Sayyed Mohammad Alavi; Majid Nemati; Sedigheh Karimpour
Abstract
The last decade has seen an increasing attention given to the notion of genre-based instruction, its application and efficacy in language teaching and learning. Regarding the benefits of genre-based instruction in second language acquisition, there have been ongoing debates in pedagogical treatments ...
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The last decade has seen an increasing attention given to the notion of genre-based instruction, its application and efficacy in language teaching and learning. Regarding the benefits of genre-based instruction in second language acquisition, there have been ongoing debates in pedagogical treatments associated with genre-based instruction in various educational contexts. The purpose of the current study was to examine how three genre-based instruction treatments affected medical students’ use of key features of the medical case report. A group of 150 subjects were selected from EFL medical students in Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences. Both male and female students were invited to this study. These students did not previously receive any genre-based instruction before the study. The participants were assigned to the “Experimental Group One”, “Experimental Group Two” and “Control” groups. The scores from the students’ pre -and post -essays were used to find out whether the students improved their writing from the pre- to post- tests. The groups were taught for one academic semester which consisted of 15 weeks. The analysis of pre- and post-essays showed that there was a significant difference in the writing qualities of explicit and implicit genre-based instruction groups. The students in the experimental groups actually outperformed on most genre move categories assessed in the posttests. Researchers and educators could benefit from an experimental study of the development of genre awareness through models with explicit and implicit writing instruction.
Shiva Kaivanpanah; Seyed Mohammad Alavi; Sara Rafsanjani Nejad
Abstract
The idea of encouraging awareness in classrooms is not new, but research into awareness is beginning to encourage those involved in language teaching to think more systematically about how language presentation facilitate language awareness. Awareness can be promoted through focus on form activities ...
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The idea of encouraging awareness in classrooms is not new, but research into awareness is beginning to encourage those involved in language teaching to think more systematically about how language presentation facilitate language awareness. Awareness can be promoted through focus on form activities as it triggers important cognitive processes in L2 acquisition. The effectiveness of various input- and output-based focus on form instructions on the acquisition of different grammatical structures and the role of awareness in each type is a matter for debate. The present study qualitatively investigated the effects of Processing instruction, Textual enhancement, and Text editing on L2 learners’ cognitive processes and the relationship between the learners’ level of awareness and their abilities to interpret English inversion structures. To do this, learners’ think-aloud verbalizations during instruction were recorded, transcribed, and coded. Criteria to decide which level of awareness they would fall into were slightly adapted from Leow, Hsieh, and Moreno (2008) to fit with the type of tasks employed in the study. Pretest-posttests design was also employed to measure learners’ interpretive abilities. The findings indicated that each instructional technique promoted different levels of awareness and depth of processing. The findings also provided explanations for the non-significant differences in performances between the Processing instruction and Text editing groups on an immediate posttest and outperformance of the Processing instruction group on a delayed posttest. Given the benefits that Processing instruction and Text editing brought about in the present study, both might be incorporated into a curriculum and serve as complementary tools for language teachers.
Masoumeh Ahmadi Shirazi; Seyyed Mohammad Alavi; Hossein Salarian
Abstract
This study investigates some problems of PhD applicants in their entrance exams in the case of answering the reading comprehension questions. To this end, the researchers considered the item types and text types as main effects and their interaction effect using generalizability theory for examining ...
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This study investigates some problems of PhD applicants in their entrance exams in the case of answering the reading comprehension questions. To this end, the researchers considered the item types and text types as main effects and their interaction effect using generalizability theory for examining the variability; the answer sheets of a mock-test from 321 applicants, from all parts of Iran, enrolled in an institute were randomly selected. Using a partially nested design of G-theory in the GENOVA program, the researchers identified five variance components in the two different passages with distinct items and investigated various sources of error that are involved in the measurement process. The results of the study showed that the main effect for items cannot be separated from the interaction between items and texts, and clarified that the items facet had a noticeable amount of variance, and therefore, they impacted the applicants' performance. However, the results of D-studies showed that the main effect for text types was zero, and both texts were at the same level of difficulty. Also, the persons had effects on the texts in their interaction. This study can motivate the researchers, test developers, and test designers to consider their work more carefully.
