Reflection, Resilience and Role Stress among Iranian EFL Teachers: A Mixed Methods Study

The present study is an attempt to discover the relationships among reflection, role stressors and resilience. To this end, a mixed-method approach was adopted. In the quantitative phase, 122 EFL teachers completed three questionnaires namely English Language Teaching Reflection Inventory, Teacher Role Stressors Scale and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. The results of correlation indicated that there is a significant positive relation between reflection and resilience. However, the correlation between reflection and role stressors was found to be negative. Multiple regression revealed that of the five components of reflection, metacognitive and critical reflection are significant predictors of role ambiguity while only critical reflection can predict role conflict. Metacognitive and practical reflection were also found to be significant predictors of teachers’ resilience. In the qualitative phase, fifteen face-to-face interviews were conducted with the participants who had also taken part in the first phase of the study. Data were transcribed, coded and thematically structured based on a grounded theoretical perspective. The two main themes which emerged out of the interviews confirmed that reflection leads to resilience through strengthening teachers’ professional identity while it also leads to resilience or stress through making teachers prepared and knowledgeable. The possible justifications of the obtained results as well as the implications of this study for teaching English and teacher education in EFL context are discussed

Score Variation in Multiple-Choice Tests of Grammar: On the Effect of Gender and Stem Type

This paper examines the effect of gender and type of stem on Iranian test takers’ performance on the grammar section of a nation-wide language proficiency test. In so doing, the scores of 2931 examinees (1107 female and 1824 male) who sat Tarbiat Modares English proficiency test were obtained. The examinees’ scores on three types of MC grammar items with different kinds of stems (i.e., blank filling, error recognition, and cloze) were compared to see if the type of stem has any effect on performance. Grammar scores of males and females were also compared to see if there is an effect for gender on the examinees’ performance on the grammar test in general and on its three item types in particular. The results indicated that test takers performed better on cloze items than the other two types. It was also found that females outperformed males on both the whole test, and also on items with blank filling and cloze types of stems. Due to the particularity of the context and the small effect sizes found, the study calls for more research to be conducted on this topic

Gender-preferential Linguistic Elements in Applied Linguistics Research Papers: Partial Evaluation of a Model of Gendered Language

This article intended to investigate whether the gender-preferential linguistic elements found by Argomon, Koppel, Fine and Shimoni (2003) show the same gender-linked frequencies in applied linguistics research papers written by non-native speakers of English. In so doing, a sample of 32 articles from different journals was collected and the proportion of the targeted features to the whole number of words was calculated. The results indicated that, although the gender-linked patterns of use for many of those features were also observed in our sample, the difference between men and women in the frequency of using those elements was not statistically significant. This non-significant difference shows that either the confinements of genre or those of using a second language or both are keeping L2 writers from expressing their gender to its fullest capacity in the texts they produce