Nayereh Behdad; Mohammad Hassan Tahririan
Abstract
Today, Lesson Study (LS) is a prerequisite to the professional development of teachers in high school settings. The present study aims to figure out how Iranian language teachers' attitudes towards LS can motivate their engagement or denial to join LS projects. The study is also driven by the desire ...
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Today, Lesson Study (LS) is a prerequisite to the professional development of teachers in high school settings. The present study aims to figure out how Iranian language teachers' attitudes towards LS can motivate their engagement or denial to join LS projects. The study is also driven by the desire to discover the obstacles to achieving LS from the perspective of language teachers in Iran. A research design on explanatory sequential mixed methods was used. The instruments used to collect the data consisted of questionnaires at the quantitative stage along with language teachers' reflection notes and semi-structured interviews during the qualitative phase of the study. A total of 206 senior high school language teachers participated in the first phase of the study, of which 14 participated in the interview and 20 wrote reflection notes for the second phase of the research. The instrument used to analyze the data in the quantitative phase was SPSS software and, at the qualitative step, MAXQDA software. The end result of both quantitative and qualitative findings draws attention to the importance of mentoring high school EFL teachers to be able to complete LS and puts emphasis on the beneficial role of Lesson Study. These findings can have implications for EFL teachers, school officials, EFL teacher educators, curriculum designers, and policymakers to pave the way for attaching importance to LS as a teachers' development approach. In terms of the limitations of this study, follow-up studies can mitigate the limitations of this research by replicating it using a larger sample of teachers teaching different levels of students in different classes for a much longer duration.
Vahid Shahidipour; Mohammad Hassan Tahririan
Abstract
EAP textbooks have been one of the most important materials commonly used in any EAP program and attracted many researchers' attention due to their crucial contributions to foreign/second language acquisition. Despite the plethora of research on EAP textbooks, especially EAP textbooks published by SAMT, ...
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EAP textbooks have been one of the most important materials commonly used in any EAP program and attracted many researchers' attention due to their crucial contributions to foreign/second language acquisition. Despite the plethora of research on EAP textbooks, especially EAP textbooks published by SAMT, the Organization for Researching and Composing University Textbooks in the Humanities, there seems to be a paucity of research on newly developed SAMT EAP textbooks. At the same time, although EAP textbooks are based on criteria to meet particular students’ needs in specific disciplines, there have been only a few evaluative studies on EAP textbooks taking students’ and teachers’ viewpoints into account. Therefore, the present study attempted to evaluate a newly developed SAMT EAP textbook for the students of Medicine, as a sample from SAMT publications, from the students' and teachers' perspectives. The study used a questionnaire and the results revealed that students and teachers were satisfied with the theoretical considerations, the organizational features and practical considerations, the vocabulary, and the grammatical structure of the current textbook. However, the students were not satisfied with the content and the language skills and the teachers were not satisfied with the content of the textbook. In addition, no significant difference between the students' and teachers' viewpoints with regard to the necessity condition of EAP textbooks was found. But, their responses to the questions related to the present condition of the current textbook were significantly different. Such findings can have some implications for EAP teachers, material developers, and textbook designers.
