Abstract:
Describing the trends and developments in language teaching practice and research
has been of considerable interest to the practitioners and researchers involved in the
field. This study sought to provide a rough outline of Iranian language teaching
research by analyzing a large collection of titles from language teaching research
reports of Iranian researchers published in English-language academic journals. The
2612 titles came from articles published from winter 2006 to summer 2016. The
main source of the articles was 21 journals published in Iran or international journals
which featured a considerable number of Iranian authors. In several exploratory
rounds of content analysis, the article titles in five language teaching journals were
examined to identify their topic areas. Then, by collapsing some of the topics, a final
list of topics was prepared. Then, the titles in all journals were examined and the
topic area or areas which each covered were tallied. To triangulate this subjective
analysis and furnish another frequency report for the topic areas of research in
language teaching, the titles were submitted to the text-analyzing software AntConc
3.3.5w (Anthony, 2012), which put out two lists: a frequency-tagged list of two- to
seven-word chunks, and a frequency-tagged list of key conceptual words. The
subjective content analysis and the machine-based analysis together demonstrated
how different sub-fields of language teaching were emphasized and received
attention in Iran. The findings help researchers become more informed about the
Iranian context and set better priorities. The limitations and weaknesses of the study
and some caveats are also discussed.
Machine summary:
Mapping the Landscape of Iranian Language Teaching Research: A Corpus-Study of the Titles of English-Language Research Articles Hadi Farjami1* 1*Department of English Language and Literature, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran, hfarjami@semnan.
To triangulate this subjective analysis and furnish another frequency report for the topic areas of research in language teaching, the titles were submitted to the text-analyzing software AntConc 3.
Collecting data from sources which were sometimes not quite well organized, defining criteria for what is or is not about language teaching, deciding about categories and how fine-tuned they should be, reviewing a large body of text, the tedious course of examining a large number of article titles one by one, the non-determinate nature of the data categorization and ascription process, and the inherent subjectivity with this review were enough to inhibit a researcher from undertaking this job.
Soler (2007) examined titles in research and review papers in two contrasting fields - biological sciences (biology, medicine, and biochemistry) and social sciences (linguistics, anthropology, and psychology) and identified 37 Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies 6(4), 31- 58, (2019) four types of structures: noun phrases, questions, compound structures, and full-sentences.
Table 1 (Appendix 1) presents information about the source journals of the database, including the publishers, the time span of the titles, the number of Farjami / Mapping the landscape of Iranian language teaching research ….
When the researcher was sure that the categories were inclusive enough of main language teaching concepts and 39 Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies 6(4), 31- 58, (2019) issues, the whole bank of titles was content-analyzed (See Table 3 for the final categories which are represented in the databank).