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The evaluation of students' writings and the allocation of scores are traditionally time-intensive and inherently subjective, often resulting in inconsistencies among human raters. Automated essay scoring systems were introduced to address these issues; however, their development has historically been resource-intensive, restricting their application to standardized tests such as TOEFL and IELTS. Consequently, these systems were not readily accessible to educators and learners. Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have expanded the potential of automated scoring systems, enabling them to analyze written texts and assign scores with increased efficiency and versatility. This study aimed to compare the efficacy of an AI-based scoring system, DeepAI, with human evaluators. A quantitative approach, grounded in Corder's (1974) Error Analysis framework, was used to analyze approximately 200 essays written by Persian-speaking EFL learners. Paired sample t-tests and Pearson correlation coefficients were employed to assess the congruence between errors identified and scores assigned by the two methods. The findings revealed a moderate correlation between human and AI scores, with AI diagnosing a greater number of errors than human raters. These results underscore the potential of AI in augmenting writing assessment practices while highlighting its pedagogical implications for language instructors and learners, particularly in evaluating the essays of EFL students.

Positive Language Education (PLE) has emerged as a significant area of focus within foreign language education, emphasizing the incorporation of well-being and positive psychological principles into the language learning process to foster a more holistic and supportive educational environment. Despite the growing scholarly interest in this approach, the application of Positive Psychology (PP) themes within language curricula, particularly in non-Western educational contexts, remains underexplored. In this qualitative study, the researchers explored the potential benefits of embedding PP content within a General English course. Drawing on established well-being themes from the literature—such as gratitude, resilience, emotion regulation, altruism, creativity, and life’s meaning—the researchers designed and implemented a series of activities and materials incorporating multimodal resources, including texts, audio recordings, and video clips across diverse genres (e.g., fiction and non-fiction). The study was conducted with a cohort of 85 Iranian female undergraduate students enrolled  in a General English course at a state university in Tehran., Iran Data were collected over the course of a semester through a combination of methods: classroom observations, analysis of student-generated materials, and in-depth semi-structured interviews with a selected number of participants. Thematic analysis of the collected data revealed that the integration of well-being themes and activities fostered the development of both linguistic and non-linguistic competencies, including enhanced positive self-expression, introspective self-reflection, well-being literacy, and the cultivation of a foreign language growth mindset. The findings highlight the multidimensional benefits of integrating PP principles into foreign language education.

Compared to non-academic contexts, the use of address forms in academic settings is insufficiently researched. To fill this gap, the present study investigated the address forms commonly used by students and lecturers in Iranian universities in their oral and written communication. The analytical framework of this study is semio-cultural conceptualization. A qualitative descriptive research design was adopted, which included six open-ended questions. Thirty Iranian EFL lecturers participated in this study, 20 males and 10 females, representing 14 different universities. The average age of the participants was 50. The thematic analysis of the data revealed that in addition to the conventional polite forms, some innovations have emerged in the academic address practice in Iran. While students always addressed their lecturers using respectful forms and honorifics, the lecturers’ address choices varied according to sociolinguistic factors such as the students’ age, gender, degree of intimacy and distance, and educational status. In the majority of cases, the lecturers employed title plus last name; nevertheless, some of them opted for more intimate forms. However, such forms were never reciprocated by students owing to the perceived power dynamics and elevated respect for teachers, which is deeply entrenched in the culturally-constructed conceptualization of the unique teacher-student relationship in Iran. The findings also suggest that the scope of address studies can be expanded to include semio-cultural conceptualizations, such as emotion schema, and symbolism.   

Sociocultural Theory (SCT) of second language learning puts the emphasis on social interaction and regards it as a pre-requisite for cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1978). Drawing on the SCT, the present study aimed to delve into the possible effect of ZPD-based teacher and peer feedback on reading comprehension and reading strategy use of EFL learners. In so doing, 75 Iranian EFL learners, who were randomly assigned into two experimental and one comparison groups, participated in a quasi-experimental study. The data were collected through Oxford Placement Test (OPT), reading comprehension test and reading strategy questionnaire. One of the experimental groups received teacher feedback based on Aljaafreh and Lantolf's (1994) regulatory scale while the other experimental group accomplished the reading task using the feedback provided by the peers. Results obtained from the one–way ANOVA and Tukey test demonstrated that both experimental groups, teacher and peer, gained significantly more and performed better than the comparison group in reading comprehension while there was no significant difference between teacher and peer feedback groups in reading comprehension. The findings of the strategy questionnaire indicated no statistically significant difference between experimental and control groups, leading to the conclusion that students’ grouping did not influence their use of reading strategy. Therefore, it is concluded that peer feedback can be as effective as teacher feedback, aiding teachers to have a learner–centered classroom by implementing peer feedback rather than teacher feedback.

Literature theoretically provides many positive contributions that could impact students’ learning performance in reading. It is because literature consists of two fundamental functions that Horace called it dulce et utile (sweet and useful). Besides, literature also contains two important elements, i.e., intrinsic and extrinsic. Integrating these literary elements into literary reading activities builds students’ comprehension skills to analyze various aspects, e.g., character, plot, setting, theme, and stylistics as the intrinsic elements and sociology, psychology, politics, and philosophy as the extrinsic elements. In studying the discourses, this research presented perceptional theory and a study of the LBI approach used in a reading course that analyzed the impacts on students’ learning performance. The methodology used in this research was Cresswell's (2016) mix-method with an explanatory case study approach. To collect the needed data, several instruments were utilized in this research, such as interviews and questionnaires. All the collected data were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. After collecting, analyzing, and discussing the data, the results demonstrated that students perceived that LBI material was enjoyable, challenging, and contains moral teaching. Furthermore, students also felt that LBI material impacted some good learning performance, i.e., LBI material improved students’ reading skills, triggered students’ critical thinking, and transformed students’ learning attitudes.  

Although email correspondence is a common means of communication between scholars from different cultures, little attention is paid to writing academic emails in tertiary education. The present investigation is aimed at studying the influence of genre education on the formation of academic writing skills and understanding the principles of academic correspondence. The main methods used in the study were experiment and survey. The research was carried out on the basis of National Research Nuclear University MEPhI. The participants of the study were postgraduate (PhD) students (n = 100) with a major in Physics, Electronics, Computer Science, and other technical areas. The results of the study show that the students made considerable progress in their academic email writing skills even after a short period of explicit instruction applying the genre-based approach. Most of the students changed their way of thinking about writing emails for academic purposes in English and became aware of the norms of formal writing. Moreover, the results of the experiment and survey justify the necessity of including academic email writing in the curriculum of teaching Academic English and demonstrate strong potential of genre-based learning in other genres involving academic writing.

Since comics comprise images and texts, the relations between them should be a major concern of comics studies. However, few studies have focused on the intersemiotic interaction between images and texts in the meaning construction of Chinese classic comics. This study applies Martinec and Salway’s system to Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version of The Analects of Confucius (The Analects), attempting to explore the image-text relations in Chinese classic comics. It is found that the image-text relations in Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version of The Analects can be summarized as unequal-status and logico-semantics combined. Quantitative analysis shows that the images are always subordinate to the texts, and in terms of logico-semantic relations, all of subsystems but “image more general” are included. Besides, the distribution of the logico-semantic relations of image and text indicates that two different subsystems, namely expansion and projection, integrate and work together to create meanings in this version. Qualitative analysis shows that the tactful deployment of the combinations of image-text relation in The Analects makes it visually-verbally coherent. The intersemiotic interaction between images and texts also contributes a lot to the discourse meaning construction of Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version. However, in The Analects, the image-text relation relies too much on the extension of the image by the text as well as the projection of locution. This study provides a case reference for the analysis of Chinese classic comic as multimodal discourse, and also contributes to promoting the overseas dissemination of traditional Chinese culture.

It is becoming an established strategy to add humor in Persian subtitles even often when the original dialogue does not include the created or any other humor. This study measures the impact of this strategy on viewers’ attention allocation while reading subtitles. The eye movements of 32 participants were recorded while watching a humorous and non-humorous version of the same scene extracted from Superchondriac (Boon, 2014), a French comedy. The results show that there is a significant difference between attention allocation in the two versions, and the viewers’ attention to the subtitles with added humor is significantly larger than non-humorous subtitles. The interviews showed that some viewers liked the added humor because they thought it is funny and close to their cultural and ideological views. On the other hand, some of the participants opted for the non-humorous subtitles because they thought the added humor was distracting, confusing, at times offensive, and detached from the original culture.

Few studies have addressed the interaction among reader and text variables in reading comprehension. This research probed the role of aspects of lexical knowledge to the TOEFL reading comprehension of passages with low and high lexical cohesion. The extent of this contribution was checked for five types of TOEFL reading test items: Main Idea, Stated Detail, Inference, Reference, and Lexical Inferencing. For this purpose, 60 Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) took the New Vocabulary Levels Test (NVLT), Word Associates Test (WAT), and TOEFL reading comprehension tests with low and high lexical cohesion determined through the computational tool Coh-Metrix. Results of Wilcoxon signed-rank tests revealed that the students outperformed on three types of TOEFL reading items (Main Idea, Inference, and Lexical Inferencing) for texts with high lexical cohesion. Multiple linear regression analyses further showed that vocabulary depth was a stronger predictor of the participants’ scores on Lexical Inferencing item of TOEFL reading texts with high lexical cohesion, while vocabulary size predicted the same item performance for the low-lexical-cohesion subtest. Moreover, vocabulary depth could significantly predict performance on Main Idea test item of TOEFL high-lexical-cohesion subtest over and above the low-lexical-cohesion subtest. The implications for teachers, test designers, and materials writers are discussed.

The present study, adopting a sequential mixed-methods design, chiefly aimed to determine the strongest predictors of EFL learners’ involvement in the components of motivational self-regulatory strategies (MSRSs). In so doing, 154 English-major university students joined in the quantitative phase, and a pool of seven students was selected to participate in the qualitative phase of the study. A number of validated instruments were utilized to gather the relevant data. The Pearson moment-to-moment correlation, SEM, multiple regression, and a semi-structured interview method were used to analyze the data. The results showed a positive relationship between the components of MSRSs and involvement in writing skills. Among MSRSs components, performance self-talk, mastery self-talk, and environmental control made significant contributions to the prediction of involvement in writing skills. More specifically, the strongest predictor of involvement in writing skills in MSRSs components was performance self-talk. Following the inter-coder reliability, the responses elicited from the interviews regarding EFL learners’ opinions about the role of MSRSs in increasing their involvement in writing skills delineated eight themes, including quiet talk, consistent working, interest, coping with distractions, class environment, motivating peers, regulating emotions, and teachers’ help. In the end, the interplay between MSRSs components and involvement factors was discussed and several practical implications were proposed.

Cet article vise à analyser la formation linguistique de l’apprenant irakien du FLE. en mettant l’accent sur le cursus des études supérieures. Les étudiants en master, encore inexpérimentés dans la recherche, rencontrent des difficultés avec le programme actuel. Leur formation antérieure leur a-t-elle donné suffisamment de savoirs dans le domaine linguistique ? Au cours de cet article, nous analysons le système éducatif irakien du français langue étrangère à l’université de Bagdad. Il s’agit de la méthodologie classique et de sa revalorisation liée à la réforme du système.  Quel est le rôle des cursus traditionnels de FLE dans le processus de l'enseignement au magistère ? Dans un contexte hétérogène, il s’agit d’un pays non francophone. Nous proposons quelques pistes d’étude afin de commencer à  rénover  le système éducatif et l’actualiser dans un sens qui le rapproche des autres systèmes d’enseignement internationaux Nous proposons un modèle spécifique pour notre contexte particulier: D. H. E. B.,  Double Hélice Éducative de Bagdad. Ce modèle est dynamique, génératif, auto-évolutif et applicatif. Notre approche spécifique nous aide à former des recommandations pédagogiques participant à la réforme de l’enseignement-apprentissage du français à l’université de Bagdad.