Azizollah Dabaghi; Elahe Ghorbanchian; Zahra Amirian
Volume 7, Issue 16 , December 2015, , Pages 1-14
Abstract
Indubitably, the efficacy of metalinguistic awareness in improving EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge and writing quality has long been an area of great interest in applied linguistics Brown (2001). Accordingly, the main objective of the present study was to investigate the impact of planned and ...
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Indubitably, the efficacy of metalinguistic awareness in improving EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge and writing quality has long been an area of great interest in applied linguistics Brown (2001). Accordingly, the main objective of the present study was to investigate the impact of planned and unplanned focus on form instruction on students’ ability to learn grammar and use it appropriately in their writing. For this purpose three intact classes registering for the Grammar and Writing course in university of Isfahan ,Iran were chosen for teaching the target structure (i.e., transitional devices) through different methods of focusing on form instructions. The selected samples comprised 30 in each group, male and female sophomore students with the age range of 19 to 24, studying English translation at university of Isfahan. The samples received instruction through planned focus on form instruction (PFFI), unplanned focus on form instruction (UFFI) and zero focus on form instruction (ZFFI) respectively. The results of the post-test on paragraph writing and on the subsequent delayed post-test revealed that the participants in the planned group notably out performed those in the unplanned and zero focus on form groups in handling transitional markers in the writing of paragraphs.
Zahra Amirian; سمیه کتابی; حامد اسحاقی
Volume 5, Issue 11 , November 2013, , Pages 1-29
Abstract
Connor et al. (2008) mention “specifying textual requirements of genres” (p.12) as one of the reasons which have motivated researchers in the analysis of writing. Members of each genre should be able to produce and retrieve these textual requirements appropriately to be considered communicatively ...
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Connor et al. (2008) mention “specifying textual requirements of genres” (p.12) as one of the reasons which have motivated researchers in the analysis of writing. Members of each genre should be able to produce and retrieve these textual requirements appropriately to be considered communicatively proficient. One of the textual requirements of genres is regularities of specific forms and content. Lexical bundles are one of the features which play significant role in building genres’ regularities. Many researchers have tried to define academic writing with resort to the lexical bundles employed in it. Advanced and high intermediate L2 students’ pieces of writing and also post-graduate writing have been analyzed in different aspects. However, the important element in the analysis of post-graduate writing has always been the differences between genres across disciplines. In other words, in investigating lexical bundles in different genres, researchers have not focused on the issue of “nativity of the writer. To be exact, they consider native and non-native writing to share the same features. By considering this gap in lexical bundles studies, the present paper is an attempt to explore the nature of lexical bundles in native and non-native post-graduate students’ writing. In order to do so, a corpus of about one-million words from Iranian students’ applied linguistics theses is compared with a corpus of the same size from native English students’ applied linguistics theses. The results show significant differences in the frequency of lexical bundles used by native and Iranian students and also in structural and functional patterns used.
Mansoor Tavakoli; Leila Bahrami; Zahra Amirian
Volume 4, Issue 9 , December 2012, , Pages 129-164
Abstract
The present study investigated the use of interactive metadiscourse resources (IMRs) in terms of appropriacy during a process- based writing course by applying qualitative and exploratory methods. Moreover, learners' perception was investigated to find out how confident they ...
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The present study investigated the use of interactive metadiscourse resources (IMRs) in terms of appropriacy during a process- based writing course by applying qualitative and exploratory methods. Moreover, learners' perception was investigated to find out how confident they felt as they were writing and rewriting the drafts. 30 intermediate EFL learners were chosen to participate in this study based on their performance on the OPT. The participants wrote essays on argumentative topics during the period of one semester. Each participant submitted three drafts on a topic, the first draft, the draft after revising and the draft after editing. Experts’ appropriacy judgments showed a clear improvement in the appropriate use of IMRs from the participants’ earlier drafts to their final drafts. Furthermore, analysis of the interviews’ data showed that most of the interviewees had positive views towards this kind of writing and stated that their level of confidence in using IMRs increased through the stages and they felt more confident towards the end of the course. The results of this study seem to have some implications for teachers and practitioners in EFL contexts and could be of major significance for classroom application.
