Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Volume:10 Issue: 1, Winter 2023

Enhancing young learners’ motivation has often been a primary concern in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). Adopting a self-determination perspective, this study attempted to examine the impact of teacher's motivational strategies on young EFL learners' basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The present research employed a mixed-methods design using data from questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and reflective journals. A total of 30 EFL young learners were selected and assigned to two classes, an experimental group in which the implementation of motivational strategies was studied and a control group. Four motivational strategies namely generating initial motivation, creating the basic motivational conditions, encouraging positive self-evaluation, and maintaining and protecting motivation were instructed in the experimental group. At the end of the treatment, all the participants filled out two questionnaires: The Student Questionnaire on Motivational Strategies Effectiveness and The Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale. Also, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the young learners of the experimental group. The results revealed that motivational strategies impacted young learners' basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness positively. Additionally, the qualitative data from the interviews and reflective journals shed more light on the young learners’ autonomy, competence, and their relatedness. Findings have implications for EFL teachers and materials designers.

This study was carried out to develop a new scale for measuring TEFL prospective teachers’ attitudes toward the teaching profession to be used as an instrument in the admission procedure of Iranian Teacher education Universities. The participants were two groups of junior and senior prospective teachers (n= 54 & n=186) majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Farhangian University in Iran. After reviewing the literature and interviewing 54 participants, the initial draft of the scale containing 38 items using a 5-point Likert type was developed. After revising the draft based on the experts’ comments and the feedback from a group of participants, the new version with 32 items was completed by 186 participants and their responses were submitted for statistical analyses. As a result of the exploratory factor analyses, the scale was reduced to 22 items across four factors, entitled economic factor, social factor, professional factor, and teacher competency factor. The reliability coefficients were found to be 0.70 for the whole scale, and 0.67, 0.69, 0.76 and 0.73 for the subscales, respectively. The results of confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the four-factor solution possessed good data-model fit across all indices, χ2 (203, N = 186) = 356.38, p < 0.000, χ2/df = 1.76, GFI = 0.95, NNFI = 0.92, CFI = 0.93 SRMR = 0.05, RMSEA = 0.064. The results demonstrated that the scale was valid and reliable to measure professional attitudes of TEFL prospective teachers.

To compensate for the lack of evidential data on the changes in both hidden and observable constructs underlying teachers’ self-efficacy throughout their teaching life, the current study aimed at comparing patterns of cognition, metacognition, emotion, and behavior across three groups of Iranian EFL teacher with scant, moderate, and considerable teaching experience. To this end, a convenience sample including 382 Iranian EFL teachers were surveyed about five interrelated constructs including pedagogical knowledge, teaching reflection, motivational needs satisfaction, teaching styles use, and work engagement. The quantitative data gathered through five standard questionnaires were compared across the three groups based on a multivariate approach to comparison. According to the results, the three groups differed significantly on a linear combination of the five variables representing the latent and observable aspects of teacher efficacy. Additionally, the results drawn from discriminant function analysis (DFA) showed that among the five variables, pedagogical knowledge and motivational needs satisfaction acted as a concordant pair and explained the heaviest load of the overall between-group differences. The significantly higher levels of pedagogical knowledge and motivational needs satisfaction among the moderately experienced teachers, compared to those of their less and more experienced counterparts, suggested that Iranian EFL teachers’ sense of efficacy reaches its peak at the middle years of a teaching life. The findings may provide new insights into the ways of setting English teachers of various experiential background on the road to optimum efficacy.

The emerging interest in scaffolding as a dynamic, multifaceted, and evolving construct has mounted over the last decades due to its impact on teachers’ professional development and students’ learning. The present paper adopted conversation analysis to analyze scaffolding intentions in content-based instruction (CBI) based on Van de Pol et al.’s (2010) framework of scaffolding intentions, which includes direction maintenance, cognitive structuring, reduction of the degrees of freedom, recruitment, and frustration control. Through convenience sampling, four science teachers in English-medium CBI were selected, and the videotaped recordings of 12 hours of their online classroom instruction were transcribed and analyzed. The findings indicated that scaffolding intentions mostly pertain to enhancing students’ cognitive structuring, controlling their frustration, and promoting their engagement in the learning process. The findings showed that the cognitive load of learning concepts was one of the main determiners of teachers’ scaffolding. Also, various activities to recruit interest were used by the teachers to provide scaffolding. The findings evidenced that teachers’ interactional and instructional techniques were mostly centered on directing students towards the pedagogical aims and engaging them in the various activities at hand to call students’ attention to the applicability of science matters in the real-life or personal experience. It should be noted that developing self-supporting and self-reflecting strategies were demanding for the teachers. These findings have implications for the teachers and teacher educators to heighten teachers’ awareness of scaffolding in CBI classes to enact more effective teaching.

The main purpose of the study was to explore the connection between teachers' critical thinking, autonomy, and their teaching experience among public and private English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. In addition, the differences between the two main contexts of English language learning (public and private contexts) were scrutinized vis a vis teachers' critical thinking and their autonomy. Two different groups of EFL private language institute teachers and EFL high school teachers were selected from two major cities in Khorasan Razavi, Iran. As the results of Path Analysis indicated, all subfactors of EFL teachers' critical thinking (analysis, evaluation, inference, inductive reasoning) except deductive reasoning were positive significant predictors of their autonomy. Additionally, the experience was a positive significant predictor of their autonomy. Furthermore, among five sub-factors of EFL teachers' critical thinking, four subfactors were predicted by experience including analysis, inference, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning. However, the experience did not predict evaluation. Also, the results of the Pearson correlation indicated that critical thinking was positively associated with autonomy with a moderate connection, and positively and weakly with experience. Furthermore, the results of the t-test for independent samples indicated that there was a significant difference between the two different contexts in the level of autonomy with private EFL teachers being more autonomous than public EFL teachers. Nevertheless, there was no significant difference between the two types of context in critical thinking.

The outbreak of Covid-19 changed many aspects of people all over the world, including the type of education and learning/teaching styles. Transferring from face-to-face education to distance education brought some difficulties and challenges for both teachers and students. Among those observed challenges and problems, one of the most important ones was related to distance listening courses at an ELT department of a state university in Turkey. In the literature, no related or similar studies to discover the perceptions of ELT students about the online listening courses. Therefore, this present study aimed at discovering the 2nd grade ELT students’ perceptions about the distance listening courses carried out throughout the Covid-19 period focusing on whether students had encountered any challenges. To collect data, a 30-item Likert-type questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were used. Randomly selected students (12) and listening course teachers (4) were interviewed to reinforce the findings of the study. Findings put forward that a great majority of the participants and instructors had negative perceptions and attitudes about online listening courses. The results of this current research will be of benefit to university instructors and syllabus designers in taking future urgent decisions and measures regarding the implementation of distance learning and teaching programs for students from different backgrounds.