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Abstract Addressing the limitations and criticisms of cloze tests, Klein-Braley and Raatz suggested a modified version of the cloze test called the C-test where the ‘C’ stands for cloze. They introduced the C-test as a better representation of the reduced-redundancy principle. In C-tests, several shorter texts involving a larger number of items completed within a shorter amount of time while cloze tests usually consist of one or two longer texts with less items. This study reports on the results of a research program carried out to validate the C-test amongst Afghan EFL learners. One hundred advanced English majors were administered two different language tests namely a language proficiency test (composed of listening, reading, and writing) and a C-test composed of four different texts to measure the overall language ability of the participants. Various analyses were to measure the validity and reliability of the C-test. The results of the study confirmed that the C-test is a reliable and valid test which can be used as a general English language proficiency test among Afghan students of English as a foreign language.

The current study investigated the Iranian Teaching English as a Foreign language (TEFL) Ph.D. candidates’ (TPCs) professional identity development during the TEFL Ph.D. education program (TPEP). Applying a mixed-method design, the current study used two kinds of instruments: a four-point, Likert-scale, a researcher-made questionnaire on TPCs’ professional identity development, and the semi-structured interviews. First, the survey was mailed to 80 university instructors. Then, to yield an in-depth understanding of how TPCs develop their professional identity, TPCs with more than 10 years of intensive experience were asked to participate in the interview.  Following the quantitative data analysis, the qualitative data obtained through semi-structured interviews were analyzed using descriptive qualitative content analysis techniques. The results indicated that the majority of the participants believed that TPEP caused them to gain social legitimation from their community of practice, to get socialized to their global community, and raised their social status; therefore, they believed that not only professional but also personal development took place. Furthermore, it developed their pedagogical knowledge; however, it created small changes in the likelihood of TPCs’ career advancement and led to a small increase in their job satisfaction and security. The findings of the study can have some pedagogical implications for teacher education programs in that they can be used to emphasize their strengths, eliminate their weaknesses, and incorporate ample opportunities for TPCs’ reflection on their current and aspiring professional identities and improve their performance in classes.

Although story mapping strategy has been shown to be beneficial in many reading comprehension classes, the benefits of this technique have not been thoroughly investigated in L2 writing research. The small number of previous studies (e.g., Li, 2007; Brunner, 2010) have found the potential benefits of using story mapping strategy on students’ writing performance, but they did not focus on different aspects of students’ writing. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the effect of story mapping strategy on writing performance of EFL learners in terms of writing components (i.e., organization, content, grammar, mechanics, and style). After administering a standard proficiency test (OPT), 30 out of a pile of 82 Iranian EFL learners all majoring English teaching were selected and assigned to two groups: one experimental group and one control group. Both experimental and control groups completed two thirty-minute composition writing tests, one as a pre-test and the other one as a post-test. The experimental group received four sessions of instruction on how to use story mapping strategy in writing personal narratives. The results of One-way ANOVA and post-hoc Scheffé test indicated that the experimental group, which used story mapping strategy, made more progress in their personal narrative writings. Also, the results revealed that L2 learners made more progress in all writing aspects. The study contributes to teaching pedagogy by encouraging teachers to use story mapping strategy in L2 writing classes

Scholarly mails apparently display stable conventional principles as an emerging genre. Thus, contributors should structure their electronic mails appropriately when writing for purposes of discussing professional topics. However, this requirement plunges many a scholar in dilemma as to how to go about this vital undertaking without written structural norms in electronic mail communication. This raises the question: what is the generic structure of the scholarly electronic mail? The aim of this paper therefore is to uncover the organizational structure of the scholarly electronic mail as an emerging genre of computer mediated discourse. A qualitative approach is adopted in the description of the generic structure. Through purposive and stratified sampling, twenty scholarly electronic mails were selected and closely studied based on the basic electronic schema model by Herring (1996) with a view to extracting the features of the genre. Findings revealed that the scholarly electronic mail has a generic structure which is signalled by typical linguistic elements. The paper recommends a genre-based approach to guiding upcoming scholars on how to construct a scholarly electronic mail that fulfils its communicative purposes.

The current study examined the Iranian EFL teachers’ and students’ perceptions about Communication Strategies Teachability. The study was conducted with 20 teachers and 110 students from universities and private language Institutes in Tabriz, Iran. The literature regarding the teachability of communication strategies (CSs) has been far from conclusive. Some researchers reject the possibility of CSs instruction while many empirical studies support their teachability. Taking a mixed method design, the present study used a language proficiency test, a questionnaire and an interview for data collection. In the quantitative phase, the participants’ responses to questionnaire before and after a 12-week period of teaching CSs were statistically compared. The analysis of the quantitative data obtained from the questionnaire through Paired-samples t-test indicated that the students’ perceptions towards the usefulness of CSs grew significantly more positive after their instruction. The qualitative analysis of the interview data collected from the teachers indicated that most teachers found CSs useful and possible to teach. It was also found that these strategies improved capability of English language learners to speak and enhaned their conciousness of CSs. This study could offer pedagogical implications for both teachers and students and pave the way for further studies in the field.

This study aims to investigate the effect of input form-focused practice on the proceduralization of English modals. It also addresses the possibility of skills becoming specific to the context of practice. A pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test design was used where the procedural knowledge was specifically operationalized through the groups‘ performance on a timed dual- task JG test, and skill-specificity through a timed dual-task completion test. Two intact classes of intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to an input and a control-group. The input-group received explicit grammar instruction and a combination of three input tasks. The control-group was just exposed to the identical texts followed by some questions irrelevant to the target structure. Results showed that on the post-test, the input-group outperformed the control group in both measures of procedural knowledge, and skill-specificity. The group was capable of comprehension as well as production of the target structure.

Some universities in Iran have recently witnessed a shift in admission criteria from university admission test performance towards high school records. This sudden change seems to be unwarranted since the predictive power of high school records has not been explored. To fill in this gap, this study aims at showcasing the predictive validity of high school records for undergraduate students of English language and literature. To this end, a random sample of undergraduate students studying at Shahrood University of Technology were selected as the participants, the predictor variables were operationally defined as the participants’ grade point average (GPA) in three school subjects including English, Persian and Arabic languages along with their overall high school GPA, and the explained variable was operationalized as the participants’ overall GPA for the first academic year. The results of Pearson correlation revealed a significant but very low correlation between the variables of interest. Moreover, the results of multiple regression analysis revealed that none of the predictor variables well predicts academic success in English language and literature. Although the results of this study are case-specific, they have clear implications for policy makers and interested researchers nationwide.

The current study investigated the impact of an interventionist model of dynamic assessment, using a repetitive process of pretest-teach-posttest design, on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension and classroom engagement. To this end, 40 intermediate participants were selected through convenient sampling from among the English majors of a university in Kerman, Iran, and assigned to two control and experimental groups, each including 20 students. Then, during 4-month period, the experimental group was exposed to reading comprehension class, using an interventionist model of DA, while the control group did not receive ant dynamic assessment program. At the end of the treatment, the participants’ scores on the pretest and post-test were statistically compared. The obtained results revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the scales of reading comprehension skill. A change was also observed in the classroom engagement of the experimental group, but not for the control group. Indeed, the results showed that dynamic assessment can boost participants' performance in a practical and effective way, not only in terms of reading performance but also in terms of motivating more classroom engagement among EFL learners. This finding has implications for teachers to design more efficient courses which are the ultimate goal of education.  

Linguistic and semantic differences are some of the main problems of translating the Holy Qur’an into English. The present study highlights the problem of lexical gap and examines a number of terms- totally 117 in 110 verses- of the Holy Qur’an, including the referential meaning of ‘sin’ and their English translations. The researcher aimed to find the strategies applied by three translators and three machine translation systems (MSTs) and to compare them.  In this regard, five frequent and common terms – ‘اثم’, ‘جناح’, ‘سیئه’, ‘ذنب’, and ‘وزر’-were selected. The strategies proposed by Mollanazar (2009) were employed to fill the gap.  To do so, the English translations produced by three machine translation systems (MTSs), namely Google Translate, SDL Free Translation and Systranet were compared with three human translation by M.H. Shakir, A.Qaraei and T.B.Irving. The results revealed that in most verses, almost in six English translations, a generic term was used without any additional information to make the sense clearer. There was no noticeable difference between human and machine translations in applying the proposed strategies to fill the gap and make the English version more meaningful in terms of these apparently similar but contextually different terms. Thus, it seems that these differences were not focused on, while rendering these given verses to English. 

This study is conducted to reveal the types of mood, speech function realizations, and the persuasion strategies applied to Donald Trump’s clauses in his three remarks regarding the issue of COVID-19. Discourse analysis is applied to analyze the data. The applied mood types and speech function realizations are then correlated with Cialdini's principles of persuasion to see the persuasion principles applied in the three remarks. The results show that the President's three remarks are dominated by declarative mood with three most frequently used speech functions: statements of fact, statements of opinion, and statements of the assertion. In terms of Cialdini's persuasion principles, the speaker uses all of the six principles in his three remarks, except the principle of preference employed only in the third remark. The other five principles, namely authority, consistency, social-evidence, reciprocity, and rareness/scarcity, are contained in the three remarks with their persuasive purposes. In Cialdini's persuasion principles, the clauses used by President Trump reveals the strategies of taking advantage of his powerful authority in his remarks, showing his consistency while delivering the remarks, expressing his best efforts for his inhabitants, and showing successful evidence in overcoming the pandemic compared with other countries’ endeavors.

As in many other countries, universities in Indonesia have been closed since March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, and lecturers have been forced to adapt to online learning. Students in this online course admitted to feeling anxious when studying public speaking. This descriptive quantitative study aims to analyze the potential factors (English oral proficiency, personality, lecturer's scoring criteria, classmates' responses, pronunciation, audience familiarity, unfamiliar speech topic, preparedness, English grammar, vocabulary) affecting the students' public speaking anxiety at four different stages. The respondents of this study were 60 undergraduate students. A questionnaire adapted from McCroskey (1970) was used, and data were analyzed using descriptive statistics of IBM SPSS statistics 26 software. The findings of this study revealed that the factors affecting the students' public speaking anxiety through online learning varied by stages. Through online learning, English oral proficiency and topic familiarity could be the most influential factors on students' public speaking anxiety. The findings of this study are useful for educators in helping EFL students overcome their public speaking anxiety and enabling them to perform better in public speaking.

This study investigated the effects of corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of English prepositions to find out which one would be more effective for third-grade high school learners in their grammar performance. This study also examined declarative and interrogative recasts to see which one the participants preferred to improve their grammar performance. To this end,75 out of 130 female students at the intermediate level in Khorramshar took part in this study. The participants were randomly assigned into one control and two experimental groups. All three groups took the same pre and posttests; however, the treatment was different. The recast group received CF in the form of recast and the other in the form of metalinguistic clues. The control group only received general comments, like good, bad, etc. The results indicated that both experimental groups improved in preposition recognition and production in their grammar performances. The findings also showed that there was no significant difference between the students'' performance in experimental groups, but metalinguistic CF was more helpful. A careful calculation using a questionnaire based on 5-points Likert Scale showed that there was no significant difference between the participants'' preference for two types of recast by the group receiving recasts.