Mansoor Ganji - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Mansoor Ganji

With the emergence of innovative online-based tools, new opportunities have emerged to improve th... more With the emergence of innovative online-based tools, new opportunities have emerged to improve the quality of language learning. The current study investigated the impact of flipped classroom on enhancing EFL learners’ cognitive and meta-cognitive competence. To this end, two groups of participants were selected for the two phases of the study and for comparing the impact of flipped classroom and conventional modes of instruction on enhancing EFL learners' self-regulated learning strategies and higher order thinking, two different sample sizes were needed. For the research questions, two groups of homogenous language learners were needed. The participants were selected from two private language institutes in Arak, Iran. To elicit the required data, multiple sources of data collection, Including Language proficiency test, the Self-Regulation Questionnaire, flipped classroom attitude questionnaire, Higher-order Thinking Skills Test, were used. The findings revealed that flipped cl...

Due to the rapid expansion of knowledge and ever-increasing growth of international communication... more Due to the rapid expansion of knowledge and ever-increasing growth of international communication, the need to highly qualified translators is felt more than ever before. Not being satisfied with the traditional approaches to teaching translation, translation experts, practitioners, and researchers argue for a move to a more team-based, experiential, and cooperative approach. This study aimed to investigate if teaching translation through cooperative learning improved university students’ class-engagement, self-esteem, and self-confidence. Having administered the class-engagement, self-esteem, and self-confidence questionnaires, the control and experimental groups, with 15 students in each, received the treatment for 10 sessions. The experimental group did the translation tasks through cooperative method in groups of 2 or 3. However, the control group was taught through traditional method, and students translated the text individually. Once the treatment was over, the questionnaires...

Textbook is an essential element of teaching and learning materials. After the teacher, textbooks... more Textbook is an essential element of teaching and learning materials. After the teacher, textbooks are the most important factor in learning. Since textbooks act as an important material in teaching and learning, they need to be evaluated regularly. In the light of the foregoing, this study aimed to evaluate “Active Skills for Reading” using a researcher-made checklist and a structured interview. This book was being taught in six classes of Chabahar Maritime University as a general English coursebook. The goal of this study was to determine the suitability of the book as a general English course from the students’ and teachers’ perspectives. To this end, 150 students and 4 teachers were selected, and data were collected during two semesters in 2020. The quantitative data of the checklist were analyzed by calculating descriptive statistics using SPSS version 26, and qualitative data was analyzed through deductive content analysis. It was shown that the teachers and students believed t...

Metacognitive reading strategies play a significant role in reading comprehension and educational... more Metacognitive reading strategies play a significant role in reading comprehension and educational success. Being noticeably absent from many Iranian classrooms and largely unaware of by many language learners and teachers, metacognitive reading strategies have fallen into oblivion in English language teaching, research, learning, and assessment. The present study was an attempt to measure the metacognitive reading strategy (MRS) awareness among Iranian university students majoring in English Translation Studies. It also aimed at determining whether gender and learners’ different academic levels would make any difference in using various types of MRS. Furthermore, it investigated the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ awareness of MRS and their reading comprehension performance. A sample of 45 EFL university students majoring in English Translation at Chabahar Maritime University participated in this study. They were asked to complete the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) q...

Profile: Issues in Teachers' Professional Development, 2022

This study investigated Iranian English as a foreign language teachers’ attachment styles and pos... more This study investigated Iranian English as a foreign language teachers’ attachment styles and possible influential factors such as age, teaching experience, gender, and educational degree. The participants were 108 female and 79 male Iranian English teachers, chosen through convenience and snowball sampling. Using Google forms, a researcher-made questionnaire was sent to the participants. There was a positive relationship between age and a secure style, and a negative relationship between fearful and preoccupied styles and age. Further, there was a positive correlation between a secure style and teaching experience, and a negative relationship between fearful and preoccupied styles and teaching experience. Male teachers were more secure, and educational degree made no difference in secure and preoccupied styles.

This study compared the use of lexical bundles in authentic spoken language data with those of tw... more This study compared the use of lexical bundles in authentic spoken language data with those of two English learning textbooks developed for IELTS preparation courses in Iran. The aim was to see if the language chunks available in the said textbooks were representative of the real-life language for which learners need to prepare. To achieve this aim, firstly, a list of lexical bundles was compiled based on Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and British Academic Spoken English (BASE). Further, the list was used as a reference tool to analyze the language data of two IELTS preparation books published and widely used in Iran. The results highlighted some considerable differences between MICASE and BASE with regard to the use of lexical bundles in terms of their frequency, structure, and function. Moreover, it was revealed that the books under investigation shared only a scarce number of similar lexical bundles with MICASE and BASE as a whole. Therefore, they failed to b...

Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies, 2020

Not being satisfied with the traditional approaches to teaching translation, translation experts ... more Not being satisfied with the traditional approaches to teaching translation, translation experts and researchers argue for a move to a more team-based, experiential, and cooperative approach. This study aimed to investigate if teaching translation through cooperative learning improved university students' classengagement, self-esteem, and self-confidence. Having administered the classengagement, self-esteem, and self-confidence questionnaires, the control and experimental groups, with 15 students in each, received the treatment for 10 sessions. The experimental group did the translation tasks through cooperative method in groups of 2 or 3. However, the control group was taught through traditional method, and students translated the text individually. Once the treatment was over, the questionnaires were distributed again, and responses were recorded. Employing one-way ANCOVA, the data were analyzed. The results revealed that cooperative learning improved students' self-confid...

Issues in Educational Research, 2018

This study aims to paint a vivid picture of the English teacher training courses held in Iranian ... more This study aims to paint a vivid picture of the English teacher training courses held in Iranian private language institutes, both to critically analyse their aims and content, and to find their strengths and weaknesses. In line with this, qualitative data were gathered through information available on 34 institutes' websites, narrative observations of 24 sessions, open-ended questionnaires filled out by supervisors in 37 institutes, and semistructured interviews conducted with six English teachers and six teacher trainers. The data were analysed using a grounded theory approach (open, axial, and selective coding). The findings indicated that these courses offered a very convenient schedule, focused on practical teaching techniques, and were based on the institutes' needs. However, they suffered from problems such as the trainees' low knowledge of general English and teaching methodology, lack of a written syllabus, focusing on received rather than experiential knowledge...

Student Question Generation (SQG) is one of the learner-centered constructive learning techniques... more Student Question Generation (SQG) is one of the learner-centered constructive learning techniques which might be a helpful too for engaging students in the learning and assessment processes and increase their interest in the learning materials. This study attempted to investigate the effect of this technique on ESP learners’ achievement in an English course and to study the learners' views on the efficacy of using this technique in teaching English. To reach the said aims, a mixed-method research design was employed to answer the questions. The research was conducted at Islamic Azad University in Hidaj with 60 participants (male and female) who were majoring at accounting and civil engineering and were divided into experimental and control groups. Data were collected through an achievement test which was administered at the end of the course and a focus-group interview held in experimental group class. Independent samples t-test was used to analyze the quantitative data, while t...

The use of collaborative classroom interactional tasks is on the rise recently since they incorpo... more The use of collaborative classroom interactional tasks is on the rise recently since they incorporate the negotiation of meaning and thus they may be regarded as one of the most efficient ways to ease a learner’s focus on form. This study investigated the immediate and long-term effects of reconstruction editing task on the learning of 20 academic vocabulary items through using five reconstruction editing tasks. Of interest was whether the number of students in the interaction groups made any considerable difference in the gains of vocabulary knowledge in the groups under study. Based on convenience sampling, some 30 teenage students of two intermediate level classes studying Top Notch course at a language institute in Isfahan volunteered to participate in the study. Having taken a teacher-made pretest, group A with 14 students did the reconstruction editing task in pairs, but the 16 students of group B did the task in groups of four. Then, they took an immediate and a delayed postt...

This study investigated the impact of Teacher-correction, Peer-correction, and Self-correction on... more This study investigated the impact of Teacher-correction, Peer-correction, and Self-correction on the performance of Iranian advanced students on IELTS writing test. The participants of the study were 54 students who were chosen from among 75 IELTS candidates, and then divided into three groups of 18. All of the students took writing pre-test at the beginning of the term and, then the 8-week treatment in which they received different types of feedback started. One-way ANOVA results of the post-test revealed that there was a significant difference among the performance of the three groups. The results of the Scheffe Test showed that there was a significant difference between Teachercorrection and Self-correction groups, between Teacher-correction and Peer-correction groups, and between Self-correction and Peer-correction groups. The findings suggested that Peer-correction and Self-correction were much more effective than the traditional Teacher-correction, and Peer-correction was sho...

This paper reports on a mixed-methods study that utilized questionnaires, open-ended questions, a... more This paper reports on a mixed-methods study that utilized questionnaires, open-ended questions, and texts to evaluate the English teacher training courses held in Iranian private language institutes. Data were gathered from 60 teacher applicants applying for and 94 teacher trainees who took these courses in three private language institutes. Descriptive statistics and content analysis techniques were employed to analyze the data. The findings indicate that while teacher applicants need training most in teaching language skills and components, general teaching skills, and classroom management, they need no training in using classroom resources, language learning and language testing theories. Furthermore, they expected the course to follow a specific syllabus and set of objectives, give them opportunities for teaching practice, observation of experienced teachers' classes, and the confidence and ability to manage classes and organize interesting language learning activities. Fina...

International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 2021

This quasi-experimental research aimed at investigating the effects of two different modes of wor... more This quasi-experimental research aimed at investigating the effects of two different modes of worksheets on the vocabulary learning of Iranian young EFL learners. Some 20 male and female learners enrolled in a language institute in Chabahar agreed to participate in this study. Then, they were randomly divided into two experimental groups, and a vocabulary test was administered before the treatment as the pre-test. This pre-test was administered to determine the learners’ vocabulary knowledge and check their homogeneity. During the treatment, learners in Paper Worksheet Group (PWG) learned new words via paper worksheets, while the learners in Online Worksheet Group (OWG) learned vocabulary items via online worksheets. At the end, all the participants took a vocabulary post-test, which was the same as the pre-test. A paired sample t-test and an independent sample t-test were run, the results of which revealed that the PWG outperformed the OWG. More precisely, paper worksheets had a si...

Initial teacher training courses are of utmost importance because they are the first entry point ... more Initial teacher training courses are of utmost importance because they are the first entry point to the teacher professional career and determine the quality and quantity of teachers. Despite the importance of initial teacher training courses and their influence on the professional lives of teacher applicants, English teachers, and language learners, there is a dearth of research evaluating these courses in Iranian private language institutes. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study that utilized questionnaires with open-ended and Likert-scale items and available documents to evaluate the English Teacher Training Course (ETTC) held in an Iranian private language institute. Data were gathered from 60 teacher applicants applying for this ETTC and 94 English teachers who took this ETTC in 2016. Descriptive statistics and content analysis were employed to analyze the data. The findings indicate that while teacher applicants needed training most in teaching language skills and compon...

This study investigated the effect of transcribing group-discussion tasks on the development of u... more This study investigated the effect of transcribing group-discussion tasks on the development of university students' autonomy and oral proficiency. A quasi-experimental research design was followed to compare the performances of four groups: two experimental groups and two control groups (each group divided into low and high proficiency students). The study lasted for 12 weeks, and the teacher assigned a classroom oral discussion task in each session. The students were divided into discussion groups of three or four students, with low and high proficiency learners in different groups. The participants had to record their group discussion tasks. Control groups’ students had to submit their recorded conversations to their instructor, but they did not do any post-task activity. However, the experimental groups’ students had to transcribe their recorded speaking tasks, to find their own and their peers' grammatical mistakes, and to correct them. Finally, while working in groups,...

Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, 2015

Many recent researchers support the use of collaborative output tasks in L2 classrooms. This stud... more Many recent researchers support the use of collaborative output tasks in L2 classrooms. This study compared the effects on the learning of English lexical collocations of two types of output tasks (reconstruction cloze task and reconstruction editing task). It aimed to see whether doing the tasks collaboratively led to greater knowledge of the target collocations than doing the same tasks individually and also whether the type of task would make a difference. The study was conducted in two intact intermediate adult English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms. The participants had to complete four editing tasks or four cloze tasks either individually or collaboratively, and they were asked to take a vocabulary knowledge scale test administered before and after the treatment. The results revealed that completing the tasks collaboratively (in pairs) led to a greater gain of collocation knowledge than completing them individually. The results, also, showed a significant difference be...

Considering the importance of sustainable development (SD) in developing countries and lack of re... more Considering the importance of sustainable development (SD) in developing countries and lack of research on this topic among Iranian English teachers, this study aims at investigating the Iranian English teachers’ awareness and understanding of this concept and the effects of demographic features on their understanding. To this end, a researcher-made 48-item validated Questionnaire that consisted of eight scales was administered among 233 English teachers teaching at high schools, private language institutes, and universities. The data were analyzed through content analysis of the open-ended question and quantitative analysis of the Likert-scale items. One-way ANOVA was used to find out about the effects of gender, workplace, teaching experience, and academic degree on teachers’ understanding and awareness. The results revealed that although some teachers could not define the term, or provided a general or wrong definition of the term, more than half of the teachers rightly emphasize...

Although researchers, postgraduate students, and university professors are under tremendous press... more Although researchers, postgraduate students, and university professors are under tremendous pressure to publish or perish, there exist few widely acknowledged rating scales or checklists for evaluating manuscripts submitted to journals in applied linguistics. To top it all, the existent peer-reviewing criteria are typically not publicly shared; thus, peer-reviewing is a closed, occluded genre. To fill this lacuna in applied linguistics, this research critically analyzed the evaluation scales, existing review criteria, and available documents from 18 journals, two publishing institutions, and APA guidelines in order to come up with a comprehensive checklist for evaluating research articles in applied linguistics. The analysis of the data through inductive content analysis revealed 43 categories, which were later classified under six main themes. It was found that researchers must be aware of the practicalities of research, include the essentials in their manuscript, and appeal to edi...

Introduction: Research findings in the last decades have shown that anxiety and its debilitative ... more Introduction: Research findings in the last decades have shown that anxiety and its debilitative consequences exert damaging effect on learning. Enjoying a profound theoretical foundation in Vygotskian theories of cognitive development and psychological therapy, dynamic assessment and interventions propose a framework for promoting student’s learning through mediation and support in the zone of proximal development of mind. The present study was an attempt to use this framework to remove anxiety and psychological barriers to mastering speaking in English classes. Methods: To this aim foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS) was adopted and administered to 250 first grade high school students in Qom and the researcher selected 10 students with highest anxiety score, serving as experimental group (n=10). The research used an experimental design, in which experimental group’s anxiety scores in pre-test (before dynamic intervention) and post-test (after dynamic intervention) was...

With the emergence of innovative online-based tools, new opportunities have emerged to improve th... more With the emergence of innovative online-based tools, new opportunities have emerged to improve the quality of language learning. The current study investigated the impact of flipped classroom on enhancing EFL learners’ cognitive and meta-cognitive competence. To this end, two groups of participants were selected for the two phases of the study and for comparing the impact of flipped classroom and conventional modes of instruction on enhancing EFL learners' self-regulated learning strategies and higher order thinking, two different sample sizes were needed. For the research questions, two groups of homogenous language learners were needed. The participants were selected from two private language institutes in Arak, Iran. To elicit the required data, multiple sources of data collection, Including Language proficiency test, the Self-Regulation Questionnaire, flipped classroom attitude questionnaire, Higher-order Thinking Skills Test, were used. The findings revealed that flipped cl...

Due to the rapid expansion of knowledge and ever-increasing growth of international communication... more Due to the rapid expansion of knowledge and ever-increasing growth of international communication, the need to highly qualified translators is felt more than ever before. Not being satisfied with the traditional approaches to teaching translation, translation experts, practitioners, and researchers argue for a move to a more team-based, experiential, and cooperative approach. This study aimed to investigate if teaching translation through cooperative learning improved university students’ class-engagement, self-esteem, and self-confidence. Having administered the class-engagement, self-esteem, and self-confidence questionnaires, the control and experimental groups, with 15 students in each, received the treatment for 10 sessions. The experimental group did the translation tasks through cooperative method in groups of 2 or 3. However, the control group was taught through traditional method, and students translated the text individually. Once the treatment was over, the questionnaires...

Textbook is an essential element of teaching and learning materials. After the teacher, textbooks... more Textbook is an essential element of teaching and learning materials. After the teacher, textbooks are the most important factor in learning. Since textbooks act as an important material in teaching and learning, they need to be evaluated regularly. In the light of the foregoing, this study aimed to evaluate “Active Skills for Reading” using a researcher-made checklist and a structured interview. This book was being taught in six classes of Chabahar Maritime University as a general English coursebook. The goal of this study was to determine the suitability of the book as a general English course from the students’ and teachers’ perspectives. To this end, 150 students and 4 teachers were selected, and data were collected during two semesters in 2020. The quantitative data of the checklist were analyzed by calculating descriptive statistics using SPSS version 26, and qualitative data was analyzed through deductive content analysis. It was shown that the teachers and students believed t...

Metacognitive reading strategies play a significant role in reading comprehension and educational... more Metacognitive reading strategies play a significant role in reading comprehension and educational success. Being noticeably absent from many Iranian classrooms and largely unaware of by many language learners and teachers, metacognitive reading strategies have fallen into oblivion in English language teaching, research, learning, and assessment. The present study was an attempt to measure the metacognitive reading strategy (MRS) awareness among Iranian university students majoring in English Translation Studies. It also aimed at determining whether gender and learners’ different academic levels would make any difference in using various types of MRS. Furthermore, it investigated the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ awareness of MRS and their reading comprehension performance. A sample of 45 EFL university students majoring in English Translation at Chabahar Maritime University participated in this study. They were asked to complete the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) q...

Profile: Issues in Teachers' Professional Development, 2022

This study investigated Iranian English as a foreign language teachers’ attachment styles and pos... more This study investigated Iranian English as a foreign language teachers’ attachment styles and possible influential factors such as age, teaching experience, gender, and educational degree. The participants were 108 female and 79 male Iranian English teachers, chosen through convenience and snowball sampling. Using Google forms, a researcher-made questionnaire was sent to the participants. There was a positive relationship between age and a secure style, and a negative relationship between fearful and preoccupied styles and age. Further, there was a positive correlation between a secure style and teaching experience, and a negative relationship between fearful and preoccupied styles and teaching experience. Male teachers were more secure, and educational degree made no difference in secure and preoccupied styles.

This study compared the use of lexical bundles in authentic spoken language data with those of tw... more This study compared the use of lexical bundles in authentic spoken language data with those of two English learning textbooks developed for IELTS preparation courses in Iran. The aim was to see if the language chunks available in the said textbooks were representative of the real-life language for which learners need to prepare. To achieve this aim, firstly, a list of lexical bundles was compiled based on Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and British Academic Spoken English (BASE). Further, the list was used as a reference tool to analyze the language data of two IELTS preparation books published and widely used in Iran. The results highlighted some considerable differences between MICASE and BASE with regard to the use of lexical bundles in terms of their frequency, structure, and function. Moreover, it was revealed that the books under investigation shared only a scarce number of similar lexical bundles with MICASE and BASE as a whole. Therefore, they failed to b...

Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies, 2020

Not being satisfied with the traditional approaches to teaching translation, translation experts ... more Not being satisfied with the traditional approaches to teaching translation, translation experts and researchers argue for a move to a more team-based, experiential, and cooperative approach. This study aimed to investigate if teaching translation through cooperative learning improved university students' classengagement, self-esteem, and self-confidence. Having administered the classengagement, self-esteem, and self-confidence questionnaires, the control and experimental groups, with 15 students in each, received the treatment for 10 sessions. The experimental group did the translation tasks through cooperative method in groups of 2 or 3. However, the control group was taught through traditional method, and students translated the text individually. Once the treatment was over, the questionnaires were distributed again, and responses were recorded. Employing one-way ANCOVA, the data were analyzed. The results revealed that cooperative learning improved students' self-confid...

Issues in Educational Research, 2018

This study aims to paint a vivid picture of the English teacher training courses held in Iranian ... more This study aims to paint a vivid picture of the English teacher training courses held in Iranian private language institutes, both to critically analyse their aims and content, and to find their strengths and weaknesses. In line with this, qualitative data were gathered through information available on 34 institutes' websites, narrative observations of 24 sessions, open-ended questionnaires filled out by supervisors in 37 institutes, and semistructured interviews conducted with six English teachers and six teacher trainers. The data were analysed using a grounded theory approach (open, axial, and selective coding). The findings indicated that these courses offered a very convenient schedule, focused on practical teaching techniques, and were based on the institutes' needs. However, they suffered from problems such as the trainees' low knowledge of general English and teaching methodology, lack of a written syllabus, focusing on received rather than experiential knowledge...

Student Question Generation (SQG) is one of the learner-centered constructive learning techniques... more Student Question Generation (SQG) is one of the learner-centered constructive learning techniques which might be a helpful too for engaging students in the learning and assessment processes and increase their interest in the learning materials. This study attempted to investigate the effect of this technique on ESP learners’ achievement in an English course and to study the learners' views on the efficacy of using this technique in teaching English. To reach the said aims, a mixed-method research design was employed to answer the questions. The research was conducted at Islamic Azad University in Hidaj with 60 participants (male and female) who were majoring at accounting and civil engineering and were divided into experimental and control groups. Data were collected through an achievement test which was administered at the end of the course and a focus-group interview held in experimental group class. Independent samples t-test was used to analyze the quantitative data, while t...

The use of collaborative classroom interactional tasks is on the rise recently since they incorpo... more The use of collaborative classroom interactional tasks is on the rise recently since they incorporate the negotiation of meaning and thus they may be regarded as one of the most efficient ways to ease a learner’s focus on form. This study investigated the immediate and long-term effects of reconstruction editing task on the learning of 20 academic vocabulary items through using five reconstruction editing tasks. Of interest was whether the number of students in the interaction groups made any considerable difference in the gains of vocabulary knowledge in the groups under study. Based on convenience sampling, some 30 teenage students of two intermediate level classes studying Top Notch course at a language institute in Isfahan volunteered to participate in the study. Having taken a teacher-made pretest, group A with 14 students did the reconstruction editing task in pairs, but the 16 students of group B did the task in groups of four. Then, they took an immediate and a delayed postt...

This study investigated the impact of Teacher-correction, Peer-correction, and Self-correction on... more This study investigated the impact of Teacher-correction, Peer-correction, and Self-correction on the performance of Iranian advanced students on IELTS writing test. The participants of the study were 54 students who were chosen from among 75 IELTS candidates, and then divided into three groups of 18. All of the students took writing pre-test at the beginning of the term and, then the 8-week treatment in which they received different types of feedback started. One-way ANOVA results of the post-test revealed that there was a significant difference among the performance of the three groups. The results of the Scheffe Test showed that there was a significant difference between Teachercorrection and Self-correction groups, between Teacher-correction and Peer-correction groups, and between Self-correction and Peer-correction groups. The findings suggested that Peer-correction and Self-correction were much more effective than the traditional Teacher-correction, and Peer-correction was sho...

This paper reports on a mixed-methods study that utilized questionnaires, open-ended questions, a... more This paper reports on a mixed-methods study that utilized questionnaires, open-ended questions, and texts to evaluate the English teacher training courses held in Iranian private language institutes. Data were gathered from 60 teacher applicants applying for and 94 teacher trainees who took these courses in three private language institutes. Descriptive statistics and content analysis techniques were employed to analyze the data. The findings indicate that while teacher applicants need training most in teaching language skills and components, general teaching skills, and classroom management, they need no training in using classroom resources, language learning and language testing theories. Furthermore, they expected the course to follow a specific syllabus and set of objectives, give them opportunities for teaching practice, observation of experienced teachers' classes, and the confidence and ability to manage classes and organize interesting language learning activities. Fina...

International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 2021

This quasi-experimental research aimed at investigating the effects of two different modes of wor... more This quasi-experimental research aimed at investigating the effects of two different modes of worksheets on the vocabulary learning of Iranian young EFL learners. Some 20 male and female learners enrolled in a language institute in Chabahar agreed to participate in this study. Then, they were randomly divided into two experimental groups, and a vocabulary test was administered before the treatment as the pre-test. This pre-test was administered to determine the learners’ vocabulary knowledge and check their homogeneity. During the treatment, learners in Paper Worksheet Group (PWG) learned new words via paper worksheets, while the learners in Online Worksheet Group (OWG) learned vocabulary items via online worksheets. At the end, all the participants took a vocabulary post-test, which was the same as the pre-test. A paired sample t-test and an independent sample t-test were run, the results of which revealed that the PWG outperformed the OWG. More precisely, paper worksheets had a si...

Initial teacher training courses are of utmost importance because they are the first entry point ... more Initial teacher training courses are of utmost importance because they are the first entry point to the teacher professional career and determine the quality and quantity of teachers. Despite the importance of initial teacher training courses and their influence on the professional lives of teacher applicants, English teachers, and language learners, there is a dearth of research evaluating these courses in Iranian private language institutes. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study that utilized questionnaires with open-ended and Likert-scale items and available documents to evaluate the English Teacher Training Course (ETTC) held in an Iranian private language institute. Data were gathered from 60 teacher applicants applying for this ETTC and 94 English teachers who took this ETTC in 2016. Descriptive statistics and content analysis were employed to analyze the data. The findings indicate that while teacher applicants needed training most in teaching language skills and compon...

This study investigated the effect of transcribing group-discussion tasks on the development of u... more This study investigated the effect of transcribing group-discussion tasks on the development of university students' autonomy and oral proficiency. A quasi-experimental research design was followed to compare the performances of four groups: two experimental groups and two control groups (each group divided into low and high proficiency students). The study lasted for 12 weeks, and the teacher assigned a classroom oral discussion task in each session. The students were divided into discussion groups of three or four students, with low and high proficiency learners in different groups. The participants had to record their group discussion tasks. Control groups’ students had to submit their recorded conversations to their instructor, but they did not do any post-task activity. However, the experimental groups’ students had to transcribe their recorded speaking tasks, to find their own and their peers' grammatical mistakes, and to correct them. Finally, while working in groups,...

Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, 2015

Many recent researchers support the use of collaborative output tasks in L2 classrooms. This stud... more Many recent researchers support the use of collaborative output tasks in L2 classrooms. This study compared the effects on the learning of English lexical collocations of two types of output tasks (reconstruction cloze task and reconstruction editing task). It aimed to see whether doing the tasks collaboratively led to greater knowledge of the target collocations than doing the same tasks individually and also whether the type of task would make a difference. The study was conducted in two intact intermediate adult English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms. The participants had to complete four editing tasks or four cloze tasks either individually or collaboratively, and they were asked to take a vocabulary knowledge scale test administered before and after the treatment. The results revealed that completing the tasks collaboratively (in pairs) led to a greater gain of collocation knowledge than completing them individually. The results, also, showed a significant difference be...

Considering the importance of sustainable development (SD) in developing countries and lack of re... more Considering the importance of sustainable development (SD) in developing countries and lack of research on this topic among Iranian English teachers, this study aims at investigating the Iranian English teachers’ awareness and understanding of this concept and the effects of demographic features on their understanding. To this end, a researcher-made 48-item validated Questionnaire that consisted of eight scales was administered among 233 English teachers teaching at high schools, private language institutes, and universities. The data were analyzed through content analysis of the open-ended question and quantitative analysis of the Likert-scale items. One-way ANOVA was used to find out about the effects of gender, workplace, teaching experience, and academic degree on teachers’ understanding and awareness. The results revealed that although some teachers could not define the term, or provided a general or wrong definition of the term, more than half of the teachers rightly emphasize...

Although researchers, postgraduate students, and university professors are under tremendous press... more Although researchers, postgraduate students, and university professors are under tremendous pressure to publish or perish, there exist few widely acknowledged rating scales or checklists for evaluating manuscripts submitted to journals in applied linguistics. To top it all, the existent peer-reviewing criteria are typically not publicly shared; thus, peer-reviewing is a closed, occluded genre. To fill this lacuna in applied linguistics, this research critically analyzed the evaluation scales, existing review criteria, and available documents from 18 journals, two publishing institutions, and APA guidelines in order to come up with a comprehensive checklist for evaluating research articles in applied linguistics. The analysis of the data through inductive content analysis revealed 43 categories, which were later classified under six main themes. It was found that researchers must be aware of the practicalities of research, include the essentials in their manuscript, and appeal to edi...

Introduction: Research findings in the last decades have shown that anxiety and its debilitative ... more Introduction: Research findings in the last decades have shown that anxiety and its debilitative consequences exert damaging effect on learning. Enjoying a profound theoretical foundation in Vygotskian theories of cognitive development and psychological therapy, dynamic assessment and interventions propose a framework for promoting student’s learning through mediation and support in the zone of proximal development of mind. The present study was an attempt to use this framework to remove anxiety and psychological barriers to mastering speaking in English classes. Methods: To this aim foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS) was adopted and administered to 250 first grade high school students in Qom and the researcher selected 10 students with highest anxiety score, serving as experimental group (n=10). The research used an experimental design, in which experimental group’s anxiety scores in pre-test (before dynamic intervention) and post-test (after dynamic intervention) was...