چکیده:
This study set out to examine the effect of explicit consciousness-raising of autonomous learning activities on a group of students’ General English achievement test scores following a mixed methods design. At the beginning of the study, four intact classes were selected based on their availability, of which one class was assigned to the experimental group and the others to the control groups, through random assignment. The treatment groups received a 10 session treatment on a number of autonomous learning activities to be done outside the classroom after the midterm exam which functioned as the pretest. At the end of the semester and after the treatment, all the four groups took the final exam (the posttest). An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare the posttest scores for treatment and no-treatment groups, and one-way ANOVA was run followed by Tukey HSD as a follow-up measure to find out the probable differences between the groups. To check the probable significant differences between students’ pretest and posttest scores, a set of paired-samples t-tests was run separately for the experimental group and control group 1. Then, the researchers conducted descriptive analysis related to the questionnaire items and checked the correlation of all the data taken from the tests and the questionnaire items. The results indicated that the treatment significantly led to better test scores in this context, where the eta squared statistic indicated a large effect size. In addition, the semi-structured interview data confirmed the results.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Objectives and Significance of the Study The present research is an attempt to investigate the effect of explicit consciousness-raising of autonomous learning activities on the students’ performance on achievements tests which include vocabulary and reading comprehension.
Since the design of the present study is mixed methods research, and considering its novelty in the Iranian EFL context, one of its advantages would be expanding the depth and breadth of the findings by using the strengths of different methods which in turn might lead to new insights about students’ awareness of their outside autonomous learning activities and the results would influence the present viewpoints of language teachers, curriculum designers, institutes, etc.
Following the Socio Cultural Theory, Kaur (2017) conducted a study on a group of Malay tertiary learners to probe how far social sources, such as peers, impact their learning of vocabulary items in their preparation for the Malaysian University English Test (MUET).
The studies reviewed above reveals the need for further research in the area of learner autonomy and considering all the above-mentioned points, the present researchers intended to see whether explicit consciousness-raising of autonomous learning activities to EFL learners would increase their performance on achievement tests.
Since the present study enjoyed a mixed methods design, the researchers tried to expand the depth and breadth of the findings by conducting descriptive analysis of the data collected from the questionnaire items and a semi-structured focus-group interview which encompassed 10 open- ended questions directly related to the autonomous learning activities (treatments received by the students in the treatment groups).