zohreh Hoominian Sharifabad; Ali Mohammad Fazilatfar; Massood null Yazdanimoghaddam
Abstract
Globally occurring changes in an ever-shrinking world acknowledge the goal of making effective communication between people with various cultural backgrounds (East, 2012; Jin, 2014; Kramsh, 2013; Zheng, 2014) and hence the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in EFL context respectively. ...
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Globally occurring changes in an ever-shrinking world acknowledge the goal of making effective communication between people with various cultural backgrounds (East, 2012; Jin, 2014; Kramsh, 2013; Zheng, 2014) and hence the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in EFL context respectively. This longitudinal study based on mixed method sequential design, and random sampling procedure strived to investigate male and female Iranian pre-service teachers' intercultural communicative competence. It also tried to assess the effect of mentor teachers on pre-service teachers' ICC and to see how and to what extent those perceptions are reflected in their classroom practices. This investigation was done in two academic semesters with participation of 49 pre-service teachers (M= 29, F=20) who were in their last year of their teacher education program in Farhangian university of Esfahan, one of the biggest teacher training centers in Iran. the second group of the participants was four mentor teachers (M=2, F=2).Results revealed that the first group of participants achieved an acceptable level of ICC, with higher mean scores in the attitude dimensions and lower levels in skill and knowledge components respectively. The results also indicated negative correlation between the attitudes and skill components of mentor teachers and pre- service teachers. The results of triangulation indicated an apparent disparity between teachers’ ICC perception and practice.
Saeedeh Erfanrad; Ali Mohammad Fazilatfar; Parviz Maftoon
Abstract
Although there is a myriad of theoretical and pedagogical research studies into L2 grammar, the instruction in this area remains traditional and there have been calls for more usage-based approaches that can fill the gap between theory and practice. Accordingly, this quasi-experimental compared the effects ...
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Although there is a myriad of theoretical and pedagogical research studies into L2 grammar, the instruction in this area remains traditional and there have been calls for more usage-based approaches that can fill the gap between theory and practice. Accordingly, this quasi-experimental compared the effects of two pedagogical frameworks, namely Systemic-Theoretical Instruction (STI), derived from Vygotsky’s ideas and proposed by Gal’perin and discovery learning (DL), derived from Piaget’s ideas mainly proposed by Bruner, on learning English tense-aspect system. To this end, 71 Iranian low-intermediate EFL learners, aged 12 to 19, were instructed in three groups through STI, DL (experimental) and traditional method (comparison). They took a pretest, a posttest and a delayed posttest consisting of grammar tests checking their receptive and productive grammar knowledge. Results of one‐way repeated‐measures analyses of ANOVA revealed that all groups improved significantly in both the entire test and its subcomponents in the immediate posttest, suggesting that the three kinds of form-focused intervention were efficient in creating immediate progress. However, significant differences were identified among the groups in the delayed posttest accounting for the inadequacy of traditional method of instruction in the long run, and for the superiority of STI over DL. These findings can have significant implications for materials developers and teacher education programs in considering the tenets of more innovative approaches such as STI through systematic representations of target language features by taking advantage of materialized tools and verbalization in teaching.
