Abstract-This study tries to investigate the relationship between learners' listening strategy use, cognitive, metacognitive, social/affective, while they listen to the texts and some of their individual differences. In order to study this relationship, 40 Iranian university EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students were surveyed with four structured questionnaires and an ILTES listening test. The questionnaires were Listening strategy use (Vandergrift, 1997), learning style (Soloman and Felder, 2001), motivation (adapted from Laine, 1988), and the Revised NEO-FFI. In order to comprehend whether there is a relationship between variables, and to see which group of individual differences use which listening strategy more, statistical analysis of Multiple Regression analysis, Chi Square test, one way ANOVA, at the p< 0.05 level, were used. The results suggested that there was a significant relationship between the level of motivation and the listening strategies. After motivation, learning style, also, had some effect on the listening strategies use. The other variables had no significant effect on the use of the three listening comprehension strategies. In addition it should be mentioned that social/ affective strategy was omitted in the analysis because the mean of this strategy use was so low. It means that no individual groups used this kind of listening strategy. Finally, the aim of this article was to clarify on little-investigated area, namely, listening comprehension strategies and some individual differences, and the findings discussed in the area of English language teaching.
Abstract-This study aimed to explore the impact of teaching grammar through humor on Iranian EFL learners. To this end, after the administration of a Solution Placement test, a total of 60 female preintermediate participants in a private institute in Isfahan, aged between 14 to 18 were selected and then randomly assigned to two groups of control and experimental (N=30). Following the pretest, the control group received instruction through the traditional way of teaching grammar and the experimental group received instruction through humor in six sessions; then the posttest, and delayed posttest were administrated. The results of t-test analysis for post and delayed posttest revealed that the participants in experimental group outperformed the control group in the short-and long-terms. The attitudes of participants were examined through interviewing 10 participants, chosen randomly from experimental group. Analysis of interviewing the participants demonstrates that they had positive attitudes towards teaching grammar through humor. Hopefully, the findings of this research study suggest the pedagogical value of humor for the teaching of grammar that can be used by EFL teachers, curriculum designers, and EFL learners.
ABSTRACT. The speech act of thanking is one of the fairly neglected areas of research in the Iranian context. The present study seeks to investigate the ways in which this social act is expressed by young male and female EFL learners. To collect the data for this study sixty participants (30 males, 30females) were selected randomly from among the population of BA and MA students of Najafabad university and students learning English in a language institutes located in Najafabad. The major focus of this study was the role that gender and individuals' level of proficiency might play in the application of thanking strategies. Students were asked to complete a discourse completion test (DCT). They were supposed to read thirteen natural situations, and react to them via expressing gratitude. In order to analyze the utterances of thanking, Cheng's coding scheme was employed. Students' responses were further classified according to the gender and level of proficiency. The results revealed that the females were more cautious in selecting strategies of gratitude. Individuals' level of proficiency was also found to play an important role in the process of strategy selection.
Following Nation' (2009) proposal of 40-50 empty spaces as an optimum length of a cloze test, this study examined whether this length would work according to proficiency level. Three cloze tests, adjusted for each proficiency level, were developed by the researcher for the use at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. The cloze tests measured participants' reading comprehension and included 40, 45 and 50 empty spaces for the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels respectively. Problematic items of each cloze test were identified over several pilot studies. Then they were administered to three groups of L1 Persian EFL learners at the beginning (56), intermediate (43), and advanced (41) levels. Results of the study suggest that an optimum length of a cloze test could vary according to the proficiency level. While the test could be long (including 50 empty spaces) and reliable at the advanced level, a shorter length of the test including 20-25 empty spaces could be more reliable at the beginning and intermediate levels.Keywords: cloze test, reading comprehension, proficiency, reliability, EFL learners Brown (1998) argues that at least three factors influence the reliability of cloze tests. These factors include variations in students' proficiency levels, differences in readability of the cloze tests, and length of the test (changes in number of items). Research suggests that if the first two factors are held constant, longer cloze tests yield more reliable estimates than shorter ones (e.g., Bachman, 1990;Brown, 1996Brown, , 1998. However, these researchers have not clearly determined the optimum length of a cloze test. Rand (1978) examined the effect of test length on the reliability of cloze tests. He suggested that a cloze test should include 20-25 empty spaces irrespective of the method used to score that. However, he had drawn on a single cloze test and single population in his study. Then variations in his participants' language proficiency and potential differences in readability of cloze tests were simply ignored in his study. Nation (2009) believes that one of the factors that make a cloze test reach a good level of reliability is that the cloze has a high number of points of measurement. He proposes that a cloze test with 40-50 empty spaces would be more reliable. However, it has not been argued whether the proposed length would work across different proficiency levels. Brown (1998) believes that there is a threshold at which increasing length of the test can have opposite effect. He has proposed a procedure through which one can determine the appropriate length of a cloze test. However, it would be very time-consuming for EFL/ESL teachers to determine the optimum length of a cloze test for each group of their participants. This is because the participants may differ in terms of language proficiency. To tackle this problem, it appears that a framework for an optimum length of a cloze test at each proficiency level is required. To meet this requirement, this study was designed to examine ...
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