Iranian Advanced EFL Learners Research Articles

The effect of corpus-assisted language teaching on academic collocation acquisition by Iranian advanced EFL learners

Purpose This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian advanced EFL learners (students learning English as a foreign language).Design/methodology/approach This is a quasi-experimental, quantitative and qualitative study.Findings The result showed the experimental group outperformed significantly compared with the control group. The experimental group also shared their perception of the advantages and disadvantages of the corpus-assisted language teaching approach.Originality/value Despite growing progress in language pedagogy, methodologies and language curriculum design, there are still many teachers who experience poor performance in their students' vocabulary, whether in comprehension or production. In Iran, for example, even though mandatory English education begins at the age of 13, which is junior and senior high school, students still have serious problems in language production and comprehension when they reach university levels.

Potential of podcasting and blogging in cultivating Iranian advanced EFL learners’ reading comprehension

This study explores the potential of podcasting and blogging in cultivating advanced EFL learners’ reading comprehension (RC) gains, as well as their perceptions of their effectiveness in improving their RC gains. For this purpose, three intact female classes (n = 20) were selected using a convenience sampling method from Pooyesh Language Center in Borujerd City, Iran. Then, they were randomly assigned into three groups, including the podcasting group, blogging group, and control group. Afterward, they went through a pre-test, an intervention (12 one-hour sessions held twice a week), and a post-test. For disclosing their perceptions, 10 students of the experimental groups were requested to fill out a reflective written statement about the potential of podcasting and blogging in improving their RC gains. A one-way ANOVA and a thematic coding analysis were used to analyze the collected data. Findings revealed that the podcasting and blogging groups outweighed the control group at the end of the treatments. Additionally, the results evidenced that there was no statistically significant difference between the podcasting and blogging groups. The qualitative findings disclosed that the participants had positive perceptions toward using podcasting and blogging in developing RC. Finally, the implications for L2 teachers and L2 learners are discussed.

Pragmatic Competence of Iranian EFL Learners in the Light of Refusal Speech Act

In order to communicate accurately and fluently, learners need to know how to produce different speech acts inside and outside the classroom context. Refusal speech act is complicated, and performing refusals successfully needs a higher level of pragmatic competence (Eslami, 2010). This study is done in order to analyze refusal speech act and its responses among Iranian EFL learners. The participants of this study are 120 advanced Iranian EFL learners. These learners are provided with scenarios so that they are exposed to situations where they should both refuse and respond to refusals. The first phase of this paper includes the analysis of refusal strategies. The second phase of the paper deals with refusal responses. It was revealed that female participants are more inclined to use indirect strategies as related to refusals and male participants are more inclined to use direct strategies. For refusal responses, male learners used reinforcing micro functions while female learners used accepting micro functions more frequently. The results of this study contribute to pragmatic instruction in a way to help learners interpret and realize this speech act successfully. I will also investigate possible cross-cultural miscommunication, which its occurrence is also acknowledged in previous research studies (Shishavan & Sharifian, 2016).

Predicting EFL Learners’ Susceptibility to Various Disfluency Types Based on Gender and Age

The aim of the current study is to investigate the relationship of production of speech disfluencies in EFL learners based on gender and age through regression modeling. Gender and age have been examined to influence the production of disfluencies in both native and nonnative speakers so it’s an important issue since fluency and disfluency are crucial aspects of language learning, however, the influence of age and gender on disfluency remains a controversial issue with studies often producing conflicting results with one another. 
 Methods. This study took a new approach to this subject as we produced regression models which can predict the likelihood of production of each disfluency type based on speakers’ age and gender. In order to do this 40 Iranian advanced EFL learners (20 male, 20 female) in four age groups (youth 19–24, young adults 25–30, adults 31–44, and older adults 45+) took part in the study. Later semi-structured interviews with a variety of questions regarding different topics were conducted and participants’ responses were first recorded and then transcribed. The frequency of occurrence of each disfluency type in participants’ speech samples formed our data. This data was then used for our regression analysis. 
 Results. Our findings indicated that, while filled pauses are the most frequently produced disfluency in both genders and all age groups, female speakers are more likely to produce hesitations in their speech compared to male speakers. We also found out that, older adults are less likely to produce filled pauses in their speech compared to younger speakers. With Further analyses, we also investigated the likelihood of producing certain disfluency types over other ones based on age and gender and how this may help instructors.
 Conclusions. Based on our findings, it can be concluded that all six types of disfluencies are produced by the Iranian EFL learners. Also, we found that, filled pauses, hesitations, and repetitions are by far the most frequently produced disfluency types by Iranian EFL learners, respectively.

Vocabulary Recall Improvement through Acronyms: A Case Study of Iranian Advanced EFL Learners

Vocabulary Recall Improvement through Acronyms: A Case Study of Iranian Advanced EFL Learners

Instruction on Intercultural Communicative Competence

The influence of globalization on applied linguistics has recently generated considerable debate. With the advent of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) at the start of the twentyfirst century, many theoreticians and practitioners have accentuated the ICC perspectives and its incorporation into teaching language skills. This mixed methods research study tries to verify whether instruction on ICC encourages Iranian advanced EFL learners to incorporate ICC in their writings, and whether gender plays any role in the tendency to use that competence. To this end, 33 male and female Iranian advanced EFL learners were chosen via an Oxford Placement Test and then placed in two experimental classes. All the participants received a five-week instruction on ICC in a writing class at a private language institute in Rasht, Iran. The data analyzed via T-tests, content analysis technique, and η revealed that instruction on ICC assisted learners in coping with intercultural issues differently in their writing; however, gender did not play any role in using the ICC in writing. This study can shine a light on the writing course and language teaching in general and teaching how to incorporate ICC in writing in particular.

The Impact of Focus on Form and Focus on Forms Instruction on Grammar Acquisition of the Subjunctive by Iranian Advanced EFL Learners

Grammar instruction is a crucial topic of debate in foreign language development. This study aimed at investigating the impact of focus on form (FonF) and focus on forms (FonFs) instruction on grammar acquisition of the subjunctive by Iranian advanced EFL learners. To this end, 40 Iranian advanced EFL learners were selected within the age range of 16-20 from a language school in Karaj, Iran. Initially, the Preliminary English Test was run to ensure that the students were homogenous with respect to their language proficiency. Before any treatment, a pretest was administered to determine the participants’ knowledge of the subjunctive. Afterwards, the researchers taught the subjunctive to one group through FonF instruction and the second group received FonFs instruction. After five weeks of instruction, the researchers administered a posttest to investigate the effectiveness of FonF and FonFs instruction. Then, paired samples statistics, the independent samples t-test, and Mann Whitney U test were run to test the null hypotheses. The findings revealed that although FonF and FonFs instruction have significant positive impacts on grammar acquisition of the subjunctive by Iranian advanced EFL learners, the students who were taught through FonFs instruction significantly outperformed the ones who received FonF instruction.

The effect of co-teaching on advanced EFL learners’ writing ability

Students need to be skilled writers to get involved in a literate society. Providing learners with effective and appropriate teaching approach can lead to an easier and better mastery of skills. One of these approaches may be co-teaching. This study investigates the effect of co-teaching for Iranian advanced EFL learners’ ability to write. The co-teaching approach was taken as a treatment through which two teachers were cooperating simultaneously during the teaching writing process in the same class with the experimental group. The participants of the control group were taught traditionally by a single teacher during all class sessions. According to the data analyses after comparing the two groups, co-teachers have been more successful in improving the overall writing ability of the treatment group. The underlying rationale is one in which teaching a class with two teachers may first add to the variety of teaching styles, feedback giving, consultation and reviewing the teaching process that can lead to better teaching practice and also doubling the class time by increasing teacher-student interaction time.

Implementing a flipped model of instruction in the EFL listening classroom: Impact on comprehension

Inventive technologies have provided students greater ways to invest more productive time within the classrooms, such as listening class. However, the flipped model of instruction should be practiced as a way to engage students in the process of listening comprehension. This experimental study aimed to investigate the effects of the flipped classroom (FC) on advanced EFL learners’ listening comprehension. Sixty Iranian advanced EFL learners (19 to 23 years old) participated in 14 sessions. Half of the students taught through the flipped model of instruction (experimental group) and the others through traditional instruction (control group). Using a before and after design, students were retested after seven weeks. Results showed that the means average resulted from the L2 listening comprehension test revealed those both groups showing increases in listening scores, but the experimental group’s mean score was higher than in the control group. Therefore, the FC model's implementation in the context of teaching and learning L2 listening comprehension can lead to positive outcomes since they could engage students in the process of learning English. The implication of this study calls for the FC model implementation to engage students in listening comprehension in the chance to learn better and expand their educational knowledge.

Students’ attitudes toward flipped classroom model: Focusing on Iranian advanced EFL learners

Flipped classroom is an engaging, student-centered approach that has been built to enhance the quality of the classroom time. Generally speaking, this approach, whose implementations are performed mostly in physical sciences, has also recently attracted the attention of educators and scholars in various disciplines. Flipped classroom technology is an advancement that helps learners to enhance engagement, increase motivation and develop their communicative abilities. The current study aimed to examine Iranian advanced EFL learners’ attitudes toward using flipped classroom model. To fulfil this objective, 80 advanced EFL learners answered an attitude questionnaire after 10 sessions instructed in a flipped classroom. After collection the data and analyzing them, the results indicated that the learners’ attitude toward using flipped classroom was significantly positive. Eventually, the researchers concluded with some suggestions for educators to adopt the flipped classroom technology to create better learning environments for their students and to reach better learning consequences.

Lexical Complexity as a Function of Task Type and Proficiency Level in the Speech Monologs of Iranian EFL Learners

Despite the abundance of research evaluating the effects of task complexity, task types, and planning on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of the language produced by learners, most studies have focused on the syntactic aspect of complexity, with very few studies investigating the lexical part of complexity. Such studies explored the lexical performance of learners through using merely one measure of lexical complexity (namely diversity). The present study is an attempt to further explore the effects of task type and proficiency level on different aspects of lexical complexity of spontaneous speech monologs produced by intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 35 intermediate and advanced Iranian learners of English performed three different speaking tasks: an argumentation, a description and a narration task. The speech monologs were coded for three different aspects of lexical complexity: diversity, density, and sophistication. Two-way repeated-measures ANOVAs were conducted to evaluate the main effects of task type (the within-subjects variable) and proficiency level (the between-subjects variable) on lexical complexity. The results showed that task type and proficiency level both significantly affect lexical complexity in the participants’ task performance. The argumentation task yielded the highest scores for diversity and density, while the highest sophistication score was obtained for the narration task. There was no interaction between task type and proficiency level for the diversity and sophistication scores, and the advanced learners consistently got higher diversity and sophistication scores for all the three tasks, while there was an interaction between the two variables for the density scores; the advanced learners got higher density scores for the description and narration tasks but not on the argumentation task.

The effect of visual priming on the lexical retrieval on implicit memory tasks for advanced foreign language learners

This study attempted to investigate the possible effects of visual priming on a foreign language vocabulary retrieval on three implicit memory task types (i.e., word stem completion (WSC), word fragment completion (WFC) and anagram solution tasks). Gender effect was also focused for lexical retrieval under the priming effect. A total of 45 male and 45 female Iranian advanced EFL learners were recruited and assigned to each of the three experimental groups of the study which contained an equal number of males and females learners. WSC, WFC and anagram solution tasks held 30 lexical items which were developed out of 5000 most frequent words in English. 15 primed and 15 unprimed lexical items were randomly accommodated in each task. After the visual priming phase and distracting participants’ attention via an unrelated task, the participants were asked to do the implicit memory tasks based on their experimental groups. The results showed that participants gained higher scores on the visually primed lexical items on all implicit tasks. Also, no statistically significant difference was observed between males and females regarding the visual priming effect. Pedagogical implications are finally discussed on the light of the findings.

The Impact of Different Output-based Task Repetition Conditions on Producing Speech Acts among Iranian Advanced EFL Learners

This examination inspected the effects of different output-based task reiteration conditions with respect to producing EFL students' speech acts. Three groups were incorporated into this investigation: (1) the explicit task-repetition (ETR) group, (2) the implicit task-repetition (ITR) group, and (3) the no-input task repetition (NTR) group. All the three groups occupied with the reiteration of output generation tasks. However, before the second execution of the task, the ETR, ITR, NTR groups received input combined with metapragmatic data, input combined with an awareness raising task, and no information separately. The outcomes demonstrated students' exhibition was factually huge from the pretest to the posttest in the ETR and ITR groups, however not in the NTR group. Besides, the analysis of contrasts over the groups in the posttest uncovered the predominance of the ETR over the ITR and NTR groups. The discoveries suggest that output-based task repetition with input can advance EFL students' speech act production.

Appropriation Based -Syllabus and Advanced EFL Learners’ Speaking Skill: The Case of Chunks-on-Card Activities

The impetus for conducting the present study came from Thornbury's (2005) approach to teach speaking in which he claimed that awareness-raising techniques, along with appropriation strategies, facilitate the process of teaching and learning speaking. Therefore, the present study attempted to explore the impact of the appropriation-based syllabus to teach speaking by using chunks-on-card activity. Accordingly, 60 female and male Iranian advanced EFL learners were selected from a private language institute and were assigned to four groups. The four groups were male experimental and control groups as well as female experimental and control groups. To examine the effect of the treatment, the participants were pre- and post-tested on speaking skill. They took part in 14 treatment sessions in which the experimental group practiced the chunks-on-card method through drilling while the control group practiced the conventional approach. The results of one-way ANOVA revealed significant differences among the posttest scores of the four groups. According to the findings, the mean score for male learners in the experimental group differed significantly from female and male learners in the control groups. Similarly, the mean score of female learners in the experimental group differed significantly from female and male learners in the control groups. The results of paired-samples t-test for each group also indicated that the appropriation-based teaching of lexical chunks had significant impacts on both genders’ speaking skills.

The effect of task modality and discourse mode on EFL learners’ narrative task performance

AbstractThis study examined the effect of task mode (written vs. spoken) and discourse mode (pair vs. individual) on advanced Iranian EFL learners’ task performance. Participants, four groups of advanced learners, performed a narrative task in four conditions: the first group of participants performed the task individually in a spoken mode, the second group performed the task individually in a written mode, the third group performed the task in pairs in a spoken mode, and the participants in the fourth group performed the task in pairs in a written mode. The results indicated that the participants’ performances, in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency improved greatly among learners who worked in pairs rather than individually, and those who performed written tasks rather than oral ones.

The Efficacy of an SFL-Oriented Register Instruction in Improving Iranian EFL Learners’ Writing Performance and Perception: Language Proficiency in Focus

The current study sought to explore the impact of SFL-oriented register instruction on Iranian EFL learner’ writing performance with a central focus on their English proficiency level. As its secondary aim, the study delved deeply into the learners’ perception of the register-based instruction. To these ends, 50 intermediate and 50 advanced Iranian EFL learners were selected randomly and assigned to four groups: two experimental and two control groups. Employing an experimental pretest/posttest design, the learners of the two experimental groups received instruction on the three components of register; that is, field, tenor, and mode along with the implementation of a three-phase teaching/learning cycle, whereas the learners in the control groups were exposed to a conventional writing instruction. Quantitative analysis of the learners’ writing performance on the pre- and posttest measures revealed the contributory role of register instruction in improving Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance, regardless of their English proficiency level. Furthermore, having been surveyed through a researcher-made questionnaire, the advanced and intermediate learners expressed their positive attitude towards the instruction. The findings highlighted the necessity of superseding the traditional linguistic-based writing instruction by a contextual and situational teaching methodology similar to what has been implemented in the current study.

Effects of the Vaughan Method in Comparison with the Audiolingual Method and the Communicative Language Teaching on Iranian Advanced EFL Learners’ Speaking Skill

Effects of the Vaughan Method in Comparison with the Audiolingual Method and the Communicative Language Teaching on Iranian Advanced EFL Learners’ Speaking Skill

The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Speaking Skills of Iranian Advanced EFL Learners

The role of emotional intelligence as a significant factor contributing to academic achievement was central in the area of research for several years. In second language learning research, personal and social skills seems to be critical as individual differences in language production. In this regard, this study has attempted to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence and speaking skills of Iranian advanced EFL learners. In order to achieve this goal, 96 advanced EFL learners including 48 males and 48 females were randomly selected from eight institutes in Tehran. The design of the study is a quantitative, non- experimental research utilizing a correlational approach. The data were gathered through an EQ questionnaire (namely EQ- i: S, designed by Bar- On), and speaking test (from ILETS samples of speaking tests in the form of individual interview). The value of Pearson correlation coefficient indicated that there was a significant relationship between emotional intelligence and speaking score of advanced EFL learners. The findings of the present study which denoted the role of EQ in speaking ability can be efficiently implemented in educational system through social- and- emotional- learning programs to improve students’ oral proficiency in language classroom. And it is the job of English teachers to exploit students’ full potential in order to facilitate language learning.

Productive and Receptive Collocational Knowledge of Iranian EFL Learners at Different Proficiency Levels

In the present study, an attempt was made to probe into the probable difference between Iranian intermediate and advanced EFL learners' receptive and productive collocational knowledge. To this end, 60 EFL learners studying at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan Branch, including 30 advanced and 30 intermediate learners, were chosen through the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). The participants at each level of proficiency received two tests of collocations, namely receptive collocation test and productive test of collocations. Paired-samples t test showed no statistically significant difference between productive and receptive knowledge of collocations of the advanced EFL learners. However, the mean comparison between the receptive and productive collocation test scores of intermediate EFL learners revealed a significant difference. Pedagogical implications emanating from the obtained results are elaborated in the study.

Dominant and Gender-Specific Tendencies in the Use of Discourse Markers: Insights from EFL Learners

This study followed two objectives: it primarily investigated the types of discourse markers (DMs) used in thespoken language of Iranian advanced EFL learners, and then explored the possible impact of gender on theparticipants’ use of DMs. To this end, 40 male and female EFL learners selected from an English language instituteparticipated in this study. The data were gathered through class observations. The researchers used Fraser’staxonomy of DMs and Fung’s category of interpersonal DMs as the theoretical framework of the study. To analyzethe data descriptive and inferential statistics were used. Results of the frequency test revealed that “and” was themost commonly used elaborative DM, whereas “but” was the most frequent contrastive DM. “Because” and “by theway” were respectively the only reason and topic-related DMs used by the participants, while “sure” was the mostfrequent interpersonal DM. In addition, results of the chi-square test revealed that learners significantly employedinterpersonal DMs more than the other sub-classes of DMs. Concerning the role of gender in the use of DMs, resultsdemonstrated that females significantly used more DMs compared with the males.