The current work aims to examine the association between Guided Discovery Learning (GDL) and personality traits and speaking confidence of Iranian EFL learners in terms of their gender. The study was conducted based on a quantitative-descriptive research method and quasi-experimental design. Accordingly, 60 participants were chosen in terms of convenience-random sampling from two language institutes in Tehran. They included both female (N=30) and male (N=30) of general English courses and were in the age range of 15 to 34 years. The results revealed that extraversion made a significant contribution to the self-confidence of Iranian EFL learners. Also, the guided discovery resulted in a more realistic classroom with an atmosphere like daily life as the learners were more active and responsible. Our findings might have significant implications for the curriculum and material designers to incorporate the GDL principles and students’ personality traits.
Processability Theory (PT) is regarded as one of the prominent theory of second language acquisition (SLA) developed to illuminate the developmental sequences in SLA as well as some other linguistic phenomena (Pienemann, 1998a;2011). Since 1990s, Processability has been at the center of attention in second language acquisition research. Within the framework of Processability theory and through analyzing the written performance of Iranian EFL learners, the present research focused on the acquisition of "Copula inversion" and "Negation" across five proficiency levels, from elementary to advanced and compared it with the stage-like development model of morpho-syntactic structures proposed by Pienemann (1998aPienemann ( , 2011. The study followed a descriptive method of research and the data was collected from 350 participants in five different proficiency levels from elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced. The participants were asked to provide samples of their written performance on different tasks such as introduction task, habitual action task, story retelling task, audio-videoretelling task, picture description task, composition, communication task. The data in this research was analyzed both qualitatively, in order to identify and classify the type and order of the morpho-syntactic structures; and quantitatively, by calculating means. The results of Kruskal-
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