Among a growing body of research that examined the contradictory role of written corrective feedback (WCF) in development of L2 writing accuracy, this study investigated the possible impact of focused metalinguistic WCF on discourse markers (DMs) in writing performance of an intact group of 42 Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners over an eight-week period. In an authentic, situated

Casting light on the pros and cons of every educational program, the outcomes of an effective evaluative endeavor may serve as a guideline for education authorities interested in content enhancement schemes. Focusing on English for specific purposes (ESP) courses for engineering students, the current study sought to evaluate the efficacy of technical English pedagogy in the academic context of Iran

This study investigated the potentials of face –to- face and computer mediated conversation (CMC) as two speaking modalities on students’ engagement. To this end, 30 Iranian male intermediate EFL learners were selected on the basis of their performance on OPT (Oxford Placement Test) and assigned into the research groups. The progression of face- to- face and CMC groups from limited to elaborate engagement

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of using inquiry-based writing instruction on students’ academic writing skills. A pretest-posttest two groups quasi-experimental design was employed. Data were obtained through test, focus group discussion, and reflective journal from 62 first-year pharmacy students who were selected using comprehensive sampling. While the experimental group received

Recently, the integration of linguistics and technology has been promoted and widely used in the field of linguistics and English writing research for several purposes. One of those purposes is to evaluate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing ability by using electronic assessment tools. In the current study, an automated writing evaluation tool (Coh-Metrix) was used to indicate English-major

This study is an exploratory study, which was conducted in relation to the study of the proficiency and performance of Iranian Air Traffic Controllers: attitude, work experience, and specific Aviation English courses. Few studies have been conducted in this field. The Aviation English Courses in Iran are very similar to Content-Based Language Training (CBLT) courses. To this end, the participants were

Teacher self-efficacy has been abundantly studied. However, it seems that the consequences of teachers’ self-efficacy have not been appropriately explored yet. The research objective was to investigate the consequences of teachers’ teaching self-efficacy. The researchers used a qualitative research method. They collected the data through semi-structured interviews with 20 EFL teachers who were selected

Beginning teachers are frequently heard making observations that the knowledge and skills they have acquired on the training programmes do not come handy when they want to apply them in their real-work situations. They have also reported lacking the ability to integrate theory and practice in reality. Henceforth, teacher-educators are faced with challenges of how to proportionally balance the two strands

While the bulk of feedback studies have focused on written corrective feedback, oral feedback in teacher-student writing conferences in EFL context has been underexplored. This article investigated teacher oral feedback based on the tenets of sociocultural theory. It examined the impact of teacher-student writing conferences on students’ accuracy and frequency of cohesive devices employment. The study

In recent years, learner-centered teaching has emphasized the demand for making healthy environment where learners’ preferences, interests, personal experiences, cultural backgrounds and lifestyles are taken into account when making decisions about various characteristics of language learning/teaching The choice of topics, which are used in EFL discussion classes, is considered to play an important

The critical role of teachers suggests that assessing teacher identity construction helps teacher educators understand the changes in teachers and design materials in harmony with their needs in teacher education programs. However, only a few studies have focused on assessing pre-service teachers’ identity in the long term in Iran. To address this gap, the contribution of a pre-service teacher education

Writing is considered a very complicated task for many EFL students and Iranian EFL learners have many problems in this regard. Present study through a mixed method design, attempted to investigate the effect of Structured Collaborative (SC) pre-writing task versus Unstructured Collaborative (USC) pre-writing task on the writing ability of Iranian EFL students. Among a population of 300 freshmen learners

Grammar varies in semantic, morphosyntactic, and phonological complexity, which may influence what type of Corrective Feedback (CF) is effective. The present study was designed to investigate the best form of CF for each grammatical feature, in conjunction with associated variables such as learner proficiency level and L1 influence. Fifteen studies, all of which had English as a Foreign Language (EFL)

The present study was an endeavor to investigate the differences between novice and experienced teachers’ achieving resiliency in an explanatory sequential mixed method study. Forty Iranian (i.e., 20 novice and 20 experienced) teachers, male and female, participated in the present study in quantitative study who were selected through convenience sampling method from several private language institutes

The linguistic scrutiny of any aspect of pragmatics is bound to considering carefully the context in which it is expressed. This becomes very glaring when the utterances that constitute discourse are viewed as performing social actions. In an EFL context like Iran, English language learners are in urgent need of raising their pragmatic awareness as they do not have regular access to an environment

Introduction From an early limited conceptualization as the application of linguistic knowledge to language teaching (Cook, 2015), current Applied Linguistics (AL) is a vibrant interdisciplinary field that considers within its domain any social problem in which language is implicated (Brumfit 1995, cited in Myers, 2005). Given that it is difficult to imagine a sphere of social life in which language

Despite voluminous studies into teachers’ cognition and the role of teachers’ beliefs in their practices, not many studies have addressed the impact of teachers’ epistemological beliefs (EB, beliefs about the source of knowledge) on their teaching styles. In this study, a mixed design research method was adopted to show English language teachers’ epistemological beliefs, teaching styles and possible

Although the findings of second language (L2) studies conducted to date have provided evidence for the positive effect of written corrective feedback (hereafter feedback) on improving L2 learners’ writing grammatical accuracy, there is no conclusive evidence regarding which kind of feedback is more beneficial for enhancing L2 writing. This study compares the differential effects of giving and receiving

The rise of world Englishes has challenged the emphasis on native-speaker accents and cultures in English language teaching. This study aimed to investigate the representation of world Englishes and cultures in three global language teaching textbooks, namely Interchange , English Result, and American English File . The textbooks were subjected to content analysis regarding their reference to Inner

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of using inquiry-based learning on students’ critical thinking skills. A quasi-experimental design which employed time series design with single group participants was used. A total of 20 EFL undergraduate students who took advanced writing skills course were selected using comprehensive sampling method. Tests, focus group discussion, and student-reflective

Adopting the self-concept framework as a lens and interpretative case study as a methodological tool, the present study set out to examine how the professional identity of an elementary school teacher is socially (re) constructed while his transition from teaching at elementary schools to teach at universities. The design of the study was the intrinsic case study. The focal participant was an assistant

Using a contrastive analysis approach, this study aimed to study emotive words (EWs) in Persian and English short stories for children. It actually tries to find the similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of using emotive words based on different types and tokens of emotions introduced by Wierzbicka (Emotions across cultures: Diversity and universality, 1999) and Devon (The

The current study probes into English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ conceptions of their professional development during practicum course. The study merits a mixed methods approach and has utilized both quantitative and qualitative data gathering and analysis. To gather quantitative data, 100 EFL teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire that measured their retrospective perceptions of

This qualitative study examines the professional agency of secondary English teachers in Midwestern South Korea. Specifically, it investigates how secondary English teachers in South Korea understand their professional agency and what mediates their professional agency. The ecological approach in this study recognises that agency encompasses both individual and environmental dimensions and is formed

This study drew on qualitative research and focused on the exercise of agency among the novice English teachers in the Iranian context. Fifteen novice English teachers who have been teaching English in private language institutes in Baneh, Iran were invited through snowball sampling. The analyses of semi-structured and focus group interviews, from the complexity dynamic/system perspective, revealed

Both Native English-Speaking Teachers (NESTs) and Non-Native English-Speaking Teachers (NNESTs) may have advantages as writing instructors, yet little is known about how they actually influence writing in EFL contexts like South Korea. To address this issue, 76 high proficiency Korean EFL university students from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) were separated

The present study aimed at investigating the relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy perceptions and their instructional practices. The mediatory role of the teachers’ occupational characteristics such as their disciplines was also examined. For this purpose, a total of 70 teachers from the soft science, hard science and English language teaching (ELT) disciplines were compared. This study was

Considering the vital role of comprehensible input, this study attempted to compare the effects of input with various difficulty levels on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension and reading motivation. To fulfil this objective, 54 Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners were selected from two intact classes (n = 27 each). The selected participants were randomly assigned to two equal groups, namely

The variety of activities and techniques suggested for improving the writing skill shows that EFL/ESL learners need scaffolding to gain mastery over it. The present study employed the reader-response approach to provide the assistance EFL learners require for writing argumentative essays. Five upper-intermediate EFL learners in a private class participated in the qualitative case study. The participants

The traditional approach to presenting idioms relies mainly on teachers’ or materials writers’ judgement, one-by-one and quite incidentally; and the existing teaching materials and references for idioms are mostly intuition-based. However, a more recent approach to better teaching and learning idioms is to present them under categories of their common themes and topics. Corpus linguistics can be of

The present case study investigated the probable effect of applying a humanoid robot as a teacher-assistant for learning and retention of English vocabulary among 10 Iranian foreign language learners with intellectual disabilities, more specifically Down syndrome. This method is a new trend in using technology to teach classes called Robot Assisted Language Learning (RALL). To this end, participants

This paper addresses Iranian English as Foreign Language teachers and learners’ perceptions of explicit grammar instruction and corrective feedback and the effect of language background on learners’ perceptions of explicit grammar teaching. The research background indicates that explicit instruction and corrective feedback can play a significant part in the second language development. However, the

This study investigated the effects of different text difficulty levels on Iranian EFL learners’ foreign language reading motivation and reading comprehension. To fulfil this objective, 40 Iranian participants were selected among 50 students based on the results of Interchange Placement Test (Richards et al, Placement and Evaluation Package Interchange Third Edition/Passages Second Edition with Audio

This research investigates the changes in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ psychological attributes in relation to awareness of the lexicogrammatical features and generic structures of a discussion genre essay. This was achieved by implementing a genre-based approach to text-based writing lessons during a 15-week course. The following lesson procedure was implemented: stage (1): modeling

Telecollaboration has been considered to have great potential for the development of L2 learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC), so an examination of what benefits L2 learners receive through telecollaboration is necessary. Also, L2 learners’ use of culturally specific expressions, such as proverbs, has not been adequately investigated. The present study investigated the effects of telecollaboration

One of the major issues in L2 learning and cognitive styles is the ambiguity of these concepts. A solution to this issue should involve the following two aspects. First, studies of factorial validity should be conducted with empirical data, and with an appropriate analysis using a theoretically well-developed scale. Second, such studies should focus on a particular group of learners, as the learning

The present study aimed to investigate the comparative impacts of input-based and output-based activities on vocabulary knowledge of Iranian EFL learners. To fulfil this objective, 54 intermediate EFL students out of 70 from a private language institute were chosen through administering the Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT). The selected participants were divided into one control group (n = 18) and

The knowledge of diverse rhetorical relations is a remarkable component of competence in research article (RA) writing for learners’ successful handling of scholarly writing tasks in English for academic purposes (EAP) programs. This study aimed to present a model of Rhetorical Markers (RMs) competence in writing EAP RAs. In so doing, a ‘qualitative meta-synthesis’ approach was adopted as the research

The purpose of the present meta-analysis is to the investigate the overall effectiveness of L2 vocabulary instruction and to find the moderator variables affecting its effectiveness. By defining a rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, a total number of 16 primary studies (N = 1008), 7 published and 9 Ph.D. dissertations, were included. Under Random-Effects Model, the overall effect size of (d = 0

This study was intended to investigate the relationship between working memory, anxiety and Iranian EFL learners’ listening comprehension. For the purpose of this study, 60 Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners were selected among 80 students at a private language institute in Hamadan, Iran. They participated in a homogeneity test (Oxford Quick Placement Test) to determine their homogeneity level.

Scaffolding is one of the key dimensions of the sociocultural theory that has been proposed in a substantial body of work as a potential metaphor for promoting second language (L2) learning. However, there is plenty of evidence that the term is misinterpreted and presents a number of epistemological problems. The first and foremost concerns the phenomenological nature of scaffolding in the sense that

The importance of teaching explicit knowledge of grammar has been one of the most controversial issues in L2 instruction. Despite the existence of considerable number of studies on different methods of grammar instruction, very few studies have investigated the role of explicit instruction and input enhancement on developing EFL learners’ explicit knowledge of grammatical structures. Therefore, this

This study investigates foreign language anxiety among Indonesian undergraduate students of English, French, Japanese, Korean and Arabic language programs, and examines its relationship with students’ motivation and their perception of teachers’ behaviors. Questionnaires were distributed to 182 s-grade undergraduate students majoring in five foreign languages at an Indonesian public university. One-way

Emojis have been indispensable and efficient tools in online interaction with the booming Internet and dramatically fast emergence of electronic communication channels. The present research is to study the pragmatic functions of emoji in internet-based communication within the revised framework of Linguagem em (Dis) curso (special issue on relevance theory) 14:511--529, 2014 8-function taxonomy. A

Under the task-based language teaching (TBLT) framework, this study investigated learners’ perceptions of a WeChat task being integrated into a Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) curriculum. The WeChat task linked up learners of Chinese from an Australian university with native speakers of Chinese as international students on the same campus. The learner-native speaker pair were required to complete

This paper reports a study that investigated the role of prior native or first language (L1) phonological and phonetic learning on the integration of vowel quality features in the production of second language (L2) vowels by examining adult L2 Korean learners’ production of Vietnamese monophthong vowels in an imitation and a read aloud tasks. Three groups of participants took part in the study (11

Although a number of studies have examined EFL teachers’ beliefs of feedback on student writing, few have investigated teachers’ feedback beliefs about student oral activities like oral presentations. To fill this research gap, this study explores three experienced EFL teachers’ beliefs about feedback on oral presentations in terms of the nature, focus, interpersonal functions, strategies and source

Following an emergentist approach, the authors examined the comprehension of four different types of restrictive relative clauses (direct object/oblique vs. subject/indirect object) with animate/inanimate referents by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, an Oxford placement test and two sets of comprehension tests within a week’s interval were administered. Of the two comprehension tests, one was used

The present study sought the differences between more and less proficient EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writers regarding their metacognitive awareness of writing (MAW). We also examined the relationship between MAW and EFL writing success. We used a validated MAW questionnaire for a comprehensive evaluation of the writers’ metacognitive awareness. The results demonstrated that skillful EFL writers

Formulaic sequences comprise a large body of language and their mastery is supposed to be a key determiner of language proficiency. However, despite their significance in language learning, they are seldom taught in any principled manner in language classrooms and their correct and appropriate use remains a particular challenge to language learners, even at advanced levels. To address this issue, the

The purpose of the present study was to compare the effects of input flooding and input elaboration on the learning of non-congruent collocations by Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The participants of the study included 60 EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency who were divided into two equal groups. They received the instruction of non-congruent collocations

The linguistic repertoire of Palestinian citizens in Israel is complex and diverse. Arabic is the language of personal, cultural, and national identity. Hebrew is important for social mobility, higher education, and shared citizenship. English, as a global language, is a window to the wider world (Amara, Policy and teaching English to Palestinian students in Israel: An ecological perspective to language

Over the past years, there has been a growing interest in intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in English language education. However, not all English language educators in the Vietnamese context and other similar contexts are well aware of intercultural language teaching since there lacks instructional design models to integrate intercultural content into English language classes. This project

This study aimed to investigate the latent constructs in the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale using a research context of Japanese undergraduates who learn English as a foreign language. The study conducted both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis against two different groups of Japanese undergraduate students. First, exploratory factor analysis was used to extract factors from 33

This paper examines the intonation of English statements and questions produced by Vietnamese speakers at two differing levels of proficiency. The goal of the study is three-fold: (1) analysing the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in information-seeking questions, namely Yes-No question, Or-question, Tag-question and Wh-question, (2) evaluating which characteristics of the L2 English

Intensive English programs (IEPs) strive to make certain that international students have sufficient levels of speaking ability, which is typically assessed through a combination of different tasks. One drawback of including multiple tasks is that the development, administration, and scoring might not be practical. Therefore, it is important to investigate how well the tasks account for examinees’

This study examines the potential effectiveness of form-focused instruction (henceforth, FFI) in developing Jordanian EFL learners’ linguistic and pragmatic knowledge. Forty-seven college students of nursing were divided into two groups: an experimental group of twenty-seven students received FFI on grammatical structures (viz. the simple present, gerunds, modal auxiliaries, questions, the present

Shadowing has increasingly been recognized as an effective practice for developing listening skills in second language learning. However, there is very little study focusing on learners’ psychological aspects in implementing shadowing practice. The aim of this study is to explore second language learners’ psychological factors, from the motivation framework point of view, in relation to shadowing practice

Cross-linguistic transfer embodies language learners’ use of linguistic knowledge of their first language to leverage the learning of a second language. The cross-linguisitc transfer between Chinese and English has been studied by scholars from different disciplines. However, variances and inconsistencies exist among prior studies regarding the investigated linguistic domains and reported results.

The ultimate goal of any academic program is to educate and bring up thoughtful citizens in societies. By “thoughtfulness” we mean paving the spectrum from simply applying the rules (lower order thinking) to finding proper solution to authentic novel problems (higher order thinking). It is helping the practitioners pave the continuum of knowledge construction towards logic construction, meanwhile restructuring