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.
This study was an attempt to compare and contrast the frequency of the use of cohesive devices in<br />independent and integrated essays written by 95 upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners to find out<br />about any possible changes in the type and frequency of using cohesive devices due to the nature of the<br />writing task. The participants were native speakers of Farsi between 18 to 30 years old, studying<br />English as a foreign language in an English language center in Yazd, Iran. The sample included 58<br />female and 37 male students. They were asked to compose an integrated argumentative essay after<br />reading a text and listening to a lecture on the same topic as it is designed in TOEFL iBT® writing test.<br />The participants first completed an independent task which had a prompt to write about and then<br />completed an integrated writing task with a two-week interval between the writing sessions. The tasks<br />were taken from the TOEFL iBT® writing task. Results indicated that there was a significant difference<br />in the use of almost all types of cohesive devices between the two conditions with the independent task<br />producing essays with lower cohesive device counts. The results revealed that in terms of textual<br />cohesion, the participants preferred using anaphoric references to cataphoric references while<br />substitution and ellipsis in both independent and integrated sample writings were rarely used. The<br />students were also found to be better at using references and lexical cohesion in their integrated<br />writings than in their independent essays. Finally, it can be concluded that the integrated writing task<br />has positive effects on the students’ use of cohesive devices. The results of this study provide evidence<br />on the effect of test method on writing performance and may advocate the use of integrated writing<br />tasks to provide a better picture of students' writing abilities.
Considering previous studies of the impact of vocabulary preparation before listening comprehension, this research investigated the impact of oral and written pushed output as two types of vocabulary preparation on listening comprehension, active and passive vocabulary learning, and vocabulary learning strategy use. Forty-one female adult Iranian EFL students at intermediate level participated in this study. As a treatment, they received two lists of new words which were learned separately through oral and written pushed output. This was followed by tests of active and passive vocabulary and listening comprehension. They also completed a vocabulary learning questionnaire before and after the treatment to detect any changes due to the treatment. We reached three pairs of scores for each participant including two active and two passive vocabulary test scores and two listening test scores for words treated through oral and written pushed output, separately. Statistical analyses indicated that vocabulary learning through oral pushed output was more effective in promoting listening comprehension and active vocabulary learning than vocabulary learning through written pushed output. Generally, vocabulary leaning through pushed output had a positive significant effect on vocabulary leaning strategy use. However, regarding passive vocabulary learning, the two types of treatment did not make any significant difference.
The importance of reading in English as a foreign language has resulted in numerous studies on the construct of reading and the nature of its underlying skills. This study investigated the possibility of any hierarchical relationship among a set of hypothesized reading comprehension (RC) subskills measured by IELTS in terms of two important criteria of relative difficulty and significance. Furthermore, it examined the relationship between the level of difficulty and significance of the subskills. To this end, five reading subskills that are most frequently referred to in the literature were selected and presented to six expert judges in order to assign them to IELTS reading items. The results showed considerable agreement among judges on matching test items with the subskills. Then, the selected items were administered to 180 Iranian English majors. Analysis of data, using repeated measure ANOVA, showed significant differences among mean scores on four, out of five, reading subskills in terms of difficulty; therefore, a hierarchy of difficulty was identified. In addition, using structural equation modeling, contribution of each of the five subskills to the construct of reading ability turned out to be significant indicating a hierarchy of relative contribution to overall RC ability among the specified subskills. However, Spearman rank order correlation showed no significant relationship between difficulty level and relative contribution to the totality of RC. The findings have implications for test construction as well as teaching and material development.
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