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One of the psychological variables which may have a long-lasting effect on our life is labeling, and students’ accomplishments might be severely undermined through the teacher’s labeling. In spite of this issue, few studies have been carried out on the ramifications of labeling in the educational contexts, in general, and EFL classrooms, in particular. The current study is an attempt to investigate the occurrence possibility of negative labeling and how such labels eventually influence students’ psychological/academic potentials. Since it was not possible to expose the students to the experience of negative labels in their real situations, the 100 high-school female participants of the study were asked to make predictions on social/academic success of a fictitious student who was labeled as dyslexic (Hunt, 2006). Besides, they were given a modified 11-item questionnaire (Mwania & Muola, 2013) about their experiences of being labeled. The participants were also asked to fill in the Coopersmith Self-esteem Inventory (SEI) (1967) to determine if there is a relationship between their labeling experiences, their self-esteem and their reported academic achievements. The collected data was then processed using SPSS. The findings of the study indicate that teacher’s negative labeling was significantly related with students’ self-esteem, their academic potentials, and their future life/success/expectations.The study bears some significant implications for teachers’ education since the findings show that the negative ramifications of labeling in EFL contexts should be taken into more serious consideration in teaching.

The present study investigated comparatively the impact of two types of input enhancement (i.e. textual vs. compound enhancement) on developing grammar ability in Iranian EFL setting. Sixty-five female secondary high school students were selected as a homogenous sample out of about a 100-member population based on Nelson language proficiency test. Then, their grammar ability was measured based on a researcher-made diagnostic test prior to the experiment. The sample was randomly divided into two equal groups; one group received text-enhancement-based instruction of grammar, while the other received compound-based enhancement. Finally, they received an achievement test of grammar as a posttest to measure their progress in light of two different types of input enhancement mechanisms. The pertinent statistical analyses of the results indicated that a) the effect of textual enhancement-based instruction of grammar is not significantly meaningful, while b) the compound enhancement-based instruction has significant effect on learning grammatical structures. Comparatively speaking, therefore, c) compound enhancement-based instruction of grammar is more significantly effective than that of textual in developing grammar ability. It can be safely concluded that grammar instruction and its resultant development are subject to intervention type, which, pedagogically, bears promising messages for both teachers and syllabus designers to incorporate parameters of input enhancement in both teaching and materials development, respectively.

The present study aimed to investigate the attitudes and perceived nature of thinking and understanding towards intercultural communicative competence (ICC) among International English major students. Accordingly, this study employed the paradigm of a sequential mixed-method research, in which it comprised a qualitative phase followed by a quantitative phase. The participants of the first phase of the study were 30 undergraduate English major students in their third year at Isfahan Islamic Azad University in Iran; and the participants of the second phase of the study included 30 international ESL students in their first year at Gonzaga University (GU), in Washington, U.S. The analysis of narratives in the first phase of the study indicated that the participants had diverse attitudes towards intercultural encounters. The results of the statistical analyses of the second phase of the study showed that the most important individual difference variables directly influencing students’ intercultural communicative competence were their communication apprehension and their perceived communicative competence. This study also showed that students’ self-image as communicators were of utmost importance: if students believe they are good communicators in English, theyare more likely to be self-confident and are more likely to take part in intercultural encounters. Thus, instructors should help students achieve a realistic self-image about their performance in English and support them if they lack self-confidence.  

Lexical inferencing is one of the most important strategies in vocabulary learning and it plays an important role in dealing with unknown words in a text. In this regard, the aim of this study was to determine the lexical inferencing strategies used by Iranian EFL learners when they encounter unknown words at both text and sentence levels. To this end, forty lower intermediate students were divided into two groups. For the first group, a text with 10 underlined words was given and for the second group, the same underlined words were given in separate sentences. The students were supposed to read the text and the sentences and to guess the meaning of the underlined words. Then some lexical inferencing strategies were given to them to determine which strategies they used in guessing the meaning of unknown words. The results showed that they used different strategies like using local context and word association in lexical inferencing and also they were more successful at the text level than the sentence one. The results also indicated that they were strategic learners using their own strategies including translation and cultural background knowledge to guess the meaning of the unknown words.

The present study investigated differential effect of two types of feedback namely, computer-mediated and metalinguistic, on Iranian EFL learners’ writing accuracy. To this end, based on Nelson Proficiency Test (300 A), 69 Iranian advanced EFL learners, including 45 males and 24 females, aged between 17 and 24, learning English in language institutes in Salmas, were selected randomly out of the total population of 121 EFL learners and then divided into three groups. The participants in the two experimental groups received metalinguistic and computer-mediated feedback separately while those in the control group received no feedback. The analyses of the results obtained through a pre-test and a post-test indicated that both feedback types significantly influenced learners’ writing accuracy. However, analysis of the participants’ performances on the post-test demonstrated that metalinguistic group outperformed computer-mediated one. Thus, the effect of metalinguistic feedback was more than that of computer-mediated feedback. In addition, both of them were more influential than no-feedback instruction. The findings of the present study can be fruitful for syllabus designers and EFL teachers. 

Despite the importance of interlanguage pragmatic rating (ILP) in the second language teaching and learning context, scant attention has been devoted to it. This study aims to investigate native EFL teachers’ major criteria in assessing the speech act of complaint produced by Iranian EFL learners. To fulfill this end, two groups of experienced native raters, including American (n=47) and British (n=30) EFL/ESL teachers, were elected for evaluating the complaint discourse completion tests (DCTs) made from video-prompts which were answered by EFL learners before. The content analysis of raters’ comments on the EFL learners’ productions revealed eleven different criteria including logical reasoning and comments, politeness, linguistic appropriacy, semantic formula, interlocutors’ relationship, register choice, formality, degree of intensity, cultural accommodations, degree of directness, and finally fluency and naturalness respectively from the most to the least frequent ones. The result of the t-test and chi-square analysis proved that British and American raters differed significantly in their degree of variations and preferences of these criteria. The results further showed that EFL learners’ responses seemed unreasonable and impolite to native raters which might be due to the different cultural norms between L1 and L2 societies and consequently encourage us to be aware of the importance of teaching sociopragmatic knowledge to the EFL learners.

According to Teacher Education Curriculum Development Document (TECDD) of Farhangiyan University, teacher professional competencies include Content Knowledge (CK), Pedagogical Knowledge (PK), Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and General Knowledge (GK). Of these competencies, CK and PCK are specific to teachers of each major while PK and GK are common among all majors. This study was an attempt to explore the components that constitute high school EFL teachers’ CK and PCK through review of the related literature and investigation of high school EFL teachers (N=40) and teacher educators’ (N=20) perspectives. Based on the content analysis of these two sources which resulted in strong agreement, 20 items of CK and 17 items of PCK were identified. To validate the items and explore their underlying factors, data were collected from 445 high school EFL teachers and teacher educators using a questionnaire. Factor analysis with Varimax rotation was carried out on CK and PCK items separately. Regarding CK items, factor analysis gave way to the emergence of three factors, namely knowledge of the principles of language teaching methodology, knowledge of linguistics, and language proficiency. Regarding PCK items, factor analysis also gave way to three factors, namely knowledge of teaching and assessing the components of the curriculum, knowledge of developing, planning and managing language teaching, and knowledge of developing and evaluating instructional materials. The results of this study can be used in the design of high school EFL teacher education program.