Interdisciplinary Studies in English Language Teaching
Volume:2 Issue: 1, Jan 2023

Elementary school teachers should keep pace with the constant changes in educational research, subject knowledge, and teaching strategies. As Farhangian University plays an essential role in the pre-service teacher training, acquainting teacher-students with the specialized language is essential. Therefore, this qualitative cross-sectional study was conducted to investigate problems with translating specialized English texts among elementary education student-teachers. The target population was the elementary education student-teachers of West Azerbaijan Farhangian University. 30 students were selected by random sampling. Participants were asked to translate an English text of 120 words into Persian and, in addition, they were also asked to translate a 120-word Persian abstract into English and to calculate how long the translation took. The translation scripts were collected and their content was analyzed and the initial coding was done. Based on the coding, for English to Persian translation, the main categories identified were vocabulary, structure, and comprehension; and two categories including vocabulary and structure were identified for Persian to English translation. Then translation scripts were analyzed based on these categories. The results indicated that little acquaintance with the necessary grammatical structures and principles of effective writing were major challenges for participants. Furthermore, interviews were conducted to identify the steps taken by participants in the translation process and the problems faced in this process. The analysis of the conducted interviews indicated that the majority of the participants hadn’t taken the proper sequence of steps in the translation process.

This study examines how different two modes of face-to-face and mobile-mediated peer review (FFPR versus MMPR) affect the commenting patterns based on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) assessment criteria and actual revisions among L2 academic writers. Moreover, the students’ attitudes towards peer review will be explored to demonstrate how they mediate between the comments received from their peers and subsequent revisions which might result in writing development. A 16-session IELTS academic writing course was held in a private university in Vancouver, Canada and seventy-two English for Academic Purpose (EAP) students participated to exchange peer comments in the classroom and in a mobile application called Telegram. In order to conceptualize the peer comments in both groups, the IELTS academic writing assessment criteria were used. The results indicated that the MMPR groups generated significantly more comments with more revision-oriented responses and actual revisions. In addition, the MMPR groups’ notes were mainly in terms of lexical resources and grammatical range and accuracy, whereas the FFPR groups centered their topics on task achievement and coherence and cohesion. Finally, based on the results, not only both FFPR and MMPR students showed positive attitudes toward peer review sessions at the end but their negative attitudes decreased. Generally, MMPR students showed more positive attitudes, yet the difference was not significant.

This paper aimed to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to investigate language selection in bilingual speech production.The present paper first reviews the sociolinguistic aspects of bilingual language choice, moves on to investigate the notion of language choice presented in the models of bilingual language production and comprehension, and view different factors a single window into the bilingual language selection and finally examines language choice in dialogue. I examined models of bilingual language production in order to provide a better understanding of bilingual language selection.When language choice is formulated, information about language is included in the preverbal message at the conceptual level in order to channel the preverbal message into the intended language. This study suggests that as bilingual language selection is highly affected by the context, language tag specification is formulated outside the language system and the output is sent to the conceptualiser level where it is included in the preverbal message.Language cue may have various values depending on the linguistic context. In a bilingual mode or a dense switch context, the value of language cue is not very high. Information about language choice at the higher level of processing, language membership information,and language nodes at the lower level of processing construct a language information network that regulates bilingual language processing. Language selection in dialogue settings was also discussed. This study suggests that bilinguals may not formulate a language choice for every utterance they produce during a course of dialogue or when there is a language history between the two participants.

Identity studies have gained ground in applied linguistics and many conventional research areas are explored under the more inclusive term of identity. Due to the fluidity of identity, important life events including immigration play a major role in (re)construction of the identity of teachers. In this autoethnographic research, my identity positions as an Iranian English teacher in Turkey are recounted. Employing autoethnography research, I use my reflection, diary, and records of my social media communication to recount the related events. While having my professional identity at the focal point, I will recount social, cultural, and even political narratives which might have affected the reconstruction of my identity. The reflection mainly includes narration of happenings at the school I used to work at, which was managed in a more strict way than other schools. There are also explanations about areas where I needed to show openness to adapt myself to the new roles in the school, while at some points I was more comfortable with being a foreigner than making efforts to blend into the new context. It also includes cultural and social differences from those in my hometown ranging from simple greetings to major behavior of the society toward a crisis that made the process of full integration not easily achievable. Finally, there is a reflection on some distinctive features that I observed over the period of my stay in Turkey. Encouraging teachers to keep a diary journal can be the main implication for classroom practice.

The studies on L2 argumentative writing have surveyed different dimensions of learners’ argumentative behavior and performance. However, less attention has been given to the strategies and techniques enhancing students’ argumentative repertoire. As such, the current study, which the design was repeated measures ANOVA, taking a pedagogy-based perspective, examined the argumentative writing behavior, introduced by Toulmin as Toulmin’s model, of 30 Iranian IELTS candidates before, during and after the instruction in both English and Persian languages. The sample questions were of the previous IELTS Writing part 2 essays from a real test by Cambridge University Press, chosen by 3 IELTS instructors in the Institute to meet the research objectives. To this end, 180 IELTS Task 2 argumentative essays were written by 30 volunteers, each having to write 6 essays, at least 250 words, (Persian and English). As for the students’ English and Persian argumentative writing performance, the results indicated that there were significant differences between the EFL learners’ overall means on argumentative tests in both languages. The results demonstrate that a sound pedagogy in argumentation can both influence the use of argumentation elements in both English and Persian written texts. The pedagogical implications for writing instruction and argumentative writing are discussed.

Second Language (L2) writing has always been a matter of difficulty for foreign language learners and an appealing topic for researchers of the field. Following a quasi-experimental method, this study aimed to investigate the comparative effects of shared, interactive, and independent writing on Lebanese EFL learners' writing accuracy and complexity. To achieve this aim, 74 non-Iranian female EFL learners were selected through convenience sampling technique. The results of Oxford placement test indicated that their level of English proficiency was intermediate. Afterward, the participants were assigned to three experimental groups (i.e., shared, interactive, and independent writing groups). The syntactic accuracy was gauged in terms of t-units and complexity was calculated based in the number of the words in t-units. The results of statistical analysis manifested that the group which used interactive writing strategies outperformed the other two groups, and no significant differences were found between shared and independent writing groups. Moreover, the performance of the interactive writing group differed significantly from those of the other two groups. Hence, it was concluded that interactive writing strategy may lead to a more accurate and complex writing performance. This study might have implications for language instructors, EFL learners, material developers, and also syllabus designers.