Mostafa Pourhaji; Seyed Mohammad Alavi
Volume 7, Issue 15 , May 2015, , Pages 93-123
Abstract
This study aims at empirically furthering awareness of the organization of interaction in EFL classes. Informed by the methodological framework of conversation analysis, it draws upon a corpus of 52 three-hour naturally-occurring classroom interaction to identify classroom interactional contexts based ...
Read More
This study aims at empirically furthering awareness of the organization of interaction in EFL classes. Informed by the methodological framework of conversation analysis, it draws upon a corpus of 52 three-hour naturally-occurring classroom interaction to identify classroom interactional contexts based on the structuring of the pedagogic goals in turn-taking sequences. Conversation analytic procedures were then paired with quantitative procedures to explore the distribution of the identified contexts within the macro-context of classroom discourse and to investigate the effect of interaction-external factors, i.e., teachers’ training and learners’ levels of language proficiency, on the distribution of the identified contexts. Analyses of extracts from the transcribed data led to the emergence of four interactional contexts: form-oriented, meaning-oriented, skill-oriented, and management-oriented contexts. As to their distribution, form-oriented and skill-oriented contexts were found to be constitutive of the bulk of interaction, with meaning-oriented context comprising the smallest proportion. A two-way multivariate analysis of variance revealed that the distribution of all identified contexts was significantly affected by learners’ levels of language proficiency. Teachers’ training had a significant main effect on just form-oriented and management-oriented contexts. The findings of this study draw teachers and teacher educators’ attention to the necessity of a change in the status quo of EFL classroom interaction.
Manoochehr Jafarigohar; Amir Valadi
Volume 6, Issue 13 , September 2014, , Pages 71-88
Abstract
Teachers’ sense of efficacy belief has been introduced as a context-specific construct, but the related literature is not clear on this specificity. This study was an attempt to show how contextual factors influence efficacy beliefs among English language teachers. To this end, thirty Iranian EFL ...
Read More
Teachers’ sense of efficacy belief has been introduced as a context-specific construct, but the related literature is not clear on this specificity. This study was an attempt to show how contextual factors influence efficacy beliefs among English language teachers. To this end, thirty Iranian EFL teachers working in both school and private institute contexts were chosen as the participants to respond to Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Beliefs questionnaire (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001) twice: once based on school context and once based on private institute context. Afterwards, the participants were invited to a brief interview designed to investigate further the reasons for which they had scored higher in either context. The interview findings and the results of a t-test revealed that context really made a difference. It is argued that the proper or improper functioning of efficacy building sources is the cause of the difference.
