حمیدرضا شیخ الملوکی

Iranian National University Entrance Exam (INUEE) as a nationwide high-stakes test is held annually to screen Iranian high school graduates and admit them into higher education programs in universities. This high-stakes examination has a wide range of impacts on test takers as the primary stake-holders and the parents, teachers, and high school principals as the secondary stakeholders. This study reports the impacts of INUEE on high school teachers and principals. To this aim, 27 teachers and 18 principals from three western provinces of Iran sat for a structured interview. Each interview lasted nearly 30 minutes. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Next, following the Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) as the basis of analysis, the transcriptions were subjected to content analysis to extract common patterns and recurring themes. Content analysis was applied to codify the transcribed interview data through an inductive process of frequent moving back and forth to extract common patterns and recurring themes of the data. After coding and 'quantitizing' the data (Dörnyei, 2007), the basic themes were identified, frequency counted, and tabulated. The results indicated that from the majority of the participants' perspective, the INUEE has detrimental consequences for students, teachers, school principals, and the educational curriculum. The findings of the study underscore the consequential invalidity and unfairness of the test and its negative impacts on different aspects of the educational system. The findings provide practical implications for educational policy-makers, school principals, and teachers highlighting the necessity of their awareness of negative consequences of INUEE.

This study explored the competition between semantic and morphosyntactic processing in L1 and L2. In addition, the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and L2 semantic-morphosyntactic processing was scrutinized. To this purpose, 73 Persian learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) participated in an offline grammaticality judgment test (GJT), an L1 as well as an L2 semantically-primed test, and a WMC test. The results showed that L1 morphosyntactic processing was not affected by semantic priming. But, L2 morphosyntactic parsing decisions, irrespective of the participants’ WMC, was significantly influenced by semantic priming, indicating that L2 morphosyntactic knowledge in learners' interlanguage system might be shaky and subject to communicative aspects of input. Additionally, the findings revealed a significant relationship between the participants' WMC and their L2 semantic/morphosyntactic processing. The findings of the study provide some implications for foreign language teachers with regard to teaching morphosyntactic aspects of language and correcting morphosyntactic errors.