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A Study on the Effectiveness of Textual Modification on the Improvement of Iranian upper-Intermediate …

متن کامل پایان نامه مقطع کارشناسی ارشد رشته :زبان انگلیسی

عنوان : A Study on the Effectiveness of Textual Modification on the Improvement of Iranian upper-Intermediate EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Ministry of Sciences, Researches and Technology

Rudaki Higher Education Institute of Tonekabon

( Non governmental – Non profit )

Department of English Language

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Title:

A Study on the Effectiveness of Textual Modification on the Improvement of Iranian upper-Intermediate EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Supervisor:

Dr. Shahrokh Jahandar

Advisor:

Dr. Morteza Khodabandelu

January 2015

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Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate the impact of textual Modification on Iranian upper-Intermediate EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension ability. For this purpose, 115 male and female university students majoring in English Translation participated in this study. Having being homogenized by an MELAB test, 60 learners were selected and they were randomly assigned into two groups, control and experimental. Then both groups sat for a pre-test, which was a reading comprehension test. The purpose of this test was to measure the learners’ initial subject knowledge of reading comprehension ability. Afterwards, the experimental group received treatment based on textual Modification strategy. However, the control group received no treatment. The treatment procedure took 10 sessions. Finally at the end of the course both groups sat for the post test of reading comprehension. Then the statistical analysis was run through ANCOVA. It was explored from the study that learners’ reading ability improves more when they are provided with textual Modification strategy.

Key words: textual Modification, Reading comprehension

Chapter One

Introduction

Introduction

Textual modification can be defined as any process that reduces the syntactic or lexical complexity of a text while attempting to preserve its meaning and information content.

The aim of Textual modification is to make text easier to comprehend for a human user or process by a program.

A common method for assessing whether a text is suitable for a particular reading age is by means of using readability metric, such as the Flesch readability score, proposed in 1943 and more recently popularized by Microsoft Word. These metrics are based solely on surface attributes of a text, such as average sentence and word lengths.

The term readability is therefore a misnomer; these metrics do not attempt to judge how readable, well written or cohesive a text is, or even whether it is grammatical. Rather, they suggest what reading age a text (that is assumed to be well written, cohesive and relevant in content) is suitable for, by means of a calibration with school reading grades.

Theoretical Framework

Compared to controlled generation and text summarization, there has been significantly less work done on the automatic textual modification of existing text. Interestingly, the two main groups involved with textual Modification have had very different motivations. The group at UPenn (Chandrasekar et al., 1996; Chandrasekar and Srinivas, 1997) viewed text simplification as a preprocessing tool to improve the performance of their parser. The PSET project on the other hand focused its research on simplifying newspaper text for aphasics (Carroll et al., 1998; Carroll et al., 1999b).

Chandrasekar et al.’s motivation for textual modification was largely to reduce sentence length as a preprocessing step for a parser. They treated textual modification as a two-stage process— analysis followed by transformation. Their research focused on dis-embedding relative clauses and appositives and separating out coordinated clauses.

Their first approach (Chandrasekar et al., 1996) was to hand-craft simplification rules, the example from their paper being: V W:NP, X:REL PRON Y, Z. −→ V W Z. W Y. which can be read as “if a sentence consists of any text V followed by a noun phrase W, a relative pronoun X and a sequence of words Y enclosed in commas and a sequence of words Z, then the embedded clause can be made into a new sentence with W as the subject noun phrase”. This rule can, for example, be used to perform the following modification:

John, who was the CEO of a company, played golf.

John played golf. John was the CEO of a company.

In practice, linear pattern-matching rules like the handcrafted one above do not work very well. For example, to simplify:

A friend from London, who was the CEO of a company, played golf, usually on Sundays. it is necessary to decide whether the relative clause attaches to friend or London and whether the clause ends at company or golf. And if a parser is used to resolve these ambiguities (as in their second approach summarized below), the intended use of text simplification as a preprocessor to a parser is harder to justify.

Their second approach (Chandrasekar and Srinivas, 1997) was to have the program learn simplification rules from an aligned corpus of sentences and their hand-simplified forms. The original and simplified sentences were parsed using a Lightweight Dependency Analyser (LDA) (Srinivas, 1997) that acted on the output of a super tagger (Joshi and Srinivas, 1994). These parses were chunked into phrases. Simplification rules were induced from a comparison of the structures of the chunked parses of the original and hand simplified text. The learning algorithm worked by flattening sub trees that were the same on both sides of the rule, replacing identical strings of words with variables and then computing tree→trees transformations to obtain rules in terms of these variables.

This approach involved the manual simplification of a reasonable quantity of text. The authors justified this approach on the basis that handcrafting rules is time consuming.

However, it is likely that the intuitions used to manually simplify sentences can be encodable in rules without too much time overhead. In addition, while this approach is interesting from the machine-learning point of view, it seems unlikely that a system that learns from a corpus that has been simplified by hand will outperform a system in which the rules themselves have been hand-crafted.

Textual modification can increase the throughput of a parser only if it reduces the syntactic ambiguity in the text. Hence, a Textual modification system has to be able to make disambiguation decisions without a parser in order to be of use to parsing. This early work on Textual modification therefore raised more issues than it addressed. Moreover, since the authors did not provide any evaluations, it is difficult to assess how well their approaches to text simplification worked.

The PSET project (Devlin and Tait, 1998; Carroll et al., 1998), in contrast, was aimed at people with aphasia rather than at parsers and was more justified in making use of a parser for the analysis stage. For syntactic simplification, the PSET project roughly followed the approach of Chandrasekar et al. PSET used a probabilistic LR parser (Briscoe and Carroll, 1995) for the analysis stage and unification-based pattern matching of handcrafted rules over phrase-marker trees for the transformation stage. The project reports that on 100 news articles, the parser returned 81% full parses, 15% parse fragments and 4% parse failures.

An example of the kind of simplification rule used in the textual modification component of the PSET project is:

(S (?a) (S (?b) (S (?c) ) ) ) −→ (?a) (?c)

The left hand side of this rule unifies with structures of the form shown in figure 1.1 and the rule simply discards the conjunction (?b) and makes new sentences out of (?a) and (?c). This rule can be used, for example, to perform the following modification:

The proceedings are unfair and any punishment from the guild would be unjustified. The proceedings are unfair. Any punishment from the guild would be unjustified. The PSET project explored a wide range of simplification options, including lexical simplification, conversion of passives to actives and resolving pronouns. Lexical simplification involves replacing difficult words with simpler synonyms. The PSET project used Word Net (Miller et al., 1993) to identify synonyms and obtained word frequency statistics from the Oxford Psycholinguistic Database (Quinlan, 1992) to determine the relative difficulty of words (Devlin and Tait, 1998).

The syntactic component of PSET comprised three components— anaphora resolution, syntactic simplification and anaphora replacement. The anaphora resolution algorithm was based on CogNIAC (Baldwin, 1997) and Canning et al. (2000b) report a recall of 60% with precision of 84% on newspaper text.

The syntactic constructs that the PSET project simplified were coordinated clauses and passive voice. Canning (2002) reports that there were only 75 instances of coordination in her corpus of 100 news reports from the Sunderland Echo. This meant that the level of simplification achieved was unlikely to be useful. As I describe in this thesis, a treatment of relative clauses, subordination and apposition can result in a higher level of simplification.

The attempt at converting passive voice to active had mixed success. Canning (2002) reports that only one out five passive constructs had an expressed surface agent. The rest were agent less; for example, in she was taken to Sunderland Royal Hospital. Further, passive constructs were often deeply embedded within a sentence, making the agent difficult to recover.

Canning (2002) reports that in her 100 news report corpus, there were only 33 agentive passive constructs. Out of these, her program converted only 55% correctly to active voice. Even the correctly converted sentences sometimes seemed odd; for example:

He was struck down by the brain disease last October.

The brain disease last October struck him down.

The main contribution of the syntactic component of PSET was the application of a pronoun resolution algorithm to text simplification (Canning, 2002). The aim was to replace pronouns with their antecedent noun phrases, to help aphasics who might otherwise have difficulty in resolving them. Intra-sentential anaphora were not replaced, to avoid producing sentences like Mr Smith said Mr Smith was unhappy.

Canning (2002) conducted an evaluation of the effect of pronoun replacement on comprehension on 16 aphasic subjects and reported 20% faster reading tim

A Study on the Effectiveness of Task types (noticing-reformulation) on Iranian Low Intermediate EFL Learners’ …

متن کامل پایان نامه مقطع کارشناسی ارشد رشته :زبان انگلیسی

عنوان : A Study on the Effectiveness of Task types (noticing-reformulation) on Iranian Low Intermediate EFL Learners’ Retention of Collocations

Ministry of Sciences, Researches and Technology

Rudaki Higher Education Institute of Tonekabon

( Non governmental – Non profit )

Department of English Language

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Title:

A Study on the Effectiveness of Task types (noticing-reformulation) on Iranian Low Intermediate EFL Learners’ Retention of Collocations

Supervisor:

Dr. Morteza Khodabandelou

Advisor:

Dr. Shahrokh Jahandar

January 2015

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Abstract

The present study aimed at the effectiveness of task types (noticing-reformulation) on Iranian upper- Intermediate EFL Learners’ retention of collocations. The study follows a two-group pretest, treatment, post-test design which was documented 40 upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners with the same proficiency level measured by an OPT test and two non- native English teachers. The participants were randomly assigned to an experimental and control group that were exposed to Noticing-Reformulation tasks and traditional methods respectively to determine whether there was any development in the long-term retention of collocations.

Analysis of the data obtained from independent-samples t-tests along with the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient indicated that there were significant quantitative and statistical differences in the output of participants from the two different groups, with learners who participated in the experimental group outperforming and incorporating significantly more retention of collocations in the immediate and delayed post-test than learners from the control group.

Key Words: Noticing, Reformulation, Collocation, Retention, Output, OPT.

Table of Content

Title Page

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

1.0. Introduction ……………………………………………………..………………..1

1.1. Theoretical Framework ……………………………………………….……….…3

1.2. Statement of the Problem ……………………………………………….…….….5

1.3. Significance and Purpose of the Study………………………………………..….6

1.4. Research Questions of the Study …………………………………………..……7

1.5. Hypotheses of the Study…………………………………………….……………7

1.6. Definitions of Key Terms………………………………………………….….….8

1.6.1.Collocation………………………………………………………………………8

1.6.2. Noticing………………………………………………………….…….…….…8

1.6.3. Reformulation …………………………………………………..………….…..8

1.6.4. Task ……………………………………………………………………..…..….9

1.6.5. Intake ………………………………………………………………..…….……9

1.6.6. Noticing the Gap………………………………………………………….…….9

1.6.7. Retention …………………………………………………………..…………..10

1.7. Summary………………………………………………………….………..….…1

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIW

2.0. Introduction……………………………………………………………….…..….11

2.1. Feedback Research in SLA……………………………………………………….11

2.1.1. The role of feedback in SLA……………………………………………………11

2.2. Psycholinguistic Processes in Second Language Acquisition …………………..21

2.2.1. Noticing and learning……………………………………………………..……21

2.2.2. The Noticing Hypothesis and SLA……………………………………………..27

2.2.3. Noticing, Intake and Subliminal Perception……………………………..…….35

2.2.4. Individual Differences in Noticing and Awareness ……………………….…..36

2.2.5. A Critical Review of Noticing Hypothesis in SLA………………………..…..37

2.3. The Theories of Vocabulary Acquisition……………………….………………..42

2.3.1. Collocation……………………………………………………………….…….42

2.3.2. Research on collocations………………………………………………..……..44

2.4. Noticing, Awareness and Attention in Learning Collocations………………….47

2.5. Problems in Collocation Production………………………………….……..…..49

2.6. Vocabulary Retention……………………………………………………………50

2.7. Summary……………………………………………………………………..….51

CHAPTER3: METHODOLOGY

3.0. Introduction……………………………………………………………….….….52

3.1. The Design of the Study………………………………………………………….52

3.2. Participants……………………………………………………………..……..…53

3.3. Materials ……………………………………………………………………..…..53

3.3.1. Concordance Software for Text Analysis………………………………..……54

3.3.2. Testing Instruments…………………………………………………………….54

3.3.2.1. The Self-report and Collocation Pre-test…………………………….………54

3.3.2.2. Immediate Collocation Retention Post-test……………………….…….…..54

3.3.2.3. Delayed Collocation Retention Post-test ………………………………..….55

3.3.3. Questionnaires …………………………………………………………….…..55

3.4. Procedure…………………………………………………………………….…..57

3.4.1. Week 1: Self-report Collocation Pretest/ Comparison Session………………..58

3.4.2. Week 3: Immediate Collocation Retention Post-test……………………….….59

3.4.4. Delayed Collocation Retention Post-test………………………………………59

3.5. Methods of Analyzing Data……………………………………………………..60

3.6. Scoring……………………………………….………………………………..…61

3.7. Summary…………………………………………………………………..……..61

CHAPTER4: RESULTS AND DATA ANALYSIS

4.0. Introduction………………………………………………………………………62

4.1. Data Analysis and Findings ………………………………………………….…62

4.1.1. The descriptive Analysis of the Data……………………………………..……62

4.1.2. Inferential Analysis of the Data……………………………………………..…66

4.2. Results of the Hypothesis Testing…………………………………………..……68

4.3. Summary……………………………………………………………………….…68

CHAPTER5: DISCUSSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

5.0. Introduction………………………………………………………………..…..…69

5.1. General Discussion…………………………………………………………..……69

5.1.1. Discussion of the Findings Gained by the Questionnaire………………..……70

5.2. Implications of the Study…………………………………………………………71

5.2.1. Theoretical Implications……………………………….……………….………71

5.2.2. Pedagogical Implications………………………..…………………………..…71

5.3. Limitations of the Study………………………………………….…………….…72 5.4. Suggestions for Further Research………………………………………..………73

5.5. Summary …………………………………………………………………….……73

REFRENCES…………………………………………………….……..……………74

LIST OF APPENDICES

Appendix A: Oxford Placement Test (OPT)…………………………………………90

Appendix B: Self-report Collocation Pretest …………………….……………….….96

Appendix C: Pretest Administered for Participants of Both Groups (Exactly the same test was given for immediate and delayed post-tests)………………………………..96

Appendix D: Post-test Administered for Participants of Both Groups ………..…..…97

Appendix E: Questionnaire………………………………………………..……….…98

List of Tables

Title Page

Table 2.1. Comparison of reformulation and direct correction …………………….. 15

Table 3.1. Data collection procedure of the study ……………………………………58

Table 4.1. Group Statistics for the Delayed Post-test…………………………………63

Table 4.2. Group Statistics for the Immediate Post-test………………………………63

Table 4.3. Correlations Between the Pretest and Delayed Post-test of Experimental Group…64

Table 4.4. Correlations Between the Pre and Delayed Post-test of Control Group….64

Table 4.5. Correlations Between Pre and Immediate Post-test of Experimental Group and Control Group…………………………………………………………………….65

Table 4.6. Correlations Between Pre and Immediate Post-test of Control Group .…65

Table 4.7.Independent-samples t-test for Immediate Post-test…………………….…66

Table 4.8. Independent-samples t-test for Delayed Post-test…………………………67

Chapter one

Introduction

1.0. Introduction

Achieving the goals of L2 collocation instruction is no easy matter. Even a well-planned collocation lesson based on contemporary pedagogical principles cannot guarantee that learners will acquire the natural co-occurrence of words that is taught.

For anyone teaching or learning a foreign language, collocation is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating challenges that they will encounter, but nevertheless can be frustrating at times. Equally, for those who are into researching foreign language collocation knowledge, learning and retention. Within the last few years learning collocations has become of paramount significance and the focus of an overwhelming majority of research studies. The pivotal aim of the researches carried out in the field has been investigating the factors and variables, which contribute to successful collocation learning, and ways of storing the most possible collocations in long-term memory.

During the last decades the area of foreign language learning has been marked by a true explosion of research into collocation learning strategies that emanated from the first attempt at pinpointing reasons why some learners achieve better results in collocation learning and retention than their peers. Accordingly, wide-ranging volumes of research in collocation learning have been published in the last 20 years or so, but not all of them have reported sufficient collocation knowledge among EFL learners and have rarely embraced dedicated studies investigating into the impact of using Noticing-Reformulation technique on collocation knowledge and retention.

The role of memory is also crucial in any kind of learning and collocation learning and retention are no exception. According to the above-described continuum, learning of collocations is not linear. Learners, without fail, forget some components of knowledge. Hence, there should be tasks which can encourage long-term retention of collocations.

On the basis of available research results, it is probably safe to say that not everyone would deny the significance of

noticing in converting input into intake. Regarding the aforementioned issue, learning and retention of collocations have always sustained defeat. When obtaining new information, most of it is forgotten immediately, after which the process of forgetting slows down.

All in all, traditional teaching of collocations seems to be a slow and inefficient process which does not necessarily imply long-term retention. Explicit vocabulary teaching via Noticing-Reformulation technique may be an alternative to traditional instruction. Because it might be able to ensure that lexical development in the target language follows a systematic and logical path. However, the contribution and effect of Noticing-Reformulation technique on collocation learning is still under dispute.

One of the chief assumptions of my study is that a teacher’s knowledge of how to teach collocations is also a very influential factor in foreign language vocabulary learning and retention. It is also a criterion which should not be eliminated from the process of learning. It has become apparent, on the basis of the above-mentioned argumentations, to all subjects involved in the processes of language learning, that collocation learning cannot rely on implicit incidental learning or traditional teaching. Here I shall mention that my proposal does not contradict the findings of learners’ autonomy in language learning. I only see when our students fail to learn, the balance of failure is shifted one way and only rests on our students’ shoulders. The advocates of this view- not disputing the significance of acquiring grammatical- syntactical structures- have begun to insist on more explicit collocation teaching.

The underlying issue is that some scholars argue the heart of language comprehension and use is the lexicon. Nearly the same idea was shared by Lewis (2000) who expresses that “the single most important task facing language learners is acquiring a sufficient large vocabulary”.

Many higher education faculty members and EFL teachers find themselves with the opportunity or requirement to teach English collocations, but how can they design and develop an effective way to develop the skill for teaching them? It is difficult to find an answer to this question, due to a lack of a clear theoretical framework to guide instructional interventions. Accordingly, teaching collocations has always been disregarded in EFL classes. English Collocations in Use (McCarthy &O’Dell) for self-study and classroom use is sometimes used for pedagogic treatment of collocations in the classroom, however, they haven’t reached a consensus on how to teach it in a more effective way. Learners, meanwhile, often use the aforementioned book for self-study, but the net results may not always be a success. I want to teach collocations in a way which can potentially help students focus their attention on language lexicon.

I therefore sat Noticing-Reformulation tasks to increase the likelihood that they would attend to lexicon in both input and their foreign language output. I hoped that this attention would lead to learning and retention of collocations with their subsequent use in learners’ language production. In order to perceive how this may come about, I decided to illustrate and consider the ideas of noticing and intake in second language acquisition,

A Scrutiny of In-service Training Programs for EFL Teachers and the Development of a Model Based on Language …

متن کامل پایان نامه مقطع کارشناسی ارشد رشته :زبان انگلیسی

عنوان : A Scrutiny of In-service Training Programs for EFL Teachers and the Development of a Model Based on Language Teachers’ Perceptions

University of Yasouj

Faculty of Literature and Humanities

Department of English Language and Literature

MA Thesis in TEFL

A Scrutiny of In-service Training Programs for EFL Teachers and the Development of a Model Based on Language Teachers’ Perceptions

Supervisors:

J. Jabbari, PhD

Kazemi, PhD

Advisor:

Zarei, PhD

October 2013

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Abstract

As language teachers play a pivotal role in the betterment of language education, teacher-training programs, pre-service and in-service training programs alike, have been in place to enable teachers to accomplish the important roles expected of them. However, not due attention has been paid to the effectiveness and practicality of these programs. Among those who can pass informed judgments on the effectiveness of such programs are language teachers themselves. However, their perceptions are not consistently taken into account while deciding on these programs. Accordingly, the current study aimed to scrutinize in-service training programs for EFL teachers and to develop a model which is hoped to be practical and effective. To this end, seven English teachers were interviewed. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and were subjected to qualitative content analysis. In addition, based on the results of the semi-structured interview and the related literature, an In-Service Teacher Training Programs Questionnaire (ISTTPQ) was developed by the researcher to evaluate the current in-service teacher training programs. Following the validation of the instrument through a pilot study, the questionnaire was administrated to 290 state high school teachers in Yasouj and Shiraz, who were selected through cluster sampling. The qualitative data analysis revealed that teachers were not satisfied with the current in-service training programs. They stated that these programs could not bring about any real changes in their performance and did not have any effective impact on them. Drawing on the ideas expressed by the interviewees and an extensive review of literature a questionnaire was developed which could serve as a framework for evaluating teacher training programs. In addition, the questionnaire was administered to the teachers to decide to evaluate the programs they had attended and come up with an optimum model of in-service teacher training program.

Keywords: Training, Evaluation, Teachers’ perceptions, In-service teacher training

CHAPTER ONE

PRELIMINARIES

Introduction

Learning a foreign language, especially English, has increasingly become more vital the world over. This is appreciable when we consider that we live in a globalized world where English is used as a lingua franca. Over the course of time, teaching English as a foreign language has gained considerable significance so much so that it has established itself as an educational field that is worth researching within the general educational system.

Since the human life has been changed radically by the development of the technologies and the improvement of the knowledge, the need for qualified teachers can be felt even more. Therefore, teachers should improve their knowledge and skills and adjust themselves to the new technology. Thus, to keep up with these changes, teachers need to be trained continuously and become more efficient in their jobs.

For the last two decades, there have been a lot of debates on the teacher’s preparation and teacher’s development. According to Lanier and Little (1986), teacher education as a field of study has not found its right place in the academy. In teacher education field, teacher educators play highly important roles; however, most of the time, they are not taken into account in the research conducted into their work. However, this situation has changed since the 1990s as university researchers, law makers, and policy analysts have paid increasing attention to what teacher educators do. From that time, teacher education has been recognized as an object of academic research.

Yet, it is difficult for teachers to be self-sufficient due to the need for specialization of the new education-teaching programs, new teaching strategies and new technologies. As a result, according to Saban (2000), teachers can develop their qualifications and achieve professional identity through both pre- and in-service

training programs, hence, the notion of lifelong learning.

It is obvious that the quality of education is influenced by the quality of teachers and their teaching. Teachers first gain an ‘entry-level proficiency’ in teacher education institutions in pre-service training programs, and ‘mastery-level proficiency’ is obtained after a wide understanding of teaching and acquiring skills based on practical experience in in-service training programs. Each teacher needs to pass in-service education and training (commonly abbreviated as INSET) programs for the initial professional training. In-service training programs are the major elements in solving the difficulties facing teachers’ development (Craft, 2000; Day, 1999; Hammadou, 2004; Lee 2007; Sugrue, 2001).

All EFL teachers concede that the profession of teaching English entails a persistent development and innovation on their behalf. There are numerous ways in which teachers can improve themselves. One way is by participating voluntarily or otherwise in teacher training programs. As Özen (1997, p. 2) states, in-service teacher training programs are considered as inimitable opportunities in which teachers can improve their professional and individual

competence. Due to this, more and more pre-service and in-service teacher training programs are offered in teacher-training institutions.

The need for constant improvement in the profession of teaching calls for ‘teacher professional development’. In the process of the development of well-prepared teachers, well-designed pre-service and in-service training programs are very important. According to Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2001), in the past, in-service training programs had a transmission-oriented approach in which teachers were the recipients of knowledge from teacher educators; now the emphasis has shifted to the constructivist approach, where teachers concentrate on what they know, and they are no longer considered as a tabula rasa and are believed to bring their prior knowledge and personal experience into the new learning environment.

One of the advantages of in-service programs is that they provide a situation for teachers to reflect on their practices so that they will be aware of themselves as teachers and keep up with the new theories and methods in teaching and learning. The crucial contribution of in-service programs is to motivate both teachers and instructors and to make them aware of their weaknesses and strengths.

‘In-service training’ is a term used to describe a set of activities and requirements generally falling under the heading of ‘professional development’. In-service training program is a program intended to improve the performance of all personnel already holding assigned positions in a school setting or to implement a specified innovation or program (Sapp, 1996). It is a key factor in influencing the professional development of teachers and, thus, contributes to the improvement of their knowledge if teachers are actively involved in the process (Saiti & Saitis, 2006). As Locke states, in-service training is accepted as an effective method of increasing the knowledge, developing the skills, and promoting positive attitudes of teachers. Once teachers have received their certification in teaching and are employed in a professional position, the in-service training programs are used as a way to continue their education (Locke, 1984). Perron (1991) gives a definition of in-service training programs according to the Education Information Network in the European Union (EURYDICE): “a variety of activities and trainings in which teachers become involved so as to broaden their knowledge, improve their skills and assess and develop their professional approach”(Perron, 1991), 137-152.

Nevertheless, at this moment it is necessary to ponder on the fact that teacher training and teacher development are considered synonymous. However, Freeman (1982) makes a distinction between the two terms. According to him, training contends with erecting specific teaching skills, for instance, how to sequence a lesson or how to teach a grammar point. However, the focus of development is on the individual teacher-on the process of contemplation, assessment, and changes- which can result in doing a better job and in personal and professional growth. In other words, development is an umbrella term which takes account of training and other ways of improving.

As mentioned earlier, teacher training is one of the ways in which teachers can develop. As Harmer (2002) states, doing action research, reading the literatu

The Role of CALL in Facilitating the Reading Ability of EFL Learners

متن کامل پایان نامه مقطع کارشناسی ارشد رشته :زبان انگلیس

عنوان : The Role of CALL in Facilitating the Reading Ability of EFL Learners

Ministry of Science, Research and Technology

Allameh Mohaddes Nouri University

(Non-Governmental, Non-Profit)

Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences

English Department

The Role of CALL in Facilitating the Reading Ability of EFL Learners

Supervisor:

Dr. Karim Shabani

Advisor:

Dr. Amir Marzban

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

ALLAMEH MOHADDES NOURI UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF ECONOMICS AND ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCES

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

NOUR, IRAN

NOVEMBER, 2014

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ABSTRACT

The present study was carried out to determine the role of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in facilitating the reading ability of EFL learners. It was hypothesized that CALL wouldn’t have significant impact on reading comprehension. The participants in this study were 60 students selected randomly from the EFL learners from an English language institute. The participants were the Iranian male and female intermediate EFL learners with the range of 18 to 22 years of age. They shared the same linguistic and cultural background and their first language in the research was Persian. The participants completed pre-intermediate level and passed the placement test at the intermediate level. Quantitative method and true experimental design was used to explore the effects of CALL on the participants’ reading ability compared to traditional method of teaching reading. The tools for collecting quantitative data in this study included a pre-test and a post-test. All the participants were randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group. The experimental group studied with a CALL program through doing some exercises. The control group went through a traditional method of teaching reading in a classroom. The results showed that using computer in the class had a positive impact on reading ability of EFL learners. The result of this study can be considered a contribution in the latest way of teaching reading to the speakers of the other language and also the results of current study may be beneficial to teachers of foreign languages (particularly Iranian teachers) in that they can benefit from innovative ways of teaching reading by CALL program and helping the learners to understand the reading text better.

Keywords:

Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), Reading, EFL context.

Introduction

0.1 Introduction

The spread of computers in educational contexts changed the realm of language teaching so dramatically that it

seems necessary to language teachers to think about the implication of computers for language learning (Warschauer, 1996).

As Hardisty and Windeat (1989) state, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) aims to describe the use of computers as part of a language course. During the last decade, Studies have illustrated how computer technologies support meaningful and comprehensive educational experiences. Although many organizational and educational settings still privilege the notion of face-to-face classroom instruction, there is nowadays a steady rush and enthusiasm for computer-oriented learning. The global popularity of the computer over the past decade has brought about the innovative uses of computers in educational and foreign language teaching and learning (Belz & kinginger, 2003); with the advance of the technology, more interactive uses of CALL and the increase in the integration of various evolved (Pusack & Lotto, 1990).

CALL is a relatively new academic field that includes highly interactive and communicative support for different language skills including extensive use of the internet. It is a new issue in both computer and linguistic science which offers good promises to teachers, material developers, linguists, and computer researchers. Hence, there are various peripheral applications for computers in the educational domain. In the EFL settings, CALL programs can improve the learning speed, individualized instruction, administration, and efficiency the notion of using computers in foreign language learning and teaching was brought about by the rapid advent of overwhelming computation (Chambers & Davies, 2001). Therefore, language instructors had to adapt their teaching methods to the new ways of FL instruction using computers. The computer focuses on the user’s progress, the possible mistakes, and problems and leads the learner to adapt its pace to the learner’s and learning results she/he has achieved.

As it is known, English has four main skills namely: Listening, Reading, Speaking and writing. The main goal of teaching these skills is to enable students to interact successfully with native and non-native users of English in a variety of social and academic settings.

Reading is considered as the most important skill. Reading is an essential skill for students which enable them to acquire knowledge and develop their academic areas. The essential aim of teaching reading is to train students to read efficiently and quickly in order to get information and meaning from the written material with full understanding and enjoyment.

Reading is one of the crucial language skills for EFL language learners, for academic success, and for professional development. It is widely known that learners learning style and pace of learning can vary significantly even if they belong to the same language learning groups. Even, during the classes dealing with reading comprehension, learners cannot develop their skills as they have to wait for their classmates to complete the assigned task to all learners. The application of computers help students work at their own pace through which teachers can assess the needs and problems of ability to select the type of reading comprehension test based on their preferences, CALL activities are also more interesting, challenging

بررسی نقش pH نهایی محلول بر فرآیند رشد و آرایش لایه های نانو ساختار …

……………………………. 46

4-2)بررسی خواص فیزیکی لایه های نازک.NiSe……. 46

4-2-1) پراش اشعه ایکس………………….. 46

4-2-2) میکروسکوپ الکترونی روبشی…………. 49

4-3) بررسی خواص نوری لایه نازک سلنید نیکل…. 54

4-3-1) گاف انرژی………………………. 55

4-3-2) تعیین گاف انرژی…………………. 55

4-4) بحث و نتیجه گیری………………….. 61

4-5)پیشنهادات…………………………. 62

منابع و مراجع

منابع ومراجع………………………….. 63

فصل اول

جدول1-1) معرفی برخی خصوصیات از چند نیمرسانای مهم 16

فصل دوم

جدول 2-1) دادههای پراش پرتو ایکس فیلم های NiSو NiSe 25

فصل سوم

جدول3-1) مشخصات پودر و محلول اولیه جهت تهیه محلول نیترات نیکل 39

جدول 3-2) مواد اولیه برای تهیه سدیم سلنوسولفات 41

فصل چهارم

جدول4-1 گاف انرژی لایه های نازک NiSe در سه pH متفاوت 56

فصل اول

شكل 1-1) تصویر هندسی دوربین پودری دبای – شرر…. 10

شکل1-2) روند حبس حاملهای بار در نانو مواد… 13

شکل1-3) گاف نواری نیمرسانای گاف مستقیم وگاف غیر مستقیم 17

شکل1-4) ترازهای انرژی گسسته شده و گاف انرژی افزایش یافته نانو ذرات…………………………………. 21

فصل دوم

شکل2-1) طیف جذب اپتیکی فیلم نازک NiS،(a) فیلم نازک NiSe رسوبگیری شده بر روی فلوراید کلسیم در دمای اتاق(b) …. 26

شکل2-2) نمودارهای جذب نیکل سلنید تهیه شده با: روش اول(a)- روش دوم(b)

شکل2-3 نمودار XRD نانو ذرات نیکل سلنید تهیه شده با روش اول(a)- روش دوم

شکل2-4) تصویر نانو ذرات سلنید نیکل تهیه شده با میکروسکوپ الکترونی روبشی SEM)) است با روش اول……………… 30

شکل2-5) تصویر نانو ذرات سلنید نیکل تهیه شده با میکروسکوپ الکترونی روبشی (SEM) به روش دوم…………………. 30

شکل2-6) تصویر نانو ذرات سلنید نیکل تهیه شده با میکروسکوپ الکترونی روبشی (SEM) به روش سوم…………………. 31

فصل سوم

شکل3-1) رسوبگیری به روش حمام شیمیایی…….. 36

شکل3-2)دستگاه التراسونیک……………….. 38

شکل3-3)تغیر رنگ نیکل با افزودن تدریجی آمونیاک 40

شکل(3-4) تهیه محلول سلنو سولفیت…………. 41

شکل3-5) pH متر دیجیتالی………………… 42

شکل 3- 6)رنگ محلول نهایی در pHهای متفاوت…. 43

شکل3-7) لایه نازک نیکل سلنید درpHهای متفاوت.. 43

فصل چهارم

شکل4-1)نمودارXRDنانو ذره سلنید نیکل با47/11=pH 48

شکل4-2) نمودارXRDنانو ذره سلنید نیکل با12/12=pH 48

شکل4-3) نمودارXRDنانو ذره سلنید نیکل با38/12=pH 49

شکل 4-4) تصویرSEM نمونه در37/11=pH……….. 51

شکل 4-5) تصویرSEM نمونه در12/12=pH……………. 53

شکل 4-6) تصویرSEM نمونه در38/12= pH……….. 54

شکل 4-7 )نمودار طیف جذبی سلنید نیکل در دمایC˚35 با سه pH متفاوت 55

شکل 4-8 )گاف انرژی در47/11= pHو زمان رسوبگیری14 ساعته 57

شکل 4-9)گاف انرژی در12/12=pH و زمان رسوبگیری14 ساعته 57

شکل4-10) گاف انرژی در38/12=pH و زمان رسوبگیری14 ساعته 58

شکل4-11) گاف انرژی در47/11= pHو زمان رسوبگیری38 ساعته 58

شکل4-12) گاف انرژی در12/12=pH و زمان رسوبگیری38ساعته 59

شکل4-13) گاف انرژی در38/12=pH و زمان رسوبگیری38 ساعته 59

شکل4-14) گاف انرژی در47/11= pHو زمان رسوبگیری62 ساعته 60

شکل4-15) گاف انرژی در12/12=pH و زمان رسوبگیری62ساعته 60

شکل4-16) گاف انرژی در38/12=pH و زمان رسوبگیری62 ساعته 61

فصل اول

کلیات

نانو چیست؟

پیشوند نانو در کلمهی نانو فناوری به معنای یک بیلیونیوم (9- 10) است. نانو فناوری به ساختارهای گوناگون موادی میپردازد که دارای ابعادی در حدود یک بیلیونیم متر میباشد. در حالی که کلمه نانو فناوری نسبتاً جدید است، وجود مجموعههای فعال و ساختارهایی با ابعاد نانو متری تازگی ندارند و در حقیقت چنین ساختارهایی به اندازه طول عمر حیات در روی زمین وجود داشتهاند. آبالون[1] که نوعی نرم تن یا حلزون است، پوستههای صدفی بسیار سختی را میسازد که دارای رویههای درونی با نمای قوس و قزحی میباشد. چنین رویههایی از آجرهای سختی از کلسیم کربنات با ابعاد نانو درست شدهاند که به کمک چسبی مرکب از مخلوطی از یک کربوهیدرات و پروتئین در کنار هم قرار گرفتهاند. ترکهای بوجود آمده در سطح بیرونی، به دلیل وجود آجرهایی با ساختار نانو، قادر به گسترش در سرتاسر پوسته صدفی نمیباشند. پوستههای صدفی، نمایشی طبیعی از ساختاری را نشان میدهند که از ذراتی به ابعاد نانو درست شده است و میتواند بسیار سخت باشد[1].

روند نانو فناوری، به طور خاص در ساخت نانو نقاط طلا، کار جدیدی نیست. بیشتر شیشههای رنگی پنجرههایی که در کلیساهای دوره رنسانس یافت میشد و برخی از ظروف سفالی جلا دار و صیقل یافته مربوط به دوران سفالی باستان، به این واقعیت متکی بود که خصوصیات مقیاس نانوی مواد از خصوصیات بزرگ مقیاس آنها متفاوت هستند بویژه ذرات طلای نانو مقیاس می توانند نارنجی، بنفش، قرمز یا سبز رنگ باشند که وابسته به اندازه آنهاست. به عبارتی نخستین نانو فناوران در حقیقت شیشهکاران ریخته گریهای دوره رنسانس

[1] . Abalon