This study examines EFL students’ perceptions of teacher feedback and intra-feedback in writing essays in an EFL university context. Traditionally, teachers who were considered more knowledgeable provided feedback to students' writing. Recently, peer feedback is considered as an alternative form of feedback, which involves a dynamic process of reviewing and discussing one another’s text in a writing class. Intra-feedback, another form of peer feedback, is a reviewer-oriented practice in which two reviewers discuss their comments provided individually on the composition of another student. This paper investigates 21 EFL students’ perceptions of teacher feedback and peer feedback using intra-feedback technique. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected using a questionnaire and follow-up semi-structured interviews. The results of the questionnaire indicated that students perceived teacher feedback to be most useful in improving the content, organization and language of their essays. From the interviews with the students, their preferences toward feedback provider, feedback focus, feedback provision and intrafeedback inclusion were elicited. Some pedagogical implications for the EFL writing instruction can be made including creation of opportunities for students to become aware of effective reviewing techniques, improvement of peer feedback quality and increasing students’ confidence and critical thinking.
The focus of the present study was to investigate the possible effects of sociocultural-based teaching techniques on EFL learners reading comprehension. The basic purpose was to clarify how learners reading comprehension and strategy use could be affected by the types of teaching techniques and how high and low proficiency learners profited from the intervention.Iranian EFL students were used as the participants of the study. A NELSON language proficiency test, a researcher-made reading comprehension test and a reading strategy questionnaire (adopted from Phakiti, 2006) were used as data collection instruments. The results showed that the sociocultural teaching techniques leads to better reading comprehension and reading strategy use for EFL learners. Also shown that proficiency factor played a determining role in reading comprehension development of the two groups of this study and that the low proficiency learners, especially in sociocultural group, outperformed the high proficiency learners. However, the interaction effect between proficiency factor and teaching method was non-significant for reading strategy use; leading to the conclusion that strategy use of the learners was not affected by their proficiency level. This indicates that the patterns of cognitive and metacognitive strategy scores are similar for students of low and high proficiency.
Understanding the beliefs held by the learners about learning a language, and the way they utilize their thoughts about knowledge and learning seem essential for planning a constructive language program. Following this line of research, this paper aims at testing a hypothetical model of the relationship between epistemic beliefs (EBs) and subscales of language-learning strategies (LLSs) through the mediating role of learners' self-efficacy (LSE). To this end, a sample of 300 Iranian high school students, taking regular courses, completed three survey questionnaires. At this stage, correlational analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) were employed to probe the interconnections, analyze the model, and outline the conceptual framework. The results revealed that the LSE framework can adequately account for the learners' LLSs. In particular, the results indicated that efforts, persistence, and imitation (i.e., the subfactors of LSE) positively and significantly influenced LLSs. However, EBs with the mediating role of LSE were known to be a significant factor in demoting the LLSs. Notably, knowledge and learning agents were the negative predictors of LLSs. This paper suggests that LSE has higher explanatory power than EBs in predicting LLSs. The findings of this study suggest that teachers and material developers should pay serious attention to the learners' self-efficacy as they were known to influence LLSs.
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