ESP & EAP
Masoud Azizi
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed all universities to offer all programs online, but not all instructors were prepared for such an abrupt transformation. Online education can be very challenging both to the instructors and the institutions and has several subtleties that make it quite different from the face-to-face ...
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The COVID-19 pandemic pushed all universities to offer all programs online, but not all instructors were prepared for such an abrupt transformation. Online education can be very challenging both to the instructors and the institutions and has several subtleties that make it quite different from the face-to-face programs. There exists an urgent need for studies examining the effectiveness of such programs being offered amid the pandemic in comparison with the same courses held face-to-face. As a result, the present study was an attempt to compare the effectiveness of an online EAP course with that of the same course being offered face-to-face in terms of its three components, namely vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension. Sixty-eight students in two groups of online and face-to-face classes took part in this study with a pretest-posttest design. While the two groups were not significantly difference at the onset of the study, the results of the SPANOVAs run showed a significant difference in the case of the grammar component, but not the other two, with the face-to-face group outperforming the online one. The follow-up interviews revealed that learners in online classes often have little interaction with their instructors and peers, and teachers cannot keep learners engaged and active during the class as it is often conducted in the form of a monologue lecture. All this indicates that an online program is not a translation of a face-to-face curriculum into an online format, but it enjoys numerous intricacies that need to be considered by all those involved.
Language Skills
Masoud Azizi; Majid Nemati
Abstract
It is often wrongly assumed that the provision of teacher corrective feedback naturally entails learners' attendance to and application of it, but learners have repeatedly been reported not to pay attention to teacher feedback due to lack of motivation and the distracting effect of the grades they receive. ...
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It is often wrongly assumed that the provision of teacher corrective feedback naturally entails learners' attendance to and application of it, but learners have repeatedly been reported not to pay attention to teacher feedback due to lack of motivation and the distracting effect of the grades they receive. The present study was an attempt to tackle this problem. To do so, the technique named Draft-Specific Scoring (Nemati & Azizi, 2013) was implemented. In DSS, learners receive both teacher feedback and grades on their first drafts; however, they are given up to two opportunities to apply teacher feedback and revise their drafts accordingly. The scores they receive may improve as a result of the quality of revisions they make. Students’ final scores will be the mean score of the grades they receive on the final drafts of each assignment. 57 Iranian intermediate students attending the ‘Advanced Writing’ course at University of Teheran, with an age range of 21 to 27 took part in this study. The gain score analysis and the SPANOVA used showed the superiority of DSS over more traditional methods in improving learners’ overall writing proficiency as well as fluency and accuracy of their written texts. Moreover, no adverse effect was observed for the treatment group regarding the grammatical complexity of their texts. This indicates that in order to make teacher feedback work, there are a number of intervening variables one needs to consider, the most important of which being learners’ motivation to attend to teacher feedback.