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Teacher professional identity is widely acknowledged as a multi-dimensional dynamic evolving concept contributing to teachers’ self-perception about their professional roles. This qualitative study aimed to explore how different instructional settings of teaching English as a foreign language in Iran impacted on teachers’ professional identities in a comparative way. To this end, 25 English teachers from public schools and private institutes of Kerman were interviewed to collect data and to examine how teachers conceptualize themselves at schools and institutes. All 25 participants (13 school teachers and 12 institute teachers) had a BA degree in English. Data analysis revealed that teachers of public schools had comprehended, strong, and thick initial professional identity in comparison to those teaching in private institutes. However, such an ideal professional identity was more vulnerable to professional identity shock that resulted from the discrepancy between initial professional identity arisen from pre-service training programs and an emergent one derived from the identity-in-practice in class life. In terms of preparation to teach, the findings showed that the teachers of public schools had more extended viewpoints towards teaching and its significance. Moreover, they believed that their identity influenced the teaching profession while the institute teachers believed in teaching influence on their identity that provided evidence for the variable nature of teacher professional identity resulting from parallel interconnections of different macro and micro factors leading to its steady reinterpretation and reshaping. Keywords: dyna

Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, there have been three packages used in the state-controlled schools of the country, namely, Graded, Right Path to English, and Prospect/Vision series. These textbooks all include prefaces to indicate the general philosophy of language teaching and education, and how the agents (learners and teachers) have to play roles in the system. This article aims to have a postcolonial reading of the Islamic post-revolutionary English language textbooks published in Iran. To this aim, the prefaces are critically content-analyzed and explained taking into consideration the key concepts of postcolonialism. After developing the table of themes in relation to postcolonial issues, the findings indicate that the resistance prevalent in the prefaces is particularly hybrid, anxious, and unstable of the Iranian type due to the socio-politico-cultural background of the country. This resistance, thus, is a tragic attempt for developing a firm background for developing language learners'' knowledge.

The current paper primarily provides an account of how apology speech acts are internally intensified in Persian. Moreover, the study checks to what extent contextual variables, namely social distance and severity of offense, may motivate the internal intensification of apology speech acts. To these ends, the study collected the required speech acts through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) from among Persian male native speakers. The data was analyzed based on the coding scheme developed by Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989). The results revealed that apology speech acts are intensified in Persian in most cases through universal strategies of internal intensification. Moreover, the Persian speakers are sensitive to severity of the offense, as a context-internal variable, which motivates more internal intensifications of apologies. The findings, however, revealed that social distance as a context-external variable does not prompt the use of internal intensifications differently in situations where there is social distance between interlocutors compared to situations where there is no social distance between interlocutors.

The present study aims at investigating English lexicon polysemy within the cognitive approach to study the way based on which Persian language learners learn English lexicon with the concepts used in cognitive linguistics such as, prototype, polysemy, categorization, etc. The nature of the methodology used in this qualitative research for studying the meanings of English lexicon is a descriptive-analytic method. After the semantic analysis of the English lexicon based on the model of Dirven & Verspoor (2004), it was found that the meanings of the lexicon are classifiable based on theoretical procedures on cognitive semantics. The authors are trying to show the cognitive concepts in cognitive linguistics can be used for teaching English lexicon. The findings, generally, showed that the unconscious knowledge of learners in learning the cognitive structure of the meanings of the lexicon has a meaningful relationship with learning. The results also revealed that the lexicon has a semantic network semantically, in which the notion of core or prototype is located in the center of the semantic network and the rest of the meanings can be examined as the peripheral meanings of a lexicon.

This study is conducted under the domain of Vygotskian Socio-cultural Theory (SCT) of mind and the notion of dynamic assessment to elevate the linguistic accuracy of EFL learners’ writing skill. 40 homogenous intermediate EFL learners from four intact classes were divided into two dynamic assessment (DA) and non-dynamic assessment (NDA) groups. As a pre-test, the participants were given writing topics during a course to assess their writing linguistic abilities. After analyzing and scoring the compositions’ errors based on four consecutive stages to error analysis and a model of linguistic errors (grammatical, syntactic, substance, and lexical), the type and frequency of errors’ sub-categories related to each category (n=516) was detected. Afterwards, the DA group went through intervention/mediation (interventionist dynamic assessment) based on their pre-test errors in five sessions, while non-dynamic assessment group received no mediation and feedback. The pre-test-mediation-post-test design (sandwich model of dynamic assessment) was used in this study. After mediation, as a post-test, both groups entered the second course of language learning and like pre-test their compositions during the course were analyzed and scored to see the effect of dynamic assessment on learners’ writing ability. Analysis of data through descriptive statistics and statistical analysis showed that the experimental group who received mediations, unlike control group, solved their writing difficulties extensively and outperformed the control group with a significant difference. In other words, application of DA as an alternative procedure to standard testing has a positive effect on both test performance and writing linguistic accuracy of EFL learners.

Listening taking over half of the learners’ time and effort (Nunan, 1998), forms a basis for acquiring much of a language. There are factors affecting listening comprehension and its perception, such as the speech rate, phonological properties of the text, the quality of the recording, the learners’ anxiety, and listening comprehension strategies (Goh, 2000; Hamouda, 2013). At the Iran Language Institute in Dezful, S.W. Iran, some teachers attributed some learners’ perception of partially unsuccessful comprehension of the recorded material to factors such as rate of speech, T-unit length, and pauses between T-units or inside T-units. This study aimed at the probable association between learners' and teachers' perceptions of these variables and compare them to the real qualities of the recordings they listen to. Thus, in an analytic single-shot design, a researcher-made questionnaire was developed and was answered by 504 (229 male and 275 female) participants together with their teachers in 21 classrooms across the six levels of proficiency at the Iran Language Institute. The results, not normally distributed, were juxtaposed with Kendall's tau and Spearman's rho correlation coefficients to ensure maximum agreement between the statistical analyses. The results indicated a strong or moderate correlation between the audio tracks' characteristics with neither learners' perceptions nor teachers' perceptions. Teachers' and learners' perceptions showed a moderate correlation between the perceived rate of speech and a weak correlation between their perceptions of between-T-unit pauses.

This study aimed to determine the university students’ level of social presence, preferred synchronous learning tool, and learning performance and their differences according to sex, age, year, major, Blackboard experience, and perceived computer literacy. The relationship between students’ social presence, preferred synchronous tool, and learning performance was also determined. The respondents were 29 students enrolled in the ESL online elective class, Global Business Communication, at a university in South Korea. There were two sets of online surveys used in this study. The statistical tools used in this study were the mean, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test, Mann-Whitney Test, and Kruskal-Wallis Test. The results showed that the students maintained a Moderately High level of social presence throughout the duration of the course, chose KakaoTalk as their preferred synchronous learning tool, and concluded the course with an overall average grade, or learning performance level of “B”. There was a significant difference regarding the students’ learning performance when they were classified according to Blackboard experience; and no significant relationship existed between the students’ social presence, preferred synchronous tool, and learning performance.

T his study attempts to examine the amounts, purposes, and reasons for using L1 by teachers as well as the amounts and purposes of its use by students in English as foreign language classrooms through investigating two pre-intermediate classes of an English language institute in Iran. Among students with an age range of 16-25 years, eight male and female students were in one class and 16 were in the other class (N = 24). Two native Persian teachers with master's degrees in Teaching English as a Foreign Language participated in this study: One was 40 years old with 14 years of experience and the other one was 32 years old with nine years of experience. Eight 90-minute sessions of each teacher’s class were audio-recorded. Following that, the two teachers were interviewed to report on the reasons for which they used their first language. The findings obtained from the classroom audio transcriptions were analyzed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches through the lens of Activity Theory. Moreover, the teachers’ interviews were thematically analyzed and the results of these analyses indicated that the teachers and their students resorted to the first language as an important cognitive and pedagogical tool on different occasions wherever needed during their teaching. The findings also revealed that teachers in this study maintained that using the students’ first language supports second/foreign language learning and teaching processes in the pre-intermediate levels.