Teachers are one of the most influential elements for the success of any educational system. This study investigates the relationship between two key personality factors of teachers, namely self-efficacy and teaching styles in an Iranian EFL context. For this purpose, 102 EFL teachers were selected according to available sampling from different high schools in Mashhad and Zahedanlarge cities in the Northeast of Iran. The research data were collected through the Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale and Teaching Styles Inventory. Analysis of the data revealed a significant relationship between teachers' self-efficacy and their teaching styles. Also, findings indicated a significant difference in teachers' self-efficacy with regard to their teaching styles. On the one hand, high self-efficacy was joined to some teaching styles (delegator and personal model) and on the other, low self-efficacy was connected with some other teaching styles (expert and formal authority). The results of the present study have implications for teacher education programs.
In line with the previous bodies of research, the present study in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) proved that some aspects of pragmatics were amenable to instruction even in foreign language (FL) contexts. However, there are still controversies over the best convenient teaching techniques and appropriate materials. Moreover, production-oriented approaches to teaching pragmatics caused scant practical studies over the perception of the frequent speech acts such as apology conducted to date. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relative effectiveness of consciousness-raising (C-R) listening prompts on the development of the speech act of apology on 64 (34 male and 30 female ranging in age from 17 to 27) upper-intermediate Persian learners of English who were randomly assigned to two groups of 32. While the experimental group took advantages of listening prompts with C-R or input enhancement activities, the control group received the same listening prompts without any C-R activities. The two groups were then exposed to 20 conversation extracts during 10 sessions of instruction including different apology situations taken from Interchange Series, Tactics for Listening Series, American Headway, and Top Notch. The results of the multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT) indicated that learners in the experimental group benefited more from C-R activities via listening prompts and outperformed the control group. In addition, the results revealed that male and female learners' development in this pragmatic aspect of language did differ significantly. The findings throw light on practical as well as pedagogical implications of ILP and provide suggestions for English as a second language/ English as a foreign language (ESL/EFL) teachers and materials developers.
This study explored the effects of contextual factors, namely exposure to instruction and gender difference on Iranian EFL learners' pragmatic perception of the illocutionary act of apology. To this end, sixty four upper-intermediate English learners (34 males & 30 females ranging in age from 17 to 27), from a language institute in a city in northeastern Iran, voluntarily took part in the study. While investigation of the effect of explicit instruction of apology speech act, through consciousness-raising listening prompts, on EFL learners' interlanguage pragmatic competence is one of the current study's prime concerns, the participants, who were equally assigned to an experimental group and a control group, were given 14 sessions of instruction accompanied, merely within the experimental class, by consciousnessraising activities via listening prompts. Adopting a multiple choice discourse completion task (MDCT) as both the pretest and post-test, the results confirmed the beneficial effect of listening-based teaching of apology speech act juxtaposed with consciousness-raising activities on the learners' pragmatic awareness. Besides, the context-external factor of gender yielded a significant impact on the way females and males, in the experimental group, perceived the communicative act of apology. In the light of the findings, the study provides implications for curriculum designers, materials developers, and language teachers.
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