Research in materials evaluation has been an important focus in ELT since the 1980s. The objective of the present study is to evaluate the general attributes of the textbooks and to evaluate the learning-teaching content. In this study, 944 male and female English teachers (Year 1 to Year 6 & Form 1 to Form 5) evaluated the English books using a valid and reliable checklist. In terms of general attributes and learning-teaching content of the textbooks, the results showed that Year 1 to Year 6 teachers reported that the current textbooks are 'highly useful' to the students, whereas Form 1 to Form 5 teachers contended that the school books are only 'moderately useful'. The findings of this study can be useful for curricula designers and Ministry of Education as a reference for improving or modifying the textbooks.
In today's world, there are lots of methods in language teaching in general and teaching writing in particular. Using two different tools in writing essays and conducting a study to compare the effectiveness of these two tools namely blog and pen-and-paper was the basis of this study. This study used a quantitative true experimental design aimed at comparing the students' writing performance scores by using pen-and-paper essay writing and blogging among Iranian graduate students of University Putra Malaysia (UPM). The result of this study showed that the tools by themselves could not effect on the quality of writing essays and improvement in the students' writing performance. However, using technology and in this study, Internet can motivate the EFL learners to write more eagerly since they may like innovation in learning in contrast with traditional old methods of learning writing and practicing it. Yet it does not necessarily improve their writing performance only because of using computer and Internet. The Iranian graduate students of UPM found blog more interesting and motivating tool for writing, but it was not as easy using as pen-and-paper for them with which everyone is familiar. This research could find answers to the research questions posed at the beginning of the study and investigated the hypotheses presented then.Keywords: essay writing, Iranian graduate students, writing performance, blogging, pen-and-paper Background of StudyEnglish language is a foreign language in Iran. Therefore, most often it is being studied in formal educational settings such as schools, universities and language institutes. According to Khajavi and Abbasian (2011), Iranians have different reasons to learn English such as travelling to foreign countries, becoming English teachers or tour guides, trading with other countries, or passing Test Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exams in order to enter overseas universities. However, the most significant role of English in Iran is in academic settings particularly in graduate program.Similarly, Farhady (2010) states that English is mostly used as a means of educational development in Iran.In accordance with Iran's Secretariat of the Higher Council of Education (2006), English is being taught from the first year of secondary school (year 6) until the last year of high school (year 12) for seven years. However, it is being instructed at universities as general and specialized English courses. In Iran universities as Farhady (2010) explained, a three-unit credit of general English is required for all fields of study. Besides, another four compulsory units of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) should be fulfilled by the students. Since the premier purpose of teaching English at Iranian universities is to make the students able to understand and read the written course materials in English, the university instructors rely mainly on translated-oriented method in which the language of instruction is Persian (Khaja...
This research study aimed at exploring the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary size of 125 undergraduate English Language Teaching students at Eastern Mediterranean University. This research study was a correlational survey study of descriptive nature. The major findings of this study were as follows. First, the findings indicated that most of the ELT students adequately operated the psycholinguistic strategies, whereas somewhat adequately the metacognitive strategies. Next, the ELT students reportedly had a somewhat average vocabulary size to cope with advanced studies at the university level. Finally, this study found no relationship between the psycholinguistic strategy and the vocabulary size of the participants, and the relationships between the metacognitive strategy and the vocabulary size, as well as the vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire and the vocabulary size of the participants were negligible. The findings also revealed that students did not operate certain strategies, rather a variety of strategies.
This paper analyzes the results of a corpus-based study on the usage of metadiscourse in argumentative writing by Malaysian college students. The aims of the study is to examine the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse used by the particular students in argumentative writing as well as to analyze the errors that made by the particular students in using metadiscourse. The finding shows that Malaysian college students are more inclined to using textual metadiscourse instead of interpersonal metadiscourse. Besides, the selected students are using less code glosses and stance indicator in their argumentative writing. In addition, Malaysian college students committed quite a number of errors in using metadiscourse and practices are needed to train them in using metadiscourse correctly. These findings are useful for Malaysian tertiary level of educators or teachers as they help the educators to figure out the weaknesses of students in using metadiscourse.
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