Hamidah Yamat

Strategies Employed by Iranian EFL Freshman University Students in Extensive Listening: A Qualitative Research.

This paper discusses the findings of a qualitative study on the strategies employed by Iranian freshmen in extensive listening. A group of 12 freshman university students were purposefully selected based on their scores in the Oxford Placement Test administered. Four learners were identified as advanced, four as intermediate, and four as lower intermediate. A semi-structured interview was then conducted from which six of them were identified for the think-aloud protocol to elicit the strategies they employed. The analysis of the interviewees’ interview and think-aloud data generated six major themes. One theme – concentration/attention – described metacognitive strategies; three themes – visualization, note-taking, and inferencing by guessing and using cues and background noise – described cognitive strategies; and two themes – communicating and skipping – described additional strategies. The implication of the study is that these strategies used in extensive listening by English as a foreign language learners need to be explicitly taught and the learners also need to listen to their target language more and more to improve their listening skills by using more top-down strategies.

ESL writing self-efficacy: contribution to ESL writing skills development

This case study aims to understand how writing self-efficacy level contributes to the development of learners’ writing skills. The participants of this study consist of three form four learners and their English teacher. Here, teacher’s assistance would act as the mechanism to develop the learners’ writing self-efficacy. In order to gather information on teacher’s assistance, learners’ writing skills and writing self-efficacy, various types of data were collected: observation, questionnaire and interview. Though this research on self-efficacy and writing is not a new area in educational research, the findings still can be the added to the existing body of knowledge. Based on the finding derived from this study, two theoretical implications are discussed in this paper. The first part of theoretical implication centred on the reciprocal relationship of cognitive and behavioural engagement. Then the second part discussed the inclusion of teacher’s assistance component to the self-efficacy framework. Both of these implications had become the additional components to the existing framework which was proposed by Linnenbrink and Pintrich (2003).

The Effect of Teacher's Assistance on Malaysian Rural L Writing Self-efficacy: A Case Study

The purpose of the study is to explore the Malaysian rural learners self-efficacy in writing after assistance given by a teacher. The social cognitive theory aid socio-cultural theory are used as the theoretical framework to pursue the discussion on the effects of teacher’s assistance on learners writing self-efficacy. A case study approach is adopted where three learners and a teacher were chosen from a form four class through purposive sampling. Learnei-s’ Titing self-efficacy is evaluated using a writing self-efficacy scale adapted from Bottomley. Henk and Melnick (1998) and also classroom observation. Wang and Pape (2007) categories were used as guidelines to analyze observation data in order to understand the participants self-efficacy phenomena in their learning to write. Overall, this study places a heavy emphasis on the perceptions and actions of the selected form four learners and teacher through non-participant classroom observations, interviews with each learner and teacher.