Sharif Digital Repository

According to Sheldon (1988) textbooks are visible hearts of any English language teaching program. Relevant textbooks are prerequisites of an appropriate teaching and learning situation (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994). Evaluation is helpful for making subsequent informed decisions through providing information on the usefulness and effectiveness of textbooks (Allwright, 1981). The Right Path to English and English Book are two Iranian textbook series that have been prescribed by the Ministry of Education for teaching in public Junior and Senior high schools, respectively. Employing Litz's (2005) questionnaires, attitudes of Iranian learners and teachers were obtained on both the series.... 

Currently, in the light of researches that have supported the necessity for pedagogical interventions to push L2 learners towards higher levels of proficiency, form-focused instruction (FFI) approach has gained critical importance in L2. FFI comprises both traditional approaches to teaching forms and more communicative approaches based on giving attention to form that are primarily meaning-focused. Considering FOF, the present study focused on idioms learning in L2 classrooms.Idiom is the inseparable part of teaching English as a foreign language and has an influential role in improving the communicative competence. However, it is not appropriately catered for in many English classes in... 

The importance of vocabulary, the building blocks of every language, in having a good command of a second language is evident. However, the best way to improve the lexical knowledge of the students is an issue that is open to discussions. This study aimed at investigating three different methods for teaching new vocabularies to Iranian students who were striving to take command of English as a second language in order to determine the advantages of one method over the other in terms of immediate and delayed retention. In this endeavor, we set 105 intermediate adult learners of English into three groups and instructed each group with a specific method, teaching them a number of new words... 

This study aimed to explore whether an online writing system designed with the premises of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and supported by the theoretical frameworks of metacognition contributed to the improvement of Iranian university students’ academic genre-based writing performance. The study also sought to find out whether learners’ proficiency level influenced the effect of the system on academic writing. As an extension of the work reported earlier by Yeh (2014), an online writing system was developed and a sample of 30 undergraduate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, at three levels of proficiency, studying at Sharif University of Technology in Iran were... 

Vocabulary knowledge has been scrutinized by many researchers from different aspects and its impact on reading comprehension has made some controversies. This study was an attempt to investigate the impact of depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension. Actually, the relationship among different aspects of vocabulary: depth and breadth and their relationship with participants’ reading comprehension was investigated. To meet this end, Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and Word Associates Test (WAT) and reading comprehension tests were administered to 94 male and female students at Sharif University of Technology in Iran. To homogenize the participants, they were classified... 

The importance of having a rich repertoire of vocabulary at one’s disposal is evidently an undeniable fact for a successful communication. However, the best way to improve the lexical knowledge of the students is an issue that is still open to dispute. Considering this issue the present study focused on vocabulary learning strategies in L2 teaching. Actually, this study aimed at investigating three different methods of teaching new words to Iranian students in order to determine which one of the methods is more effective in terms of immediate and delayed retention. So the researchers strived to examine the question of how two different mnemonic devices, i.e., the Keyword method and the... 

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has been the focus of investigation in the field of foreign language learning for many years. This study aimed to investigate the impact of learning through blogging on the students’ essay writing skill and attitude in the Iranian context. As an extension of the research conducted earlier by Lin (2015) 32 Sharif University of Technology students were selected as the participants of the study. To this end, the students were divided into two groups of experimental group and control group. Then, they were instructed in two different ways by using different teaching methodologies. The bloggers, experimental group students, did not receive any direct... 

The present study was an endeavor to investigate the effectiveness of English full and keyword captions in comparison to Farsi full and keyword subtitles and no caption with regard to English language learners’ listening comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition. For this purpose, 76 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners at Sharif University of Technology from five intact classes were assigned to each condition. Preliminary English test was administered to measure learners’ listening performance before and after the treatment. Researcher-made vocabulary tests based on the difficult words that were captioned in the videos were included in vocabulary tests. The treatment... 

The purpose of the study was four-fold: first to investigate the predictive adequacy of the Task-Induced Involvement Load Hypothesis which contends that higher-load inducing tasks yield better retention rates in incidental learning situations, second, to examine whether type of dictionary search could affect vocabulary retention, third, to investigate the effect of translation direction on retention rate, and finally to determine the most effective tasks. To meet these ends, six groups of EFL learners - all male, aging 19-25, majoring in various fields of engineering sciences were assigned to the study. Each one of the groups performed distinct tasks which were as follow: reading... 

Textbooks play major roles in education and incorporation of textbooks into the courses can better the outcome of the learning (McGrath, 2006; Sheldon, 1988). Considering the role of textbooks, it seems crucial to examine and evaluate textbooks to select the best material for the educational courses (Tomlinson, 2001). This study focused on the evaluation of the EFL textbook, Prospect 1, which is currently taught at secondary schools of Iran. The researcher intended to evaluate the textbook from the perspectives of both teachers and learners based on the evaluation model proposed by Litz (2005). The participants of the study were 173 learners and 102 teachers who filled out the questionnaires... 

The current study aimed at both analyzing and evaluating Prospect course books(2012) with reference to a list of criteria which mainly consisted of: layout and physical appearance, different language skills, vocabulary, grammar, content and supplementary materials. Also a comparison was carried out between Prospect textbooks and Hip Hip hooray 2nd edition (2004) – a globally published ELT textbook taught at many Iranian private language institutes, in the related parts. The study is a qualitative one and makes use of descriptions and comparisons for providing data then content analysis has been used. The results showed that there are some positive points regarding Prospect, including... 

The current study aimed to investigate the differential effects of multimedia input with no subtitle, subtitle, or caption (L2 subtitle) on vocabulary retention while controlling for the possible effects of students' vocabulary size and language aptitude as covariates. A total of 81 undergraduate university students were assigned to the study from three intact groups at Sharif University of Technology. All of the participants were Persian speakers and were in the age range of 18 and 22 years old; homogeneity of the students regarding their language proficiency was also established. During two different sessions, students' vocabulary size and language aptitude were measured. The groups were... 

Adopting a mixed-methods research approach, this study investigated the impacts of four task planning conditions, i.e. online planning (OLP), pre-task planning (PTP), combined pre-task planning and online planning (PTP+OLP), and no planning (NP) on written narrative output which was elicited by means of a picture composition from 80 female advanced EFL learners. The narratives were analyzed in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Moreover, in the qualitative part of this study, how learners planned during pre-task planning time and the content of their narratives were analyzed. The results of the one-way ANOVAs showed that the PTP+OLP group produced significantly more complex,... 

Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) proposed the Task-Induced Involvement Load Hypothesis stating that in the retention of new words in an incidental context, tasks with higher involvement load will be more effective than tasks with lower involvement load. The present study aimed to examine whether the retention of vocabulary is enhanced with an increase in the amount of task-induced involvement load in an intentional learning environment. Moreover, it was investigated whether proficiency level of learners had a role in the effectiveness of the vocabulary tasks with different involvement loads. Four groups of university students, male and female, participated in the study. They were given a TOEFL... 

It is generally observed that the textbooks employed in the classrooms play a crucial role in the process of teaching and learning a second/foreign language. As a result, a number of studies have been carried out to evaluate English Language Teaching (ELT) materials. Trying to contribute to this growing body of literature, the present study was conducted to evaluate the eight most popular global textbooks which are taught in Iranian ELT institutes in terms of their task types according to Nunan’s (1999) classification of the tasks. Nunan (1999) classified tasks into different groups according to the strategies underpinning them. He divided tasks into five major groups each one consisting... 

Intercultural Communicative Competence has been the focus of much academic inquiries in the field of second/foreign language learning in the last decades since learners’ ability to communicate authentically in the target language has been recognized among the scholars. This study aimed to address this issue in the Iranian academic environment where there was almost a gap in not touching the cultural issues of target language in a focused and organized manner in language classes at universities. For that purpose, an intercultural syllabus was designed for a 14-week course of English short story in the Minor Program at Sharif University of Technology. The syllabus was an integration of various... 

The main purpose of the study was to introduce and utilize e-Readers in teaching and testing and compare the participants’ reading performance with those of the participants using paper books. To explore the learners’ perspectives and attitudes toward the use of electronic publications, 60 upper intermediate and advanced English language learners’ experience was examined via the data which were collected through interviews on their motivation and engagement. The two phases of this study were conducted in two separate sessions with a time interval of twenty days. In order to create a description of the details of the participants’ experiences using e-Readers, a descriptive analysis of their... 

Regardless of the extensive research on different aspects of vocabulary and the great emphasis that leading scholars (Meara, 1996; Nation, 990; Read, 1988) placed on the significance of the number of words a learner knows as a substantial component in language learning and vocabulary learning, few investigations have been conducted regarding the size of the vocabulary each language learner knows (Nation, 2012). In addition, Nation (2012) debates the need to combine modern technology and language testing. Therefore, it is necessary to provide innovative methods of testing this knowledge. The present study developed the Computerized Adaptive Test (CAT) of Nation and Beglar’s (2007) Vocabulary... 

In various fields of engineering sciences, SUT occupies the highest rank among other technical universities in Iran based on the ranking of Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC) in 2013. It is, therefore, the host of the majority of exceptionally talented engineering students. In this respect, students of SUT are expected to perform considerably well in their future academic and vocational careers. The primary aim of this investigation is to shed light on a more appropriate course syllabus customized to the needs of these gifted students. A triangulation approach to data collection was employed to gain more insights into the study. A five-point Likert scale questionnaire was... 

The gaps in the existing studies on L2 listening comprehension have been highlighted in the literature of second language learning. Accordingly, the necessity of the qualitative investigations in this field has been frequently addressed by the scholars (e.g., Vandergrift, 2007). The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the use of dynamic assessment (DA) in L2 listening comprehension within a group of six advanced EFL learners to extract the patterns of teacher mediation and learner reciprocity moves through a dyadic examination of their interactions. The examination of listening self-regulation was another incentive behind this study. This research also investigated learners’...