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It is substantiated that particular features of pragmatics are teachable, and instruction is both necessary and effective. Determining what kind of intervention is most effectual for facilitating learners’ pragmatic development has been a central issue for researchers. To respond to the inconclusive findings in intervention studies and to extend the instructional studies in L2 pragmatics to less studied and more complex teaching targets, such as implicatures, the current study inquired into the effects of metapragmatic awareness, interactive translation, and discussion through video  vignettes on the comprehension of implicatures of 51 (15 male and 36 female) Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners, who were selected based on Oxford Quick Placement Test (2004) from students majoring English Literature and TEFL at Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran. Fifty-six video prompts containing implicatures from Friends sitcom series and Desperate Housewives TV series were taught to the participants who were randomly assigned to four groups (metapragmatic awareness, interactive translation, discussion, and control). The participants attended the classes twice a week for eight sessions. Results of multiple-choice implicature listening test revealed that all three intervention groups outperformed the control group. Results of Tukey’s Honest Significant Difference (HSD) test illustrated that the metapragmatic awareness group outperformed the interactive translation and discussion groups. No meaningful difference was found between the interactive translation group and the discussion group. The paper concludes that providing learners with contextually appropriate input through video using methods of pragmatic instruction (metapragmatic consciousness-raising, translation, and discussion) is effective to promote their ability to comprehend implicatures and signposts some avenues for future research.

Writing is thought as the most complicated skill in second language acquisition; therefore, L2 researchers have always been in pursuit of discovering an effective approach to improve it. One of the most debated ways is feedback which has a key role in improving the quality of writing. Much of the previous research on feedback has focused on analyzing different types of feedback and their effect on the learners’ writings and few studies have examined the effectiveness of computer feedback. Therefore, the present study was conducted to 1) determine what aspects of students’ writings receive computer feedback, 2) examine the difference in the effect of computer-generatedfeedback (CBF) and Teacher-based feedback (TBF) on improving the students’ writing quality and 3) compare the differences in Depth of Processing (DOP) in processing computer and teacher feedback. The results indicated that content, style and organization of their essays received feedback from the teacher and the computer. Teacher feedback was more effective in terms of its impact on improving the quality of the writing of the students than computer-generatedfeedback and it resulted in deeper processing of lexical items, whereas computer-generated feedback invoked medium processing on grammar.   

This study aims at investigating the Medical students’ English language needs as the first step for designing an alternative curriculum for teaching English for Medical Purposes (EMP). It also tries to examine if the needs of medical students are perceived differently by stakeholders in medical sciences. For so doing, a structured questionnaire was developed and distributed among 282 Medical Students, 12 instructors, and 15 practitioners studying and working at Birjand University of Medical Sciences, Iran. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS using statistical tests of Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis. The findings indicated that medical students need to be competent enough in all four language skills, considering the demanding nature of their profession in the future. They ranked the importance of language skills like reading, writing, speaking, and listening, respectively. Besides, the results of four Kruskal-Wallis tests indicated a statistically significant difference among the responses of the three groups regarding the importance of the subcomponents of speaking and listening skills. Six follow-up post hoc analyses showed that the differences lay between medical students and practitioners. The findings are discussed and the implications for policy and practice are made.   

La réalisation d’un mémoire est considérée comme la tâche finale des étudiants en master, à la fin de leur cursus afin de mériter un diplôme universitaire. Or, cette activité cause divers types de difficultés notamment aux étudiants allophones. Cette étude a pour but d’analyser les problèmes auxquels se trouvent confrontés les étudiants iraniens en master de didactique du FLE lors de la préparation et de la rédaction de cet écrit académique. Pour atteindre l’objectif assigné, 3 dispositifs de recueil de données ont été combinés : les commentaires de 4 professeurs sur 7 textes de mémoire, un entretien semi-directif effectué auprès de 12 étudiants et un questionnaire rempli par 33 étudiants. 3 dispositifs d’analyse de données ont alors été exploités : une grille d’évaluation basée sur les compétences nécessaires à la rédaction d’un mémoire, une grille d’analyse des entretiens ainsi que le logiciel SPSS. Les résultats de notre étude montrent que selon les étudiants, les problèmes engendrés lors de la préparation du mémoire sont significativement plus élevés par rapport à ceux causés lors de la rédaction du mémoire. Par ailleurs, les problèmes d’ordre linguistique pour rédiger un texte académique sont récurrents. A cette complication se greffent les difficultés d’ordre scientifique/méthodologique (pratiques de citations, choix et mise en place des méthodes de recherche ainsi que des dispositifs d’analyse des données). D’autre part, les obstacles sur le plan spatio-temporel peuvent être considérés comme un malaise auquel se heurtent les étudiants iraniens lors de la réalisation de l’étude de terrain. Le manque d’accès à des ressources diversifiées pour élaborer le cadre théorique ainsi que la non-maîtrise des logiciels de traitement de texte comptent également parmi les problèmes des étudiants.

This study examined the combined effects of two task complexity levels (i.e., high- and low-complex) and two planning conditions including pre-task planning and on-line planning on Iranian intermediate language learners’ speech production regarding complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To this end, 90 intermediate EFL learners from a language institute in Shiraz were randomly assigned into two control and four experimental groups. At first, the language learners in all groups participated in the speaking pretest. Presented with a series of picture description tasks, the participants were asked to narrate a story. During 10 treatment sessions of picture description task performance, the experimental and control groups attempted different planning time conditions including pre-task planning, online planning, and no-planning along with task complexity levels. Finally, following the last session, the posttest was administered to all participants. The narrations analysis, as well as the results of Mixed between-within groups ANOVAs and a series of one-way ANOVAs, manifested that language learners in the pre-task high complexity group outperformed all other groups in terms of complexity. Moreover, the online low complexity group and online high complexity group outperformed the pre-task planning low complexity, no-planning low complexity, and no-planning high complexity groups regarding accuracy. With regard to fluency, the pre-task planning low complexity group significantly outperformed the no-planning low complexity, no-planning high complexity, and online high complexity groups. It was also concluded that pre-task planning affected language learners’ speech fluency. The implications of the results are also addressed.