Journal of Practical and Pedagogical Issues in English Education
Volume:1 Issue: 1, May 2023

This study attempted to investigate the Determination Theory in the Iranian EFL context by shedding light on the relationship between EFL learners’ basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and (intrinsic) motivation. To conduct the study, 324 Iranian EFL university students participated in the study. A standard questionnaire (on the students’ innate needs fulfillment and their second language motivation) developed by Agawa and Takeuchi (2016) was administered to the participants. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was employed to assess the proportion between hypothetical expectance and factual data. The model indicated that there was a substantial positive relationship between competence needs and Iranian EFL learners’ motivation. On the other hand, relatedness needs indicated a weaker influence on students’ motivation, and the autonomy needs fulfillment revealed to hold either negative or demotivating effects on Iranian L2 learners’ motivation.

The role that the parents play in the psychology of a child is indispensable. They are the two human beings that the child comes into contact with and looks up to them in almost everything. The Jungian psychology has tried to investigate the roots of father and mother in archetypal psychoanalysis and their relationship to childhood. Psychoanalytical readings of Radcliffe categorize her in female gothic and see her as a proto-feminist. While they are right about her search for a lost matriarchy, they ignore her endings in marriage. Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance is filled with symbolism and symbolic elements. The mother-daughter relation including both rivalry and friendship is central to the novel. Sometimes the heroine antagonizes certain father figures and mother figures. At other times she looks for and cherishes other father and mother figures. The heroine' double attitude towards her parents resembles the double faces of father and mother archetypes. Her running from tyrant Patriarch and Matriarch is toward a new benevolent Matriarch who is later replaced by a chivalrous hero figure. The hero substitutes the father and plays the role of a husband who shows features of a chivalric manhood in a long-gone past. In the end While Radcliffean heroine in A Sicilian Romance is looking unconsciously for her mother and therefore the lost Matriarchy, she consciously accepts an ideal Patriarchy.

The present study made an effort to examine the correlation between Iranian male and female language teachers’ reflection and their instructional practices in the school settings. To this end, first, the researcher used convenience sampling in order to select 110 EFL teachers including 50 male and 60 female teachers in different public high schools in Baneh (Iran) and Saqqez (Iran) as the participants of the study. Second, , the researcher obtained the participants’ informed written consent and provided them with the Teacher Reflection Questionnaire (Akbrai, et al., 2010) and Instructional Practices Questionnaire (Hong, et al., 2006) of the present study. Third, the EFL teachers completed the teacher reflection questionnaire and the instructional practices questionnaire in 15 minutes. The researcher collected the data in a two-week period of time. Finally, the researcher used Pearson-Product Moment Correlation test to analyze the obtained data. SPSS 20 was utilized to perform the data analysis of the study. Based on the results of the study, there were significant positive correlations between the male and female teachers’ reflection and their instructional practices in the context of the classroom. It was argued that there were significant positive correlations between these teachers’ reflection and their pertinent instructional practices due mainly to the fact that these teachers’ reflection empowered them to assess the effectiveness of their instructional strategies and to redress them in order to ameliorate their efficacy in the context of the classroom.

The present study examined the correlation between EFL learners’ language anxiety and their reading ability. To this end, first, 200 intermediate-level EFL learners including 100 male and 100 female learners were selected from among the learners of a private language institute in Urmia as the participants based on their results on a proficiency test. Second, the participants received Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope’s (1986) Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale and completed it in about twenty-five minutes. Third, they took the researcher-made reading comprehension test of the study and answered its items in about forty minutes. The study was carried out in three sessions within a one-week period. Pearson Product Moment Correlation test was used for data analysis. The results of the study highlighted the fact that there were significant negative correlations between language anxiety and reading ability for both of the male and female EFL learners. It was argued that, the negative correlations between the participants’ language anxiety and reading ability stemmed from: a) the debilitative role of anxiety in language learning; b) learners’ lack of ability to recognize and adapt themselves to the cultural, social, and linguistic characteristics of the native speakers of the target language; c) the effect of formal evaluation on the learners’ task performance; d) learners’ underestimation of their capabilities to use the second language; and e) learners’ inability to utilize efficient communication and group-based strategies in the context of the classroom.

Discourse markers` instruction is currently receiving an increasing amount of attention in foreign language learning. The current quasi-experimental study was an attempt to determine the impact of discourse markers` instruction on reading comprehension of Iranian EFL junior high school female students. To do so, a total of 45 female junior high school students were selected randomly from Nasl-e-Payam Shahed Junior High School in Urmia. Having homogenized by pretest, participants were assigned into either experimental or control group. Then, the experimental group received treatment regarding discourse markers; however, control group only approached the traditional teaching method. Following ten sessions for both groups, all subjects participated in a posttest.  Finally, the statistical analysis of the collected data confirmed that experimental group outperformed control group on reading comprehension test. To sum up, the findings of this study revealed that discourse markers` instruction has a significant effect on reading comprehension of Iranian EFL junior high school female students. The present study has implications for teaching grammar that learners’ improvement in reading comprehension could be enhanced through discourse markers` instruction.