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Digital technology has recently become a ubiquitous feature of the modern era posing problems to higher education institutions. Digitization of the academic life has brought forth the claims that there is an evident disparity between the digital naturals and digital immigrants and that the myth of the former is “undemystifiable”. The claim that the new digitized generation has its own distinguished learning preferences, skills of learning and beliefs about how learning in such an era should make higher education authorities revisit their curricula and “reshuffle the academic cards” so that the digital immigrants could catch up with the fast-running pace of the digitized train and provide the digital natives with what they need for a successful academic life. T he overall aim of the present work therefore is to investigate the extent to which the so-called digital natives really have control of the use of educational technology either as part of their self-directed learning practices or as part of a formal tertiary level teaching, the type of technologies they prefer to use, whether they possess the required digital skills that are important for their future careers, and how vital the digital skills are in boosting their employability. In line with the major findings of the present study, it could be concluded that the media change under the created discourse of “moral panic” has unveiled the singularity of this generation and has forced academic authorities to reconsider learning, teaching as well as both skills and employability of a such a generation for the betterment of a healthy academic higher education system.

The present study aimed at highlighting the possible effects of age, proficiency level, and the structural composition of Garden-Path (GP) sentences on EFL learners' comprehension. 80 Iranian EFL learners were recruited from the initial pool of 114 participants based on the results of an English proficiency test; 40 advanced, and 40 intermediate learners were selected. Moreover, two age-groups of teenagers and adults were specified based on the study's necessities. In order to determine the accuracy and also the time needed for comprehension of GP sentences, a software application was designed, which provided learners with a set of GP and non-GP sentences and depicted the elapsed time for each participant to show the correct understanding of the presented sentences on the screen. As statistical analyses revealed, the participants, apart from age and proficiency levels, had less difficulty in comprehending non-GP items. It was also concluded that different types of GP sentences imposed different degrees of difficulty for the participants to comprehend. Furthermore, "proficiency level," unlike "age," was found to be a determining factor for the comprehension of GP sentences for Iranian EFL learners.

The current pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study attempts, firstly, to probe the effects of teaching formulaic sequences (FSs) on the second or foreign language (L2)  learners' oral proficiency improvement and secondly, to examine whether teaching FSs through different resources (i.e. animation vs. text-based readings) have any differentially influential effects in augmenting L2  learners' oral proficiency or not. To this end, a cohort of 60 young L2 learners of an immersion program school in the southwest of Iran was randomly divided into three groups, two experimental and one control. During 24 instructional sessions, one experimental group received the FSs instruction through animation, and the second experimental group noticed FSs through text-based readings.  The control group was taught using the school mainstream L2 textbooks without any focus on FSs. The results indicated that both FSs groups outperformed the control group. Moreover, animation-based instruction significantly increased the efficacy of FSs instruction, pointing to the issue that educational technology is a better strategy for teaching FSs rather than the traditional way of reading.

This paper offers a state-of-the-art working definition for the concept of Critical Thinking (CT hereafter) in an attempt to provide a framework for the development of an operational definition for this complex concept. Having studied various definitions and models, proposed for CT by major figures in the field, the key defining features of this rich concept were identified and classified. Based on these key descriptors, a working definition consisting of three main components namely Mind Analysis , Data Evaluation , and Thinking in Education has been proposed and then each dimension of this definition is defined and elaborated further so that the complexity of the concept could be framed in an extended model. The elaborated conception of CT proposed in this paper seeks to include the core elements of CT so that it can be expandable into an operational definition with measurable items. There are two main reasons for conducting this research: Firstly, CT has evolved into a multifaceted construct with a broad range of cognitive abilities and intellectual dispositions. Secondly, although CT has been recognized as a significant concept in education, its full potential has not been achieved yet.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the validity of the English section of Iranian Universities PhD Entrance Exam in TEFL. To this end, 15 EFL learners from university of Isfahan who were in their last semester of that MA education were invited to contribute to the study. A group of 5 university lecturers were also asked to support the study as expert judges. A TOEFL reading paper was used to divide the participants into three ability groups, each consisting of five learners. Think-aloud study was used to find out the strategies each ability group used when completing the test. All the participants completed the reading section of the PhD Entrance Exam while verbalizing their thoughts. The verbal reports were transcribed and coded based on Barati’s (2005) taxonomy of Test-taking strategies. The Chi- square analysis of the think aloud protocols revealed that Monitoring and Evaluation strategies were used significantly more than other strategies by all ability groups. Moreover, the results indicated that the high ability group of test takers were more successful compared with others in maneuvering among different type of strategies. Further, different patterns of strategy use were observed in the three ability groups. The findings of the present study may be of interest to the PhD Entrance Exam developers as well as EFL material designers and classroom instructors.

The nature of heterogeneity issues within the context of Iranian, English language learning contexts in high schools is one of the under-researched lines of inquiry. For this aim, a researcher-made, Likert-type questionnaire whose items were initially validated through a multi-stage, exploratory research design among 30 teachers was distributed among some 67, Iranian EFL teachers with different degrees of experience (less vs. more) to find the teachers’ concerns/challenges and their strategies to tackle them. The findings suggested that the concerns behind heterogeneous classes were not consistent regrading weak and strong students. In the second place, it became evident that the order of tendency towards adopting the four enunciated strategies was not the same in the two less and more experienced teachers. Possible interpretations regarding teacher outlook as mapped on ‘teacher experience’ to target heterogeneity issues were presented in the end.

The study aimed to investigate students’ self-efficacy, self-esteem, and attitude as determinants of their writing performance. The participants for the study were 373 South Gonder Zone Preparatory School students who were chosen using multistage sampling technique. Questionnaire and writing test were employed to gather data. Pearson’s Correlation technique was used to analyze the associations among the variables of this study. A standard multiple regression technique was used to check the combined effect of the students’ self-efficacy, self-esteem and attitude on the writing performance of students; a Stepwise regression technique was used to check the effect that each predictor variable could have on the students’ writing performance. Also, ANCOVA was employed to compute the independent effects of the students’ self-efficacy, self-esteem and attitude on the students’ writing performance after age and gender were adjusted. The study revealed that (1) the variables were significantly and positively correlated to each other; (2) the combined effect of the independent variables on students’ writing performance was R2 = .222 which means that 22.2% of the variation in the students’ writing performance was explained by the composite impact of self-esteem, attitude and self-efficacy of writing; (3) the independent effects of the three predictor variables on writing performance were found to be significant although attitude was identified as the only predictor of writing performance when age and gender were controlled. The study concludes that self-efficacy, self-esteem and attitude have significant roles in predicting performance of writing though attitude takes the lion’s share in determining the latter.

This study aimed at investigating the effect of instructional YouTube videos on Iranian male and female EFL learners' listening comprehension. It was conducted with 60 male and female intermediate male and female EFL learners. The Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) was used to measure the participants’ language proficiency to make sure about homogeneity of the participants. The participants were assigned into two experimental groups and two control groups based on their gender. Then, the experimental groups received instructional YouTube clips, but the control group received the same material without YouTube clips. A pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design was adopted for the purpose of doing this research study. The findings represented that the experimental groups had a significantly higher performance than the control groups and there was no significant difference between male and female learners. The findings of the study offer some practical implications for EFL teachers, learners, curriculum planners, and teaching methodology.

There is controversy on the conditions under which cooperative learning methods can improve academic achievement. Group-specific motivational aspects might contribute to the effectiveness of cooperative learning among which classroom goal structures were focused on. More specifically, the study aimed at investigating the efficiency of cooperative writing technique through performance versus mastery-oriented classroom goal structures in improving academic writing of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, 83 intermediate EFL learners took part in this quasi-experimental pretest, post-test study. The participants were required to write a 5-paragraph essay for pretest and post-test. The collected data was analyzed based on an analytic writing rubric (Hedgcock & Leftkowitz, 1992). The results of one-way ANOVA tests indicated that the experimental group which practiced cooperative writing through performance goal orientation outperformed the individual and mastery-oriented classes. It was concluded that performance goal orientation, between-groups competition, and extrinsic motivation, can help EFL teachers in setting a more effective classroom structure for cooperative writing practices to improve the writing proficiency of L2 learners.

This study analyzed the requirement of English education for arts students and the language needs for arts administrators in the workplace in Taiwan. A total of 83 participants, comprising 37 graduate students majoring in the arts and 46 company administrators in art-related jobs, responded to a questionnaire requesting their opinions concerning English education. The results indicated that the language skills that the students required were similar to those that company administrators used in the workplace. Reading was the skill that company administrators used the most, and speaking was the least used skill. However, among the 30 language tasks, the comparison of mean scores indicated a discrepancy in needs between the students and company administrators. The arts students required sufficient vocabulary and adequate reading practice, because they were required to take English proficiency tests as a graduation requirement and their course materials included English articles and journal papers. Regarding the company administrators, introducing artwork and presenting products were crucial because they must sell artwork. The results can serve as fundamental information for reforming and preparing English curricula and courses tailored to the needs of arts students in Taiwan.

This study was an attempt to investigate the comparative impact of Student Teams Achievement Divisions (STAD) and Think-Pair-Share (TPS) on EFL learners’ listening. Accordingly, 60 female EFL learners selected from a larger group of 90 learners based on their performance on a sample piloted Preliminary English Test (PET) who studied at a language school in Tehran were randomly divided into two experimental groups. Both groups demonstrated homogeneity in terms of their listening at the outset. The same content was taught to both groups during 15 sessions with one experimental group undergoing STAD while TPS was used in the other group. At the end of the treatment, another sample PET listening section was administered to both groups. The result of the independent samples t-test run on the participants’ mean scores on the posttest revealed that the TPS group significantly outperformed those in the STAD group. These findings have certain implications which are discussed at length in the paper.