EFL Lecturers’ Perceptions of Teacher Effectiveness and Teacher Evaluation in Iranian universities

Teacher effectiveness research (TER), as a multifaceted phenomenon, is a seminal part of most educational agendas upon which a successful teacher appraisal system tends to be contingent. Whereas there is a wealth of research on teacher effectiveness in mainstream (general) education, there is a dearth of studies on it in second/foreign language education, thereby sowing seeds of doubts apropos of the extent to which findings in mainstream education can be applied to L2 education. A paucity of cutting-edge research in the Middle-eastern context is another missing piece of the jigsaw testifying to a need for further research on teacher effectiveness. Taking such lacunae into consideration, this study endeavours to inquire into EFL teacher effectiveness in the Iranian higher education context as its main objective. With this end in view, a number of research questions are formulated whereby the main constructs are identified. This study is aimed at investigating lecturers’ understanding of teacher effectiveness and its pertinent appraisal model, and more specifically, delving into their perceptions of teacher appraisal in Iran. Measures of evaluation, opportunities of which lecturers can avail themselves to improve their effectiveness, and lecturers’ ideal appraisal system are other areas which are examined in this research. In this study, a mixed methods exploratory sequential design is adopted to address the proposed research questions. Close-ended and open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interview are the instruments utilised for data collection. The collected quantitative and qualitative data are analysed with the help of SPSS and NVivo, respectively. The analysis of both sets of data culminated in the emergence of six major themes, i.e. lecturers’ understanding of teacher effectiveness and the qualities of an effective teacher, measures of evaluation, opportunities and strategies conducive to improving teacher effectiveness, the Iranian appraisal system, non-teacher-controlled factors impacting on teacher effectiveness, as well as lecturers’ perceptions of an ideal appraisal system. Following a myriad of ideas garnered through data analysis, a differentiated appraisal model informed by lecturers’ voices is proposed. Based on the findings which provided evidence for some imperfections in the nexus between policy and implementation, this study concludes that there is still some room for improvement in teacher appraisal in 3 Iran. Important amongst others are better alignment between teacher appraisal and teachers’ professional development needs, transparency of the appraisal, and use of all types and forms of teacher evaluation. The study brings to the fore further implications, conclusions and suggestions for future research which are presented in the final chapter of this thesis

Ethical Challenges of Designing on Application for Reading Instruction Management System (RIMS): A Phenomenological Study

This study aimed at identifying the ethical challenges encountered when developing a language education virtual environment that acts as a smart platform for managing reading comprehension instruction for EFL/ESL learners. Since Reading Instruction Management System (RIMS) is going to observe, monitor, and supervise the learners' out-of-class activities and help teachers improve their teaching quality, it has to seriously handle humane elements which have not been seriously debated in the related literature on language education software development so far. To this end, this study has devised a qualitative study to further explore the aspects of ethical considerations that have to be considered when developing technological aid. Accordingly, 14 teachers and 14 students were selected based on the purposive sampling method concerning the condition that they will be among the teachers and learners who will use RIMS when it is officially launched in the institution. They were asked to take part in interviews which were held on a one-on-one basis and in Persian, the participants' mother tongue. The data were codded and the emerged ones were then classified under four themes including the challenges related to the teachers, learners, and institutions. Each of these has several aspects which are discussed, accordingly

The Effectiveness and Rank of Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback Strategies on Written Grammatical Performance: Monolingual Persian vis-à-vis Bilingual Turkmen EFL Learners

Much uncertainty still exists about the possible role of myriads external and internal mediating variables such as language backgrounds and ethnicities in the process of corrective feedback (CF). To address the issue, 79 monolingual Persians and 79 bilingual Turkmens aged between 13 and 18 from two language institutes in Golestan Province, Iran participated in the study comprising three experimental and a control group each. Pretests revealed the learners’ grammatical errors based on which the experimental groups were provided with different strategies of metalinguistic CF, namely mid-focused oral metalinguistic CF (OMCF), written metalinguistic CF (WMCF), and oral/written metalinguistic CF (OWMCF) on their five most recurrent grammatical errors while the control groups received none. Following significant Kruskal-Wallis test results, the Conover’s pairwise comparison test was employed to exhibit differences among CF strategies. In monolingual Persians and bilingual Turkmens, all the experimental groups significantly outperformed the control groups. Mid-focused OMCF and OWMCF had significant effects on the reduction of Persians’ errors, but for Turkmens, all the CF strategies exerted a significant reduction of errors. The effectiveness rank of the CF strategies investigated through Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) selected OMCF as the best strategy for monolingual Persians while for bilingual Turkmens, WMCF ranked first. This ranking was highly stable for 10000 iterations changing the weights up to 50%. The outcomes of the research might be of help to EFL learners, EFL teachers of bilingual learners, syllabus designers, and materials developers, while opening doors to further pertinent studies

The Role Of Knowledge Management In Increasing Quality

This work limits the field of investigation to challenges and barriers of knowledge management within the organizations

Turning knowledge into wisdom: Improving the reading comprehension ability of EFL students through thinking analytically and reading critically

Abstract. This study explores the ways in which Critical Reading (CR) practices can improve reading comprehension ability of Iranian EFL students. In the present study, the following null hypothesis was proposed: The application of critical reading has no significant effect on improving the reading comprehension ability of Iranian EFL students. The proposed design was a pretest-posttest groups design. Hence, a group of seventy homogeneous students were selected. They were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. Then both groups enjoyed a series of similar instructions except that the students in experimental group were required to express their own opinions about and react critically to the reading passage they had just read. The students in order to express their own ideas about and react critically to the passage had to activate and use their background knowledge. Finally, in order to capture the probable significant relationship between critical reading and reading comprehension a t-test was used. The results rejected the null hypothesis, and indicated that critical reading practices positively affected students' reading comprehension