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The study aimed at examining the effects of scaffolding ESP readers, by using graphic markers and highlighting syntactic and emphatic prosody, on their Foreign Language Reading Anxiety (FLRA) and fluency. A mixed-methods research design was used for a deeper understanding of the obtained data. An experimental design was planned with a control and an experimental group including 38 students of two fields, museum studies, and conservation of historic buildings in Shiraz University of Arts. Participants of the experimental group were scaffolded to develop reading fluency with different graphic markers, while members of the control group had their usual ESP classes. The participants’ FLRA and reading fluency levels were assessed prior to the study and after it ended. Statistical analysis of the results proved that scaffolding the students with graphic markers had the potential to lower their FLRA. Also, the results of fluency assessment frameworks including Words Read Correctly per Minute (WCPM), Multidimensional Fluency Scale (MDFS) and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) confirmed the effectiveness of scaffolding the readers with graphic markers. For a deeper understanding, the data were explored using qualitative data classification and analysis by the NAEP framework. The qualitative analysis of the observations showed while graphic cues can scaffold the learners to notice their shortcomings toward an optimum level of fluency, they could not be the sufficient condition for achieving the goal. It was also concluded that online decoding, sight-word reading, and sensitivity to stress and intonation are pre-requisites of fluent and prosodic reading with expression.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate speech acts performed by Iranian EFL learners on the social network of Facebook in their interaction with their teacher and with their peers in response to divergent and evaluative questions. A page was constructed for the students in order to provide the opportunity for their answering divergent and evaluative questions posed by the researchers. A total of 240 comments including 1680 speech acts were collected from five EFL students during an academic semester. Content analysis of the collected data revealed that participants primarily used expressive speech acts in response to divergent questions and directive speech acts in response to evaluative questions. The results also revealed differences in using emoticons regarding the difference in power relations between the teacher and students. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper.

Consecutive interpreting (CI) requires a lot of parallel cognitive and affective processes, which are challenging for the interpreter who has to deal with them concurrently . This study focuses on the problems trainee interpreters encountered intheir CI sessions. An analysis of the strategies they used to weigh whether they have been successful in completing their task is also given. The sample of the study consists of 50 senior students of Translation enrolled in CI course (English-Arabic) in the Fall Semester 2018/2019 at the Translation Department at Yarmouk University, Jordan. The Source Text (ST), which was divided into one-minute period for each time, was given to students for interpretation and then the Target Text (TT) was recorded. Most of the challenges encountered by trainee-interpreters were linguistic problems, memory problems, note-taking and reproducing the ST into the TL. It is imperative therefore that interpreter training should be as effective as possible and interpreters shoulddevelop a series of skills and strategies such as chunking and joining, shadowing, anticipating, listening and recalling and paraphrasing that can be used to solve the problems encountered.

Discourse Markers (DMs) are pragmatic ties representing the relationship between different concepts in a discourse. As Fraser (2009) puts it, these lexical expressions are free morphemes that signal a special message about or in addition to the basic message. Given the importance of DMs in the written discourse of English as foreign language (EFL) learners, this study investigated the effectiveness of two methods of interaction in improving Iranian EFL learners’ use of discourse markers (DMs) in writing compositions. The data were drawn from comparing the compositions of two virtual groups of EFL learners who were exposed to two types of online interactions within which different flipped instructional activities were assigned. The data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results showed that the learners who engaged in online discussions used higher numbers of DM in terms of both type and token. The results also showed an increase in the length of compositions in the case of those groups who embarked on online interactions and discussions of flipped content. The findings suggest that once supported by the provision of flipped content, online interactions help create authentic opportunities for learner-centered discussions, which lead to an increased authenticity level of the EFL learners’ language production. The findings might also underscore the significance of flipped content and online interactions in developing other aspects of EFL learners’ pragmatic competence.

The present research aimed to investigate gender-specific charactonyms in the Persian Translation of John Bunyan’s (1684) The Pilgrim's Progress, Part 2. It also aimed to reveal whether the TL preferred equivalents for the SL gender-specific charactonyms could convey the meanings and the characteristics of the names in the Persian translation. The material was borrowed from the book Seir-o Solouk-i Za’ir, Bakhshe Dovom (‘سیر و سلوک زائر، بخش دوّم’) translated by Golnaz Hamedi in 2002 (1381), and also its French and Arabic translations. Thus, SL gender-specific charactonyms were compared with TL equivalents in Evelyn Hatch’s (1992) macro-level analysis. According to Hatch (1992), characters, as one of the main elements of a story, play a significant role and affect the macrostructure of the story. The results showed that the Persian equivalents used by Hamedi (2002) ranged from transparent to problematic ones. Hamedi (2002) less preserved the meanings of the names and sometimes replaced the female charactonyms with already-used male charactonyms that affected the novel due to the change of the characteristics and additional information the charactonyms bear in their inner forms.

Emotional words are assumed to have a processing advantage over neutral words due to their emotional content. Meanwhile, this advantage depends on other word features such as frequency and the characteristics of the processor and context of learning. Accordingly, the current study investigated the simultaneous impacts of L2 words’ emotional valence and frequency, and L2 user’s gender on word recognition time in a natural reading context. 43 intermediate EFL learners read 36 sentences in a coherent text for comprehension while their eye movements were recorded by eye-tracker. The findings revealed that participants processed the positive, negative, and neutral words identically based on eye fixation time. However, the frequency effect was attained for both valenced and neutral words. Also, no significant gender differences were approved in terms of recognition time though male participants tended to process all word types slightly faster than female ones. The lack of processing difference between valenced and neutral words is attributed to the disembodiment of L2 emotional words and learning experience of the participants as late EFL learners. These learners have been deprived of affective socialization and the affective sensory experience in their development of L2 emotional words. The absence of valence/frequency interaction is attributed to the L1/L2 relationship in terms of the target words. Although witnessed gender effect did not reach a significance level, it is suggested that the processing of emotional words be viewed in a multidimensional framework where the characteristics of the word, the processor, and the learning context are taken into account

Notwithstanding all of the advances in language learning strategy research, there are still some areas that strategy scholars have overlooked. The dearth of research into grammar learning strategies (GLS) may be the most egregious instance of this neglect. In order for this type of research to gain momentum, the present article reports on research that sought to identify whether there was any relationship between advanced EFL learners’ creativity and their grammar learning strategy use. It also sought to find if male and female advanced EFL learners were different in terms of grammar learning strategy use. To this end, 69 Iranian advanced EFL learners (30 males and 39 females) selected through convenience sampling participated in this study. Data were collected through Creativity and Grammar Learning Strategy Questionnaires. The Pearson product-moment correlation analysis and the independent samples -test were used to analyze the data. The results revealed that there was a significant relationship between Iranian advanced EFL learners’ creativity and their grammar learning strategy use. In addition, the findings demonstrated that female learners employed the grammar learning strategy more than male learners. Finally, pedagogical implications of the study for language teachers, learners, educational policymakers, and curriculum developers were presented.      

Medical practitioners’ ethnocentric orientations and English language skills contribute to the success or failure of intercultural communication in the context of health care. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between ethnocentrism and investment in learning English in the multicultural setting of English classrooms at an Iranian medical university. To this end, 200 Iranian medical students’ levels of ethnocentrism and investment in learning English were measured. The findings of this study revealed that the participants had relatively moderate levels of ethnocentrism and investment, and there was a strong negative relationship between the two constructs. Female medical students were found to be significantly less ethnocentric than male students, but were not significantly different from them in terms of investment. These findings were explained considering several contextual factors such as the participants’ linguistic loyalty, intercultural contact, and social comfort in English classrooms. Practical implications, direction, and limitations are discussed.

The study of linguistic devices variously referred to as stance expressions is one of the best means by which the relationship between the writer, the reader, and propositional meaning could be examined. This paper looks at a particular structural group of lexical bundles encoding stance expressions. These are bundles starting with an anticipatory it followed by is, a predicative adjective and finally ending with infinitival to or complementizer that (e.g. it is important to, it is possible that). The use of these bundles is compared in three corpora of research articles, doctoral dissertations, and master theses in the discipline of applied linguistics to explore possible generic variations and identify possible differences between published students writing. Using Hewings and Hewings's functional typology of interpersonal roles of it clauses (2002), this group of bundles is found to have three stance expressions of hedging, marking attitude, and stressing emphasis. The major difference is discovered to be between students' genres and research articles, with the former drawing less in their expression of interpersonal meanings. The differences are accounted for by referring to generic expectations, and students' growing disciplinary identity. The findings of the study have some implications for academic writing.

A major part of any graduate program concerns academic writing, but most students do not have sufficient skills pertaining to it. For non-native Ph.D. students who need to write English language dissertations, this issue is particularly troublesome since it causes time-consuming extracurricular efforts, which can, at times, be frustrating. The present study was carried out in the form of an action research project to explore the impact of a process-based teaching of writing on the attitudes of 8 Iranian Ph.D. candidates of TEFL towards writing academically. The course procedure included phases requiring students to send their completed writing assignments by specified dates and receive and apply teacher guidance on the texts’ logic, content, consistency, tone, and grammar. In-person discussions about the progress were also programmed for each student. The findings indicate that the students felt that the teaching process had a constructive effect on developing their writing skills. Implications include providing space for dialogue between teachers and students to complement written feedback, keeping the sense of accountability active in student minds by assisting them to self-organize, and realizing that graduate students may need assistance in very basic writing skills and knowledge.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of students' learning styles on their performance in various question types of the listening section of IELTS examination as well as their strategy selection. To this aim, 90 Iranian IELTS candidates from IELTS courses of an English language institute in Tehran, took part in the study as the sampling method was based on availability. The participants of the study comprised of 35 males and 55 females, and they mostly aged between 20 to 27 years old. The researcher first used Kolb's questionnaire to recognize the individual learning styles of candidates, which were accordingly categorized into four classes as activists, theorists, pragmatists, and reflectors. The results obtained from the one-way ANOVA showed that the dissimilarity of the style groups causes different performance in some question types of the listening test. In the note completion, multiple choice, and matching question types, the findings indicated a statistically significant difference. Therefore, it could generally be argued that in these three types of questions in the listening comprehension module of the IELTS examination, variation in different learning styles groups causes variation of performance in different question types. The results of the present study also reveal that the style preferences affect the individual differences in selecting the learning strategies

Given the importance of assessment in language education, this study was aimed at investigating the effects of interventionist and interactionist Dynamic Assessment (DA) on Iranian EFL learners’ perfectionism, willingness to communicate (WTC) and foreign language anxiety (FLA). The participants of the study were 166 pre-intermediate female and male learners at two public schools and one private language institute in Karaj. The participants were divided into three experimental groups and were given three separate questionnaires to measure their perfectionism, WTC, and FLA before the treatment sessions. During 14 sessions, groups A and B received instruction using interactionist DA and interventionist DA, respectively. Group C was instructed conventionally as the control group. At the end of the treatment sessions, they were given the same three questionnaires as the post test. The collected data were analysed using one-way ANCOVA. The results showed no significant differences among the two approaches of dynamic assessment and the control group in terms of their effect on learners’ perfectionism and willingness to communicate. Although there was no significant difference between the interventionist and interactionist models of DA, they were both significantly more effective than the control group on learners’ FLA. The findings suggested that dynamic assessment could reduce learners’ anxiety in language learning and lead to an effective teaching and learning process. These findings can have implications for teachers, students, and material developers.