Abstract-This study was an attempt to compare the effect of reading story aloud (RSA) and storytelling (ST) on intermediate EFL learners' listening comprehension. The design of the study was quasi experimental with listening pre and post tests. The participants were 99 Iranian EFL learners who were selected based on their performance on a Placement and Evaluation Package. For 6 sessions, the participants of both experimental groups who were 66 students listened to their teacher reading a story aloud in group 1 and telling the story in the second group. At the end of each session, they answered the questions that followed each story. After 6 sessions of treatment, the listening posttest was administered to both groups. Besides, there was a control group in which the students were expected to listen to listening parts of the book taught in their term through a traditional method of teaching without receiving extra treatment like the two mentioned experimental groups. Based on the results of one-way ANOVA test, it was evident that the ST method was more effective in improving the learners' listening comprehension than the RSA. In order to specify where the difference(s) were, Scheffe post hoc test was applied. The results indicated that the gain in ST group's listening comprehension was significantly more than that of RSA group. The results could have been due to the influence of the way of telling story with the help of teacher's body language and continuous eye contact that attracted the students to follow the stories eagerly. The results have some implications for syllabus designers, material developers, and language teachers.
Abstract-This study investigates commonalities and differences in overall rhetorical structure within the Iranian EFL subjects in their Persian and English pre-and post-argumentative essays and also it examines the effect of two different treatments, namely, models with implicit instruction, and models alone. After conducting TOFEL test, 76 subjects were selected. They were randomly divided into two groups, an experimental group which received no-instruction treatment, and a control group which was instructed implicitly. A pre-test and a post-test were administered before and after the treatment. The quantitative analysis of the post-argumentative essays revealed that the implicit group outperformed the no-instruction group. This study is significant for genre analysis and contrastive rhetoric research.
This study aimed at comparing the effects of reflective learning portfolio (RLP) and dialogue journal writing (DJW) on the Iranian EFL learners' grammatical accuracy in writing as well as their overall writing performance. 60 Iranian EFL learners between the ages of 17 to 30 who were studying at general English courses were selected based on their performance on the Nelson English Language Test. They were assigned randomly into two experimental groups: DJW and RLP. Each group received 14-sessions of treatment. Two samples of Task 2 of General Module of IELTS were used for the pretests and posttests. Each essay was scored independently by three raters. The final score consisted of the average score of the three raters.The findings revealed that the gains in the RLP group's grammatical accuracy and overall writing performance were significantly better than that of the DJW group. This could have been due to the influence of reflection with support of a mentor or collaborator as well as the efficacy of intentional learning over incidental one and explicit learning over implicit one. The results have some main implications for syllabus designers, material developers, and language teachers.
This study aimed at investigating the application of e-learning for master's students of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Payame Noor University, the biggest distance education university in Iran and the Middle East. To do this, a questionnaire was sent to all students studying in five different Payame Noor centers around the country. After eliminating the incomplete questionnaires, 122 were analysed. Besides, 14 students as well as ten teachers were interviewed and 10 classes were observed to take advantage of a triangulated data collection method. The results revealed that distance learning students find some features of e-learning such as flexibility in time and class location very convincing; however, the status quo is not satisfactory due to shortcomings in areas including the Learning Management System (LMS) quality, web-based materials, and lack of interaction between students and teachers. Furthermore, despite their dissatisfaction, the students were happy to take e-learning courses because of their convenient features. Similarly, the teachers believed that e-learning can serve distance education, but many aspects such as teacher training courses, the number of students in each class, and the quality of under-web materials need to be improved. The results have some implications for using e-learning in distance education.
The current study set out to find out the relationship between language learners' multiple intelligence abilities and their foreign language achievement. With regard to the above mentioned aim, 112 EFL learners participated in the research. Further, in this study, the researcher made use of the following measuring instruments: 1) the Persian version of McKenzie's Multiple Intelligence (MI) Inventory; and 2) participants' final term scores as the measure of their language learning achievement. Analyzing the data employing some independent-samples t-tests, it was explored that there was a statistically significant difference [t (104) = 2.100, p (two-tailed) =.035] in the mean of verbal intelligence scores of the low and high achievers, which was larger among the high achieving group. Accordingly, it can be concluded that higher achieving EFL learners have a higher verbal intelligence, implying that more proficient EFL learners may be more intelligent 'verbally' than their less proficient counterparts. Moreover, verbal and visual intelligences-with the highest mean scores-were the two mostly used types of intelligences by both high and low achieving groups.
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