This study was an attempt to explore Iranian EFL teachers' attitude towards supervision and its influence on their classroom decision making. The study also examined the relationship between teachers' teaching experience and their attitude towards classroom supervision. 74 male and female English teachers holding BA, MA, or PhD degrees participated in this survey. Classroom observation and a teachers' questionnaire were used for the purpose of the study. The findings reveal that among the less experienced teachers those who had less than five years of teaching experience were found to be more influenced by the supervision process when it came to making decisions in the classroom. These teachers indicated the importance of supervision for their classroom improvement and their teaching skills and appeared to hold positive attitudes towards supervision program they were experiencing. Teachers with six to ten years of teaching experience appeared to be the most pessimists amongst others. In addition, from the results of the qualitative analysis it can be concluded that the supervision program obviously failed to function for those teachers who had 16 years of teaching experience and more as well. In this case, the program seemed to be only a paperwork job.
Islamic Azad University Takestan Branch, Takestan, IranAs far as we are concerned, one of the elements of assessing EFL/ESL (English as a Foreign Language/English as a Second Language) learners' language proficiency in institutions and universities in our country "Iran" are multiple-choice reading comprehension tests. We also know that, it comprises one major section of the standard and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) tests. Taking into account its importance and the problems which EFL learners have answered them, I get motivated to uncover some of the test-taking strategies which they employ to answer multiple-choice reading comprehension questions when dealing with familiar versus unfamiliar topics. To get a better conclusion, I choose 20 advanced male and female candidates whose English proficiency is at an acceptable level and at least at the same age level, and they major in English language from different colleges and universities. They are given two reading comprehension passages (familiar and unfamiliar), each one with five final questions and allotted time to answer the questions. Two main instruments in this study are a retrospective think-aloud protocol and a semi-structured interview. The results of the reading comprehension tests and interview part revealed that advanced learners' high scores in the familiar topic were not because of their strategy use but because of their high linguistic and background knowledge on the topic. I also concluded that the number, kind, and sequence of strategies employed, were greatly dependent on the degree of testees' familiarity on the topic. In other words, test-takers used more strategies to compensate for their lack of linguistic knowledge.
The major aim of learning a second or foreign language is communication. In order to be a competent communicator, we must get familiar with the ingredients of speech and language. Speech acts are one of the principal elements and functional units of communication. In this realm, refusals play a key role. Due to their inherently face threatening nature, refusals are of an especially sensitive nature, and a pragmatic breakdown in this act may easily lead to unintended offence or breakdowns in communication. Refusals are also of interest due to their typically complex constructions. They are often negotiated over several terms and involve some degree of indirectness. While there are a great number of studies which examine certain speech acts, the amount of research on refusals is much more limited. The aim of this study is to investigate whether either of the instruction types, explicit vs. implicit, proves more efficient in improving pragmatic performance of Iranian EFL learners. For this reason, 45 male, military intermediate EFL learners all between19-25 years of age in a military language institute, in Tehran, Iran, were selected to participate in the study. A pretest/posttest design was adopted in this study. Having formed the three groups under investigation, (explicit, implicit and explicit-implicit) I measured all subjects’ pragmatic performance of L2 refusals through Discourse Completion Tests, DCTs. All groups were exposed to conversations from 'spectrum' English books which embody refusals. The findings proved the efficiency of explicit instruction over implicit one in increasing Iranian EFL learners' pragmatic performance.
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