amir marzban - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by amir marzban
The education norms are influenced by teacher autonomy as well as learner autonomy. In this gende... more The education norms are influenced by teacher autonomy as well as learner autonomy. In this gender-comparative study, we followed the debate concerning the link between EFL academics autonomy sense and their styles of teaching. The data was gathered through convenience sampling by online distributing two sets of questionnaires namely Pearson and Moomaw’s Teacher Autonomy Scale and Grasha’s Teaching Style Inventory which was completed by 156 Iranian EFL teachers (both male and female) to respond to the two research questions. Then, SPSS (version 26) was used to analyze the data obtained from our three sample groups: males only, females only, and mixed. The analysis showed the female participants’ autonomy sense was significantly lower than the males’. However, females gained stronger correlations between their autonomy and the teaching style subconstructs. Moreover, the following results could be inferred from our statistical results: a) Males naturally feel more sense of autonomy th...
Applied Linguistics, 2013
Willingness to communicate (WTC) plays a central role in learning a second/foreign language. The ... more Willingness to communicate (WTC) plays a central role in learning a second/foreign language. The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of doing problem-solving task on learners’ WTC in English. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 61 pre-intermediate learners were chosen by means of administrating a placement test. Learners were pretested through three scales of WTC and its two antecedents: self-perceived communication competence (SPCC) and communication apprehension (CA). Of course, the experimental group was provided with fifteen problem-solving tasks during the course, while the control group was not. After fifteen sessions of the treatment, two groups were posttested through the same three scales. The results demonstrated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of their WTC’s level. Moreover, the learners’ WTC was found to be directly related to their SPCC and indirectly related to CA. So based on the MacIntyre’s path model (1994), the...
The purpose of the present study was to see whether translation (contribution of the mother tongu... more The purpose of the present study was to see whether translation (contribution of the mother tongue) had any significant impact on promoting reading comprehension of Iranian high school students. 66 female high school students in grade three participated in this study. To select a sample of subjects, a teacher-made language proficiency test was administered. Then they were randomly assigned into two groups of experimental and control equally. Prior to the treatment a reading comprehension test was administered to EG and CG as pretest to reconfirm the homogeneity of the two groups of EG and CG and to make sure there was not any significant differences between the performance of the two groups before the treatment. The control group went through the placebo which was regular instruction through “Englishonly” sessions. The experimental group received the treatment which was instruction through translation from English to Persian. The treatment was performed in 5 separate sessions taking...
It is understood that translation plays a crucial role in human communications. In the process of... more It is understood that translation plays a crucial role in human communications. In the process of transferring the sense form the source language (SL) to the target language (TL), translator plays a pivotal role. One of the most important issues regarding translation is shift in translation. Teachers of translation can employ two methods in order to teach shifts as one of the procedures in translation, explicit and implicit teaching. In this study, the researcher is intended to find out whether explicit and/or implicit instruction of shifts as a procedure of translation can be effective on translation ability or not. Two classes were chosen, one as the experimental group and the other as the comparison group. In the experimental group, the teacher made use of explicit teaching procedures and in the comparison group the teacher utilized implicit teaching procedures. After the treatment and obtainment of the scores, the researcher tested the following null hypotheses: There is no effe...
Following previous studies reporting a beneficial effect for pre-task planning on learners' t... more Following previous studies reporting a beneficial effect for pre-task planning on learners' task performance, the present research takes into account the possible effects of directing learners' attention to meaning and form of language on their written production while they have one- and five-minute strategic planning time. The study randomly categorized 48 intermediate learners of English into six groups and asked them to undertake a narrative task under formfocused, meaningfocused, and unguided planning conditions each with one or five minutes of strategic planning time. Their performances were analyzed by a set of fluency and accuracy measures whose results were put into one-way ANOVA. As for the comparison under one-minute planning condition, formfocused planners outperformed the other two groups in both measures. Similar results were obtained under the five-minute planning condition. The results also showed that five-minute planning condition enhanced the learners' ...
Alzahra University, 2020
Academic writing is one of the important skills in higher education and as a social phenomenon ca... more Academic writing is one of the important skills in higher education and as a social phenomenon can be investigated for ideological manipulations. This study tries to unveil the westernized hegemonic discourse such as legitimation patterns in academic discourse of Iranian applied linguists in three major research paradigms. To this end, five-point classification of van Leeuwen’s (2008) authorization’s category was used as our analytic framework. The published articles of Iranian academic-scholarly journals were critically analyzed for the observed frequencies of the mentioned classifications and Chi-square tests were used to statistically investigate the associations between authorization’s patterns and research paradigms. The results revealed statistically significant associations between quantitative and qualitative research methods on one hand and between qualitative and mixed-methods on the other hand. Accordingly, the results of this study may shed some lights on the domination ...
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Oct 1, 2017
The present study was carried out to evaluate Mosaic 1: Listening and Speaking. This study took a... more The present study was carried out to evaluate Mosaic 1: Listening and Speaking. This study took an advantage of mixed method. The adopted checklist was retrieved from Al-sowat's (2012) with minor revision to gain qualitative data. The appropriateness of the checklist was sought vis a vis the comments by two faculty members of Guilan University with research interests in curriculum design and development. The evaluation was based on criteria, namely, layout and design, objectives, activities and tasks, balance of skills, language type, subject and content, social and cultural value, structures and vocabulary, and teachers' need. Some weaknesses and strengths of this book were discussed accordingly. In addition, the attitude of thirty freshmen towards this book was investigated via opinionnaire to gather quantitative data. The validity of the oppinionnaire was checked by the Faculty members of Guilan University. The estimated value of Cronbach's alpha for opinionnaire was (α═.780). Findings showed shortcomings and strengths such as limited number of pictures, usefulness of objectives, appropriateness of the activities for different learning styles, combination of different activities, little attention to reading and writing, lack of unplanned interaction, lack of different dialects and accents (World Englishes), culturally unbiased. Moreover, the result of the opinionnaire indicated highest positive attitude towards items (11, 13, 2, 6, 8, and 3) respectively. This study might be of help to speaking and listening teachers, syllabus designers, textbook evaluators in that they could apply appropriate addition, deletion, adaption and adoption if using Mosaic1: speaking and listening.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies
The present study aimed to investigate the effect of metatalk activity on Iranian Intermediate EF... more The present study aimed to investigate the effect of metatalk activity on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners' Knowledge of Tense. 60 intermediate institute learners took part in this experiment. They were randomly chosen from among a population of intermediate via an PET test score of at least on standard deviation below the mean. They were then randomly assigned into two experimental and control groups of 30. A pretest of English grammar was administered to both groups, then they were taught grammatical tenses for 8 sessions but with different methodologies: the experimental group was treated with metatalk activity while the control group received traditional method. A posttest of grammar was then administered to both groups. The data of the study were analyzed using the independent samples t-test and correlation coefficient. The results demonstrated that Iranian EFL learners in the experimental group received higher knowledge of tense score after being treated with metatalk act...
Page 1. The Relationship Between Willingness to Communicate and Solidarity with Frequency, Breadt... more Page 1. The Relationship Between Willingness to Communicate and Solidarity with Frequency, Breadth, and Depth of Communication in the Sibling Relationship Kelly A. Rocca West Virginia University Matthew M. Martin West Virginia University ...
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature
This study aimed at probing the effect of using mnemonic keyword techniques, a number of less use... more This study aimed at probing the effect of using mnemonic keyword techniques, a number of less used procedures, in teaching vocabulary in an EFL context in Iran on the vocabulary achievement level and vocabulary size of language learners. to this end, 70 EFL intermediate students were selected because they were all intermediate level learners. They were assigned to control and experimental groups. The instructor taught the two groups new vocabulary items in their textbooks as part of the class procedures. The first group received vocabulary instruction through mnemonic keyword techniques while the second had vocabulary taught in conventional ways. Both groups were tested for their EFL vocabulary achievement and vocabulary size. The results revealed significantly higher achievement and vocabulary size levels for the participants in the experimental group. Certain implications were provided for EFL instructors, material developers and EFL learners who pursue to boost their vocabulary l...
LSP International Journal
This study is an attempt to investigate the effect of physical arrangement of sentences on the ba... more This study is an attempt to investigate the effect of physical arrangement of sentences on the basis of constituent structures of text type passages on Iranian EFL students' reading comprehension with regard to language proficiency. For this purpose, three English text type passages each consisting of six passages in one of three forms (a) texts with breaks at major constituent boundaries -Between constituents- (b) texts with breaks at minor constituent boundaries -within constituents- and (c) intact texts; were given to 90 students, who were divided into three groups at the same level of proficiency. A 30-item multiple-choice test was used to assess comprehension. To test the hypotheses posed in the study, the collected data were analyzed by ANOVA (one way) and scheffe test was utilized in post hoc analyses. The results of the study indicated that physical arrangement of sentences has a significant effect on students reading comprehension. So, what this research suggests is tha...
Theory and Practice in Language Studies
Freewriting is writing whatever one knows or thinks for a certain length of time without stopping... more Freewriting is writing whatever one knows or thinks for a certain length of time without stopping and editing till the time finishes. It’s an easy and useful way of writing for generating ideas but it is sometimes full of errors. The current study examined a new area of freewriting which aimed to explore the effect of freewriting on development of learners’ correct use of punctuation marks in their paragraph writings. The participants were 36 female intermediate students with Persian as their first language, enrolled in a six-week intensive English writing class. To homogenize the respondents they were given a version of Oxford Quick Placement Test (OPT) in order to assess the participants’ proficiency level. As a pretest and posttest students were supposed to write about a topic which were scored according to a standard rubric. In order to test the inter-rater reliability of the scores given by the two raters, intra-class correlation coefficient was calculated. Mann Whitney test wa...
Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry
The International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Invention
The present study was conducted to explore the effect of dialogic interaction on the writing perf... more The present study was conducted to explore the effect of dialogic interaction on the writing performance of the Iranian EFL learners. In order to achieve this goal, a quasi-experimental pretest posttest design was utilized. Besides this quasiexperimental design which was responsible for answering the first research question, the researcher used an interview in order to obtain the data for answering the second research question of the present thesis. A total number of 32 participants were selected and assigned to an experimental group (n= 17) and a control group (n=15). They were homogenized using Oxford Placement Test (OPT). They took a pretest and a post test and undergone a nine-session treatment. Since the distribution of the data was normal an independent sample t test was used to compare the mean scores of the groups. The results of the study showed that the dialogic group, the experimental group, outperformed the control group in terms of their achievement in their writing. Moreover, the results of the interview conducted with the learners showed that the attitude of the learners to the dialogic group was positive toward the use of this technique in the writing class.
Applied Linguistics Research Journal
In an instructive setting, assessment is the way toward describing, gathering, scoring, and trans... more In an instructive setting, assessment is the way toward describing, gathering, scoring, and translating data about learning. According to Brown (2010, p.346), "assessment is an ongoing process of collecting data about a given object of interest according to procedures that are systematic and substantively grounded. " Nowadays, researchers are recommended to use multiple assessments to evaluate what learners have learned. Dynamic assessment (DA) is a kind of interactive assessment used most frequently in education. DA is a relatively new approach to L2
Asian Journal of Social Sciences Humanities, Nov 1, 2012
Global Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, Jul 13, 2013
The education norms are influenced by teacher autonomy as well as learner autonomy. In this gende... more The education norms are influenced by teacher autonomy as well as learner autonomy. In this gender-comparative study, we followed the debate concerning the link between EFL academics autonomy sense and their styles of teaching. The data was gathered through convenience sampling by online distributing two sets of questionnaires namely Pearson and Moomaw’s Teacher Autonomy Scale and Grasha’s Teaching Style Inventory which was completed by 156 Iranian EFL teachers (both male and female) to respond to the two research questions. Then, SPSS (version 26) was used to analyze the data obtained from our three sample groups: males only, females only, and mixed. The analysis showed the female participants’ autonomy sense was significantly lower than the males’. However, females gained stronger correlations between their autonomy and the teaching style subconstructs. Moreover, the following results could be inferred from our statistical results: a) Males naturally feel more sense of autonomy th...
Applied Linguistics, 2013
Willingness to communicate (WTC) plays a central role in learning a second/foreign language. The ... more Willingness to communicate (WTC) plays a central role in learning a second/foreign language. The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of doing problem-solving task on learners’ WTC in English. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 61 pre-intermediate learners were chosen by means of administrating a placement test. Learners were pretested through three scales of WTC and its two antecedents: self-perceived communication competence (SPCC) and communication apprehension (CA). Of course, the experimental group was provided with fifteen problem-solving tasks during the course, while the control group was not. After fifteen sessions of the treatment, two groups were posttested through the same three scales. The results demonstrated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of their WTC’s level. Moreover, the learners’ WTC was found to be directly related to their SPCC and indirectly related to CA. So based on the MacIntyre’s path model (1994), the...
The purpose of the present study was to see whether translation (contribution of the mother tongu... more The purpose of the present study was to see whether translation (contribution of the mother tongue) had any significant impact on promoting reading comprehension of Iranian high school students. 66 female high school students in grade three participated in this study. To select a sample of subjects, a teacher-made language proficiency test was administered. Then they were randomly assigned into two groups of experimental and control equally. Prior to the treatment a reading comprehension test was administered to EG and CG as pretest to reconfirm the homogeneity of the two groups of EG and CG and to make sure there was not any significant differences between the performance of the two groups before the treatment. The control group went through the placebo which was regular instruction through “Englishonly” sessions. The experimental group received the treatment which was instruction through translation from English to Persian. The treatment was performed in 5 separate sessions taking...
It is understood that translation plays a crucial role in human communications. In the process of... more It is understood that translation plays a crucial role in human communications. In the process of transferring the sense form the source language (SL) to the target language (TL), translator plays a pivotal role. One of the most important issues regarding translation is shift in translation. Teachers of translation can employ two methods in order to teach shifts as one of the procedures in translation, explicit and implicit teaching. In this study, the researcher is intended to find out whether explicit and/or implicit instruction of shifts as a procedure of translation can be effective on translation ability or not. Two classes were chosen, one as the experimental group and the other as the comparison group. In the experimental group, the teacher made use of explicit teaching procedures and in the comparison group the teacher utilized implicit teaching procedures. After the treatment and obtainment of the scores, the researcher tested the following null hypotheses: There is no effe...
Following previous studies reporting a beneficial effect for pre-task planning on learners' t... more Following previous studies reporting a beneficial effect for pre-task planning on learners' task performance, the present research takes into account the possible effects of directing learners' attention to meaning and form of language on their written production while they have one- and five-minute strategic planning time. The study randomly categorized 48 intermediate learners of English into six groups and asked them to undertake a narrative task under formfocused, meaningfocused, and unguided planning conditions each with one or five minutes of strategic planning time. Their performances were analyzed by a set of fluency and accuracy measures whose results were put into one-way ANOVA. As for the comparison under one-minute planning condition, formfocused planners outperformed the other two groups in both measures. Similar results were obtained under the five-minute planning condition. The results also showed that five-minute planning condition enhanced the learners' ...
Alzahra University, 2020
Academic writing is one of the important skills in higher education and as a social phenomenon ca... more Academic writing is one of the important skills in higher education and as a social phenomenon can be investigated for ideological manipulations. This study tries to unveil the westernized hegemonic discourse such as legitimation patterns in academic discourse of Iranian applied linguists in three major research paradigms. To this end, five-point classification of van Leeuwen’s (2008) authorization’s category was used as our analytic framework. The published articles of Iranian academic-scholarly journals were critically analyzed for the observed frequencies of the mentioned classifications and Chi-square tests were used to statistically investigate the associations between authorization’s patterns and research paradigms. The results revealed statistically significant associations between quantitative and qualitative research methods on one hand and between qualitative and mixed-methods on the other hand. Accordingly, the results of this study may shed some lights on the domination ...
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Oct 1, 2017
The present study was carried out to evaluate Mosaic 1: Listening and Speaking. This study took a... more The present study was carried out to evaluate Mosaic 1: Listening and Speaking. This study took an advantage of mixed method. The adopted checklist was retrieved from Al-sowat's (2012) with minor revision to gain qualitative data. The appropriateness of the checklist was sought vis a vis the comments by two faculty members of Guilan University with research interests in curriculum design and development. The evaluation was based on criteria, namely, layout and design, objectives, activities and tasks, balance of skills, language type, subject and content, social and cultural value, structures and vocabulary, and teachers' need. Some weaknesses and strengths of this book were discussed accordingly. In addition, the attitude of thirty freshmen towards this book was investigated via opinionnaire to gather quantitative data. The validity of the oppinionnaire was checked by the Faculty members of Guilan University. The estimated value of Cronbach's alpha for opinionnaire was (α═.780). Findings showed shortcomings and strengths such as limited number of pictures, usefulness of objectives, appropriateness of the activities for different learning styles, combination of different activities, little attention to reading and writing, lack of unplanned interaction, lack of different dialects and accents (World Englishes), culturally unbiased. Moreover, the result of the opinionnaire indicated highest positive attitude towards items (11, 13, 2, 6, 8, and 3) respectively. This study might be of help to speaking and listening teachers, syllabus designers, textbook evaluators in that they could apply appropriate addition, deletion, adaption and adoption if using Mosaic1: speaking and listening.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies
The present study aimed to investigate the effect of metatalk activity on Iranian Intermediate EF... more The present study aimed to investigate the effect of metatalk activity on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners' Knowledge of Tense. 60 intermediate institute learners took part in this experiment. They were randomly chosen from among a population of intermediate via an PET test score of at least on standard deviation below the mean. They were then randomly assigned into two experimental and control groups of 30. A pretest of English grammar was administered to both groups, then they were taught grammatical tenses for 8 sessions but with different methodologies: the experimental group was treated with metatalk activity while the control group received traditional method. A posttest of grammar was then administered to both groups. The data of the study were analyzed using the independent samples t-test and correlation coefficient. The results demonstrated that Iranian EFL learners in the experimental group received higher knowledge of tense score after being treated with metatalk act...
Page 1. The Relationship Between Willingness to Communicate and Solidarity with Frequency, Breadt... more Page 1. The Relationship Between Willingness to Communicate and Solidarity with Frequency, Breadth, and Depth of Communication in the Sibling Relationship Kelly A. Rocca West Virginia University Matthew M. Martin West Virginia University ...
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature
This study aimed at probing the effect of using mnemonic keyword techniques, a number of less use... more This study aimed at probing the effect of using mnemonic keyword techniques, a number of less used procedures, in teaching vocabulary in an EFL context in Iran on the vocabulary achievement level and vocabulary size of language learners. to this end, 70 EFL intermediate students were selected because they were all intermediate level learners. They were assigned to control and experimental groups. The instructor taught the two groups new vocabulary items in their textbooks as part of the class procedures. The first group received vocabulary instruction through mnemonic keyword techniques while the second had vocabulary taught in conventional ways. Both groups were tested for their EFL vocabulary achievement and vocabulary size. The results revealed significantly higher achievement and vocabulary size levels for the participants in the experimental group. Certain implications were provided for EFL instructors, material developers and EFL learners who pursue to boost their vocabulary l...
LSP International Journal
This study is an attempt to investigate the effect of physical arrangement of sentences on the ba... more This study is an attempt to investigate the effect of physical arrangement of sentences on the basis of constituent structures of text type passages on Iranian EFL students' reading comprehension with regard to language proficiency. For this purpose, three English text type passages each consisting of six passages in one of three forms (a) texts with breaks at major constituent boundaries -Between constituents- (b) texts with breaks at minor constituent boundaries -within constituents- and (c) intact texts; were given to 90 students, who were divided into three groups at the same level of proficiency. A 30-item multiple-choice test was used to assess comprehension. To test the hypotheses posed in the study, the collected data were analyzed by ANOVA (one way) and scheffe test was utilized in post hoc analyses. The results of the study indicated that physical arrangement of sentences has a significant effect on students reading comprehension. So, what this research suggests is tha...
Theory and Practice in Language Studies
Freewriting is writing whatever one knows or thinks for a certain length of time without stopping... more Freewriting is writing whatever one knows or thinks for a certain length of time without stopping and editing till the time finishes. It’s an easy and useful way of writing for generating ideas but it is sometimes full of errors. The current study examined a new area of freewriting which aimed to explore the effect of freewriting on development of learners’ correct use of punctuation marks in their paragraph writings. The participants were 36 female intermediate students with Persian as their first language, enrolled in a six-week intensive English writing class. To homogenize the respondents they were given a version of Oxford Quick Placement Test (OPT) in order to assess the participants’ proficiency level. As a pretest and posttest students were supposed to write about a topic which were scored according to a standard rubric. In order to test the inter-rater reliability of the scores given by the two raters, intra-class correlation coefficient was calculated. Mann Whitney test wa...
Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry
The International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Invention
The present study was conducted to explore the effect of dialogic interaction on the writing perf... more The present study was conducted to explore the effect of dialogic interaction on the writing performance of the Iranian EFL learners. In order to achieve this goal, a quasi-experimental pretest posttest design was utilized. Besides this quasiexperimental design which was responsible for answering the first research question, the researcher used an interview in order to obtain the data for answering the second research question of the present thesis. A total number of 32 participants were selected and assigned to an experimental group (n= 17) and a control group (n=15). They were homogenized using Oxford Placement Test (OPT). They took a pretest and a post test and undergone a nine-session treatment. Since the distribution of the data was normal an independent sample t test was used to compare the mean scores of the groups. The results of the study showed that the dialogic group, the experimental group, outperformed the control group in terms of their achievement in their writing. Moreover, the results of the interview conducted with the learners showed that the attitude of the learners to the dialogic group was positive toward the use of this technique in the writing class.
Applied Linguistics Research Journal
In an instructive setting, assessment is the way toward describing, gathering, scoring, and trans... more In an instructive setting, assessment is the way toward describing, gathering, scoring, and translating data about learning. According to Brown (2010, p.346), "assessment is an ongoing process of collecting data about a given object of interest according to procedures that are systematic and substantively grounded. " Nowadays, researchers are recommended to use multiple assessments to evaluate what learners have learned. Dynamic assessment (DA) is a kind of interactive assessment used most frequently in education. DA is a relatively new approach to L2
Asian Journal of Social Sciences Humanities, Nov 1, 2012
Global Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, Jul 13, 2013