Education
Mahnaz Mostafaei Alaei; Mahya Alaei
Abstract
Although the concept of favoritism has received attention in various areas of study such as management, business, and medical settings, this line of research has scarcely been explored in teacher education and especially in L2 acquisition context. The current study aimed to design and validate a scale ...
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Although the concept of favoritism has received attention in various areas of study such as management, business, and medical settings, this line of research has scarcely been explored in teacher education and especially in L2 acquisition context. The current study aimed to design and validate a scale that could explore English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ perceptions of academic favoritism. After developing the 40-item Academic Favoritism Questionnaire (AFQ), it was administered to the target participants of the study, and the required data were collected from 154 Iranian EFL teachers selected through non-random convenience sampling. The results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed eight underlying components of the model: damaging collaborative learning, educational inequality, teachers’ biased attitudes, teacher-student conflicts, learning barriers, unfair students’ treatments, negative learners’ experience, and unhealthy academic atmosphere. The study findings may shed light on this obscure topic in the field of education. The study provides important implications for different education stakeholders including researchers, teacher educators, supervisors, EFL teachers, and L2 learners as the findings could increase their awareness of favoritism and its likely influence on their professional practices and environment.
Language Skills
Mahnaz Mostafaei Alaei; Amir Kardoust; Abdulbaset Saeedian
Abstract
To better illuminate the link between scaffolding and visual aids, this quasi-experimental study attempted to scaffold an intact group of 14 intermediate-level Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners through providing graphs with the aim of enhancing their writing ability. Ensuring lack ...
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To better illuminate the link between scaffolding and visual aids, this quasi-experimental study attempted to scaffold an intact group of 14 intermediate-level Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners through providing graphs with the aim of enhancing their writing ability. Ensuring lack of familiarity with eight unknown words, they were scaffolded through visual images. The scaffolding process included three respective phases of contingency, fading, and transferring. As post-tests for checking the learners’ understanding of and opinion about the graph scaffolding process, a researcher-made questionnaire and a semi-structured interview followed the treatment phase. The results of the questionnaire showed that visual scaffolding aided the learners to better grasp the meaning of the target vocabularies and even some grammatical points in the materials. Moreover, the visual scaffolding helped them to produce the material in different modalities. The results also indicated all the three characteristics of scaffolding were met by the visual scaffolding. Finally, the interview results revealed the learners had favorable attitude toward visual scaffolding and considered the third phase of the scaffolding as the most challenging one. It can be concluded that the findings gave credence to the effectiveness of visual scaffolding in improving EFL students’ writing ability.