حسین براتی

The present study investigates the efficacy of preparation time in four speaking tasks of TOEFL iBT. As the current pre-task planning time offered by ETS is very short, 15 to 30 seconds, we intended to explore how the test-takers’ speaking quality would change if the preparation time was added to the response time, giving the respondents a relatively longer online planning opportunity. To this aim, two groups of TOEFL iBT candidates were studied under pre-task and online planning conditions. Totally, 384 elicited speaking samples were first transcribed and then measured in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). The results yielded by a series of One-way MANOVA revealed the online planning group significantly outperformed the pre-task planning group in terms of accuracy and fluency across all four speaking tasks. Although with less robustness, the online planners had significantly higher speech complexity represented by lexical diversity and left-embeddedness. The results obtained through this study may challenge the efficacy of the currently provided preparation time in TOEFL iBT speaking subsection.

The present study aimed to examine the effects of an educational technology called smart learning pen (i.e., iPen) as an ICT tool on young Iranian male and female EFL learners' speaking accuracy and fluency. A group of 180 young (6-9 years old) male and female learners with no previous formal education in English were randomly assigned into three different conditions: those who used the iPen in class and at home (IPC), at home only (IPH), and those who did not use the iPen at all (NIP). As gender was an independent variable, each condition had male and female groups. To address the research questions, the participants' performance on the oral sub-test of the posttest was put into analysis. The two-way ANOVA run on the effect of the independent variables (iPen and gender) and their interaction on the participants' speaking accuracy, and fluency revealed that using iPen helped the IPC and IPH participants significantly outperform the NIP group in terms of both accuracy and fluency. However, such an analysis did not show any significant effect for gender, nor did it show any significant effect when the interaction of gender and other variables was taken into account. The study has practical implications for policymakers, language teachers as well as software, hardware, and mobile phone application developers.

The aim of this study was fourfold: (1) to investigate the effect of literature-based activities on the accuracy of Iranian Engineering students’ writing (2) to examine the effect of literature-based activities on the accuracy of their WhatsApp assisted writing (3) to determine whether their emotional intelligence (EI) increases through literature-based activities in a WhatsApp assisted setting and (4) to survey the effect of literature-based activities and the produced emotional intelligence on the complexity and lexical diversity of students’ WhatsApp assisted writing. In phase I, as students went through literature-based activities, no significant differences of accuracy were found; despite the fact that the mean difference and standard deviation scores were indicative of effective treatment, literature-based activities. In phase II, the results obtained from the analytic procedures of literature-based activities on the accuracy of students’ WhatsApp assisted writing showed that the experimental group showed higher accuracy of writing. In phase III, the result of emotional intelligence improvement was more remarkable in the WhatsApp assisted writing. Additionally, the WhatsApp assisted written productions were significantly more diverse in using lexis, t-units and clauses but not other parameters of complexity. The results have some implications for teachers and researchers in the ESP setting. 

This study compares three integrated tasks of the TOEFL iBT speaking subtest in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To this end, a group of TOEFL iBT Iranian candidates took a simulated TOEFL iBT some days prior to their real exam. The collected oral responses were first transcribed and then quantified using software such as ‘Syllable Counter’ and ‘Coh-Metrix3’ for fluency and complexity, respectively. For accuracy, however, the responses were tallied manually. The results revealed the responses to the three speaking tasks were significantly different in terms of fluency. The difference in the accuracy index also turned significant, though the pairwise comparisons showed some inconsistencies. As for the selected complexity measures, lexical diversity, the mean number of modifiers per NP, and latent semantic analysis all showed significant differences between tasks 2 and 3 on the one hand and task 4 on the other. Left-embeddedness, however, revealed no significant difference among the three tasks. The results may support the influential role of prompting texts in such integrated speaking tasks

Context is a vague notion with numerous building blocks making language test scores inferences quite convoluted. This study has made use of a model of item responding that has striven to theorize the contextual infrastructure of differential item functioning (DIF) research and help specify the sources of DIF. Two steps were taken in this research: first, to identify DIF by gender grouping via logistic regression modeling, an inventory of mostly cited DIF sources was prepared, based on which a list of demographic items was appended to the TOEFL reading paper only to be administered to the intermediate Iranian undergraduates; second, using multiple-variable matching regression (Wu & Ercikan, 2006), a built-in sequence was followed to let every potential DIF source be considered as a covariate, over and above the conditioning variable, and specify whether a particular ecological variable could reduce DIF value/status. Then, all significant variables were analyzed together to show the final DIF predictors. The same procedures, i.e., individual/collective analyses, were employed after the purification of the test. The results indicated three ecological predictors affecting DIF before and after purification: income, administration convenience, and SES. The ultimate predictors helped create an EFL configuration of the ecological model of item responding. The implications for validity arguments are also discussed.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the validity of the English section of Iranian Universities PhD Entrance Exam in TEFL. To this end, 15 EFL learners from university of Isfahan who were in their last semester of that MA education were invited to contribute to the study. A group of 5 university lecturers were also asked to support the study as expert judges. A TOEFL reading paper was used to divide the participants into three ability groups, each consisting of five learners. Think-aloud study was used to find out the strategies each ability group used when completing the test. All the participants completed the reading section of the PhD Entrance Exam while verbalizing their thoughts. The verbal reports were transcribed and coded based on Barati’s (2005) taxonomy of Test-taking strategies. The Chi- square analysis of the think aloud protocols revealed that Monitoring and Evaluation strategies were used significantly more than other strategies by all ability groups. Moreover, the results indicated that the high ability group of test takers were more successful compared with others in maneuvering among different type of strategies. Further, different patterns of strategy use were observed in the three ability groups. The findings of the present study may be of interest to the PhD Entrance Exam developers as well as EFL material designers and classroom instructors.

The study compared the pedagogical effects of early versus delayed Form Focused Instruction (EFFI vs. DFFI), both subsumed under Isolated Form Focused Instruction (IFFI), on the achievement of three target structures with relative degrees of complexity by monolinguals and bilinguals. Six intact Gilaki-Persian learners of English as L3 and six groups of Persian learners of English as L2 participated in the study. They were all male beginning learners of English in Iranian public high schools who followed a pretest-treatment-posttest procedure. Four groups (grade 7) received instruction for the simple structure; four other groups (grade 8) were taught the moderately complex structure and four groups (grade 9) were exposed to the highly complex structure instruction. Within each grade, one group of Gilaki and one group of Persian natives received EFFI while their native counterparts benefited DFFI. The overall results revealed that when the method of instruction was the same, Gilaki natives outperformed Persian natives both in the post and delayed tests regardless of complexity. The groups that received the simple structure via EFFI did better than their native counterparts instructed via DFFI in both the post and delayed tests though a significant difference was only observed in the latter test. In contrast, DFFI groups outperformed their native counterparts taught via EFFI on the fairly and highly complex structures in the post and delayed posttests. Further analysis of the data demonstrated that DFFI contributes better to the durability of gain effects for more complex structures regardless of linguistic background of the learners.

Motivation for learning a new language is both self and time-oriented. The language learner’s motivation experiences gradual fluctuation over time and the view of oneself is different on each timescale of the study. Interaction among different timescales throughout the Second Language Development (SLD) is a novel area of investigation (de Bot, 2015). In order to probe this interactive nature, the present study tried to examine the motivational dynamics of a group of language learners in longer timescales composed of a number of tasks performed on shorter timescales. To this end, a group of university students were surveyed at the onset, while performing tasks and at the end of the course to better picture the interplay of different motivational themes over time. The results revealed different manifestations of components of L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) over different timescales of the study. Apart from this evolutionary manifestation of L2MSS components, ANNOVA results revealed significant difference between scores of each individual component among all three timescales. In sum, results of the study confirmed temporal and visionary variation in participants’ motivation. Finally, some implications were driven from the findings of the study.

هدف از پژوهش حاضر، بررسی تأثیر چهار روش تدریس واژگان تخصصی زبان اقتصاد، یعنی تدریس از طریق تفصیل ریشه ای، تعریف بافتی، ترجمه ی فارسی و تدریس ضمنی، بر درک مطلب متون تخصصی اقتصاد بوده است. یافته های پژوهش نشان داد که در زمینه درک مطلب کلی تفاوت معنی داری بین روش های تدریس وجود ندارد اما در مورد درک ایده ی نویسنده ، روش تدریس تفصیل ریشه ای بر سایر روش ها برتری داشت.

There is a growing interest among the higher education principals and policy makers to improve teacher evaluation methods and more important than that to use the evaluation data. A number of research studies implied the ineffective instruction of ESP courses in Iran (Atai, 2002; Eslami, 2005; Hayati, 2008; Ahmadi, 2008; Sherkatolabbasi & Mahdavi, 2012; Boniadi, Ghojazadeh & Rahmatvand, 2013). The basic objective of research in field of ESP/EGP instruction and evaluation is to facilitate informed decisions for the betterment of English classes. The literature suggested that most of the teachers and students were dissatisfied with the students’ progress in specific English courses. Data was collected from the teachers by various ways including observation checklist and feedback form. To carry out the study, 12 ESP and EGP teachers were observed using Marshall’s rubrics (2011) and observation logs’ analysis. Then, 18 teachers offered feedback on different aspects of their own courses. The data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively using ANOVA statistical measurement. The findings firstly indicate that EGP teachers were more standard teachers in comparison to ESP teachers. Secondly, the feedback forms show discrepancy between the views of EGP teachers and ESP teachers in some areas including the material effectiveness and students’ interest. To reach a standard point in EGP/ESP instruction, more evaluation is to be applied by the faculty members, university principals and the teachers themselves. Politically correct attitudes towards teachers should not lead to ineffective English courses. Some practical implications are suggested to upgrade the current practice in ESP classes