جمیله راحمی

With the growing adoption of digital technologies in education, digital literacy (DL) is essential for both novice and experienced educators. Farhangian University, Iran’s leading teacher education institution, plays a key role in fostering DL and technology integration through internship programs where mentor teachers model instructional practices. Despite its significance, the DL competencies of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching mentees of Farhangian University and their mentor teachers remain underexplored. Grounded in the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) and Teacher Digital Competency (TDC) frameworks, this descriptive study examined self-perceptions and cross-evaluations of DL and technology use among EFL mentor teachers and teaching mentees at Farhangian University. Purposive sampling was used to distribute two parallel Likert-scale questionnaires to 62 female EFL teaching mentees, enrolled in practicum course three, and 53 female EFL mentor teachers in Isfahan. Self‑perceptions revealed that both mentors and mentees rated themselves most proficient in basic digital tools; mentees reported broader confidence across collaborative and content‑specific technologies, while mentors rated themselves lower across specialized applications. Cross‑evaluations showed that mentors viewed mentees as digitally capable but only moderately effective in classroom integration, whereas mentees perceived their mentors as less digitally literate and infrequent technology users. Both mentors and mentees rated their own competencies higher than those of their counterparts, indicating a self‑enhancement bias and underscoring intergenerational differences in DL perceptions. These findings highlight the need for reciprocal DL development, stronger mentor modeling, and structured digital training within teacher education programs to address intergenerational gaps.

Over the past decades, writing assessment research has been concentrating on alternative methods with a social-oriented view of assessment, including dynamic assessment (DA). Given the lack of research juxtaposing the interventionist and interactionist DA frameworks in the area of narrative writing, this study sought to compare the effectiveness of Brown’s graduated prompts model vs. Poehner’s model in the development of one-paragraph narrative essays in terms of grammatical accuracy. The study followed a quasi-experimental design, with 15 Iranian EFL learners selected via convenient sampling from among the female students of a language institute in Tehran. The participants were then randomly divided into three groups: Interventionist group, in which mediation was based on Brown’s model in the sandwich format; interactionist group, where mediation was done using Poehner’s model in the cake format; and non-dynamic assessment (NDA) control group with no mediation involved. The research consisted of three pilot sessions and eleven sessions as the main phase. To analyze the data, both descriptive and non-parametric inferential statistics were run. The results conceded the superiority of both DA approaches to NDA, whereas no significant difference was observed between the two DA groups in their general performance on narrative tasks. However, the analysis of the number and types of required mediational moves over the DA sessions indicated the superiority of the interactionist model to interventionist framework in the development of grammatical accuracy in narrative paragraphs. The study offers some theoretical and pedagogical repercussions for educators, curriculum designers, and L2 teachers.

The studies on the merits of processing instruction (PI) and output-based instruction (OI) have mostly treated the two approaches as mutually exclusive. To address the potentials of combining interpretation and production activities, this research compared the two isolated approaches of PI and OI with two combined approaches in which processing and output tasks were used in two opposite orders suggested by the researcher, i.e. processing-output-based instruction (POI) and output-processing-based instruction (OPI). The target structure was English passives. Participants included 185 Iranian EFL students from five intact classes, with four assigned to each treatment and one comprising a control group. Results on sentence-level interpretation and production tests administered before, immediately after, and one month following instruction indicated similar improvement for the treatment groups on the first interpretation posttest, and the superiority of POI over OPI and PI over the delayed posttest. On the first production test, POI, OPI, and OI performed equally well and better than PI, while more accurate uses of the target form were observed by POI and OPI on the delayed posttest. It was concluded that the combined approaches, particularly POI, could produce more persistent outcomes by giving learners the opportunity to both process a form and produce it.