Journal of Applied Linguistics Studies
Volume:3 Issue: 1, Winter and Spring 2024

The present study aimed to investigate the role of EFL teacher’s strictness, stroke, and gender identity in teacher success. To do so, 420 EFL teachers, 200 males and 220 females, participated in the study. The teachers were teaching English courses in different language institutes in Tehran and Alborz provinces in Iran. The method for sample selection was convenience sampling. The present study was in the form of a survey design. To collect the required information, four instruments were administered to the sample of the study: Characteristics of Successful Iranian EFL Teachers Scale, Masculinity/Femininity Scale, Student Stroke Scale, and Teacher Strictness Scale. For collecting the data, these questionnaires were filled out by the participants during one month. After collecting the data, Pearson product-moment correlation formula and Path Analysis were used to analyze the data. The findings showed that there are no significant differences between female and male teachers’ perception of stroke, strictness, and gender identity. The findings indicated that strictness does not have a significant positive effect on female and male teachers’ success. Additionally, gender identity and stroke play a significant role in predicting female and male teachers’ success. As insufficiency of effective teachers can harm learning to a great extent, knowledge of the factors which might cause teacher success seems to be necessary for teacher trainers.

A carefully-constructed discourse is requisite for acquainting learners with a native-like lingual situation. The present study sought to appraise three locally-made EFL textbook series, prescribed by the Ministry of Education in Iran for the school students, in respect of their discourse features to ascertain the extent to which these course-books enable the foreign language learners to achieve pragmatic competence. The content analysis was built mainly on the framework developed by Carter and McCarthy (2006) and Cutting (2011). The post-use evaluation of 21 dialogues incorporated in the course-books divulged that they were satisfactory at living up to the provision of sufficient instances of discourse markers but showcasing them in a hackneyed and iterative motif and in a cursory and hasty tempo. Situational ellipsis, as the most salient feature of the spoken discourse, was sparsely evidenced and for some discourse markers a one-off insertion of their instances was witnessed. Results of this study have some practical implications and suggestions for language teachers and textbook developers.

The study aimed to investigate the application of Digital Literacy to Lexical and grammatical accuracy of Iranian EFL learners and determine whether dynamic assessors could benefit from the literacy. Accordingly, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the ways in which young students are developing computer and information literacy (CIL) to support their capacity to participate in the digital age. Further, this study explored the mediating role of teachers’ digital literacy between educational strategy use and dynamic assessment. The participants of the study, 230 young adult-male and female EFL teachers aged between 22 to 42 years old at different language institutes in several cities of Mazandaran province, Iran, were selected based on a snowball sampling method and were delivered two questionnaires. Following a multiple case study design to addresses the characteristics, and major cases of strategy use for teachers. Therefore, the paper used qualitative methods to gather data. The major advantage of multiple case research lies in cross-case analysis and changes the focus from realizing a single case to the differences and similarities between views. Finally, the results revealed that the social practices of literacy change due to the use of digital technologies. The findings provide further attitude into understanding how to probe the purposes where they have been formed and used in conceptualizing digital literacy

The study probed the relationship between Iranian EAP learners' self-confidence and language achievement of hotel-management students concerning their gender. Initially, 100 BA male and female students at two non-governmental universities of Darvishi and Pardisan in Mashhad-Iran participated in the study. Based on Krejcie and Morgan’s (1970) table of random sampling, 80 participants were considered as the target sample. The data were gathered through administering two instruments including Moradi et.al’s (2014) language learners’ self-confidence questionnaire and an EAP language achievement test, derived from Rashidi (2017). The data were analyzed using SPSS 24. The study followed a quantitative descriptive design. The findings indicated positive significant relation between learners' self-confidence and language test scores. Concerning gender, there did not exist any significant difference in self-confidence. The findings also proved the significant predicting role of self-confidence for language proficiency level of the participants. The findings have some implications for EAP teachers, syllabus designers, and international tourism industry authorities. The findings suggest the significance of non-linguistic factors including self-confidence in language learning process.

This study was undertaken to investigate the accountability of implementing dynamic assessment (DA) on Iranian high school students’ autonomy and reading comprehension development. To this end, 60 Iranian male students from two public vocational high schools in Guilan, Sowme’eh Sara took part in this study. To gather the required data, two instruments were used including an autonomy questionnaire and a reading comprehension test. To conduct the study, the participants were divided into two groups: an experimental group (N=30) and a control group (N=30). Before the academic term, the pre-tests (autonomy and reading) were administered. Then, during the academic term, the experimental group was exposed to a sandwich format dynamic assessment which consists of three phases: pre-test, mediation, and post-test. The control group was exposed to conventional teaching practice. After ending the academic term, the post-tests (autonomy and reading) were administered again. The driven data through pre-and post-tests of this study were analyzed through SPSS software. The results of the study indicated that implementing DA had a statistically significant effect on Iranian high school students’ autonomy and reading skill development. This study has some implications for EFL teachers, students, and language syllabus designers.

The effect of task type on interlanguage pragmatics development has remained under-researched. This study aimed to explore the effects of an input-based task (i.e., consciousness-raising task) and an output-based task (i.e., discourse completion task) on learning the speech act (SA) of suggestion. To this end, sixty Iranian EFL ninth graders were selected as the participants of the study through convenience sampling. Then, they were assigned to three non-equivalent groups (i.e., one control group and two experimental groups). A 10- item scenario-prompted written discourse completion test (WDCT) was administered as the pretest and posttest to all three groups. Afterward, the input-based group received the target SA, enhanced with colored bold-face subtitles, and output-based group received the same clips with regular subtitles and were asked to do WDCTs. The control group was taught through a traditional instructional procedure with the same clips. Finally, they sat for an immediate posttest. The results demonstrated that input-based task had the most significant within-group effect on learning the target SA from the pretest to the posttest, followed by output-based task and traditional instruction. At the same time, no statistically significant differences were found among the groups' posttest performance. The implications are offered finally.

This mixed-methods experimental study investigated the effect of English language instruction on English language proficiency and social identity among patients suffering from mental disorders. Two days a week for 90 minutes (48 sessions), the experimental group received English language instruction. The study participants were 52 adults with mental illness diagnoses from a center for patients suffering from mental disorders in Isfahan, Iran, and were randomly classified into control and experimental groups. Quantitative data were collected and presented using the English language proficiency test and the social identity questionnaire (Bruner & Benson, 2018). Moreover, semi-structured interviews were used to show the participants’ reflections regarding English language instruction. To analyze the data, One-Way ANCOVA was used to answer the research questions. The statistical results indicated that the experimental group contributed significant improvements in being empowered with higher levels of English language proficiency and social identity (p< 0.01). Besides, the qualitative analysis showed that English language instruction increased the levels of engagement, motivation, willingness to take risks, emotion regulation, and self-growth among the participants. The results of this study provide evidence of the feasibility of successful English language instruction among mental illness patients, which has not received adequate attention in academic studies.

The aim of this research was to investigate the effect of cooperative error detection in an online context on ESP students' writing accuracy and their attitudes towards cooperative error correction. To achieve this aim, the researchers selected 60 ESP students after homogenization. The Barratt Impulsivity Scale (Barratt, 1995) was administered to the participants. The researcher randomly assigned the participants to two groups: the experimental group (n=30, reflective=13, impulsive=17) and the control group (n=30, reflective=13, impulsive=17). The experimental group received the intervention for ten sessions. Skype was used in this group. The participants in this group were divided into six groups of 5 members each. Then, in each session, the students were given a descriptive topic and they were supposed to write and share their writing in their groups. Other members of each group had to check each member's writing and, in case of a problem, underline the mistakes and share them with the group. Finally, they sent the revised writing to the teacher. In the control group, the participants had to write about the same descriptive topic. They wrote and gave their writing to the teacher who corrected it. The results showed that the participants in the experimental group performed significantly better than those in the control group. In terms of learning style, both reflective and impulsive ESP students benefited equally from the intervention. In addition, participants in the experimental group who received the treatment had a positive attitude towards cooperative error detection, seeing it as something positive and fun.

The present study is specific to the typology of the category of case in two dialects of the Turkish language; Azeri and Khalaji Turkish. Case Marking is one of the practical methods in order to show the syntactic relationship between sentence elements, so that it shows the syntactic relationship between the noun phrase and the verb. The main theoretical approaches of the present research is Bernard Comrie's (1989) Case Marking System, which introduced five language categories. The present study also deals with the Case Theory, which is the approach of Chomsky (1981) and is considered among the subtheories of the Government and binding theory. The selected data of the research is from literary and fictional texts and the collected sentences are extracted from these texts. According to the collected data, there are six types of Case Marking in the Turkish language and its dialects, which are; Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Ablative and Locative Cases. In the present study, also the effect of some factors such as Transitivity, Animacy, Gender, and Definiteness, on case marking have been investigated. Since these two dialects are two branches of the Turkish language, they have similarities and differences, which are analyzed typologically here in the present article.

This study investigated the level, dominant type, and reasons for writing anxiety among EFL students through a quantitative research design. The participants were one group of 75 (40 female and 35 male) freshmen students from the Department of English at Karbala University, Iraq. Their ages ranged from 19 to 24, selected through a purposive sampling technique based on their intermediate level of English proficiency. The Language Writing Anxiety Inventory and the Causes of Writing Anxiety Inventory (CSLWAI) were administered. Data were analyzed using SPSS software. The findings of this survey research design study showed that EFL students have a high level of writing anxiety. Moreover, cognitive anxiety was found to be the predominant type of writing anxiety. The main reason for writing anxiety was fear of teachers' negative comments. This study has significant implications for English language teachers, indicating that they cannot assume their students to be homogeneous in terms of writing anxiety. This suggests that while designing assignments and activities for their programs, teachers should be more aware of the effect of writing anxiety.

Dynamic assessment (DA) is founded in Sociocultural Theory (SCT) of Vygotsky (1978) and his conception of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). It motivated the scholars to find a way from a static approach of assessment to the dynamic approach to increase individuals’ independence and level of performance (Lantolf & Poehner, 2004; Poehner, 2008). To this end, this investigation probed DA intervention on writing fluency and complexity of Iranian EFL learners. Before the treatment, the KET test was implemented for homogenizing the participants and then 36 learners were chosen in groups of namely, experimental and control (18 participants in every group). In both groups, learners wrote a one-paragraph essay in the first session. During the intervention which lasted for two sessions, the researcher followed some stages including implicit and explicit feedback types in the second and third sessions to help learners move from teacher-regulation to self-regulation and then they wrote again a one-paragraph essay as the post-test in the fourth session. Participants in the control group wrote on the same topics as the experimental group, however, with no DA intervention. The researcher corrected their papers and provided some general comments in the control group. The t-tests in the post-tests indicated that experimental group surpassed the control group considerably concerning the writing fluency and complexity improvement. The paper concludes with a discussion and recommendations for further research into the potential DA contributions to EFL writing assessment and instruction.

Practicing innovative, constant, dynamic, ongoing and process-oriented assessment techniques with constructive and communicative feedback can consolidate and stabilize learners’ instruction and learning. This study investigated the impact of the think-pair-share (TPS) formative assessment (FA) strategy on Iranian EFL learners' reading comprehension skill and vocabulary knowledge. Sixty male intermediate EFL participants from two intact classes took part in the revised Cambridge Preliminary English Test and forty-eight students were chosen by analyzing their scores considering two standard deviations above or below the mean. The participants were from Allameh Jafari high school of Marand. They were assigned to two intact groups of twenty-four learners. This quasi-experimental study was implemented by using a pretest and posttest design to quantitatively collect data so as to compare the experimental group (EG) and the control group (CG). The EG was assessed through the TPS assessment technique, while the CG was assessed using the product-oriented summative assessment (SA) tool. To find out the effect of the assessment techniques on reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge, the two groups of the study were assessed for twenty weeks. Then, Independent Samples T-test and the one-way ANCOVA were used to compare and analyze the pretest and the posttest scores of the participants in the two groups. The findings indicated that the EG with the TPS FA technique outperformed the CG with the SA strategy in reading comprehension and vocabulary learning. The findings can be pedagogically rewarding for learners, teachers and theoreticians and may cast light on SLA research in applying FA techniques.