Amin Khanjani; Fereidoon Vahdany; Manoochehr Jafarigohar
Volume 4, Issue 2 , April 2017, , Pages 78-63
Abstract
Teacher education programs are ought to deal with the issue of language proficiency. Moreover, finding appropriate framework to help prospective teachers with different learning styles to transform the acquired knowledge and skills into actual teaching practice is highly promising. Task Based Instruction ...
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Teacher education programs are ought to deal with the issue of language proficiency. Moreover, finding appropriate framework to help prospective teachers with different learning styles to transform the acquired knowledge and skills into actual teaching practice is highly promising. Task Based Instruction (TBI) might pave the way for such transformative learning. This study attempted to testify this hypothesis. To this end, among 105 available EFL teacher trainees, who were instructed through the TBI, 76 trainees in four experiential learning styles (n = 19), were selected for further analysis. There was no control group in this study. The trainees were first selected through convenience sampling; they were then administered to experiential learning style inventory. Through a mixed-method design, the TBI and experiential learning style effects on trainees’ reading skills and transformation of the acquired skills were examined. A wide range of qualitative and quantitative instruments were implemented in this study. The results of the questionnaires, tests and observation checklist were analyzed quantitatively. For interview results, both quantitative (percentages) and qualitative analysis were employed. The results demonstrated that the TBI had a significant effect on trainees’ reading skills; the transformation was also observed. However, no significant effect of experiential learning styles was observed. At the end, some recommendations are provided.
Manoochehr Jafarigohar; Saeed Kheiri
Volume 4, Issue 1 , February 2017, , Pages 31-17
Abstract
Integrating the triplex notion of evidentiality into its theoretical framework, this study aimed at contrastively scrutinizing the ELT academic papers authored by non-native Iranian and native English researchers in terms of the utilization of evidentiality, focusing on the adverbial and epistemic-modality ...
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Integrating the triplex notion of evidentiality into its theoretical framework, this study aimed at contrastively scrutinizing the ELT academic papers authored by non-native Iranian and native English researchers in terms of the utilization of evidentiality, focusing on the adverbial and epistemic-modality types. To this end, the discussion sections of 20 online papers were randomly selected from both groups. Then, postulating Ifantidou’s model (2001) as its analytical framework, this investigation identified the other evidentiality types in the collected corpora, and then classified them into appropriate subtypes based on the subcategories of the model. Furthermore, the frequency and the rate of evidentials in each group were compared and contrasted to see their rate differences. The findings indicated that the “adverbial” type of evidentiality enjoyed the first-ranked frequency, and the “epistemic modality” was the fourth frequently-used type of evidentiality in both native and non-native ELT papers. The other frequent types of evidentiality in these papers included “inferring,” “reported,” “memory,” and “propositional attitude,” respectively, which were not the types this study concentrated on. Finally, it was observed that there were subtle differences in both the degree and the way these authors draw evidentiality in their papers.
