Hamed Babaie Shalmani; Seyyed Ayatollah Razmjoo
Volume 7, Issue 15 , May 2015, , Pages 1-41
Abstract
This study compared the effects of two annotation modalities on the reading comprehension of Iranian intermediate level EFL learners. The two experimental groups under study received treatment on 10 academic L2 reading passages under one of two conditions: One group received treatment on key words in ...
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This study compared the effects of two annotation modalities on the reading comprehension of Iranian intermediate level EFL learners. The two experimental groups under study received treatment on 10 academic L2 reading passages under one of two conditions: One group received treatment on key words in the reading passages through a multimedia environment providing textual annotations. The second group received treatment under a similar environment but received compound glosses. The control group, however, received no treatment and was encouraged to use contextual guessing. The findings revealed that the experimental group who received treatment through compound glosses outperformed the other two groups on the comprehension test, and the group who used textual annotations obtained a higher mean on the post-test than the control group. One explanation is that compound glosses might help learners better decipher the meanings of key words in L2 passages, thus contributing to their deeper understanding of the texts.
Seyyed Ayatollah Razmjoo; Saeed Mehrpur; Behnaz Darban
Volume 4, Issue 9 , December 2012, , Pages 101-127
Abstract
The objective of the present study was to identify and examine the influence of instructional tools, namely, games, songs and stories on young Iranian EFL learners’ achievement utilizing a quantitative design. To conduct the study 65 Iranian EFL learners, divided into an ...
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The objective of the present study was to identify and examine the influence of instructional tools, namely, games, songs and stories on young Iranian EFL learners’ achievement utilizing a quantitative design. To conduct the study 65 Iranian EFL learners, divided into an experimental group and a control group, learning English at Navid English Institute, Shiraz, Iran, participated in the study. The data were collected through two instruments: a pre/post- achievement test, and audio-recorded interviews, both designed by the researchers. The data obtained from the administration of the test and the interviews were analyzed using independent samples t-tests and paired samples t-tests and the findings were compared to describe the influence of employing instructional games, songs and stories on participants’ achievement. Findings drawn from the analysis of data revealed that the implementation of pedagogical tools used in the study can significantly affect the learners’ language achievement, realized through their listening, speaking, and writing ability and their vocabulary and grammar.
Saeed Mehrpour; Seyyed Ayatollah Razmjoo; Parvaneh Kian
Volume 2, Issue 222 , December 2010, , Pages 97-127
Abstract
The current study is an attempt to investigate the particular role learners' vocabulary knowledge plays in their reading comprehension performance. It intends to determine whether breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge are related to EFL learners' reading comprehension, and to investigate which one ...
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The current study is an attempt to investigate the particular role learners' vocabulary knowledge plays in their reading comprehension performance. It intends to determine whether breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge are related to EFL learners' reading comprehension, and to investigate which one of these variables, that is, depth or breadth of vocabulary knowledge, makes a more important contribution to L2 reading comprehension. It also attempts to investigate whether there is a relationship between these two vocabulary knowledge dimensions, that is, depth and breadth. Finally, the study tries to find out whether gender has any effect on learners' reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. The participants of the study were sixty (30 male and 30 female) EFL learners who were chosen from among five language teaching institutes in Shiraz based on available sampling. To collect the relevant data, two tests measuring breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge were administered to all participants. They also received a reading comprehension test in which they were asked to read the passages and answer some multiple choice questions. The results obtained from the analysis of the data indicated that while both depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge play an important role in EFL learners' reading comprehension performance, depth of vocabulary knowledge makes a more important contribution. The results further revealed that depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge are positively correlated, that is, those learners who had large vocabulary size had a deeper knowledge of the words, too. It was also found that gender had no significant impact on learners' reading comprehension performance and vocabulary knowledge.
