Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research
Volume:3 Issue: 2, Jul 2015

The present research sought to investigate how expert EFL teachers manage their class and keep its discipline. To this aim, the existing prior ELT (English Language Teaching) research on exemplary teachers’ practices were reviewed and the typical class management strategies used were extracted. Moreover, 20 ELT specialists including teacher educators, university professors of applied linguistics, mentor teachers and language institute supervisors were selected through purposive snowball and convenience sampling methods, and were interviewed. Since they were directly dealing with teachers as trainers, supervisors, and mentors, they were considered as qualified informants. There were finally 4 themes and 3 sub-themes extracted from the qualitative content analysis of the interviews, which were presented in this paper along with sample extracts of the actual interview content. The themes included: expert teachers’ identification power, use of external control, use of preventive management strategies and monitoring student behavior. The 3 sub-themes of the second theme were: clarification of expectations, use of body language and establishing rules and routines. Knowledge of these themes and sub-themes can shed light on a key behavioral aspect of expert English language teachers in class. These strategies, if followed properly, can set good examples for novice teachers and those who have problem managing their classes.

This paper seeks to elaborate on the notion of 'grammatical metaphor' intended by M. A. K. Halliday (1983) in his Functional Systemic Linguistics (FSL). 'Metaphor' in linguistic parlance is 'a process of mapping between two different conceptual domains - the source domain and the target domain'. Halliday draws on this definition of lexical metaphor and applies the concept to syntactical structures, a gimmick whereby a particular grammatical structure is converted into another structure while the original meaning is preserved. A good many examples are supplied to illustrate the points in case. Also, this paper deals with different kinds of metaphors. The key argument in this paper centers on the methodology of teaching writing to English majors in the author's English composition classes which we applied some years ago in the English program in the University of Tabriz. The claim we make is that the methodology of teaching writing which we used in our composition classes was indeed the practical realization of the tenets of grammatical metaphor intended by Halliday in his FSL.

Self-regulation is referred to as learners’ self-generated ideas and actions which are systematically directed towards achieving educational goals and require learners’ active participation in the learning process (Zimmerman & Bandura, 1994). The present study investigated the relationship between Iranian EFL students’ self-regulation capacity for vocabulary learning and their vocabulary size. For this purpose, the researchers made use of two main instruments: the self-regulation capacity in vocabulary learning scale developed by Tseng et al. (2006) consisting of five subscales of commitment, metacognitive, emotion, satiation and environment control, and a bilingual vocabulary size test developed and validated by Karami (2012). The results of the data analysis revealed no significant relationship between the two variables measured by these instruments. However, the results of the multiple regressions indicated that the metacognitive control compared to the other subscales made a better contribution to the prediction of learners’ vocabulary size. In addition, based on the analysis of variance (ANOVA), which examined and compared the self-regulatory strategy use of learners in different experience groups, the first year students had a higher mean score in their self-regulation capacity, which can possibly be attributed to the strategies they have learnt in their Study Skills courses. Finally, it was suggested that teachers must try to develop self-regulatory power in the learners because their creative effort and informed decisions in trying to improve their own learning are highly important.

The current study aimed at investigating the nature of EFL teachers and learners’ perspectives on the intercultural competence potentiality of an EFL textbook, i.e. Top Notch Series, which is used extensively in Iranian institutional EFL context. To this end, forty EFL teachers and eighty-eight advanced EFL learners from private language institutes of Kermanshah, Kurdistan and Hamadan provinces took a researcher-made textbook evaluation questionnaire including thirty eight 5-point Likert scale items. The questionnaire was designed to assess the text in terms of four factors of cultural awareness, cultural knowledge and attitude, intercultural skills, and cross-cultural understanding. The face and content validity of the questionnaire was verified by the experts in the field. In addition, using Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient, the reliability of the questionnaire was estimated to be α=0.87 in this study. The results of Frequency analyses indicated that both EFL teachers and learners were satisfied with the overall intercultural competence potentiality of the textbook. However, MANOVA analyses revealed that EFL teachers and learners’ perspectives on the text’s potential for creating cultural awareness, cultural knowledge and attitude, intercultural skills, and cross-cultural understanding were significantly different. The EFL learners believed that the textbook covers the aforementioned factors well enough, whereas, the teachers believed that it falls short of sufficient attention to the factors. Furthermore, the results suggested that cross-cultural understanding receives scant attention in Top Notch series. Findings of the this study can be specially illuminating for all of the stakeholders of Lingua Franca pedagogy who pursue the development of intercultural competence through language education, in general, and language teaching materials, in particular.

A surge of interest in using First Language (L1) in English as Second/Foreign Language (L2/EFL) learning has recently been developed. Despite this upsurge, the concern about using L1 by teachers and students in L2/EFL classrooms is still important for researchers to consider in the field. The focus of this study is to investigate the amount and purposes of L1 use in EFL classrooms by teachers and students in two English language institutes in Iran. Responding to the research questions on the amount and purpose of L1 use, the researchers collected the data for 12 sessions (a 90-minute class) from six male and female EFL teachers aged from 25 to 30 and 155 students 19 to 25 years of age whose pre-intermediate classes were video recorded for two sessions. The findings revealed that the EFL teachers used a limited amount of L1 in the EFL classrooms though they still used it as an aid for a variety of purposes in order to improve their teaching purposes and the students’ learning. The findings also indicated that using L1 facilitates students’ learning in EFL classrooms, and it should not be excluded from the classroom syllabi or considered an evil in EFL classrooms.

Vocabulary knowledge is an integral part of second/foreign language learning. Thus, using teaching methods that can help learners retain and expand their vocabulary knowledge is necessary to facilitate the language learning process. The current research investigated the effectiveness of an interactive classroom method, known as Project-Based Learning (PBL), in helping Iranian EFL learners not just learn but retain new vocabulary knowledge. To this end, an experimental approach using two groups of participants (i.e. experimental and control) was employed. The experimental group was taught using the PBL method while the control group was taught using the conventional method. The findings of the study indicated that learners who were taught using the PBL approach (i.e. the experimental group) had a significant improvement in their vocabulary recall and retention rate. Besides, they even showed better retention of new vocabulary with higher level of difficulty. This supports previous findings on the effectiveness of PBL as a vocabulary teaching method in the EFL context which could contribute to the betterment of the existing teaching methods.

One problem which can be observed in the field of EFL/ESL learning is that a number of English major BA and MA students are not highly committed to their major and decide not to continue their graduate studies. Sometimes even graduate students from English majors prefer to extend their education or work in an unrelated field. This might be attributed to the extent to which they perceive evaluation procedures and outcomes as fair. Considering this, the present study investigates first the relationships between justice judgments, outcomes and identity orientations. The study, then, uses structural equation modeling in order to examine whether identity orientation has any mediating effect on the relationship between justice judgment and outcomes. Participants were74 students in Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, Shiraz University selected based on convenience sampling. They filled out three questionnaires on distributive and procedural justice judgments, rule compliance and outcome satisfaction, and personal and social identity orientations. The collected data was then analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation, and structural equation modeling. Based on the obtained findings, procedural justice had significant positive correlation with rule compliance and distributive justice was significantly correlated with outcome satisfaction. The generated structural equation model also indicated that justice judgments only directly affected outcomes and identity had no mediating effect on the causal relationship between the two.