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The attitude one has towards language learning determines the success or failure of learning the language. To this effect, this study aimed to explore EFL learners’ attitudes towards communicative language learning and the relationship between learners’ attitudes and English language achievement. To address these objectives, the study adopted a survey research design. Two hundred seventeen grade 11 students were selected through simple random sampling technique. Attitude questionnaire, achievement test and interview were tools of data collection. In order to verify students’ attitudes towards communicative language learning, the mean score obtained from attitude scale and qualitative descriptions of the interview data were utilized. To address the relationship between students’ attitudes to communicative language learning and English language achievement, and to decide the predictive power of attitude on learners’ English language achievement, Pearson correlation and regression were applied respectively. In addition, t-test was used to investigate if gender caused attitude difference or not. The findings indicated positive attitude towards communicative language learning. In addition, it was found that attitude to communicative language learning significantly predicted achievement scores of the students. Furthermore, gender was not found to be a determining factor in the attitude towards communicative language learning.

The current study was an attempt to investigate the effect of performing Focus on Form (FoF), Focus on Meaning (FoM), and Focus on Forms (FoFs) instructions on the development of collocational knowledge among Iranian intermediate EFL learners, and to explore any significant difference on the achievement of the participants' collocational knowledge among three groups. In so doing, 107 female intermediate EFL learners were selected for this research. They all took the Nelson proficiency test and 90 students who had gotten the higher scores were randomly divided into three groups of FoF, FoM, and FoFs. Before the treatment they were pretested and the results of the three groups did not have any significant difference, thus all of the learners were at the same level of knowledge. After the treatment, they were posttested and their scores in FoM group were considerably higher than the learner' scores in FoF and FoFs groups but the learners' scores in FoF and FoFs groups did not have any significant difference with each other. The findings of this study offer beneficial implications for EFL teachers, learners, and materials developers which are finally discussed.

This study aimed to explore the relationship between language acquisition and grade four senior high school (G4SHS) students’ achievement in English as a foreign language (EFL). To this end the 41-item English Language Acquisition Scale (ELAS) designed by Khodadady and Younesi (2017) was administered to 518 G4SHS students. Also to find the probable relationship between ELAS, its latent variables and participant achievement in EFL classes in EFL classes 126 participants were randomly selected out of population to answer schema-based cloze multiple choice items test ( S- test) designed by Khodadady and Ghergloo ( 2013). To know which of the G4SHS students who took the ELAS took the S-Test as well the researcher was matched the codes of the ELAS S-test and ELTAS carefully. The results showed that the ELAS consists of five factors, i.e., Qualified, grammatization, Humanistic, Engagement and Orientation. Also the ELAS and its underlying factors show significant relationships with English achievement scores. The results of the study are discussed .

By the end of the 2020s, a change involving the substitution of the Communicative Approach to English teaching for the Structural one has been fully operative in the Iranian secondary education system. This study set out to explore the views of Iranian teachers vis-a-vis the changes introduced into the education policy of the nation since teachers as end-point policy workers play a pivotal role in the ultimate success or failure of any curricular activity. Using data from semi-structured interviews and follow-up procedures, the investigation sought to delve into how eighteen EFL teachers at the upper secondary education level made sense of changes effected at the intersection of policy and practice. Common patterns and themes were identified and presented at the level of data analysis. Despite embracing the changes, the results showed that the teachers sensed that they had been left to their own devices in translating policy into practice and that the proposed reforms were not all-inclusive in the sense that significant stakeholders including parents, school counselors, and educational leaders had been left out. They were further keenly aware of a number of obstacles in the way of policy enactment and found especially the prevalence of a regime of cramming for tests leading to the dominance of a negative teach-to-the-test culture, limited support available and infrastructural challenges, as well as resistance to change among structurally-minded practitioners as highly detrimental to implementation of change. Implications for policy, practice, and research are finally given.

The study examined the impact of high school English teachers’ awareness of pedagogical competence on student learning. A psychometric measurement instrument of English language teachers' pedagogical competence (ELTPC) was first developed through factor analysis with 320 high school teachers in Guilan, Northern Iran. Based on the developed instrument, 36 teachers were divided into two groups of aware and unaware teachers of pedagogical competence (PC) according to Contrasting Groups Method of cut score. Then, 160 high school third graders received instruction from the aware and unaware teachers for 7 weeks. Finally, a survey regarding the teachers’ implementation of pedagogical competence in classrooms was conducted with 30 students. The findings from the experiment and survey supported the teachers in aware group. Although, based on the survey results, the aware teachers were reported to act better, they were not reported as highly practicing the pedagogical competence. The findings can be practically used by schools, education administration, and teacher educators.

The objectives of the present study were threefold: First, it sought to investigate difficulties Iranian EFL high school learners face to understand English idioms. Second, it attempted to explore intermediate EFL learners’ language learning strategy preferences to comprehend idioms. Third, it aimed to examine whether there was a significant difference between successful and less successful students' strategy use in idiom comprehension. To this end, 200 Iranian male and female students of the three grades of different senior high schools in Qom, Iran, were selected through convenience sampling. They responded to a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire (Alhaysony, 2017), investigating the challenges of idiom comprehension. Afterwards, they took the Oxford Quick Placement Test. Ninety-eight of them were selected as intermediate learners. Third, they took a multiple-choice test on idiom comprehension, developed by the researcher, and responded to the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (Oxford, 1990). Descriptive statistics, frequencies and means, and a one-sample t-test were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that the participants complained that idioms were challenging mainly because they were not taught well in class and were not part of the course syllabi. They also revealed that successful learners in understanding idioms used all six categories of strategies in the high and medium levels. They employed metacognitive strategies the most (M= 3.88), but affective strategies the least (M= 2.84). The results of the t-test suggested significant differences between successful and less successful learners' strategy use. The results provide insights into the challenges and strategies of English idiom comprehension.

The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study aimed primarily to reinvestigate the closing structures of telephone conversation (hereafter abbreviated as TC) in Persian and to discover the common politeness strategies used by native Persian speakers to end their TCs considering the contextual variables of social distance and status. Moreover, this study tried to explore the effect of time availability/limitation along with those contextual variables on TC closing part. To this end, 30 Persian native speakers were selected randomly. A DCT (Discourse Completion Test) of 12 scenarios was developed by considering three criteria: status, time limitation and distance. Analyzing DCTs, many different TC closing patterns were found. The obtained findings depicted that the aforementioned variables had significant effects on the TC closing patterns and strategies taken by the participants. The findings of the present study may be beneficial for extending pragmatic knowledge through emphasizing the significance of pragmatic competence in language proficiency. Also, since the results showed some limitations in the previous politeness models, the findings of this study can guide researchers to follow more complete and perfect politeness models.

Most of the validation studies conducted across varying test application contexts are usually framed within the traditional conceptualization of validity and therefore lack a comprehensive framework to focus on test score interpretations and test score use. This study aimed at developing and validating a collocational behavior test (CBT), drawing on Kane's argument-based approach to validity. Four types of inferences including observation, generalization, extrapolation and explanation were articulated. To verify the validity assumptions, both theoretical and empirical evidence were presented within the formative and summative stages of test development and validation. Followed from Kane, theoretical evidence was sought through test specification, item construction, and test construction procedures. Empirical support, however, was sought through examining the collocational behavior test (CBT) with a sample of 60 university students majoring in TEFL. Ebel’s criteria, KR-21 reliability and a series of Pearson-Product correlation were applied to analyze the data for both theoretical and empirical phases. The findings refer to the support for the assumptions proposed for test validity, suggesting that the collocational behavior test(CBT)may provide an appropriate and accurate indicator of collocational language ability for EFL learners. The implications for language testing and assessment are discussed

This study investigated the cross-disciplinary variations in the generic structure of Introduction sections of 52 Applied Linguistics and 52 Chemistry research articles drawing upon Swales’ (2004) framework, taking into account the new insights proposed by Bhatia (2004), Shehzad (2008), and Lim (2012, 2014). To this end, in addition to collecting quantitative data and conducting frequency and Chi-square analyses, a number of semi-structured interviews were conducted with some Chemistry scholars and Applied Linguistics (ALs) experts for triangulation purposes. The results of the quantitative data analysis indicated that the two disciplines showed significant variations in the frequency with which they used some steps and sub-steps to realize the moves. The results of the qualitative content analysis of the interviews also helped understand why authors in each discipline might use a specific move/step more than the others and why a move/step was frequently used by the authors in one discipline, but completely absent in another. Finally, based on the results, some implications were presented to postgraduate students and novice researchers in Chemistry and Applied Linguistics to help them write effective research articles in their field. The findings of the study could also provide some practical implications for the EAP teachers to help their students become better writers. In addition, some suggestions were presented to genre analysts to help them obtain more dependable results when analyzing the generic structure of various sections of research articles.

Various individual differences, including ambiguity tolerance (AT), have gained momentum because of the influence they can exert on the process and product of learning, and thereby, on various aspects of the learner’s interlanguage system such as accuracy of oral speech. The present study was undertaken to examine the extent to which Iranian EFL learners’ AT was significantly correlated with the accuracy of their task-based speech. To serve the purpose, a random sample of 60 Iranian EFL learners studying English at New Pegah Institute in Tabriz were selected from a population of 150. The Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale (Ely, 1995) was employed to quantify the participants’ AT while the accuracy of their speech, based on a picture description task, was measured based on the ratio of the grammatical errors to the total number of t-units produced. Correlational analyses of the research data revealed that the participants were highly inaccurate in their oral performance and that there was a significant moderate relationship between the two research variables. The findings underscore the need to determine and promote Iranian EFL learners’ AT and offer a number of pedagogical implications.  

Through a descriptive Ex Post Facto research design, the relationship between teacher reflection and classroom management, the predictive power of teacher reflection components regarding classroom management, and classroom management strategies used by high and low reflective teachers were examined. To this end, 113 EFL teachers completed the Attitudes and Beliefs on Classroom Control (ABCC) Inventory (Martin et al., 1998b) and teacher reflection inventory (Akbari et al., 2010). The results of Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient showed that there was a significant positive relationship between teachers’ reflection and their sense of classroom management. Moreover, a multiple regression was run whose findings revealed that practical and critical components of reflection are the best predictors of teachers’ sense of classroom management. Twenty teachers were also interviewed. The thematic analysis of the interview showed that high reflective teachers used different kinds of management strategies, for their students’ social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties using proper pedagogical planning and techniques, to deal with the classroom problems in comparison with their low reflective counterparts.