Iranian Journal of Applied Linguistics
Volume:17 Issue: 2, Sep 2014

This paper provides a fairly detailed corpus-based vocabulary profile of the Iranian EFL books used in public schools. To this end, the WordPerfect files of all the seven books were converted to text format to get rid of the formatting features and be compatible with the software used for analysis. The software tools used were the Compleat Lexical Tutor suite, version 6.2 (Cobb, 2011), AntConc (Anthony, 2012), and AntWord Profiler (Anthony, 2012). The output of the analysis included general counts of words in Iranian school books at different levels, the frequent function and content words, frequent n-grams, frequent metalinguistic words, the coverage of several well-known, corpusbased word lists in these books, the range of the words across the books, and the amount of vocabulary recycling. The paper discusses the vocabulary representativeness and recycling and the adequacy of exposure to English in these EFL books. Detailed word frequency tables as well as some practical implications of the quantitative results constitute important features of this article.

Incidental vocabulary learning is often seen as superior to direct instruction on many occasions. Meanwhile, upon the emergence of the World Wide Web, second language (SL) learners have been introduced to ''podcasts'' (recorded audio and video online broadcasts) which could be authentic sources of vocabulary learning. The relatively recent phenomenon of video podcast (vodcast) might be considered as a reliable complementary source of input to the written text or the audio track which are predominantly used to represent the platforms of SL instruction. To examine this assertion, three groups of Iranian EFL learners (n=63) were independently exposed to different modes of input (the reading text, audio track, and vodcast) during a series of classroom sessions under highly controlled circumstances. Immediate and delayed passive recall tests of vocabulary were administered to investigate their incidental gains. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed that both dependent variables (immediate and delayed recall) were significantly affected by the input modes. The post-hoc tests indicated no significant difference between the written and the audio groups while the vodcast group significantly outperformed the other two. The rich contextual clues made available by this audiovisual source seem to account for its superiority.

ELT has recently witnessed a shift away from a method-bound orientation and toward a post-methodic view of teaching English. Consequently, the focus of some second language teacher education programs has shifted toward sociopolitical aspects of ELT (Miller, 2004) and its contributions to reinforcement or transformation of the status quo (Kumaravadivelu, 2003a). Yet, in many countries, including Iran, ELT teacher education has maintained a relatively method-bound focus on technical dimensions of teaching English and has avoided adopting a critical and sociopolitical approach to ELT. In order to investigate the ways in which teacher education as currently practiced facilitates or stifles implementation of postmethod in ELT, the present study explored English teachers’ perceptions of the dominant approaches to teacher education in ELT centers in Iran and their ideological and pedagogical bases. To this end, 23 language teachers were interviewed about the logistics, content, and procedures of the teacher education programs they had attended. The analysis of the interviews, as directed by grounded theory, yielded three themes, namely no/little teacher learners’ involvement in course design and implementation, dominance of a transmission model, and dominance of a linguistic and technical focus.

This study investigated the role of interactive output tasks in developing EFL learners’ vocabulary knowledge. The participants were 103 elementary female Iranian EFL learners who were randomly divided into three groups: input-only, input-output-no-interaction, and input-output-interaction. After all participants took a placement test and a vocabulary pretest, the input-only group was exposed to input tasks, while the other two groups received both input and output tasks with or without interaction. Then, all the participants took a vocabulary posttest. The results of ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis tests showed that the participants in both the input-output-no-interaction group and the input-output-interaction group outperformed the ones in the input-only group in the vocabulary posttest (in both the overall vocabulary test and in the productive vocabulary section). Moreover, the results of the t-test and the Mann-Whitney test revealed that the participants in the interaction and no-interaction groups performed similarly on both the overall vocabulary posttest and the productive vocabulary section. The findings of this study support the idea that output is a facilitative factor for the acquisition of L2 vocabulary and, specifically, productive vocabulary development. The results also suggest that both interactive and non-interactive output-plus-input tasks can lead to higher achievement in vocabulary knowledge compared to the input-only condition lacking output tasks.

The main objective of this study was to investigate how Iranian EFL learners used their literacy practices and multimodal resources to mediate interpretation and representation of an advertisement text and construct their understanding of it. Fifteen female adolescents at an intermediate level of proficiency read the «مبلمان برليان» (“Brelian Furniture”) advertisement text and re-created their understandings in pictures and sentences. The data was analyzed based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2001) theory of social semiotics. The findings suggest that students situated the meanings of the advertisement texts in specific contexts that reflected their own social and cultural experiences. Furthermore, the students demonstrated that the use of multimodal resources had the potential to enhance language and literacy learning in a way that was transformative and was affected by their identities. In addition, the use of multimodal/multiliteracies pedagogy permitted the students to enter into text composition from different paths. Finally, multimodal/multiliteracies pedagogy could foster critical literacy practices by offering EFL students the opportunities to create new identities and challenge discursive practices that marginalize them. The implications of the findings are also discussed.

The current second language (L2) instruction research has raised great motivation for the use of both processing instruction and meaningful output instruction tasks in L2 classrooms as the two focus-on-form (FonF) instructional tasks. The present study investigated the effect of structured input tasks (represented by referential and affective tasks) compared with meaningful output tasks (implemented through text reconstruction cloze tasks) on the acquisition of English nominal clauses (NCs). The study sought to investigate if (1) both input and output instruction would lead to significant gains of knowledge in acquiring NCs, and (2) there were any significant differences between learners'' receptive and productive knowledge of nominal clauses. First-year undergraduate students studying at four intact university classrooms participated in the study. The effectiveness of the tasks was determined by a noun-clause recognition test and a sentence combination production test administered both as the pretest and posttest. The results revealed that both processing instruction and meaningful output instruction helped the learners improve their receptive knowledge of grammar effectively; nevertheless, the processing instruction group did not significantly outperform the meaningful output group in their gains of receptive knowledge of grammar. The findings further illustrated that meaningful output instruction group significantly outperformed processing instruction group in their productive knowledge of grammar.