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Language teacher immunity has recently attracted the attention of the scholars interested in teacher psychology. Following the previous line of research in teacher psychology, the present study explored the immunity types among 260 Iranian EFL teachers working in schools and language institutes. Drawing on Hiver’s (2017) categorization, this study found that the participants were classified into productively and maladaptively immunized teachers through cluster analysis. It was also found that gender played a significant role, and female participants were more productively immunized than men. Regarding the role of teaching experience, it was found that EFL teachers’ immunity fluctuated in the late stages of their practice to a more fossilized, negative one. Regarding age differences, the results also suggested different immunity types among the participants of different age groups. The results implied that teacher education programs should enhance EFL teachers’ understanding of language teacher immunity as an important factor in their effectiveness and well-being as well as students’ achievement.

In educational psychology, mindsets refer to a set of core beliefs about intelligence and its role in successful learning in a specific domain. This study investigated the extent to which, the EFL learners’ mindsets might predict their English achievement considering the mediating roles of engagement and self-regulation. The data were collected by means of three questionnaires: The Language Mindset Inventory (LMI), the University Student Engagement Inventory (USEI), and the Academic Self-Regulated Learning Scale (A-SRL-S), as well as the institutes’ reports on their English achievement. We analyzed the data quantitatively using the SPSS 20 and Amos 8 Software. The results revealed that there was a significant direct relationship between language mindsets and English achievement of the EFL learners. Besides, this relationship was significantly mediated by the learners’ engagement and self-regulation. Drawing on the findings of this research, the challenge for teachers is to cultivate in students the mindsets that emphasize growth and potentials rather than constraints and stagnation.

This study focused on the pedagogical application of priming in an EFL context. Structural priming refers to the speakers’ tendency to produce the structure they encountered in recent discourse in subsequent production compared to an alternative form. Given the limited number of studies in the literature with a focus on the application of priming in L2 teaching and the problems that L2 learners face during speech production, the present study aimed at investigating whether the implication of priming leads to a more frequent oral and written production of the relative clause (RC) structure compared to adjectival modification of nouns (AN) in long- and short-terms as an instance of implicit learning. Participants consisted of 60 EFL female L2 learners, aged between 18-25 years old. Two experimental and 1 control groups were defined and 20 participants were allocated to each group. By applying a pretest, a treatment, an immediate posttest, a delayed posttest design, a picture description task, and a grammaticality judgment test (GJT), the data were gathered. Results of the descriptive and inferential analyses revealed that the implication of priming led to an improvement in the rate of the RC construction when the participants were involved in the written production of the L2, as compared to oral modality. Results are discussed based on structural complexity and procedures involved in L2 production. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are considered, too.

Extracting incompatible values in the best-sellers current in ELT markets is a real concern. In this study, the researchers tried to bring some claims/counterclaims for hidden ideologies regarding two imported English language teaching coursebooks-Four Corners and Impact Values Series, which are commonly taught within Iranian English language institutes. The main intention was that they might transmit incompatible English culture to the Iranian learners. Through a qualitative design, vigorous content analysis was conducted over diverse randomly selected texts/topics and images in the two books, it was found out that regarding images, four themes instantiated incongruent values to the local context for Iranian learners including A) boy-girl relationship, B) imbalance of religious norms as opposed to other religions, C) incongruent lifestyles, and D) the proportion of the male vs. female images in the two books. As to topics included in the books, mismatching items were detected within seven main categories including A) Cross-gender relationship, B) disregarding the importance of family, C) excessive Use of Internet, D) Mobile Phones, and Computers, E) food and drink prohibitions, F0 forbidden or inappropriate habits,G) incompatible jobs and professions, and H) showing disrespect for older people. Finally, some suggestions regarding compatibility issues with local cultural input enrichment with the Iranian culture were given.

The present study was primarily aimed at investigating how Processing instruction would affect the Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge and how the effectiveness of this method would be modulated by the learners’ individual differences in grammatical sensitivity. To this end, three senior intact high school classes were selected and randomly assigned to two experimental and one control group. Each of the experimental groups was treated with one operationalization of Processing instruction, namely, full PI (n=24), and Structured input (n=24) while the control group (n=20) received traditional output-based instruction (TI) on the English passive structure over three weekly sessions. The results illustrated that Processing instruction was more effective than TI since it improved learners’ both interpretation and production while TI only could improve learners’ production. Additionally, the results demonstrated that the positive impact of Processing instruction was not affected by the learners’ differences in grammatical sensitivity. All in all, this suggests that as long as a grammatical structure is affected by an underlying processing problem, Processing instruction is possibly a more effective pedagogical option compared to traditional output-based instruction. Furthermore, Processing instruction seems to work for all learners irrespective of their differences in terms of grammatical sensitivity.

To explore the effectiveness of flipped instruction in influencing second language learning outcomes, the current research investigated the contribution of flipped classrooms of an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) writing course to Iranian learners’ writing development and writing motivation. In so doing, two intact classes were chosen as the participants (N=43) of this research and they were randomly assigned to a Control Group (N = 18) and an Experimental Group (N = 25). During one semester, the Control Group underwent the traditional writing instruction, while the Experimental Group received a flipped writing instruction. Second Language Writing Motivation Scale (SLWMS) and two timed writing tasks were given to gather the required data. The results demonstrated that the flipped method of teaching was substantially effective in improving the L2 writing performance of the experimental group ( F = 22.20, p = 0.000, partial eta squared = 0.35) . Also, the results indicated that the flipped instruction had a statistically significant effect on learners’ writing motivation ( F = 51.67, p = 0.000, partial eta squared = 0.56) . The findings have remarkable implications for L2 writing methodology.  

Although Task-Based Instruction (TBI) has received large attention on the part of English practitioners throughout the world, it seems that there is yet a huge gap between the Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions and practices in implementing it in real classes. Hence, this study set out to unearth the possible sources of difficulties in using TBI in EFL classes. To meet the goals, a total of 120 male and female EFL teachers were selected through stratified random sampling from Iran language institute (ILI) branches in Tehran, Iran. After critically reviewing the literature and using a flow chart technique, a questionnaire including 20 items was developed, piloted, and distributed among the participants. Then, the collected data were analyzed through the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Results indicated that three main factors, namely lack of appropriate assessment methods , cultural difference , and efficacy of the method received the utmost significance from the EFL teachers’ perspectives that have led to not using TBI. In the end, the implications of the findings were discussed for different stakeholders.

The United States with its presidents stepping into power from either the Democratic or Republican parties influences global affairs in one way or another. These two main political parties have long been struggling for power and the significance of tapping into the ideological inclinations of the two parties underscores scholars’ accountability toward raising the critical language awareness of the public which could be an initial step toward a change for the better. The presidential inaugural speeches, due to their programmatic and strategic nature, are of significance to researchers. This study employed van Dijk’s (2006b) socio-cognitive framework where he defined two levels of analyses for a political discourse including the micro-level and macro-level text analyses. The former included 25 discursive devices such as polarization, generalization, hyperbole, etc. The latter drew on the dichotomy of ‘positive self-representation’ and ‘negative other-representation’. In the present study, the linguistic features in 16 inaugural speeches delivered by American Democratic and Republican presidents from 1961 to 2017 were examined at both levels. The overall data analysis revealed that Democrats employed ‘norm expression’ and ‘presupposition’ significantly more than Republicans, while Republicans made more use of ‘categorization’, ‘lexicalization’, and ‘populism’. The macro-level comparison of the two parties indicated that both Democrats and Republicans resorted to using ‘positive self-representation’ significantly more than ‘negative other-representation’ while the deployment of ‘negative other-representation’ by Republicans was significantly more than that by Democrats. The findings of this study have some implications for English for political purposes, political studies, as well as attempts in discourse studies.

The present study aimed to review the instruction of the L2 speech acts in English pragmatics in the Iranian context during the last two decades from 2000 to 2020. To this end, upon the completion of the study search, the retrieved articles were selected and analyzed based on the research domain.  The results of our synthesis from 54 studies carried out on the instruction of the speech act not only reveal that pragmatics is amenable to instruction but also unfold that the most frequently instructed speech act is the speech act of request which has been conducted in 29 studies, while the least instructed speech act is  invitation, used in only one study. Moreover, analyzing the data collection methods documented that Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) is the most predominant method utilized in 36 papers during the last decades in English pragmatic instruction. With respect to the treatment types, it is illuminated that the most recurrent treatment type is explicit, implicit vs. control, followed by explicit vs. implicit, although other treatment types have been embarked on. As a final point, it is worth noting that 53 of the conducted studies utilized the quantitative method in their data analyses, whereas only one study implemented the qualitative method. The paper concludes with some avenues for further research.

The current study aimed to explore the nature of discursive strategies academics would use to share their specialist knowledge to both specialists and non-specialists. To this end, a corpus of 40 academic research articles and 40 popular science articles were randomly selected from the archive of four English international peer-reviewed journals and four English popular magazines and newspapers in the field of Nutrition. Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), a discourse framework to examine evaluative and/or persuasive language, was used to analyze the data. The results revealed significant areas of similarity and difference in terms of certain discursive elements leading to discernible degrees of persuasion. The findings imply that in order to develop a scientifically literate society, scientists should appeal to diverse discourse resources to provide the public with their findings in an informative and entertaining way. The results of the study carry some pedagogical implications for EAP courses held in EFL settings since being able to both comprehend and produce scientific texts of different professional levels at international scale seems to be a requirement for the future scientists.