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This paper seeks to probe cultural agendas pertaining to the images of celebrities in the widely-used English language textbooks. In fact, while visual analysis has solidified its position in ELT (e.g. Hurst, 2014; Mitsikopoulou, 2015; Romney, 2012; Taylor-Mendes, 2009) and caused the pendulum to swing away from the grammatical or textual content to the visual presentation (Giaschi, 2000), research into celebrities as the cultural representatives has been a barely touched issue. To address this gap, the researchers, drawing on Kachru’s (1985) orthodox model of the usage of English across the globe, examined the images of celebrities in four widely-used English language textbook series. In so doing, the terms depiction and mention (Toprak & Aksoyalp, 2014) were taken as a yardstick to pinpoint the type of intersection between the text and the image. Further, the images were thematically explored, which notably indicated the images relating to the field of media were the far most common theme in the English language textbooks. Lastly, it was revealed that whereas the images of the inner-circle outnumbered all, the images of the expanding circle surprisingly outnumbered those of the outer circle, an outcome which could point to linguistic schizophrenia (Kachru, 1992) as the main reason.

The present study aimed at exploring phrasal complexity features in data commentaries produced by graduate students and in research articles written by expert writers. To this end, 25 empirical RAs in the field of Applied Linguistics and 158 data commentaries generated by graduate students of English Language Teaching were comparatively examined. The results revealed that students approximated expert writers in terms of producing two linguistic features (i.e., N+N structures and nominalizations). However, they differed significantly from expert writers in generating four linguistic elements (i.e., attributive adjectives, appositive structures, of -genitives, and PPs as noun post-modifiers). The results also revealed that expert writers’ texts comprise varied presence of exceedingly complex patterns of pre-modification, triple/quadruple/quintuple (pre)modification, a hybrid of novel appositive structures, and multiword hyphenated adjectives. Conversely, graduate students’ language could be characterized by less variety, single/dual (pre)modification, a far less extensive range of noun-participle compounds functioning as nominal pre-modifiers, linguistically limited complex modifications, and minimally multifarious patterns of use associated with N+N formulations. Overall, the findings can give fresh insights into the needs of the L2 student writers in developing an academic text.

This paper reports on the findings of a research aimed at exploring the professional identity (PI) of English as Foreign Language (EFL) teacher in Iran. The research further examined the extent to which the identified PI factors affect their teaching quality. The authors argue that earlier classification of different factors of professional identity of EFL teachers is arbitrary and may only be valid by definition. The possible grouping of these factors is also examined to identify what clusters of factors have relative importance in EFL teacher's professional identity and how these clusters may contribute to the quality of teaching. Sample participants contributed in semi-structured interviews and subsequently based on the thematic analysis of the interviews a questionnaire was developed and completed by a total of 143 EFL instructors and students. Factor Analysis of data identified four distinct clusters accounted for a total of nineteen variables presenting the PI profile of EFL teacher in which Personal Characteristics (PC) emerged as the most important cluster. Consequently, five clusters identified to have a considerable effect on teaching quality, Pedagogical knowledge (PK) found to be the most influential cluster. These findings may well serve as a valuable pedagogical resource for EFL teachers and policy makers to help improve teaching quality, educational processes, and curriculum design.

Learning in every context is influenced by the social factors such as the people with whom the learners are communicating in that specific learning environment. As the role that social factors can potentially play in the process of education seems not to have been explored comprehensively in the field of English language teaching, in general, and in the Iranian educational context, in particular, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the impact of both social goals and achievement goals on emotional, behavioral, and cognitive engagement, in an academic context. The participants of the study consisted of 302 undergraduate students (88 females, 206 males, 8 unspecified), majoring in English literature at two state universities and two private universities in Iran. The data were collected through one questionnaire consisting of items relating to different types of social goals and various types of engagement. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Regression Analysis were conducted to analyze the data. The results of CFA confirmed the validity of such goals in our context. Also, regression analysis showed that mastery goals, social status goals, and social concern goals predicted variance in different facets of engagement.

Pragmatic rating is considered one of the novel and crucial aspects of second language education which has not been maneuvered upon in the literature. To address this gap, the current study aimed to inspect the matches and mismatches, to explore rating variations, and to assess the rater consistency between the holistic and analytic rating methods of the speech act of agreement in L2 by non-native English teachers. In this regard, 12 discourse completion tests (DCTs) for agreement accompanied by EFL learners’ responses to each situation were rated by 50 non-native English teachers. Initially, they were asked to rate it holistically, and the content analysis of raters’ comments revealed twelve agreement criteria. Grammatical structure was the prominent criterion which suggested that the raters were predominantly concerned with pragmalinguistics. In particular, the results of descriptive statistics demonstrated that there was a degree of divergence in the frequency of the criteria applied. Additionally, the teachers were asked to rate the pragmatic outputs analytically which showed that the raters were more consistent in the analytic phase. Finally, the findings indicated that there was a convergence between the two rating methods. The results of the present study implicated the necessity of rater training with regard to the rubric-based pragmatic rating. This study offers crucial pedagogical implications for syllabus designers, materials developers, language testers, and some suggestions for further research studies.

This study was an analytical account of EFL postgraduate learners’ use of verbs in citing other scholars in their own writing. Particular interest was differing extents of these verbs as categorised by Myer (1997), namely verbs representing a statement of scholarly writing, verbs communicating knowledge of scholarly writing, and verbs denoting cognition of scholarly writing, each of which has subcategories. To achieve this, 40 postgraduate dissertations and theses by the University of Dar es Salaam students were purposively selected. From these citation verbs from the introduction and literature review chapters were posted to the Microsoft Excel sheets and frequencies of occurrences were computed for each verb before assigning them to their relevant categories. The findings indicate the predominance of verbs of cognition of scholarly writing (notably perception and interpretation verbs) followed by those denoting knowledge of scholarly writing (notably procedural verbs). The least used category was verbs belonging to a statement of scholarly, especially inclusive verbs with only 10 instances of occurrence.

This study investigated a new blended approach for enhancing vocabulary achievement. To this end, the project used a convenience sample of 50 intermediate EFL learners ranging from 19-35 years of age from three intact classes studying English translation at university. They were randomly assigned to two groups of 25 students each. In the experimental group, the treatment consisted of providing photos/cartoons related to the sessions’ course of instruction on Instagram, with the learners discussing and exploring the meaning of vocabularies via peer scaffolding using metacognitive strategies. The control group followed the syllabus and assigned homework according to the class program. To investigate the vocabulary achievement of the participants, a piloted multiple-choice vocabulary posttest was administered. The results that were analyzed through independent samples T-test revealed that the blended approach could significantly affect the performance of the experimental group. This study has implications not only for teachers, researchers, and syllabus designers but also for EFL learners with unpacking the notion of metacognition and peer scaffolding, proposing an integrated framework that illustrates how it may pervade the teaching-learning process as an educational goal. The implication of this study supports student responsibility, a student-centered classroom, and higher levels of cognition.