The aim of the present study was to investigate the move analysis of the abstracts in two discipl... more The aim of the present study was to investigate the move analysis of the abstracts in two disciplines namely Medicine and Applied Linguistics to find out whether they are written according to Swale's model (1981-1990) in terms of move analysis and Halliday’s model (1994) in terms of transitivity system and to figure out any differences between the two disciplines in terms of move analysis and transitivity system. For this purpose 400 samples of abstract (200 Applied Linguistics and 200 Medicine) were selected as our corpus. All the ranking processes were classified first at the sectional level based on Swales’ model including of four moves (introduction, method, result and conclusion) both in medical and applied linguistics RAs. In the second step these abstracts were analyzed through identification of Halliday’s transitivity system which includes 6 process types, namely material, relational, behavioral, mental, verbal and existential. To see if the differences of frequency coun...
International journal of humanities and social sciences, 2016
This study was an attempt to examine the role of dynamic assessment in developing the listening c... more This study was an attempt to examine the role of dynamic assessment in developing the listening comprehension of EFL learners and determine the extent to which DA can foster listening comprehension development compared to NDA. This study also aimed to elucidate the potential and effectiveness of DA in diagnosing L2 learners’ problems in listening comprehension and putting them right. Fifty TEFL students at Imam Khomeini International University were randomly divided to DA and NDA groups. The data analysis took into consideration the participants’ mediated and unmediated recalls of the idea units contained in the texts during assessment sessions. The results indicated that the dramatic improvement in independent listening performance of the DA group may be attributed to the administration of the enrichment program. Also, there was a statistically significant difference between the performance of the DA and the NDA group. The problem areas for the participants’ listening comprehension...
This study seeks to investigate whether Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC), a principle of UG for pro... more This study seeks to investigate whether Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC), a principle of UG for pro-drop languages, is operative in Persian or not. To achieve this goal, a total of 61 male/female university students, aged 19-22were selected and were randomly assigned to three groups. In the first two groups data were collected through the off-line procedure. In the third group data were gathered through the on-line procedure. All the participants were exposed to 10 quantifier items (5 overt quantifier items and 5 null quantifier items), 8 referential items (4 overt referential items and 4 null referential items) as well as 2 filler items, to detract the participants' attention and to obscure the regularities in test items, which were not to be analyzed.Each sentence was followed by a question asking the person to select the antecedent of overt pronoun or pro. The total performance of the participantsin the first two groups indicated that 57% of the participants transgressed OPC an...
This study employed a mixed method to investigate the effects of dynamic assessment (DA) on liste... more This study employed a mixed method to investigate the effects of dynamic assessment (DA) on listening comprehension of EFL students in a foreign language learning context. The participants of the study (N=57) were randomly divided into one control group, i.e., non-dynamic, and one experimental group, i.e., dynamic. They were asked to listen to some listening comprehension teaching materials and transcribe what they hear. The participants in the control group just listened to the audio files and took the tests while in the experimental group, the participants received mediation. The qualitative analysis of the exchanges between the mediator and the participants in the experimental group indicated that the application of mediational strategies was successful enough to help the participants promote their comprehension of the listening input. In addition, participants‟ listening problems diagnosed in the mediation sessions and the related support helped them overcome their listening com...
This paper strives to examine the short term/long term retention of abstract versus concrete voca... more This paper strives to examine the short term/long term retention of abstract versus concrete vocabulary; and intends to investigate the effectiveness of teaching abstract and concrete vocabulary incidentally through marginal glosses presented in L1 and L2. 72 EFL learners at Imam Khomeini International University participated in this study. Their proficiency level was determined by a Proficiency Test. 10 participants were excluded from the study, and the remaining 62 were mostly at upper-intermediate level. The participants read two reading comprehension passages of approximately the same length and difficulty and answered six comprehension questions following each passage. In each passage, the difficult vocabulary items were glossed marginally so that the participants would incidentally notice them to gain a better understanding of the passage. In one passage, marginal glosses were provided in L1 while in the other the glosses were in L2. Then, the participants were tested for thei...
European Online Journal of Natural and Social Sciences, 2017
SLA research has scarcely explored whether holding a TEFL degree affects teachers' beliefs ab... more SLA research has scarcely explored whether holding a TEFL degree affects teachers' beliefs about written corrective feedback (WCF). The present study was an attempt to survey the perceptions of 47 TEFL-degree holders (TDH) and 39 non-TEFL-degree holders (NTDH) teaching English for general purposes about different aspects of WCF as well as the problems they have putting their perceptions into practice. The participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire eliciting their perceptions about different aspects of written error correction. Ten TDH and 10 NTDH teachers were then randomly selected for the follow-up interview. The findings of the questionnaire and the interview revealed that compared to their counterparts, TDH teachers favored more selective and indirect types of WCF and tended to use more varieties of error correction techniques. Nevertheless, both groups of teachers complained that time constraints largely influenced their amount and type of feedback. The results fur...
Research has shown that morphological awareness facilitates decoding of the words and enhances wo... more Research has shown that morphological awareness facilitates decoding of the words and enhances word knowledge and reading comprehension (Carlisle, 2010; Nagy et al., 2014). This study aimed to investigate the effect of morphological awareness on the reading comprehension performance of field-dependent and independent learners. The study was conducted on ninety male and female intermediate learners at an English institute in Tehran. Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) was administered to determine the participants’ field-dependence and field-independence. The participants were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. As their pre-test, the reading comprehension section of a PET test was administered to both groups. Then, the morphological awareness treatment was given to the experimental group, including field-dependent and field-independent learners. The participants in the control group were exposed to the conventional methods of the institute. Then, the participant...
Although many studies have focused on the language learners’ beliefs and attitudes regarding erro... more Although many studies have focused on the language learners’ beliefs and attitudes regarding error correction, less has been done to investigate whether and how student characteristics influence their preferences. The present investigation explores how socio-economic status affects the error correction views of 140 upper-intermediate/advanced students, ranging from 23 to 31, in an EFL context. The participants' social class was determined by MacArthur scale of subjective socio-economic status. A questionnaire and a follow-up interview were employed to obtain the students' overall preferences about different aspects of oral corrective feedback (OCF). The results showed that the students unanimously favored teachers as the best provider of feedback and highly expected both local and global errors to be treated; nevertheless, whereas middle-class students would rather their errors to be corrected at the end of the class while the teacher addressed the whole class, high-class st...
This study compared teacher revision with peer revision on comprehension and production of relati... more This study compared teacher revision with peer revision on comprehension and production of relative clauses (RCs) in Iranian EFL students’ writing performance. Data were collected from 109 Iranian intermediate language learners studying at Imam Khomeini International University and Kharazmi University. After being homogenized by taking Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency (MTELP), they were divided into three groups (teacher revision, peer revision, and control). They all sat for the pretest. Then, the students in teacher revision and peer revision groups underwent eight treatment sessions, practicing teacher revision and peer revision respectively. The control group, however, did not receive any treatment. Then, the posttest was administered to all the groups. ANCOVA was employed to compare the performances of the groups. The results indicated that both teacher and peer revision were beneficial to students. However, peer revision led to better comprehension and production ...
This study investigates the effect of summarizing, note-taking and outlining on lexical and gramm... more This study investigates the effect of summarizing, note-taking and outlining on lexical and grammatical writing accuracy of upper elementary EFL learners. To achieve the purposes of the study, 67 female students were selected from 93 female students based on their performance on an oxford placement test and were assigned to three different experimental groups. Two parallel forms of the same test with the same content were devised. At the beginning of the study, the first form was administered to evaluate the existing lexical and grammatical writing accuracy of the students. The same content was taught by the teacher to the three groups throughout the 4-sessions of treatment. Each group received three different types of treatments (summarizing, note-taking, and outlining) with the same material. The three groups received the second form of the test as their posttest. SPSS software was used for statistical analysis. The results revealed that there were significant differences between ...
As the use of metacognitive strategies is not common among students, more research on metacogniti... more As the use of metacognitive strategies is not common among students, more research on metacognitive awareness is crucial to determine how students can be taught in order to apply the cognitive resources, activate their metacognitive knowledge and strategies, and enhance their learning. This study investigated the effectiveness of using metacognitive strategies to improve the reading comprehension of Iranian EFL intermediate learners. Ninety intermediate students from among 110 language learners at an institute in Tehran were chosen non-randomly based on their performance on a PET. Then, the EPI was administered to the participants to determine the extroverted and introverted participants of the study. After administering a pretest, in the first experimental groups of both introverted and extroverted learners, the participants were taught metacognitive strategies explicitly while in the second experimental groups, the participants received implicit instruction of metacognitive strate...
This study was an attempt to examine the contribution of metacognitive strategies to English as a... more This study was an attempt to examine the contribution of metacognitive strategies to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' listening comprehension performance and their metacognitive awareness. Fifty seven out of sixty eight EFL students were selected to participate in this study after their performance on Oxford Placement Test. The participants were then randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. After signing a consent form, both groups sat for the Preliminary English Test as their pretest. After filling in the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), the students in the experimental group received five sessions of listening practice and strategy training using The Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) Model (1999). The students in the control group, however, did not receive any instruction about strategies. After the strategy training the learners in both groups took another version of the PET as their posttest, and the ex...
Despite the multitude of studies on the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) in hel... more Despite the multitude of studies on the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) in helping learners improve their grammatical accuracy, SLA research has scarcely explored whether there is a reliable alternative to typical WCF. In an attempt to investigate whether there are other options to address learners' written grammatical errors, the present study employed a pre-test-immediate posttest-delayed posttest design to compare the effects of indirect focused WCF with sample enhanced motivating input (SEMI) on the accuracy with which EFL learners used English articles to express first and second mention in narrative writing tests. Using three intact intermediate classes totaling 46 EFL students who ranged in age from 15 to 18, three groups were formed: (1) a WCF group (n = 17) who received indirect focused WCF along with written metalinguistic information, (2) a SEMI group (n = 15) who received SEMI-feedback (a writing sample the focused structures of which are enhanced)...
This study employed a mixed method to investigate the effects of dynamic assessment (DA) on liste... more This study employed a mixed method to investigate the effects of dynamic assessment (DA) on listening comprehension of EFL students in a foreign language learning context. The participants of the study (N=57) were randomly divided into one control group, i.e., non-dynamic, and one experimental group, i.e., dynamic. They were asked to listen to some listening comprehension teaching materials and transcribe what they hear. The participants in the control group just listened to the audio files and took the tests while in the experimental group, the participants received mediation. The qualitative analysis of the exchanges between the mediator and the participants in the experimental group indicated that the application of mediational strategies was successful enough to help the participants promote their comprehension of the listening input. In addition, participants" listening problems diagnosed in the mediation sessions and the related support helped them overcome their listening comprehension problems. The performances of the participants in the two groups on an achievement test developed based on the instructional materials showed that the dynamic group outperformed the non-dynamic group.
The aim of the present study was to investigate the move analysis of the abstracts in two discipl... more The aim of the present study was to investigate the move analysis of the abstracts in two disciplines namely Medicine and Applied Linguistics to find out whether they are written according to Swale's model (1981-1990) in terms of move analysis and Halliday’s model (1994) in terms of transitivity system and to figure out any differences between the two disciplines in terms of move analysis and transitivity system. For this purpose 400 samples of abstract (200 Applied Linguistics and 200 Medicine) were selected as our corpus. All the ranking processes were classified first at the sectional level based on Swales’ model including of four moves (introduction, method, result and conclusion) both in medical and applied linguistics RAs. In the second step these abstracts were analyzed through identification of Halliday’s transitivity system which includes 6 process types, namely material, relational, behavioral, mental, verbal and existential. To see if the differences of frequency coun...
International journal of humanities and social sciences, 2016
This study was an attempt to examine the role of dynamic assessment in developing the listening c... more This study was an attempt to examine the role of dynamic assessment in developing the listening comprehension of EFL learners and determine the extent to which DA can foster listening comprehension development compared to NDA. This study also aimed to elucidate the potential and effectiveness of DA in diagnosing L2 learners’ problems in listening comprehension and putting them right. Fifty TEFL students at Imam Khomeini International University were randomly divided to DA and NDA groups. The data analysis took into consideration the participants’ mediated and unmediated recalls of the idea units contained in the texts during assessment sessions. The results indicated that the dramatic improvement in independent listening performance of the DA group may be attributed to the administration of the enrichment program. Also, there was a statistically significant difference between the performance of the DA and the NDA group. The problem areas for the participants’ listening comprehension...
This study seeks to investigate whether Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC), a principle of UG for pro... more This study seeks to investigate whether Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC), a principle of UG for pro-drop languages, is operative in Persian or not. To achieve this goal, a total of 61 male/female university students, aged 19-22were selected and were randomly assigned to three groups. In the first two groups data were collected through the off-line procedure. In the third group data were gathered through the on-line procedure. All the participants were exposed to 10 quantifier items (5 overt quantifier items and 5 null quantifier items), 8 referential items (4 overt referential items and 4 null referential items) as well as 2 filler items, to detract the participants' attention and to obscure the regularities in test items, which were not to be analyzed.Each sentence was followed by a question asking the person to select the antecedent of overt pronoun or pro. The total performance of the participantsin the first two groups indicated that 57% of the participants transgressed OPC an...
This study employed a mixed method to investigate the effects of dynamic assessment (DA) on liste... more This study employed a mixed method to investigate the effects of dynamic assessment (DA) on listening comprehension of EFL students in a foreign language learning context. The participants of the study (N=57) were randomly divided into one control group, i.e., non-dynamic, and one experimental group, i.e., dynamic. They were asked to listen to some listening comprehension teaching materials and transcribe what they hear. The participants in the control group just listened to the audio files and took the tests while in the experimental group, the participants received mediation. The qualitative analysis of the exchanges between the mediator and the participants in the experimental group indicated that the application of mediational strategies was successful enough to help the participants promote their comprehension of the listening input. In addition, participants‟ listening problems diagnosed in the mediation sessions and the related support helped them overcome their listening com...
This paper strives to examine the short term/long term retention of abstract versus concrete voca... more This paper strives to examine the short term/long term retention of abstract versus concrete vocabulary; and intends to investigate the effectiveness of teaching abstract and concrete vocabulary incidentally through marginal glosses presented in L1 and L2. 72 EFL learners at Imam Khomeini International University participated in this study. Their proficiency level was determined by a Proficiency Test. 10 participants were excluded from the study, and the remaining 62 were mostly at upper-intermediate level. The participants read two reading comprehension passages of approximately the same length and difficulty and answered six comprehension questions following each passage. In each passage, the difficult vocabulary items were glossed marginally so that the participants would incidentally notice them to gain a better understanding of the passage. In one passage, marginal glosses were provided in L1 while in the other the glosses were in L2. Then, the participants were tested for thei...
European Online Journal of Natural and Social Sciences, 2017
SLA research has scarcely explored whether holding a TEFL degree affects teachers' beliefs ab... more SLA research has scarcely explored whether holding a TEFL degree affects teachers' beliefs about written corrective feedback (WCF). The present study was an attempt to survey the perceptions of 47 TEFL-degree holders (TDH) and 39 non-TEFL-degree holders (NTDH) teaching English for general purposes about different aspects of WCF as well as the problems they have putting their perceptions into practice. The participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire eliciting their perceptions about different aspects of written error correction. Ten TDH and 10 NTDH teachers were then randomly selected for the follow-up interview. The findings of the questionnaire and the interview revealed that compared to their counterparts, TDH teachers favored more selective and indirect types of WCF and tended to use more varieties of error correction techniques. Nevertheless, both groups of teachers complained that time constraints largely influenced their amount and type of feedback. The results fur...
Research has shown that morphological awareness facilitates decoding of the words and enhances wo... more Research has shown that morphological awareness facilitates decoding of the words and enhances word knowledge and reading comprehension (Carlisle, 2010; Nagy et al., 2014). This study aimed to investigate the effect of morphological awareness on the reading comprehension performance of field-dependent and independent learners. The study was conducted on ninety male and female intermediate learners at an English institute in Tehran. Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) was administered to determine the participants’ field-dependence and field-independence. The participants were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. As their pre-test, the reading comprehension section of a PET test was administered to both groups. Then, the morphological awareness treatment was given to the experimental group, including field-dependent and field-independent learners. The participants in the control group were exposed to the conventional methods of the institute. Then, the participant...
Although many studies have focused on the language learners’ beliefs and attitudes regarding erro... more Although many studies have focused on the language learners’ beliefs and attitudes regarding error correction, less has been done to investigate whether and how student characteristics influence their preferences. The present investigation explores how socio-economic status affects the error correction views of 140 upper-intermediate/advanced students, ranging from 23 to 31, in an EFL context. The participants' social class was determined by MacArthur scale of subjective socio-economic status. A questionnaire and a follow-up interview were employed to obtain the students' overall preferences about different aspects of oral corrective feedback (OCF). The results showed that the students unanimously favored teachers as the best provider of feedback and highly expected both local and global errors to be treated; nevertheless, whereas middle-class students would rather their errors to be corrected at the end of the class while the teacher addressed the whole class, high-class st...
This study compared teacher revision with peer revision on comprehension and production of relati... more This study compared teacher revision with peer revision on comprehension and production of relative clauses (RCs) in Iranian EFL students’ writing performance. Data were collected from 109 Iranian intermediate language learners studying at Imam Khomeini International University and Kharazmi University. After being homogenized by taking Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency (MTELP), they were divided into three groups (teacher revision, peer revision, and control). They all sat for the pretest. Then, the students in teacher revision and peer revision groups underwent eight treatment sessions, practicing teacher revision and peer revision respectively. The control group, however, did not receive any treatment. Then, the posttest was administered to all the groups. ANCOVA was employed to compare the performances of the groups. The results indicated that both teacher and peer revision were beneficial to students. However, peer revision led to better comprehension and production ...
This study investigates the effect of summarizing, note-taking and outlining on lexical and gramm... more This study investigates the effect of summarizing, note-taking and outlining on lexical and grammatical writing accuracy of upper elementary EFL learners. To achieve the purposes of the study, 67 female students were selected from 93 female students based on their performance on an oxford placement test and were assigned to three different experimental groups. Two parallel forms of the same test with the same content were devised. At the beginning of the study, the first form was administered to evaluate the existing lexical and grammatical writing accuracy of the students. The same content was taught by the teacher to the three groups throughout the 4-sessions of treatment. Each group received three different types of treatments (summarizing, note-taking, and outlining) with the same material. The three groups received the second form of the test as their posttest. SPSS software was used for statistical analysis. The results revealed that there were significant differences between ...
As the use of metacognitive strategies is not common among students, more research on metacogniti... more As the use of metacognitive strategies is not common among students, more research on metacognitive awareness is crucial to determine how students can be taught in order to apply the cognitive resources, activate their metacognitive knowledge and strategies, and enhance their learning. This study investigated the effectiveness of using metacognitive strategies to improve the reading comprehension of Iranian EFL intermediate learners. Ninety intermediate students from among 110 language learners at an institute in Tehran were chosen non-randomly based on their performance on a PET. Then, the EPI was administered to the participants to determine the extroverted and introverted participants of the study. After administering a pretest, in the first experimental groups of both introverted and extroverted learners, the participants were taught metacognitive strategies explicitly while in the second experimental groups, the participants received implicit instruction of metacognitive strate...
This study was an attempt to examine the contribution of metacognitive strategies to English as a... more This study was an attempt to examine the contribution of metacognitive strategies to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' listening comprehension performance and their metacognitive awareness. Fifty seven out of sixty eight EFL students were selected to participate in this study after their performance on Oxford Placement Test. The participants were then randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. After signing a consent form, both groups sat for the Preliminary English Test as their pretest. After filling in the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), the students in the experimental group received five sessions of listening practice and strategy training using The Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) Model (1999). The students in the control group, however, did not receive any instruction about strategies. After the strategy training the learners in both groups took another version of the PET as their posttest, and the ex...
Despite the multitude of studies on the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) in hel... more Despite the multitude of studies on the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) in helping learners improve their grammatical accuracy, SLA research has scarcely explored whether there is a reliable alternative to typical WCF. In an attempt to investigate whether there are other options to address learners' written grammatical errors, the present study employed a pre-test-immediate posttest-delayed posttest design to compare the effects of indirect focused WCF with sample enhanced motivating input (SEMI) on the accuracy with which EFL learners used English articles to express first and second mention in narrative writing tests. Using three intact intermediate classes totaling 46 EFL students who ranged in age from 15 to 18, three groups were formed: (1) a WCF group (n = 17) who received indirect focused WCF along with written metalinguistic information, (2) a SEMI group (n = 15) who received SEMI-feedback (a writing sample the focused structures of which are enhanced)...
This study employed a mixed method to investigate the effects of dynamic assessment (DA) on liste... more This study employed a mixed method to investigate the effects of dynamic assessment (DA) on listening comprehension of EFL students in a foreign language learning context. The participants of the study (N=57) were randomly divided into one control group, i.e., non-dynamic, and one experimental group, i.e., dynamic. They were asked to listen to some listening comprehension teaching materials and transcribe what they hear. The participants in the control group just listened to the audio files and took the tests while in the experimental group, the participants received mediation. The qualitative analysis of the exchanges between the mediator and the participants in the experimental group indicated that the application of mediational strategies was successful enough to help the participants promote their comprehension of the listening input. In addition, participants" listening problems diagnosed in the mediation sessions and the related support helped them overcome their listening comprehension problems. The performances of the participants in the two groups on an achievement test developed based on the instructional materials showed that the dynamic group outperformed the non-dynamic group.
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