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Cet article organise la réflexion autour de l’impact des représentations sociales sur l’enseignement de la grammaire dans les cours du FLE en Iran. Comme nous le savons, la dimension socio-affective de l’enseignement et de l’apprentissage des langues, qui comprend les notions telles que les représentations sociales, les stéréotypes, les attitudes et la motivation des apprenants, se penche sur les rapports existants entre la didactique des langues et la sociologie. Cette étude a pour origine deux questions à répondre : quelles sont les représentations sociales dominantes de la grammaire auprès des enseignants du FLE en Iran ? Dans quelles mesures ces représentations sociales influent sur l’enseignement de la grammaire ? Nos résultats s’inscrivent au croisement d’entretiens semi-directifs avec les enseignants de FLE et du journal du bord du chercheur pendant l’observation des cours de ces enseignants. Nous avons pu montrer l’importance de la prise en considération des attitudes dans l’animation des séquences didactiques qui portent sur l’enseignement de la grammaire pour remédier aux représentations partielles voire stéréotypées de cette tâche en Iran et proposer des pistes de réflexion pour de futures recherches.

The systematic study of EAP teachers’ pedagogic content knowledge and their actual teaching practices in class is a fresh avenue in applied linguistics, especially in contexts like Iran, where, EAP courses are taught by two groups of teachers with different specializations; i.e., language teachers and content teachers. This study explored the similarities and differences between language teachers’ and content teachers’ PCK, and teaching practices, and students’ beliefs about their EAP teachers’ methodology at Medical Sciences Universities across Iran. In order to answer the research questions, a wide range of instruments including questionnaires, observations, semi-structured interviews, and field notes were utilized. Sources included language teachers, content teachers, students taught by language teachers, and students taught by content teachers. Representative samples of 318 EAP teachers and 1573 students participated in the study. The results indicated substantial inconsistencies across the two groups of teachers with respect to their PCK and teaching practices. The findings also showed that students favored language teachers’ methodologies and teaching practices. The findings promise implications for EAP instruction in Iran and highlight the pressing need for more systematic teacher training programs. 

The present study examines the role of Gal’perin’s Concept-based Instruction (CBI) as a pedagogical approach in teaching cognitive grammar-based (CG-based) concepts of tense and aspect to EFL students. Following the sociocultural theory of L2 Acquisition (SCT), arming L2 learners with scientific concepts can lead to L2 development by deepening their understanding and raising awareness of L2 structures. To this end, over the course of eight weeks 28 third grade middle school students (14 years old) received the concepts in the CBI framework and 30 third grade middle school students received a traditional type of instruction. There were three sets of data including definition of the concepts of tense and aspect before and after CBI, concept verbalization data during CBI, written discourse performance plus responses to a set of grammatical questions before and after CBI. It was found that although both groups improved significantly after receiving the instruction, the students who received CBI performed significantly better than those in the traditional group. The students who received CBI also produced a significant definition of the concepts and their written discourse performance and responses to the grammatical questions improved after CBI. The result provides insight into the application of scientific concepts in L2 instruction.

If we are keen to boost the process of language learning, we need to study every aspect and component of our course. To this end, we carry out an investigation in which every detail of the course is put under microscope. Assessment of a course is an attempt in which different type of information is gathered systematically in order to study the working of a language instruction program. Certainly, program evaluation might be carried out for fulfilling different goals and purposes. Therefore, an evaluator should clarify the audience and the objectives of conducting program evaluation from the very beginning in order to obtain some adequate results.  Different researchers have presented different proposals for the specific time of collecting data, type of data, and procedures of gathering data. Consequently, an evaluator should be familiar with the different dimensions of program evaluation. Also, some researchers treat program evaluation as a neat product, i. e. merely consisting of learners’ end of instruction scores. Yet, others consider program evaluation as a process. At this juncture, the important issue is the selection of an appropriate design for the implementation of the actual process of the evaluation. It is suggested that the illuminative modelis rather a proper design for program evaluation because of its different advantages. This article attempts to shed some light on the dimensions, goals, and design of the course study.

This paper aims to study Vygotsky’s (1987) sociocultural theory of learning with respect to how it relates to technology-based second language learning and teaching. The researchers selected their participants from advanced students from Payame Noor University. We divided the participants into two groups- an experimental group and a control group. After teaching the course an experimental group was asked to continue practicing language in an online learning environment, whereas those in the control group were not told anything about practice procedure. We found that students’ engagement in an interactive group activity in the online learning can be a useful approach to facilitating and motivating internalization, learning, and better performance.

Some consider assessment in terms of a systematic way of gathering and evaluating information within educational system and particularly higher education. Since, the term ‘’assessment’’ refers and relates to administrative processes, this paper has shed light some consideration on how it can benefit the members of department and program. Program assessment ultimately emphasizes on direction for developing students learning quality and satisfaction of its central role in educational system. Thus, this study aimed to regard goals and purposes, specifically, explore new trends, techniques and procedures which play an important role in this aspect of assessment and also can have influences on outcomes of the academic units. To this end, some of the practical assessment methods were selected to be done on different fields of study in Shahrekord Azad University as well as discussing their description, strengths and weaknesses to expose whether assessments follow the rules and procedures of program assessment to reach the best consequences in assessment of academic units. 

EFL learners who loved to read newspapers but have difficulty in comprehending. Present paper is a study on the significance of special styles of newspapers’ writing that may contribute in decreasing reading and comprehension skills for EFL learners and also is primarily concerned with the language and style of newspaper reportage. Skilled readers don’t just read, they interact with the text. The present study aims to probe into this important issue by providing formal instruction of the strategies to a group of Iranian EFL learners and comparing their newspapers’ reading comprehension performance with another group not receiving such an instruction.

Although scientific forum has obliged its members to hide their presence particularly while they are discussing research outcomes to avoid personal biases, a recent trend is encouraging writers to demonstrate their identity as the author of the text through the use of first person pronouns in order to take responsibility for the content. Therefore, the present study focuses on intermediate and advanced EFL learners‘ adoption of first person pronouns so as to manifest their identity in argumentative and narrative writings. A total of 30 EFL intermediate and advanced students attending an IELTS preparation course were requested to write essays on narrative and argumentative topics. The comparison between their uses of self-mention pronouns revealed that there was not a significant difference between the use of first person pronouns which are adopted by advanced and intermediate learners in the use of pronouns in both modes of writing (argumentative and narrative essays). Moreover, by tallying first person pronouns, it is shown that advanced learners have exploited first person pronouns less than intermediate learners within narrative writings. In addition, it was found that learners used more first person pronouns in narrative writings than in argumentative ones. Findings imply that since argumentative writing requires logical reasoning, learners prefer to be cautious about the adoption of first person pronouns and revealing their presence to show their credible self. English language teachers are suggested to make language learners aware of the uses of self-mention pronouns while practicing different writing modes. Since the overuse of the personal pronouns as well as the absolute absence of the mentioned pronouns is not recommended in writing, explicit instruction concerning the use of self-mention in witting is recommended.

Many studies abroad have focused on neural machine translation and almost all concluded that this method was much closer to humanistic translation than machine translation. Therefore, this paper aimed at investigating whether neural machine translation was more acceptable in English-Persian translation in comparison with machine translation. Hence, two types of text were chosen to be translated by Google Translate. The inputs have been translated in two distinctive methods. The outputs were investigated by the descriptive-comparative human analysis model of Keshavarz. Consequently, the results revealed that approximately the same errors were found in both methods. However, semantic aspects were improved.

In Construction Morphology (CM), a compound is treated as a construction at the word level with a systematic correlation between its form and meaning, in the sense that any change in the form is accompanied by a change in the meaning. Compound words as one type of complex words are coined by compounding patterns or templates which are called abstract schemas in CM. These abstract constructional schemas generalize over sets of existing compound words and specify how new compound words can be created. The schemas dominate the compounds so that these words inherit all predictable morphological and semantic properties from these schemas. In fact, this is mainly the constructional schema which determines the properties for every compound word not individual constituents of a compound word. Therefore, the form and meaning of a compound, as a whole, are affected by formal and semantic/syntactic properties of the construction itself. Also, the dominance of schemas and subschema as over the compound words reinforces the idea of hierarchical lexicon. In addition, CM adopts a paradigmatic approach to word formation; that is, the creation of new compound words is caused by the extension of a systematic form-meaning relationship in a set of existing compound words to new cases resulting in new compound words. Regarding these properties of CM, This paper aims to study one type of Persian compounds, that is, compound nouns in the framework of Construction Morphology. From this perspective, two types of compound nouns including endocentric and exocentric compound nouns are treated in a rather similar way because the compound noun construction as a holistic schema plays the main role in specifying the syntactic features, head(if any) and semantic content of compound nouns, not their constituents. According to findings of this study, the analysis of Persian compound nouns based on this model increases the degree of generality in compound noun formation and develops the concept of holisticity in the form and meaning of compound nouns as well as it highlights the paradigmatic relationship in Persian compound noun formation templates.

The present article studies Quranic quotations in the poetry of Mohammad Iqbal Lahori based on the approach of intertextuality. Iqbal is one of the greatest poets and intellectuals of the Eastern Muslim world. Quran is a source of inspiration both in his life and poetic career. His poetry is interwoven with Quran through intertextual Quotations. These Quranic quotations are central to the production of meaning in Iqbal’s poems. The present research limits itself to Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality. Kristeva (1980) states that meaning is not inherent in the text rather it is produced through the intertextual relations between texts. This research aims to apply Plett’s (1990) set of structural codes of quotations to Iqbal’s poetic text to expose the role of scriptural quotations in his poetry. The findings of this paper show that Quranic quotations mostly follow the rules of general quotations; except that as authoritative words they are open to some transformations at surface structure but not at deep structure. The semantic fixity of Quranic quotations does not prevent their application as means of power for purposes not endorsed by Quranic instructions. Finally, the authoritative nature of Quranic quotations allows Iqbal not to employ quotation markers in his text wherever he makes use of them.

The present study investigated the possible difference between EFL teachers’ beliefs and their actual classroom practices. To this end, 210 Iranian EFL teachers (103 teachers from high schools and 107 from language institutes) participated in the study. The 45-item Likert-scale Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) developed originally by Horwitz, (1985) and validated by Kasraee Nejad (2014) for the context of Iran and an observation checklist, devised and validated by the researchers, comprised the data collection instruments adopted in the current study. The results of paired t-test revealed statistically significant differences between beliefs of Iranian EFL teachers and their actual classroom practices. Moreover, the results of Independent Samples t-test indicated that the two groups of high school and language institute teachers were significantly different with regard to their beliefs on language learning. In addition, the results of Chi-square analysis demonstrated 43 out of 45 teachers’ specific beliefs were significantly different from their actual classroom practices. In the light of the findings of the present study, educational policy makers and managers in both high schools and language institutes are recommended to introduce ways to raise EFL teachers’ awareness of their beliefs to enhance their efficiency in their actual classroom practices.