محمد ظهرابی

Most EFL schools, both government-run and private, use materials developed based on the curriculum developed by the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education in Iran started to update English textbooks for junior and senior high schools to enhance students’ communicative competence. To achieve this, there is a need for changes both in methodology and content of the textbooks in assessment methods. This study aimed to investigate whether teachers’ tests align with the changes in textbooks or assess students' knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, regardless of their communicative competence. A mixed-methods design was employed, combining quantitative data collected through questionnaires, teacher-made tests, textbooks, and qualitative interview data to provide a comprehensive understanding of the match. Thirty Iranian English teachers from different provinces participated in the study and 100 teacher-made tests were compared with the content and purpose of the updated textbooks. The results analyzed through chi-square test and thematic analysis showed no match between the theory of the tests and the textbooks and revealed that teachers' attitudes towards change of assessment tools contribute to the development of communicative skills. 

Positive psychology constitutes an approach to the study of human behavior that examines the extent to which individuals’ affective factors are likely to ameliorate their life conditions and their performance in diverse academic and occupational settings. The present study strived to determine the degree to which university learners’ psychological well-being, as their main positive psychology factor, was influenced by their grit, emotion regulation, and academic engagement. To this end, the researchers used convenience sampling to select 221 English Language and Literature learners and 178 Persian Language and Literature learners from among the learners of a university in Tabriz (Iran) as the participants. Second, they administered the English and Persian versions of the psychological well-being scale, grit scale, emotion regulation scale, and academic engagement scale of the study to the learners of English and Persian respectively. Finally, the researchers utilized SPSS 25 and Amos 24 to analyze the obtained data. Based on the results, while English learners’ grit, emotion, regulation, and academic engagement significantly predicted their psychological well-being, Persian learners’ grit, and academic engagement constituted significant predictors of their psychological well-being in their academic setting. Moreover, English learners’ psychological well-being was significantly higher than that of Persian learners. The results may have certain implications for professor educators, syllabus designers, and professors in the context of Iran.

The meticulous examination of discourse analysis, particularly the scrutiny of language application in academic writing, carries significant weight in the realm of Applied Linguistics. A critical aspect of this exploration revolves around the deployment of stance markers, which function as linguistic tools for articulating the personal viewpoints and assessments of writers concerning the assertions they proffer. The primary objective of this study was to juxtapose the overall and categorical distribution of stance markers in academic research articles authored by native (English) and non-native (Iranian) academic writers across the spheres of soft and hard sciences. The analytical framework of Hyland (2005b) on interactional metadiscourse was utilized to delineate the specific taxonomy of stance markers employed in the academic research articles written by two groups of authors. The results of the research revealed significant differences in the overall and categorical distribution of stance markers between the two sets of datasets, highlighting the potential impacts of disciplinary and cultural variations on their usage. The study advocates for an enriched understanding and integration of the rhetorical norms inherent in academic genres, including the deployment of stance markers, to enhance the creation of educational materials and elevate the language proficiency of students in linguistic studies.