Abstract Despite their mastery over commercially popular textbooks, many EFL learners feel communicatively incompetent in real communicative interactions outside the classroom context. This data-driven study aims at exploring the roots of this educational ill by interviewing nine experienced English language teachers teaching in private language schools of Mashhad, the capital city of Khorasan province, Iran. An initial round of data collection and analysis yielded transfer value as the missing link in ELT materials, which accounts for learners’ communicative incompetence. Iterative data collection and analysis and the constant comparative technique presented a thick description of what transfer value is, related it to its underlying causes and predicted its implications for teaching, learning and materials development. Furthermore, importing the transcription of the participants’ perspectives and the emerged codes and categories into MAXQDA yielded: (1) a semantic network which shows that the final conceptualisation of teachers’ perspectives enjoys descriptive, explanatory and predictive adequacy; (2) a code relation browser that clearly shows the degree of overlap or concurrence of the codes; and (3) a set of charts that illustrate the degree to which the emerged categories are grounded in the participants’ perspectives. The findings have clear implications for materials developers and practitioners.

中文翻译：

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ELT材料中缺少的链接：数据驱动的概念化

摘要尽管精通商业流行的教科书，但许多EFL学习者在课堂背景之外的实际交流中仍感到交流能力不足。这项数据驱动的研究旨在通过采访伊朗霍拉桑省省会城市马什哈德的私立语言学校的九名经验丰富的英语教师来探究这种教育疾病的根源。最初的一轮数据收集和分析产生了转移价值，这是ELT材料中缺少的环节，这说明了学习者的沟通能力不足。迭代数据的收集和分析以及不断进行的比较技术对什么是转移价值进行了详尽的描述，并将其与潜在原因相关联，并预测了其对教学，学习和材料开发的意义。此外，将参与者的观点和出现的代码和类别的转录输入到MAXQDA中产生：（1）一个语义网络，表明教师观点的最终概念化具有描述性，解释性和预测性的充分性；（2）代码关系浏览器，清楚地显示代码的重叠或并发程度；（3）一组图表，这些图表说明了出现的类别在参与者的观点中所基于的程度。该发现对材料开发人员和从业人员具有明显的含义。（2）代码关系浏览器，清楚地显示代码的重叠或并发程度；（3）一组图表，这些图表说明了出现的类别在参与者的观点中所基于的程度。该发现对材料开发人员和从业人员具有明显的含义。（2）代码关系浏览器，清楚地显示代码的重叠或并发程度；（3）一组图表，这些图表说明了出现的类别在参与者的观点中所基于的程度。该发现对材料开发人员和从业人员具有明显的含义。