EFL Lecturers Research Articles

A Study of Iranian EFL University Lecturers’ Practice of Code Switching in English as Foreign Language Instruction

<p>This study aimed at investigating where and the purposes for which code-switching is used by Iranian EFL lecturers in universities as foreign languageinstruction.The data of this study were gathered from two sources: six EFL university lecturers from three local universities where they taught English as EFL instruction.Theywere interviewed individually regarding the use of code-switching in their classrooms in order to reveal their purposes of using this strategy as well as their participants’ understandings of code-switching as a language teaching strategy. The interviews took 30-40 minutes each. The interviews were finally transcribed and the main themes were coded to answer the research questions; the second group of participants was students as native speakers of Persian. Ninety undergraduates from the three universities were randomly chosen from among those students majoring in TEFL. They were majoring in the first grade of the academic program. To this end, an eleven-item questionnaire was given to them to elicit their responses for the contexts and the reasons for which code-switching was preferred.The data from interview with EFL lecturers as well those of the students’ responses were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using SPSS, respectively, to determine where and for what purposes codes-switching were applied or practiced in EFL classrooms. The findings of the study indicated that their code-switching habits were connected to what was being taught. Their code-switching had to do with efficiency in their teaching and how to make it easier for the students to understand what they were teaching. <strong></strong></p>

Teaching Strategies Used by Thai EFL Lecturers to Teach Argumentative Writing

Knowledge about argumentative teaching strategies is not adequately descriptive to be effective in instructing EFL students to be proficient in writing. There is a critical need to investigate and develop effective teaching strategies to develop students’ writing competence. This study used a semi-structured interview and a stimulated recall interview to collect detailed information from two Thai EFL lecturers about the challenges in teaching argumentative essays,with the teaching strategies used to help improve their students’ writing skill. The types of teaching strategies used by the Thai EFL lecturers indicate avenues that can further develop their teaching activities to meet the writing needs of EFL students (Flower & Hayes, 1981; Leighton & Gierl, 2007). The findings of the study reveal that both Thai EFL lecturers admitted that their most consistent problems were with their students’ inability to produce a clear thesis statement, because they were not familiar with this genre. Their students encountered problems due to insufficient knowledge of grammatical structure, lexical features and argumentative features. Moreover, they encountered difficulties in putting together organised ideas and producing solid evidence to write a well organised essay. These weaknesses were the main barriers for Thai EFL students to write an argumentative essay. Furthermore, Thai tertiary students had less experience with argumentative writing as this genre was not taught to them while they were in school. The findings reveal that the two lecturers used the following strategies to teach argumentative writing to their students: (1) using different inputs and activities in class in order to motivate students to become active learners, including pair work, group discussion, explanation, illustration and debate in class;(2) analysing sample texts and presenting their understanding in class; and (3) understanding their students’ learning styles and providing what they need to develop their writing skills. The implications of the findings suggest that university EFL lecturers need to acknowledge the full repertoire of teaching strategies available to teach argumentative writing effectively. Importantly, this study highlights that enabled EFL learners can build effective social and cognitive bridges when writing argumentative essays using effective scaffolding, while receiving close guidance from teachers in the writing classroom.

The Effect of EFL Teachers’ Extrovert and Introvert Personality on Their Instructional Immediacy

The Language teaching is a complex process influenced by many psychological factors such as personality traits (Tonelson, 1981) and socio-communicative styles (Thomas. Et al. 1994). This research sets out to investigate the effect of Teachers' Introvert and Extrovert personality on their instructional Immediacy. In order to address this issue, a study was conducted on 14 PhD holder university EFL lecturers from Guilan province. Instruments for this research included preliminary Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI) Test, non-verbal immediacy scale, along with verbal immediacy scale observation inventory. After determining the lecturers' Introvert/Extrovert personality, at the next stage, six sessions of direct observation of each lecturer's classroom instructional immediacy were conducted. Statistical analysis of Fisher's exact test between data along with Pearson's correlation was run to determine the relationship between teacher's extrovert personality and their use of verbal immediacy; the results indicate strong, positive correlation (r=.7, p<. 03). Similarly, a strong, positive correlation was found between extrovert personality and use of non-verbal immediacy (r=.75, p<. 01). The other finding of the study was that instructors’ gender showed no significant relation with their verbal and nonverbal instructional immediacy.