Investigating the Relationship between Application of Typographical Features in Designing Exam Papers, EFL Students' Performance and Evaluation of their Teachers

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assistant professor of TEFL, department of foreign languages and linguistics, Shiraz University, Iran

2 (Corresponding author) Ph. D candidate of TEFL, department of foreign languages and linguistics, Shiraz University, Iran.

Abstract

Undoubtedly, today's world is multi-modal and multi-literate, therefore, it is very important for school teachers and university instructors to be aware of different types of meaning negotiation and to consider them in both teaching and constructing test items. The present study was aimed at investigating the relationship between the application of typographical features in designing exam papers and EFL students' performance and evaluation of their teachers. For this to achieve, the framework presented by Serafini and Clausen (2012), as one of the most dominant frameworks of discourse analysis was used for analyzing and interpreting typographical elements. To conduct the study which benefited from both qualitative and quantitative approaches, 30 exams in Microsoftword format were collected from 5 experienced foreign language instructors at the department of foreign languages and linguistics, Shiraz University.  It seems that the use of typographical features in exam papers was significantly affected by the APA format which instructors followed in writing their research papers. Although, some features such as weight and slope were used in some tests, they seemed to be used just for aesthetic purposes and not to show the saliency of the elements. Considering each instructor's exam papers, it was found that typographical features had a statistically significant relationship with either students' total scores or teachers' evaluation scores. 

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History

  • Receive Date: 24 January 2017
  • Revise Date: 22 May 2017
  • Accept Date: 16 July 2017

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