Journal of Language Horizons
Volume:5 Issue: 1, Winter and Spring 2021

Attention to language awareness is prominently increasing with the passage of time due to the effects different awareness-raising techniques might have on language learners’ performance. The present study specifically focused on the effects of syntactic awareness-raising techniques on Iranian intermediate EFL learner's written narrative task performance. The participants in the study included 40 intermediate learners whose initial homogeneity in terms of language proficiency was assessed via a General English Test. They were further randomly assigned to one control group and one experimental group, each comprising 20 participants. The amount of instructional time was 17 sessions, during which the participants in the experimental group received syntactic awareness-raising techniques through 'story grammar elements' and 'word order correction'. Right after the treatment, a post-test comprising a written narrative task was administrated. Data analysis results demonstrated that the experimental group which received the syntactic awareness-raising techniques outperformed the control group in retelling short stories in written form. The findings of the current study highlight the contribution of language awareness to the improvement of proficiency in EFL learners and pave the way for its inclusion in language teaching syllabuses.

As a growing trend in the cognitive approach to teaching, exploring teachers’ preconceptions can help to reveal various underlying dimensions that could leave significant impacts on the teaching process. Such preconceptions, of course, are very important in the case of novice teachers, particularly English as foreign language (EFL) ones, who have started to shape or re-shape their ideas about teaching. This study investigated Iranian EFL novice teachers’ preconceptions at private institutes, following three purposes (a) it tried to find any possibly existing underlying preconceptions about teaching in the teachers; (b) it sought to detect any similar patterns in their ideas; and (c) it intended to find the metaphorical expressions the teachers used to share their experiences of teaching English. To trace any similarities in the novice teachers' preconceptions, copies of a questionnaire including twelve items werecompleted by a sample of novice EFL teachers (43 males/females). The data analysis revealed five factors underlying the preconceptions: learning, students' problem solving, teachers' role, instruction, and good teacher. Moreover, to investigate the metaphorical expressions, 20-miniute semi-structured interviews were arranged with five EFL novice teachers. The interviews revealed that the participants employed metaphors in sharing their teaching-related experiences.

These days, technology is an inseparable part of our lives. There is still comparatively little research into effective podcast or vodcast design and students’ perceptions and attitudes towards this method. In the present study, the purpose is to clarify the impact of podcasts and vodcasts on motivated learners’ improvement in listening skills. The researchers used purposive sampling, and learners were divided into control and experimental groups. To this end, a validated version of a questionnaire that shows the degree of interest in improving listening skills was used to select a good number of motivated learners. Among the selected learners, 250 intermediate and advanced learners aged 18-35 who were studying English as a foreign language in Ayandegera Institute in 2020 were asked to fill out two questionnaires. Among 60 podcast files and 50 vodcast files, 10 podcasts and 10 vodcasts were chosen according to content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI) (0.42, 0.79) formula. The design of the study was experimental. In the current study, descriptive statistics and ANCOVA tests were applied in the analysis of the quantitative data. It was implied that there was a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group in both podcast and vodcast groups, whereas there was little significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the control group. Also, the findings showed that there was no significant difference between listening to podcasts and watching vodcasts.

Previously regarded as a static concept, motivation has now come to be viewed as an entity which is permanently in a state of flux. The dynamic nature of motivation and the concept of motivational fluctuations became widespread as complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) gained more popularity and credence among scholars in sciences and then gradually in the field of applied linguistics. Inspired mainly by this current view of motivation as a dynamic phenomenon, the present study sought to investigate the potential role of task type in motivational fluctuations experienced by EFL learners at the high school. In so doing, the possible role of gender was also taken into consideration. To gather data, the researchers made use of Motometer as a commonly used device for gauging learners’ self-reported levels of motivation over time as well as interviews. In line with the findings, task type was shown to be a major determiner of motivational changes. Among the three tasks implemented in the study, task 2 with a problem-solving focus was characterized as the most inspiring for learners followed by task 3 which was a picture-prompted task. Furthermore, as regards the second research question, gender was found to be of no significance during task performance. The study is thought to have fruitful implications for all educational stakeholders, particularly in the context of secondary education, as well as in language school settings.

This study investigated the effect of teaching cultural materials on reading motivation and reading attitude across two genders. To fulfill this objective, 150 upper-intermediate male (n = 75) and female (n = 75) EFL learners were selected and randomly divided into three equal groups. Then, a reading motivation pretest was carried out to check the participants’ reading motivation at the beginning of the course. As the treatment, some reading passages related to American and English cultures (for group A), Persian culture (for group B), and culture free-materials (for group C) were taught. After the treatment, a posttest of reading motivation and a reading attitude questionnaire were executed. The outcomes indicated that teaching materials with cultural content in them promoted the Iranian EFL learners’ reading motivation as checked by the Motivation for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ) (Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997). Moreover, as measured by a 25-item attitude questionnaire adapted from Liu’s (2015) scale, it was discovered that students had a positive attitude toward using such cultural materials in their reading. Lastly, the results demonstrated that female participants performed better than the male ones on reading motivation posttest. In light of the findings, a number of conclusions are drawn and several implications are put forward.

Task-based language learning and blended learning have become an ideology in modern EFL teaching and are considered to be an effective trend in teaching English as a foreign language. Thus, the present study explored the effect of integrating blended language learning into task-based language learning on Iranian male and female intermediate EFL learners’ reading comprehension ability. Initially, four groups including two experimental groups and two control groups were formed. The two experimental groups were taught through blended integrated task-based language learning. In so doing, Staker and Horn’s (2012) blended learning model was integrated into Ellis’ (2017) task-based model in order to improve participants’ reading comprehension ability. In this innovative approach, learners were involved in a series of offline and online focused and unfocused task-based reading comprehension activities, whereas the control groups were taught through conventional reading comprehension methods using traditional reading strategies. Accordingly, the results of ANCOVA indicated that learners in the experimental groups obtained considerably higher scores than those in the control groups. Further, the results of two-way ANOVA depicted that there was no substantial difference between the female and male learners across groups. Finally, the pedagogical implications of this study suggested that curriculum designers and materials developers can incorporate the innovative notion of integrating blended learning into task-based language learning method to transform the learning environment into more student-centered classrooms. More importantly, the teachers can develop learners’ critical thinking and metacognitive skills by designing interactive reading comprehension online tasks.

The objective of the present study was two-fold. First, the effect of speaking task difficulty on EFL lower-intermediate learners’ quantity of code-switching was examined. Second, the effect of speaking task difficulty on the participants’ quality of code-switching was studied. The participants of this study included 61 lower-intermediate language learners in a private English language institute in Iran. The participants performed twelve speaking tasks with easy, medium, and difficult levels of complexity developed by theresearchers. The findings indicated that less than 10 percent of students’ clauses included code-switching. The participants employed significantly more code-switching items under difficult task condition. The findings showed that the participants used code-switching for different purposes including vocabulary, syntactic structure, content, rubric clarification, turn-taking, and pronunciation. The learners employed expressive, referential, and directive language functions to fulfill their purposes and the number of directive items rose as the task difficulty level increased. Regarding the addressee of learners’ code-switches, the inductive analysis of the data showed that the code-switches were self-directed, peer-directed, teacher-directed, teacher and then peer-directed, and peer and then teacher-directed. The participants addressed almost half of the code-switches to their peers; however, more difficult tasks resulted in a higher number of teacher-directed code-switching items.

In this article, we explore the concept of criminal psychology and will explicate some of its major tenets in characterization of Hercule Poirot. Using an interdisciplinary approach, by close reading and drawing from crime and psychological theories (especially Behaviorism), we investigate the criminal profiling techniques in Agatha Christie’s detective novels. Particularly, we adduce Ian Marsh’s theory in introducing a set of explanations for criminal behavior and Westera et al.’s propositions in identifying features that make a detective’s endeavors effective. We focus on the psychological procedures that exist in the process of mystery (making and solution), as well as on the detective’s task to decodify riddles in light of the internal and external forces acting on him and how these affect his final decision. Then, we expand the notion of profiling as conducted by a detective and will illustrate some of the recurring biases that influence the final verdict about a case. Finally, we depict how the abovementioned proceedings are implemented in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The A.B.C Murders (1936), and Hickory Dickory Dock (1955), three of Christie’s best-selling novels with Hercule Poirot as their leading character. The character of Poirot, with his immaculate criminal profiling, bears witness to how Christie drew from and, at the same time, contributed to the concept and practice of criminal psychology in fiction.

So far, there have been three important theories explaining the nature and extent of grammatical deficit in agrammatic aphasia. In this respect, while the two mainly performance-based theories of agrammatics, i.e. trade-off hypothesis (TOH) and mapping hypothesis (MH), provide a very broad account of this deficit, the trace deletion hypothesis (TDH) presents a much narrower stance on the nature of the deficit as well as on the question of modularity. This research, being the first one in the Persian context, tries to test this theory in four gender-, education-, and age-matched Persian-speaking agrammatics and the same matched controls via executing a grammatical judgment test. For the purpose of evaluating our participants’ performance, 90 pairs of sentences, composed of well-formed and ill-formed ones, were presented to the subjects in a randomized manner, based on which participants were supposed to express their opinions regarding their grammaticality in a grammatical judgment task. The types of sentences being testified included active agentive, object cleft, subject cleft, agentive passive, psychological passive and object WH-constructions. Our findings, in line with the predictions of TDH, indicated that agrammatics faced many challenges with constructions in which constituent movements are involved. In contrast, their comprehension remained intact in agentive constructions. The theoretical and psychological implications of the findings are discussed.

Reading comprehension has a multidimensional nature, and different factors and affordances affect the language learners’ reading performance. The present study examined Iranian EFL learners’ reading motivation orientations and investigated the motivational and textual factors and affordances in reading, considering the learners’ reflections. The participants of the current study were 32 Iranian high school learners. The Persian translation of Motivation for Reading in English Questionnaire (MREQ) developed by Komiyama (2013) was administered to determine the participants’ orientations on the motivational dimensions. Analyzing the results of the questionnaire showed that the mean score of extrinsic motivation was higher than the mean score of intrinsic motivation. Motivational and textual factors and perceived affordances were also revealed using a qualitative analysis of the participants’ semi-structured reflections written during reflective learning process. The results of the questionnaire and reflections analyses can increase teachers’ awareness of the influential factors in reading based on the learners’ perceptions, and can help them provide effective feedback and appropriate learning opportunities.

Questions are the most important and the most common feature of legal talk. Questioning is the weapon that is used to test or challenge statements made by lay people and it is considered as a tool to make accusations. Based on syntactic and formal features of questioning, which are important parts of any linguistic analysis, questions are categorized into two classes: closed and open questions. The criteria for choosing one form over the others is determined by pragmatic factors. In other words, the questioner chooses one form of questions on the base of pragmatic strategies that s/he adapts during questioning. This article is dedicated to exploring the crossroads where structural and pragmatic features of questions come together to achieve this goal. To this end, we combined two quantitative and pragmatic approaches. The data of the present research was gathered from four cases during interrogation processes in the court of Shiraz.  The research findings indicate that pragmatic strategies determine the types of question forms and, also, closed questions have the most application in the interrogation process because they have a high level of control that can challenge the addressee’s statements.

Vocabulary knowledge has a significant role in communication. Therefore, a plethora of research has investigated the effect of various factors on the acquisition of L2 vocabulary. This empirical study aimed to examine the predictions of Laufer and Hulstijn’s (2001) involvement load hypothesis (ILH) by considering the impact of task type and involvement index on Iranian EFL learners’ incidental vocabulary learning. The ILH predicts that tasks with the same involvement load should lead to equal vocabulary gains. To this end, forty-five upper-intermediate learners were given one of four different tasks with the same involvement index (i.e., reading comprehension plus dictionary use, cloze-exercise plus dictionary use, inferencing, and sentence writing plus meanings of target words in L1 + L2). Participants’ receptive and productive knowledge of target words were tested immediately after fulfilling the tasks and three weeks later. Mixed-plot ANOVAs were run to compare the performance of the participants on the tasks. The results revealed that, contrary to the theory’s predictions, the performance of the learners on the four tasks was significantly different although the tasks had the same involvement indices. The results suggest that depth of processing and involvement are important factors in vocabulary learning. However, it also seems that the relative importance of the components of involvement might require reconsideration.