Saeed Ghaniabadi - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Saeed Ghaniabadi

As a post-psychometric model based on Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (SCT), dynamic assessme... more As a post-psychometric model based on Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (SCT), dynamic assessment (DA) aims at assessing and developing learners' abilities simultaneously. The learners' development is accounted for through the analysis of their performance on the transcendence/transfer (TR) tasks that are more challenging and difficult than the original DA tasks. Addressing the scarcity of research on the transcendence of learning in the L2 context, and following Poehner and Lantolf (2013), the present study explored the transcendence of learning via developing an online computerized dynamic test of English listening skill for the first time. 43 Iranian English majors in two state universities participated in the study. Applying graphical representations as well as correlations and t-tests, the overall comparison of the mediated (DA) and transfer (TR) scores revealed that learners sustained their abilities responding to TR tasks yet analyzing the TR scores on the basis of ...

The current study aimed to develop a Formative Assessment of Writing (FAoW) instrument through op... more The current study aimed to develop a Formative Assessment of Writing (FAoW) instrument through operationalizing Black and Wiliam’s (2009) Formative Assessment (FA) and Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) feedback model. Following intuitive approach of scale construction (Hase & Goldberg, 1967), a comprehensive review of the literature was undertaken, and 30 Likert scale items were devised. The items tapped students’ experiences of FA practices in writing classrooms and their attitudes towards the helpfulness of each practice. In a focused group interview, the items were intuitively classified by three experts of writing and assessment based on the five components of FA (clarifying criteria, evidence on students’ learning, feedback to move learners forward, peer assessment and autonomy) and in three stages (“Where the learner is going/Pre-writing, “Where the learner is right now/Writing and “How to get there/ Post-writing”). The expert interviews resulted in revisions and 20 additional i...

International Journal of Linguistics, 2015

Proceedings of the …, 2006

Count and Mass Across Languages, 2012

Plural marking on mass nouns in languages like English and Persian is assumed to be allowed only ... more Plural marking on mass nouns in languages like English and Persian is assumed to be allowed only when the interpretation of the mass noun is subject to coercion-i.e. count reading of mass nouns (Ghomeshi 2003). As such, plural marking serves the purpose of portioning out the undivided stuff into conventionalized units (Borer 2005, Mathieu 2007). This paper presents facts establishing that plural marking on mass nouns in Persian, in addition to its portioning-out function (2&3), can induce definiteness (1). I propose that the definiteness interpretation triggered by plural morphology arises from the syntax of plural marking in Persian. (1) barq-â / âb-â qat"-e. definiteness reading electricity-PL / water-PL cut-is.3SG "Thepower/the waterisshutoff." (2) berenj-â-ye šomâl zud mi-paz-e. taxonomic reading rice-PL-EZ north early DUR-cook-3SG "Rice(*s)fromthenorthcooksfast."[i.e.differentvarieties] (3) čây-â-ro gozâšt-am tu sini. understood quantity reading tea-PL-OM put.PST-1SG in tray "Iputtheteasinthetray."[i.e.cups/glasses] BuildingonGhomeshi"s(2003)assumptionthatpluralmarkinginPersian,contraEnglish,is licensed within D/QPs rather than NumPs, and Wiltschko"s(2008)diagnosticsfor identifying the categorial identity of plural marking, I propose, following Ghaniabadi (to appear), that plural marking in Persian is not a functional head and is thus modificational. Adopting Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993 et seq.), I propose that the definiteness-inducing plural marker and the default plural marker are two homophonous but semantically distinct Vocabulary Items meeting different contextual features at Vocabulary Insertion. (4) Vocabulary Items for plural marking in Persian a. /-hâ/ ↔ [pl] / D DEF > N + ____ b. /-hâ/ ↔ [pl] The definiteness-inducing plural mass nouns in (1), i.e. barq-â "thepower"andâb-â "the water", are not understood in any way to involve coercion effects. They are rather interpreted as referring to the totality/maximality/exhaustivity of the mass that satisfies the description of such pluralnounswithintheirgivencontext.Lyons(1999)adoptsHawkin"s(1978)term "inclusiveness"to characterize the concept underlying the definiteness of plural and mass nouns. He further suggests that "withpluralandmassnounsthe is a universal quantifier, similar in meaning to all... and the difference between them may be that all issimplymoreemphatic"(p. 11). I show that this generalization holds true for the definiteness-inducing plural marker on mass nouns in Persian, thus providing further evidence in support of the proposal that the plural marker on mass nouns may function as a definite marker.

... Besides shaping this dissertation in content and form, Jila mentored me intellectually, profe... more ... Besides shaping this dissertation in content and form, Jila mentored me intellectually, professionally, and personally ... A big thank you to my first linguistics teacher Dr. MohammadDabir-Moghaddam to whom I owe much of what I learned about linguistics during my ...

Beliefs about language learning have turned out to be a growing subject of concern within educati... more Beliefs about language learning have turned out to be a growing subject of concern within educational contexts specifically in relation to other variables such as language learning strategies. The aim of the current study was to compare EFL and ESL beliefs about language learning strategies using a mixed method research design. A total number of 229 participants, 115 EFL and 114 ESL upper-Intermediate English language learners were selected to complete Beliefs about Language learning Inventory (BALLI) questionnaire. Further, 10 volunteer participants, five from each contexts, were also interviewed about their attitude on language learning strategies. The results of the study revealed that there was a significant statistical difference between EFL and ESL beliefs about language learning strategies. Moreover, the analysis of the qualitative data showed that context had a great influence on shaping learners’ beliefs about learning a language.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2021

Educational context is a pool of various emotional demands asking for competent teachers who are ... more Educational context is a pool of various emotional demands asking for competent teachers who are capable enough to regulate and manage them. The language teacher emotion regulation focuses on the strategies that language teachers implement to regulate their emotions. Considering the paucity of a psychometrically sound instrument in language teacher emotion regulation, this realm has received scant research attention. Thus, the present study was an attempt to develop and validate a conceptually meaningful and psychometrically sound instrument to capture language teacher emotion regulation strategies at workplace. This study is composed of three phases. In the first phase, based on a comprehensive consideration of the existing literature and the results of a semi-structured interview, a six-component model of the language teacher emotion regulation was designed. In the second phase, the results of exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and reliability e...

Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods, 2015

Introduction"Discourse analysis" (DA) or discourse studies, developed in 1970s, are use... more Introduction"Discourse analysis" (DA) or discourse studies, developed in 1970s, are used to describe various activities related to different disciplines of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, philosophical linguistics, computational linguistics, education, anthropology, cultural studies, international relations, human geography, communication studies, and translation studies. In another attempt, Abrams and Harpham (2005) mentioned that discourse analysis "concerns itself with the use of language in a running discourse, continued over a number of sentences, and involving the interaction of speaker (or writer) and auditor (or reader) in a specific situational context, and within a framework of social and cultural conventions " (p. 134).There are two forms of discourse analysis: descriptive analysis and critical analysis. These two concepts refer to the analysis of language in use through analyzing linguistic forms (the linguists' function) and also the aim or ...

International journal of research in social sciences, 2015

One of the main areas of research in First Language (L1) and Second Language (L2) studies which h... more One of the main areas of research in First Language (L1) and Second Language (L2) studies which has recently attracted a lot of attention is the significance of error analysis/correction and its subsequent effects on language learning. There is a vast amount of research concerning errors and corrective feedback in language learning. What had not yet been studied widely enough and was the focus of this study, however, was what kinds of corrective feedback are more effective with regard to grammatical errors in writings of elementary EFL students. The type of feedback under the investigation was implicit corrective feedback and the two of its sub categories, metalinguistic feedback and elicitation feedback. This quasi-experimental study sought to investigate the relationship between noticing of implicit corrective feedback (CF) and L2 development in relation to learning past tense in grammar and writing. To this end, 32 second language learners from Jihad English Institute of Neyshabo...

This study examined the effect of selfquestioning strategy as a generative learning strategy on t... more This study examined the effect of selfquestioning strategy as a generative learning strategy on the Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’reading comprehension performance. The participants in this study were seventy five undergraduate students from two universities, Garmsar Payame Noor University and Sabzevar Tarbiat Moallem University, majoring in English. Out of the total seventy five students, only sixty students met the criterion of scoring between two standard deviations above and two standard deviations below the mean of Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) proficiency test and were chosen as intermediate subjects of the current study. The selected students were pre-tested on a reading comprehension test. This resulted in thirty students at Payame Noor University and thirty at Sabzevar Tarbiat Moallem University were chosen and assigned to two groups of the experimental and control, respectively. They were given the same texts taught by the researc...

Computerized dynamic assessment has been proposed as a solution to the practicality issues involv... more Computerized dynamic assessment has been proposed as a solution to the practicality issues involved in ordinary dynamic assessment procedures. However, most of computerized dynamic assessment studies have addressed receptive skills (i.e., reading and listening). Responding to the scarcity of CDA studies of productive skills, the present study was an attempt to design and implement a computerized dynamic test of writing (CDTW) for 93 Iranian EFL university students. Moreover, this study investigated if learners’ willingness to communicate might have a facilitating role in their level of responsiveness to mediation. CDTW was designed following a sandwich-format interventionist approach. 93 Iranian EFL learners took part in a six-week procedure that consisted of a pretest; a mediation procedure; a posttest; and a delayed posttest. Running paired sample t-test revealed that there was a significant difference between learners’ non-dynamic (pretest) and dynamic (posttest) scores indicat...

This paper takes three distinct kinds of reduplication in Persian and argues that together they p... more This paper takes three distinct kinds of reduplication in Persian and argues that together they provide strong support for Morphological Doubling Theory (Inkelas and Zoll 2000, 2005). The three types of reduplication we consider are: echo reduplication, intensive reduplication, and indifference reduplication. We discuss each in turn giving descriptive information and showing how the construction is modeled within Morphological Doubling Theory. We also present and discuss analogous constructions from Persian and other languages.

Applied Research on English Language, 2018

Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2016

It is axiomatic that listening skill is the primary channel to the process of language acquisitio... more It is axiomatic that listening skill is the primary channel to the process of language acquisition. To foster this skill, a wide array of approaches and methods has been offered, one of which is the often-neglected well-beaten approach. The current study is an attempt to provide glimpse into the possible effect of employing well-beaten path approach on developing learners’ listening fluency. To achieve such intent, 60 EFL learners were randomly selected and assigned to two groups. Before assigning them, they sat for a pre-test to ensure their homogeneity. For one group the well-beaten path approach was applied in that the same listening test was repeated three times and for the other group the test was run only once. The findings signified that using a well-beaten approach noticeably leads learners to outperform their listening fluency. The study results might significantly contribute to the more optimal teaching of listening skill.

International journal of humanities and social sciences, 2016

The integration of interactive whiteboard (hereafter IWB) in language classrooms has attracted th... more The integration of interactive whiteboard (hereafter IWB) in language classrooms has attracted the attention of many researchers all over the world. The purpose of the current study is to teach reading texts (multimedia) presented on an IWB to determine their effectiveness on enhancing Iranian high school EFL learners’ reading comprehension. To conduct the study, fifty three first-grade high school students from two different high schools were randomly selected and assigned to two groups: one experimental group (N=25) taught through the IWB and one control group (N=28) taught through conventional method. During the first week, a standardized reading comprehension test was given to both groups as the pretest to assure the homogeneity of the two groups, and also to assess the participants’ achievements as a baseline for comparison with posttest results. The training took ten sessions during a two-month period, and the same instructor taught the groups ninety minutes each session. Then...

SAGE Open

This study investigates the correlations between the three measures of written receptive vocabula... more This study investigates the correlations between the three measures of written receptive vocabulary size and second language (L2) depth of vocabulary knowledge to find the most reliable test of vocabulary size. Moreover, the corresponding relationship is examined for the higher and lower word-frequency bands of the three tests to find whether the correlation between the two constructs differs as a function of frequency level and task format. In so doing, Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT), the monolingual and bilingual Persian versions of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST), and Word Associates Test (WAT) were administered to 122 high-proficient undergraduate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. Results of Pearson correlations and linear regression analyses indicated that (a) the VLT had the highest correlation with the participants' scores on the WAT; (b) although all the three tests of vocabulary size could significantly predict L2 depth of vocabulary knowledge, the VLT was the strongest predictor; (c) the higher word-frequency levels of the three VSTs in general, and the VLT in particular, were more predictive of L2 vocabulary depth; and (d) the 3,000-word-frequency level of the VLT, in particular, had the highest contribution to the performance on the WAT. The overall findings point to the superiority of the VLT among the three measures of vocabulary size.

Computer Assisted Language Learning

International Journal of Assessment Tools in Education

This validation study was undertaken to evaluate the construct of Formative Assessment of Writing... more This validation study was undertaken to evaluate the construct of Formative Assessment of Writing (FAoW) operationalized by an instrument with 50 Likert scale items. To identify the EFL learners’ experiences of FAoW practices, the instrument was first piloted with three EFL learners, and subsequently administered on a sample of 255 EFL learners selected based on purposive sampling. A five-factor solution with five latent variables (i.e. clarifying criteria, evidence on students’ current learning, feedback to move learners forward, peer-assessment and autonomy) was evaluated through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) with AMOS 22. Model fit showed that the five-factor structure of FAoW could only be supported in terms of absolute and parsimony fit indices. The model with three factors (i.e. clarifying criteria, peer-assessment and feedback) in two stages of pre- and while-writing, however, provided higher discriminant validity in addition to absolute and parsimony fit indices. In other words, FAoW was not found to be practiced within its full potential with five components in the context of this study. A conceptual model was developed based on the findings and the literature to show pedagogical application of FAoW and how it can be practiced in line with Black and Wiliam’s (2009).