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Thai students’ writing in English is a chronic problem documented in the literature of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Thailand. However, little research has been conducted on how Thai teachers and students perceive the importance of English-writing and what difficulties and expectations/suggestions they have in teaching and learning this skill at upper-secondary schools (U-SS). This study, therefore, plans to fill this gap by employing two sets of surveys and semi-structured interviews with 114 teachers and 170 students from 30 different U-SS in the Northeastern part of Thailand and two provincial supervisors of Foreign-Language-Education Divisions (Pro-Sup). Besides their various stated personal and contextual problems in terms of time constraint, insufficient resources and poorly-motivated and mixed-ability students, national test structures and the presence of untrained English teachers, the participants acknowledged the importance of English-writing and expected to have this skill taught at all school levels. These findings suggest that to improve the teaching and learning practices of this skill at U-SS in Thailand and other countries with similar contexts, relevant support and necessary reforms from teachers, school leaders and national-test and policymakers are needed.

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between attitudes towards cheating, academic self-confidence, and general language ability among Iranian EFL learners. One hundred and thirty-nine university EFL students participated in this study. Findings showed that attitudes towards cheating negatively correlate with academic self-confidence and ability as measured by students’ GPA. The relationship between age, gender, level of education, and attitudes towards cheating was examined too. Analyses showed that there is a negative correlation between age and attitudes towards cheating. However, no relationship was found between gender and level of education, and attitudes towards cheating. Furthermore, psychometric qualities of the Attitudes towards Cheating Questionnaire were examined. Analyses revealed that some items had low and negative item discrimination indices. When malfunctioning items were deleted the reliability of the scale improved. Implications of the study on correlates of cheating among Iranian EFL learners and the validity of the Attitudes towards Cheating Questionnaire are discussed.

Through a descriptive Ex Post Facto research design, the relationship between teacher reflection and classroom management, the predictive power of teacher reflection components regarding classroom management, and classroom management strategies used by high and low reflective teachers were examined. To this end, 113 EFL teachers completed the Attitudes and Beliefs on Classroom Control (ABCC) Inventory (Martin et al., 1998b) and teacher reflection inventory (Akbari et al., 2010). The results of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient showed that there was a significant positive relationship between teachers’ reflection and their sense of classroom management. Moreover, a multiple regression was run whose findings revealed that practical and critical components of reflection are the best predictors of teachers’ sense of classroom management. Twenty teachers were also interviewed and the thematic analysis of the interview showed that high reflective teachers used different kinds of management strategies, for their students’ social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties using proper pedagogical planning and techniques of teachers’ teaching style, expertise, and experience in better assessment of the students in the classroom.

The well-established affiliation of metadiscourse research tradition to the philosophy of ESP raises some inevitable expectations on how much and how well the concept has been geared to meet the practical necessities of academic writing pedagogy. In light of such an expectation, a corpus of 35 academic writing coursebooks published during the last three decades was evaluated in terms of the possible realizations of key resources of interaction in pedagogical tasks. Due to its theoretical rigor and analytically operationalized nature, Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2005a) was taken as the guiding framework for the current evaluation. The quantitative findings emerging from the analysis of the corpus did not sound sufficiently promising, suggesting that those theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e., the 55 categories emerging from the evaluation of the corpus) suggest that the rigorous tradition of research in metadiscourse has contributed to the effective operationalization of the concept for pedagogical objectives. It has been argued that through the effective introduction of the concept of metadiscourse into pedagogical designs and its appropriate operationalization, novice participants of academic/scientific discourse communities would be enabled to redefine the nature of academic communication and get rid of a large number of misconceptions which have become fossilized through long years of the dominance of positivistic thinking.

Within the framework of professional development, teachers adapt, develop, and complement their pedagogical competences and behavior, and they become an agent of change. In this regard, teachers’ awareness of the components of pedagogical competence plays an important role. The current paper addressed the components of assessment strategies and teaching skills and investigated Iranian university instructors’ awareness of these components with regards to their personal, professional, and educational backgrounds. In so doing, a 29-item questionnaire already established in terms of validity and reliability was administered to 72 university instructors practicing teaching in Guilan universities. Analysis of the results revealed that the instructors used different assessment strategies and employed various teaching skills with regard to their gender, teaching experience, fields of study, and university degrees. The results may be practically utilized by education authorities to provide instructors with appropriate trainings to augment the instructors’ teaching and learners’ learning in the end.

L2/FL writing ability, which per se includes many different types, is considered a major skill in academic settings. However, little research has been done in this area and even less has focused on the effectiveness of task-based writing instruction on the two specific kinds; namely, referential writing and expressive writing. To this end, 60 English Translation sophomores of both genders were selected and divided into two classes after ensuring their homogeneity through the Quick Placement Test (OQPT). For the pre- and post-tests, the participants were required to take IELTS writing tests requiring referential and expressive types of writing. As for the treatment of the study, all participants were instructed based on the same content materials of advanced writing and a task-based framework. The results of the statistical analysis indicated significant improvements in the participants’ writing abilities in referential and expressive written tasks. Besides, the effectiveness of task-based writing techniques was approved in terms of referential and expressive types of language functions in the academic writing of Iranian EFL learners.

Giving corrective feedback (CF) is an essential part of the teaching and learning process, and the way it should beneficially be done has been the focus of attention for numerous researchers especially when traditional ways of CF provision are not possible, particularly in rare situations such as outbreaks of diseases. This study investigated how different ways of giving feedback; namely, through online chats and class discussions can help language learners in benefitting from their instructors’ CF provision. To this purpose, the effects of two ways of feedback provision were tested on the participants writing quality. Three hundred and seventeen Iranian EFL learners took a TOEFL test, 132 of them (53 males and 79 females) scoring between 477 and 510 were asked to deliver a 200-word writing task. Then, they were randomly put into 4 experimental and control groups to undergo different treatments, i.e. receiving CF through online chats and class discussions for 10 one-hour sessions. After the treatment, they were required to deliver another 200-word piece of writing. The results of statistical data analysis showed that the writing quality of the participants receiving CF through online chats was significantly higher than that of those who received CF through class discussions. The findings of this research have practical implications for Iranian educational system to update its instructional methods and for the nature of teaching and learning processes and practices.

This study aimed at determining the effect of teaching idiom strategies, that is, socializing learning and cognitive linguistic approach, on Iranian EFL learners' recognition and production of ambiguous idioms. To this end, 78 upper-intermediate students of Islamic Azad University, Tabriz Branch, Iran, formed the total population of the study. Then, Proficiency English Test (PET) was administered to ensure the homogeneity of the needed sample. Based on the results of this test, 60 students were selected as the final participants. They were randomly assigned to two experimental groups: WhatsApp socializing group and etymological elaboration group. A pretest was used to ensure the unfamiliarity of the idioms. The criteria for choosing ambiguous idioms were that all ambiguous idioms required to have etymology and could be illustrated using a picture Also, posttests for the recognition and production of ambiguous idioms were used to compare the performance of the two groups. The statistical analysis of results indicated that the etymological elaboration group outperformed the socializing group in both idiom recognition and production. The findings of this research have pedagogical implications for teachers, syllabus designers, and materials developers in using appropriate instructional methods for teaching idioms.

Individual differences in personality traits can influence students' ability to learn a new language. Among the important personality traits, perfectionism has recently been the topic of investigation in second language acquisition research. Following this line of research, the current study aims at examining a path model linking dimensions of perfectionism to second language (L2) listening comprehension through mediating effects of subscales of self-efficacy along with the use of metacognitive listening strategy (MLS). A sample of 230 English as a foreign language (EFL) participants majoring in Translation studies and English Literature completed the perfectionism, general self-efficacy, and MLS questionnaires and took an IELTS listening comprehension test. The sample included 112 juniors (48.7 %), and 118 seniors (51.3 %) selected through convenience nonrandom sampling. Cluster analysis was used to identify three perfectionistic clusters: adaptive, maladaptive, and non-perfectionists. The results of a path analysis revealed that perfectionism and MLS use were the most significant variables in the proposed conceptual model. While correlational analyses in this study revealed significant relationships among self-efficacy components and listening comprehension, the overall total effects were not significant. Adaptive perfectionism significantly contributed to the MLS use and listening ability (LA). Perfectionism also contributed significantly to the effort and persistence self-efficacy components. In contrast, perfectionism did not significantly influence the initiative self-efficacy subscale. Implications of this study are discussed.

The study reported here is survey research that aims to examine the assessment literacy (AL) of the instructors (N=12) as well as graduate and postgraduate students (N=46) in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics at Shiraz University. To this end, interview questions were designed using Pastore and Andrade's (2019) three-dimensional AL framework. The questions, having been field-tested and their validity having been approved by three experts, were used to interview the participants. The interviews were transcribed and idea units in them were specified and coded according to a coding scheme designed based on Pastore and Andrade (2019).  At the conceptual dimension, the results suggested that most of the participants in both groups believed in the learning potential of assessment, and most of the instructors used multiple tasks throughout the term to gather on the students' learning, especially at the MA and Ph.D. levels. At the praxiological dimension that concerned the integration of assessment with instruction, the students mentioned using the results of summative assessment to alter their studying approach, while only a few instructors used assessment results to modify their teaching practices. At the socio-emotional dimension, discrepancies existed among the instructors and between instructors and learners in how ethical issues should be observed in assessment. The results are discussed, and implications are provided for designing teacher education programs and for future research.

This research study was conducted to investigate the most representative characteristics of the habitus developed by academically successful Iranian English majors. Learning a second or foreign language, like many sociocultural practices, from a Bourdieusian perspective, is informed by the interrelation between habitus, field, and cultural capital (CC). Within an exploratory qualitative design, utilizing the Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method of both semi-structured and unstructured one-on-one interviews, seven academically successful BA students majoring in English language studies were studied in an attempt to explore their CC and habitus. Each participant was interviewed in 3 separate sessions. The constructivist grounded theory method was adopted to analyze the collected data. Constructed on 75 initial codes, 22 focused codes, 10 categories, and 4 themes, two major themes were most relevantly indicative of theoretical associations with the research problem. The findings suggest that the habitus developed by the English majors in this study was representative of their accumulation of certain forms of CC. Their habitus seemed to have been developed under the influence of their interaction with the mediatory field of learning and majoring in a foreign language. In an exigency-driven social quest for certain forms of cultural capital, the participants’ habitus were majorly characterized and influenced by their strategic accumulation of institutional and social capital, their field-oriented social identities, and their strategic administration of CC in the field. The knowledge developed by the findings of this study can provide useful sociocultural insights into academic achievements of English language majors.