but not in language component. Additionally, self-efficacy had a significant impact on the writing ability of both multimodal and monomodal groups regardless of the type of writing they produced. Besides, the thematic analysis of the interviews revealed that highly-efficacious learners had positive perception about multimodal composition. The study concludes with the necessity of reshaping educational practices for English writing instruction in Iran and fostering the learners’ self-efficacy in the composition processes.

The relationship between student engagement and motivation has been shown to be significant. However, the nature of this association still needs to be further known. Self-regulation also has a close connection with both student engagement and motivation. The present study thus aimed at investigating this relationship by examining the mediating role of self-regulated language learning between the four dimensions of student engagement and language learning motivation among Iranian EFL learners. As an ancillary objective, the study tried to explore the relationships between dimensions of student engagement and self-regulated language learning. The participants, selected based on convenience sampling, comprised 146 young adult male language learners learning English at the Iran Language Institute (ILI), Gorgan, Iran. The participants were given three questionnaires. In order to analyze the data, structural equation modeling (SEM) was run by using the SmartPLS software, version 2. The results of path analysis indicated that self-regulated language learning failed to mediate between the four dimensions of student engagement and language learning motivation. The findings also showed that there were positive significant relationships between self-regulated language learning and three dimensions of student engagement, i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and agentic. However, the relationship between self-regulated language learning and emotional engagement was not statistically significant.