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Formative writing assessment can help writing instructors to explore weaknesses and strengths of language learners’ writing performances. The current research aimed to explore firstly writing attributes and secondly examine their reciprocal contribution to one another. To achieve such an objective, the participants (N=200) were asked to write about two different topics. One writing sample before treatment was considered as the pre-test and the other after the treatment was considered as the post-test writing sample. Having scrutinized the pre-writing samples, five raters extracted the writing attributes which appeared in pre-test and post-test writing samples. Results indicate that there is a statistically significant difference among the participants’ performances in terms of using writing attributes. The results can be advantageous for both instructors and syllabus designers to provide pedagogical materials which identify particular frailties and notify them about the more troublesome points to concentrate on in the classroom so as to arrange effective education.

This study was conducted to explore the impact of integrating an evaluation cycle (Newly-developed Task Cycle) into Willis's task-based model on the improvement of Iranian medical students’ reading comprehension. In this quasi-treatment study, 60 medical students were selected through convenience sampling from Jahrom University of Medical Sciences, Jahrom, Iran, and assigned to two groups of Willis and NDTC. The control group (Willis group) received the procedures of the task-based cycle proposed by Willis, and the treatment group (NTDC group) received the procedures of NDTC designed by the researchers of this study. Each group participated in 12 sessions with a focus on reading comprehension, which met twice a week for 90 minutes. Prior to starting the treatment, a pre-test was administered. Also, one week after the last session, a post-test was administered. The post-test scores were compared with pre-test scores in each group and finally with each other. The results obtained from the statistical analysis of the collected data revealed that while both frameworks were effective in improving the learners’ reading skills, NDTC had a greater impact in this respect. The findings of the study have beneficial implications for teachers, researchers, and educational managers, should NDTC be infiltrated into teaching methods. 

This study aims at investigating the challenges of conducting qualitative research (QLR) from Iranian ELT (English Language Teaching) Ph.D. students’ and ELT faculty members’ viewpoints in the Iranian higher education context. The participants of the study consisted of 100 Ph.D. students majoring in ELT and 50 ELT faculty members. The study followed a mixed-methods approach with the exploratory design. The instruments utilized for collecting the data were a semi-structured interview and a researcher-made questionnaire. To analyze the qualitative data, a grounded theory approach was employed (Charmaz, 2006), and to analyze quantitative data, both descriptive and inferential statistics were utilized. The results of the study indicated that from the ELT Ph.D. students' perspectives, the Iranian educational system, professors, and lack of time, respectively, are factors affecting the possible weaknesses in undertaking QLR. While from the ELT faculty members' points of view, lack of time is the only reason for weaknesses in undertaking QLR. The results also demonstrated that from the viewpoint of ELT Ph.D. students, data interpretation, data analysis, data collection, data coding, and determining the validity of research, respectively, are the most challenging parts of conducting QLR. Moreover, from the perspective of ELT faculty members, data analysis, data collection, data interpretation, and data coding, respectively, are the most challenging parts of undertaking QLR. The implications of the present study for the universities in the context under investigation are discussed. At the end of the paper, some suggestions for further research are presented. 

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of multifactorial socio-educational variables of the family in the structural model of predicting the academic achievement of EFL learners and the mediating roles of parents' involvement and perceived autonomy support. The population of the study comprised all the high school EFL students in Urmia, from which 492 students (262 males and 230 females) were selected as the participants through Cochran's formula and stratified random sampling method. The study was conducted with a correlational design, using structural equation modeling method, and the assessment tools were standard questionnaires. The results of data analysis showed that perceived parental autonomy support, parental socio-economic status, and parents' involvement in education are significantly related to language learners’ academic achievement. Based on this finding, it is claimed that to improve the academic achievement of language learners, these three variables should be taken into consideration and strengthened as facilitating mediators.

From the dawn of the third millennium, the utilization of state-of-the-art technology for educational purposes, especially computers and the Internet, has become prevalent across the globe. In this regard, flipping EFL classes appears to be an effective approach to practicing second/foreign languages through computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in order to extend the class time to asynchronous activities outside the class, and make the students more autonomous and actively engaged in the painstaking process of language learning. However, this question merits consideration why many current CALL programs run and taught through flipped learning do not seem to take full advantage of collaborative learning and peer-assessment, specifically taking place in asynchronous channels of communication, namely threaded comment forms and discussion boards. The present study investigates the prospect of realizing social presence as a shared feeling of community among the learners by restructuring and optimizing the existing methods for flipping language classes. Employing a qualitative research based on grounded theory and data triangulation, the researchers recorded, transcribed and analyzed 41 semi-structured group and individual interviews with 44 participants attending an online IELTS preparation course on the first researcher’s website for over one year. Additionally, the same interview questions were posed in an open-ended questionnaire accessible to the participants from the website. The obtained results suggested that learner-centered flipped classes in which asynchronous student-driven content development and out-of-class peer-assessment through commenting and replying are adequately practiced can tremendously increase student interactivity, thereby fulfilling the sense of social presence.

This study investigated the comparative effects of audio-visually prompted collaborative dialogue on the listening comprehension development of symmetrical, asymmetrical, and asymmetrical teacher-fronted EFL learner groups. Besides, it explored the attitude of the participants of the groups concerning the effectiveness of collaborative dialogue for their listening comprehension improvement. The participants of the study were 120 Iranian female EFL learners who were conveniently chosen from several English language institutes and put into three experimental and one control groups, each with 30 learners. In the first experimental group, coequal learners engaged in collaborative dialogue. In the second experimental group, the expert peer(s) and less knowledgeable peers applied collaborative dialogue, and in the third experimental group, in addition to the peers, the teacher was involved in collaborative dialogue with the group members. As for the control group, the collaborative dialogue was abandoned and the participants worked individually. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that collaborative dialogue in asymmetrical teacher-fronted, asymmetrical peer and symmetrical peer groups were respectively the most effective procedures for listening comprehension development of the EFL learners. Also, it was found that the participants of the asymmetrical teacher fronted group had a more positive attitude towards the efficacy of audio-visually prompted collaborative dialogue compared with asymmetrical and symmetrical peer groups. The findings underscore the cognitive and affective efficiency of a more knowledgeable source, either a teacher or a peer, in asymmetrical dyadic interactions for the less knowledgeable partners' ZPD sensitive development.   

As a fascinating and colorful part of English language, idioms highly affect fluency, but they are quite difficult to teach and learn, and they have often been neglected particularly in ESL/EFL settings. Considering the large number of English idioms, corpus linguistics can be of great benefit in prioritizing materials in language classrooms based on the frequency information. Accordingly, the present corpus-based study aimed at identifying the most frequent idioms in English language by analyzing the data coming from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), composed of more than 520 million words. The study involved writing a special script using Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) language which resulted in the development of five idiom lists, each containing 50 most frequently used idioms in each one of the five genres in COCA including academic, fiction, spoken, newspaper, and magazine along with their frequency of occurrences. Comparison was then made across the mentioned five genres. It was found that the spoken genre included more idioms whereas the academic genre was the least idiomatic. Furthermore, various levels of overlap was found among different genres. The least and the highest levels of overlap was found between the academic and fiction genres and between the magazine and newspaper genres respectively. The academic genre had more overlap with the newspaper and magazine genres. The findings can benefit EFL materials developers, teachers, and learners in recognizing and including frequently-used authentic idioms in language classrooms and textbooks.

This research was carried out to examine the effect of using careful online planning vs. pressured online planning on learning multi-word expressions among intermediate English learners. To this end, two samples of learners through an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) were selected as the careful online group and pressured online group. After the pretest, the researcher exposed the experimental group to all multi-word expressions, adapted from input text. The experimental group was supposed to listen to some audio files and learn the multi-word expressions and then they must have been able to produce those expressions while speaking. They were asked to watch a film of The Donkey and The Master , take notes, and retell the story in six minutes for pressured online planners and then the time for careful online planners. The first time was for pleasure; the second time, they were expected to retell the story using Multi-Words Expressions in the film. After three weeks of instruction, the posttest was given to the students of both groups to assess their achievement. After quantitative data analysis, an independent sample T-test was performed. The results indicate that pressured online planning was more effective. This study has implications for EFL teachers and instructors.

Although Diagnostic Classification Models (DCMs) were introduced to education system decades ago, it seems that these models were not employed for the original aims upon which they had been designed. Using DCMs has been mostly common in analyzing large-scale non-diagnostic tests and these models have been rarely used in developing Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment (CDA) from scratch. Despite the prevalence of retrofitting CDA studies, true applications of CDA are believed to be rare since, firstly, a coherent framework to conduct such studies had not been available and, secondly, researchers were not able to analyze various DCMs according to the same model fit indices and criteria. This paper presents a summary of different types of DCMs and reviews true and retrofitting CDA studies. Having examined the limitations of previous CDA studies, the present study argues for the implication and application of Ravand and Baghaei’s (2019) framework to conduct true CDA studies. This framework is of importance since not only does it fit into prominent frameworks in education assessment such as Cognitive Design System and Assessment Triangle, but also it can provide test-developers with practical steps in conducting valid cognitive diagnostic tests.