Mohammad Aliakbari; Fatemeh Fadaeian
Abstract
Acknowledging the difference in the lexical backgrounds of students and teachers aids in having a realistic picture of how learning happens. Translanguaging promotes learning by exploring the multilingual capabilities of students. However, it is not sufficient to only account for the learner aspect of ...
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Acknowledging the difference in the lexical backgrounds of students and teachers aids in having a realistic picture of how learning happens. Translanguaging promotes learning by exploring the multilingual capabilities of students. However, it is not sufficient to only account for the learner aspect of the matter. One way of considering the influence of educators is to start conversations about teacher immunity. Language teacher immunity allows teachers to function effectively at school and to appreciate new approaches. A few studies have been carried out to evaluate the association between Translanguaging and teacher immunity. This study tried to fill the gap in the literature by surveying 207 Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions toward translanguaging. This study aimed at finding connections between Translanguaging and teacher immunity in order to potentially develop teacher resilience by utilizing the full potential of the students’ lexicon. Participants were from both genders and were different in terms of their experience, native language, and their current field of study. Findings indicate that Iranian EFL teachers have a moderate sense of immunity in their pedagogies. Approximately 61% of the participants chose to teach English using both Persian and English and 54% think using Persian to teach English is beneficial for students. Mostly, participants reported that they sometimes encourage and personally use Persian to teach English in different activities. Finally, the educators’ views of taking advantage of the full range of language resources of students by translanguaging techniques could not be clarified by their competence in dealing with complicated work conditions.
Zahra Bavandi Savadkouhi; Mahnaz Mostafaei Alaei
Abstract
The present study aimed at investigating the perceptions of English language teachers and learners towards cross-cultural pragmatic failure in Iranian EFL contexts. To elicit the information for the construction of Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure Questionnaire, besides reviewing the related literature, ...
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The present study aimed at investigating the perceptions of English language teachers and learners towards cross-cultural pragmatic failure in Iranian EFL contexts. To elicit the information for the construction of Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure Questionnaire, besides reviewing the related literature, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 12 university instructors in the field of applied linguistics. Employing an exploratory sequential mixed methods design, the researchers developed and validated the Questionnaire with 25 items on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree with 220 EFL teachers and learners. Principal component analysis extracted 6 factors: semantic inappropriacy, insufficient pragmatic instruction, social interaction deficiency, interlingual transfer, cross-cultural illiteracy, and grammatical inadequacy via SPSS Software. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed this multi-dimensional model using structural equation modeling via LISREL software. The constructed questionnaire was then administered to the target population comprising 165 Iranian EFL instructors and students from different state universities and language institutes in Tehran, to investigate their perceptions towards cross-cultural pragmatic failure. The findings of the study indicated that EFL teachers perceived insufficient pragmatic instruction as the most substantial factor leading to cross-cultural pragmatic failure in EFL classrooms, followed by social interaction deficiency, cross-cultural illiteracy, semantic inappropriacy, grammatical inadequacy, and finally interlingual transfer as the least important factor while EFL learners perceived semantic inappropriacy as the most and interlingual transfer as the least contributing factors to cross-cultural pragmatic failure. The study’s implications for EFL teachers and learners, educators, and materials developers are discussed and suggestions for further research are provided.
Rana Najjari; Gholam-Reza Abbasian
Volume 2, Issue 4 , November 2015, , Pages 90-77
Abstract
This study investigated Iranian EFL teachers’ and learners’ perceptions and attitudes towards integrating Internet in EFL instruction; and the congruence of their attitudes and perceptions. As a mixed-method research, the data was collected both through questionnaires and interviews. Chi-square ...
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This study investigated Iranian EFL teachers’ and learners’ perceptions and attitudes towards integrating Internet in EFL instruction; and the congruence of their attitudes and perceptions. As a mixed-method research, the data was collected both through questionnaires and interviews. Chi-square test was run for quantitative data and the qualitative data were transcribed, coded and thematized. The findings gathered from both qualitative and quantitative methods showed that both teachers and learners had positive perceptions and attitudes towards integrating Internet in EFL instruction and indicated that the factors like lack of facilities and hardware equipment limit Internet integration in Iranian setting. Moreover, the groups indicated that using Internet in EFL instruction and teaching process could be facilitative because of more accessibility to authentic sources, possibility of teacher-student interaction out of the educational environment and improvement of acquiring English learning skills in a faster and efficient way.
