Discourse Analysis
Faeze Soleimanifard; Biook Behnam; Saeideh Ahangari
Abstract
Teaching and learning languages via the Internet is becoming increasingly common all over the world and therefore, the experts growingly debate around the positive or negative effects of online education. The present study aimed to critically investigate into science and technology lessons of the VOA ...
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Teaching and learning languages via the Internet is becoming increasingly common all over the world and therefore, the experts growingly debate around the positive or negative effects of online education. The present study aimed to critically investigate into science and technology lessons of the VOA English Learning Website in a two-year interval, which claims to teach new words and phrases through the authentic VOA world news. Applying van Dijk’s (1998) Ideological Square Model of CDA, the researchers attempted to critically analyze the representation of the key term the United States within the collected VOA news story transcripts in order to observe whether the Website was trying to manipulate the learners’ minds through in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. The findings revealed that the VOA online lessons promoted certain American political, economic, cultural, social, and ideological values through particular discursive structures that tend to describe in-group members in a positive or at least neutral manner. Thus, as McPhail’s (2006) Electronic Colonialism Theory assumes such free online lessons on the VOA Website, which is a core country multimedia giant, struggle to convert and capture the attitudes, desires, beliefs, faiths, lifestyles, and consumer behavior of the other countries. Therefore, it is highly recommended that English teachers and learners try to inspect the content, reflect on the purposes, and evaluate the merits of similar online authentic materials before and while applying them to facilitate the language learning process.
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.