Language Education
Zohreh Gooniband Shooshtari; Zohreh Sadat Naseri
Abstract
Considering the importance of online classes in the Covid-19 era, this study surveyed the satisfaction of English language teachers in secondary schools with teaching on the Shad educational network in 2020 and 2021. This study aimed to explore the teachers’ attitudes towards the opportunities ...
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Considering the importance of online classes in the Covid-19 era, this study surveyed the satisfaction of English language teachers in secondary schools with teaching on the Shad educational network in 2020 and 2021. This study aimed to explore the teachers’ attitudes towards the opportunities and challenges of the Shad application and to provide the educational community with solutions to overcome the obstacles in the application. A mixed-methods research design was employed, involving 55 high school English language teachers. The quantitative data were collected through a questionnaire that was adapted from several questionnaires in the field of online education (the validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by EFL instructors of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz and its reliability was estimated at 0.84 using Cronbach’s alpha, α = 0.84). The qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews. Results indicated that the use of the Shad application increased the parents’ responsibility and involvement in the student’s learning process. The identification of capable teachers and the utilization of teachers’ experiences were among the opportunities of the Shad application. The teachers commented the biggest problem with using the Shad application was that it was too slow to transfer and learn.
Parya Razmdideh; Zohreh Sadat Naseri
Abstract
One of language learning difficulties for Persian speaking learners is the pronunciation of sounds that do not exist in their mother tongue. These sounds include English consonants /w/, /θ/, /ð/, and /ŋ/. Due to the interference of the first language (L1) and the second language (L2), most ...
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One of language learning difficulties for Persian speaking learners is the pronunciation of sounds that do not exist in their mother tongue. These sounds include English consonants /w/, /θ/, /ð/, and /ŋ/. Due to the interference of the first language (L1) and the second language (L2), most Persian speaking learners replace the unfamiliar sound in L2 with a similar one in L1. This research, adopting a descriptive-analytic approach, aims to investigate the substitution of each English consonant with their corresponding consonants in Persian through argumentation around their constraints and ranking of Optimality theory in order to avoid interference in the later stages of language learning. To this end, 50 seventh-graders (middle school students) were randomly-selected from those who had not previously attended any English class outside school. Then they were asked to read 10 sentences containing at least 2 words with one of the English consonants /w/, /θ/, /ð/ or /ŋ/. The results show that these students substitute English consonants /w/, /T/, /D/, and /N/ with their corresponding counterparts in Persian [v], [t], [d], and [Nɡ], respectively. In some cases, depending on the consonant position in the syllable, they are replaced by another similar consonants in Persian, as [s] and [z] instead of /T/ and /D/ at coda position.
