Fahimeh Rafi; Natasha Pourdana; Farid Ghaemi
Abstract
Grounded in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of mind and the learner-centered approach to second/foreign language acquisition (SLA), this study investigated the extent to which the embedded differentiated instructions and diagnostic assessment, being mediated on Google Meet™ computer-mediated ...
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Grounded in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of mind and the learner-centered approach to second/foreign language acquisition (SLA), this study investigated the extent to which the embedded differentiated instructions and diagnostic assessment, being mediated on Google Meet™ computer-mediated communication platform, would impact the improvement of mixed-ability English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners’ English words pronunciation and their degree of engagement in language learning. In a repeated-measures research design, an intact group of 66 EFL learners were partitioned into three tiers of higher, mid- and lower achievers to complete a virtual pretest of listening comprehension, followed by a series of parallel tiered performance tasks of English words pronunciation on a weekly basis. Their task outcomes were subsequently subjected to collective computer-mediated diagnostic assessment. After 10 sessions of intervention, the participants performed on an immediate virtual posttest of listening comprehension, and a post hoc interview. The results of mixed between-within subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated both the significant learning progress by the tiers, and the outperformance of the lower achievers on the tiered tasks. The statistical results of an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) similarly reported significant improvement of the tiers’ performance on the pretest-posttest summative assessment in this study. The inductive content analysis of the participants’ responses to the structured interview elicited seven themes which were interpreted as the participants’ strong approval of the usefulness of differentiated instructions, effectiveness of diagnostic assessment, and successful appeal of Google Meet platform.
Natasha Pourdana; Mehdi Shahpouri Rad
Abstract
Language teachers are usually faced with the challenging classrooms wherein the students with mixed language abilities sit together. One solution to deal with this situation is to apply differentiated instructions in terms of tiered task strategy. By definition, tiered tasks are extracted from the same ...
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Language teachers are usually faced with the challenging classrooms wherein the students with mixed language abilities sit together. One solution to deal with this situation is to apply differentiated instructions in terms of tiered task strategy. By definition, tiered tasks are extracted from the same material or skills, and personalized according to students' readiness, interest and preferred modes of learning. In the same vein, this experiment investigated the role of tiered listening tasks on 46 mixed-ability Iranian EFL learners in 9 intervention sessions. The participants were pre-assessed and assigned in to 3 divisions of high, mid and low achievers. While the control group in this research experienced the conventional one-size-fits-all instructions to listening comprehension, the divisions in the experimental group received open-ended, multiple choice and true-false tiered listening tasks. Moreover, upon the individual’s performance on tiered tasks, their division arrangement changed every 3 sessions so that they either remained or to be removed to higher or lower divisions. Findings statistically implicated the effectiveness of the tiered tasks on the participants’ listening comprehension improvement. However, the observed matrix of multiple correlation coefficients failed to show any powerful association between the participants’ mixed-levels of language proficiency and their successful performance on tiered tasks. The researchers’ concluding remarks on the assessment and teaching benefits of differentiated instructions in EFL contexts were provided too.
