درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between spatial memory and Symptoms of Neuroticism in men and women visitors of a flower garden. The participants were chosen by an available sampling method among people who visited flower garden, located in Isfahan, Iran in October 2016. Subjects (woman=36, man=24) were asked to specify approximate locations of eight sites in the flower Garden on the incomplete map of flower garden after visiting the garden. Then, the subjects filled a demographic questionnaire and a short form of Eysenck introversion-extraversion questionnaire. The results showed that the means of spatial memory in men are significantly more than those of women (F= 11.46, p<0.05) and also, neuroticism in men is significantly less than that in women (F=7.22, P<0.05). Furthermore, positive relationship between age and spatial memory (r= 0.41, p<0.01) and negative relationship between neuroticism and spatial memory have been discovered (r= -0.59, p<0.01). According to the results, it can be concluded that neuroticism avoids paying attention to the environment and it causes memory function slump.

Using chunks is said to bring about fluency into speech as they save speakers from constructing their speech upon a word-by-word basis. Particle phrases (A term coined in this study to refer to phrasal verbs and their derived and deviated nouns and adjectives) are also among those chunks. This study seeks to see whether memorizing them will affect EFL learners' spoken fluency. To this end, 51 Persian speaking participants (37 females, 14 males) who were selected from 3 intact classes based on their performance in narrative video-based retelling constituted the sample of the study. The study was a quasi-experimental one in design because of the non-random assignment of the participants into either of the experimental and control groups. They were assigned to three groups: two experimental and one control. Both experimental groups received the same instructions on metaphorical concepts of particles (out, off, etc.) in the 150 phrasal verbs available in Garnier and Schmitt’s (2015) frequency list. They both engaged in self-generated contexts except that those in the first came up with hands-on task of drawing sketches, too. The control group, however, received none of the above treatments. The results of a one-way ANOVA procedure in the immediate post-test indicated that the participants in the first experimental group significantly outperformed not only the control group, but also the second experimental group that made more relative gains than their counterparts in the control group. The outperformance of the first experimental group was also found in the delayed post-test, which represented the long-term effects of the methods. The findings suggest several implications for this vital but surprisingly neglected issue of engaging students with self-generated sketches.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of using motivation strategies on EFL teachers’ motivation and reflective teaching. In order to do this, 30 Iranian female EFL teachers who were the researcher’s colleagues and expressed their willingness to participate in this study were selected. The group filled out a reflective teaching questionnaire by Akbari, Behzadpour, and Dadvand (2010) and motivation strategies questionnairre by Chastain (1988) as the pretest at the outset of the study and subsequently sat for a workshop where the researcher introduced motivation strategies and techniques to them. Following the end of the workshop, the teachers went back to their routine teaching program for 15 sessions and the researcher administered the reflectivity questionnaire and motivation strategies questionnaire as the posttest to the 30 teachers after those 15 sessions. In order to test the null hypotheses, that is to check any significant difference in the degree of the reflective teaching and motivation of the group prior to and after the treatment, a paired samples t-test was conducted in this research. The results revealed that there was a significant difference between the participants’ scores on the motivation pretest and posttest; favoring the posttest. Also,there was a significant difference between the participants’ scores on the reflective teaching pretest and posttest, favoring the posttest. Therefore, the results showed that motivation strategies significantly affect the teachers’ motivation and reflective teaching.