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The current study investigated the relationship between teachers’ creativity, motivation and job satisfaction. In so doing, the role of demographic factors, i.e. gender, teaching experience and teaching context was also taken into account. To conduct the study, a total of 103 EFL teachers at both institute and school contexts were selected. The teachers were recruited on a voluntary basis, and the sample included teachers from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, coming from both genders and either of the teaching contexts. Three questionnaires (Teacher Creativity Questionnaire, Teacher Motivation Questionnaire, and Job Satisfaction Scale) were employed to gather the data, which were then analyzed through a number of analyses, including Spearman’s Rank Order Correlation, Multiple Regression Analysis, Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test. Findings revealed the existence of a significant correlation between teachers’ motivation and their job satisfaction. Furthermore, teachers’ motivation in comparison with their creativity had a greater predictive power with regard to job satisfaction. However, demographic factors did not have a significant role in job satisfaction. The findings can offer insightful implications for educational authorities, teachers, school leaderships and academicians to help promote job satisfaction in different instructional contexts.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the students’ English foreign language learning anxiety and English language performance test result. Thus, the objective of the study was to assess the relationship between students’ English foreign language learning anxiety and their English language performance. To attain this objective, a descriptive survey research design was employed. Students’ first semester English final examination result was used to explore the relationship between students’ English classroom anxiety and their English performance test result. In line with this, foreign language classroom anxiety scale and the students’ language performance scores were used to collect data. One hundred and seventy six (176) first year students were involved in the study. Multiple instruments that included questionnaire and document analysis were used to gather data. Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods were employed to analyze the data. The findings indicated that most of the students were found to be anxious. Furthermore, the findings showed that there was a significant negative relationship between students’ English foreign language learning anxiety and their English performance test result. Also, the findings of the study revealed that anxiety is much more prevalent in line with the subjects of the study and had negative correlations with their English language performance exam result. Finally, it was recommended that EFL instructors should acknowledge anxiety feelings as legitimate and attempt to lesson students’ feelings of inadequacy and failure by providing positive experiences and feedback to counter act anxiety.

This study was conducted to identify self-directed and external professional development obstacles facing primary school EFL teachers in Southern Zone of Tigray Region in Ethiopia. The participants of the study were 63 primary school EFL teachers, 10 school principals and 2 clusters of supervisors. School teachers were selected using random sampling technique whereas school principals and cluster supervisors were selected by using purposive sampling. To gather data for the study, questionnaires and semi-structured interview were used. The results of the study revealed that lack of interest, having dissatisfaction in their job, unattractive salary, lack of knowledge and skills in doing action research and misunderstanding of the concept of CPD and how to do it were the major self-directed obstacles of professional development activities. The study also revealed that in adequate in-service training, supervisors’ lack of knowledge, skills and expertise in teaching English as a foreign language, work load, and lack of support and recognition from stakeholders were the major external obstacles of professional development.

AbstractIn this study, the researchers examined the sources of demotivation among adult language teachers in Najafabad language institutes. Two objectives were pursued in the process of implementing this research: 1) Determining the main sources of demotivation among adult teachers teaching in Najafabad language institutes 2) Uncovering the most significant demotivating factors among English adult teachers in Najafabad. Based on convenience sampling, seventy male and female teachers were chosen as the participants of this study. The questionnaire used in this study, Teacher Demotivation Questionnaire (TDQ), contained four parts: students’ attitudes in class (SAC), teaching materials and facilities (TMF), research and working condition (RWC) and human relations (HR). Fifty copies of the questionnaire were distributed among the teachers. One-sample t-test was utilized to examine the statistical significance of the analyses. Comparing the findings, the most demotivating factors in SAC, TMF, RWC and HR were "Students are not interest in studying", "low teacher evaluation from students", "low pay" and "little appreciation from the administration", respectively. Among four subsections of the questionnaire, "students’ attitude" and "research and working conditions" were more influential and regarded as more effective demotivating factors.

This study investigated the impact of interaction and output modality on vocabulary learning and retention of EFL learners. To investigate the impact of Interaction, solitary (n =69) and collaborative (n =62) groups served as experimental and No Interaction No Output (n =26) as control group. To address the effect of modality, spoken (n =39) and written (n =31) modalities served as experimental and No output modality (n =26) as control group. The study was done in 8 weeks. The groups read passages with target words highlighted. Solitary and collaborative groups reconstructed the passages individually or in dyads. The spoken and written modality groups reconstructed them in the respective modality. Then, pretest, immediate, and delayed posttests were administered. The ANOVA results showed that the collaborative group outperformed the other groups and spoken modality outperformed the written modality group focusing on interaction and modality separately. The 2×2×2 ANOVA results showed significant main effects for time, interaction, and output modality. An ‘interaction’ effect was found between time and interaction, time and modality, and modality and Interaction. The ‘interaction’ between time, Interaction, and modality was insignificant. The findings have implications for language teachers, syllabus designers, and language testing experts.

The present study was aimed at exploring the use of pronominal reference for identity representation in terms of power and solidarity in English political discourse. The investigation was based on a corpus of four political interviews and debates amounting 26,500 words. The analysis was both qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative analysis, a discourse-analytic approach was used to find out the pronouns, their references and their identity load, and in the quantitative analysis, the distribution of different representations of identity were calculated. A nonparametric test, that is, Chi-Square was run in SPSS as the statistical operation needed for the current study. The analysis showed that most of the personal pronouns represented identity in the form of solidarity. The results also showed that political figures use <em>I</em>-pronoun and its variants to represent their identity in terms of power. The representation of identity in terms of power was also found to be correlated with the use of certain terms such as <em>veto</em> and active voice constructions. Furthermore, the results showed that when making claims, instead of giving pronominal reference to self, political figures use first-person plurals. In order to show solidarity, the speakers may also make use of discoursal proximity. Considering the important role that discourses play in constructing reality, it is important for CDA researchers to reveal sources of power, inequality and prejudice in discourses and interpret their hidden meanings. Pronominal choice and academic voice as linguistic constructions that are ideologically loaded need to be brought into the spotlight.

This study investigates the role structural priming plays in production of passive structures among Iranian EFL learners. In order to answer the research question, which asked whether structural priming effects result in an increase in the production of the target structure (i.e., passive structures), 60 Iranian EFL learners participated in the study. After taking the placement test, they were divided into four experimental and control groups, namely Experimental High-Proficiency, Experimental Mid-Proficiency, Control High-Proficiency, and Control Mid-Proficiency. Participants then took part in picture description sessions the results of which were subjected to a 2 x 2 analysis of variance. The results of the experiment showed that priming resulted in increased production of the target structure in question by experimental groups as compared with production by control groups. In addition, the results indicated that EFL level of proficiency made a significant difference in production of the target structures. It is believed that structural priming can be employed as an alternative technique for presenting certain grammatical structures

The current pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study attempts, firstly, to probe the effects of teaching formulaic sequences (FSs) on the second or foreign language (L2)  learners' oral proficiency improvement and secondly, to examine whether teaching FSs through different resources (i.e. animation vs. text-based readings) have any differentially influential effects in augmenting L2  learners' oral proficiency or not. To this end, a cohort of 60 young L2 learners of an immersion program school in the southwest of Iran was randomly divided into three groups, two experimental and one control. During 24 instructional sessions, one experimental group received the FSs instruction through animation, and the second experimental group noticed FSs through text-based readings.  The control group was taught using the school mainstream L2 textbooks without any focus on FSs. The results indicated that both FSs groups outperformed the control group. Moreover, animation-based instruction significantly increased the efficacy of FSs instruction, pointing to the issue that educational technology is a better strategy for teaching FSs rather than the traditional way of reading.

Recent research has shown that academic writing is not ‘author-evacuated’ but, rather, carries a representation of the writers’ identity. One way through which writers project their identity in academic writing is stance-taking toward propositions advanced in the text. Appropriate stance-taking has proved to be challenging for novice writers of Research Articles (RAs), especially those writing in a foreign language. To contribute to the literature on stance-taking, the present study compared the move-based use of evaluative resources in the introduction section of L1 (written by native English speakers) and L2 (written by Iranian, non-native writers) English RAs in the discipline of Applied Linguistics. To this end, 100 English Research Article Introductions (RAIs), 50 by L1 writers and 50 by L2 writers, were investigated as the corpus of the study. Categories of analysis were taken from Appraisal framework (Martine & White, 2005) and CARS model (Swales, 2004). The results revealed that the two groups of texts were not substantially different in the overall use of appraisal resources in the whole body of RAIs. However, more detailed analyses of the specific categories of appraisal in each of the rhetorical moves demonstrated that in some cases, especially in moves 1 and 3, L1 and L2 writers made different choices when taking a stance. The findings of this study can serve as a valuable source providing a practical and comprehensive understanding of the use of evaluative resources in RAIs for EAP researchers, teachers, and other professionals involved in the teaching of academic writing.

Measurement has been ubiquitous in all areas of education for at least a century. Various methods have been suggested to examine the fairness of education tests especially in high-stakes contexts. The present study has adopted the newly proposed ecological approach to differential item functioning (DIF) to investigate the fairness of the Iranian nationwide university entrance exam. To this end, the actual data from an administration of the test were obtained and analyzed through both traditional logistic regression and latent class analysis (LCA) techniques. The initial DIF analysis through logistic regression revealed that 19 items (out of 70) showed either uniform or non-uniform DIF. Further examination of the sample through LCA showed that the sample is not homogeneous. LCA class enumeration revealed that three classes can be identified in the sample. DIF analysis for separate latent classes showed that three serious differences in the number of DIF items identified in each latent class ranging from zero items in latent class 3 to 43 items in latent class 2. The inclusion of the covariates in the model also showed that latent class membership could be significantly predicted from high school GPA, field of study, and acceptance quota. It is argued that the fairness of the test might be under question. The implications of the findings for the validity of the test are discussed in detail.

The focus of the present study was to explore the effect of self-directed learning method on Iranian EFL students’ writing achievement in two levels of language proficiency (pre-intermediate and intermediate). It also attempted to find out if there was any significant difference between two groups of learners, control and experimental, in each level regarding their development of writing skill. In order to reach this goal, 30 male EFL learners that were selected based on random sampling, participated in this study. After the treatment was over, both groups in each level were given the post-test, the results of which were compared with pre-test results. Then, an independent sample t -test was run to find the effectiveness of two approaches to detect the differences among the means of the two groups in each level. The results of the present research indicated that the self-directed learning method had significant effects on the pre-intermediate and intermediate students’ performance of English writing ability. The results also indicated that there was a significant difference between the two groups of learners in each level regarding their development of English writing ability.

This paper reports a study which investigated if there was a match between students’ English vocabulary size and the vocabulary load of a locally produced textbook. The analysis of the passages of the pre-university English textbook currently in use in Iran’s education system using RANGE program indicated that in order to comprehend the texts, students need to know not only words from 2000 high frequency word list, but also words from academic and low frequency lists. On the other hand, results of the 2000 vocabulary level test administered to 464 Iranian pre-university students, male and female, showed that students did not possess sufficient vocabulary knowledge in order to comprehend the texts and that their vocabulary knowledge was limited far below 2000 words. Other analyses of the textbook, including exercises and word glosses provided more evidence for the inadequacy of the textbook. The paper concludes that the pre-university textbook is flawed in terms of the required principles and standards in materials development which results in students’ frustration and disappointment in learning English. The findings of the study are discussed, which should be of much interest to local and international ELT stakeholders, especially textbook writers.

EFL learners’ low motivation and lack of sufficient prior knowledge can be regarded as the barriers that impede their success in presentation of high quality writing pieces. To solve the mentioned problems, some researchers suggest the application of inventive technology-enhanced instructions in teaching the writing skill. In this regard, WebQuest as a computer-based instructional model providing the already-selected website links can be proposed as an appropriate candidate. Hence, the very aim of the present experimental pre-test/post-test study was to address the effect of WebQuest-based instruction on Iranian undergraduate EFL learners’ achievements in their overall essay writing ability as well as their writing ability concerning the elaboration, focus, conventions, vocabulary, and organization sub-skills. To do so, 50 participants in the experimental group and 49 participants in the control group performed the WebQuest-based and the alternative tasks without access to the web links, respectively. To analyze the obtained data, six ANCOVAs were run. The results revealed a significant improvement in EFL learners’ overall writing performance as well as their outperformance in the organization, focus, elaboration, and vocabulary subskills, but not the conventions sub-skill. The findings of this study indicated optimistic implications about the potential applicability of novel educational technologies in Iranian higher education context. EFL learners’ improved writing performance and vocabulary acquisition as well as their increased motivation and collaboration in WebQuest-based writing classes can be regarded as a valuable clue for teachers, administrators, and designers to pave the way for further integration of innovative technologies in EFL settings.