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Drama courses are core at the English departments in the Palestinian Universities. Teaching drama properly will help students have an excellent command of English language and culture. The research aimed to find out the problems English majors at Al-Aqsa University in Palestine encounter in understanding drama. It also aimed to propose ways to reduce the problems students encounter in drama. In order to achieve the study objectives, the study used the descriptive analytical approach. A questionnaire consisting of (25) items was designed (25) items and distributed to (75) male and female English majors at Al Aqsa University. The researchers also conducted interviews with (3) drama teachers at Al Aqsa University to offer ways to help reduce problems in learning drama. The study revealed that more (73%) of the students believed that the major problem encounter them in learning drama is that there is no chance to act the play. The study also found that there is no statistically significant difference attributed to gender or the level of the students in learning drama, and English Language Education students face more problems in learning drama than English Language Literature students. The study offered a number of suggestions to reduce problems in learning drama.

The article deals with some “generic” features of Russian literature. The works of Russian thinkers are permeated by the idea of Russian writers’ exclusive fate, which consists in these writers’ discovering their own selves. Their artistic quest was aimed at comprehending the spiritual substance of a human being within themselves. Russian artistic school also implies the period of growth, the development of Russian national culture, its historical and cultural character, and according to N.Ya. Danilevsky and A.S. Khomiakov, it was convinced that our writers should take in the European heritage, but they should not limit their works to it. One should embrace works of different schools and become a free artist. The central and the most intense questions to consider for each thinker are those of Russian artists’ worldview, their spiritual and creative act (their unique “artistry”), the subject matter, lyricism, the artistic word, and particular types of creative works. It is not a coincidence that in their articles they have dwelled on the European (Catholic and Protestant) lifestyles and that of the Old Testament. They concluded that the Russian artistic type is characterized by “completeness and integrity of mind”, maturity and manhood, unparalleled sincerity, simplicity and directness in treating the subject matter, and artistic ingenuousness.

The major objective of this experimental research was to assess the differences between two varieties of focus on form instruction, namely proactive and reactive across multimodal vs. traditional input settings in both comprehension and production of modal auxiliaries. The participants of the study were 75 Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) high school students at the elementary level in three classes. The students in each class took part in a pre-test including both comprehension and production items. Then, they were randomly exposed to one of the three types of grammar instruction, i.e. proactive focus on form in which students were exposed to multimodal input through preplanned techniques of input enhancement and input flood, reactive focus on form in which the tasks occurred in multimodal episodes including negotiation and correction by the instructor through recasts, clarification requests, and repetition techniques. Lastly, in the control group, the students were provided with a pamphlet and their teacher’s explanations. The post-test was then administered to the three groups, and the results were analyzed by conducting a one-way-analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) which revealed a significant difference among these three groups. The results showed that the proactive group outperformed the reactive and control groups both in the comprehension and production of modal auxiliaries. At the end of the experiment, a brief survey which was accomplished through an interview revealed that the majority of the students highly favored PowerPoint presentations, teacher's explanations, and video clips respectively.

This study compared the effects of teacher-provided written corrective feedback and manipulation of resource-directing dimensions of task cognitive-complexity along +/- Here and Now condition on the grammatical accuracy of Iranian EFL learners’ writing products. There were 45 participants in the study who were randomly assigned to three experimental groups. All the participants were first given a prompt for the pre-test of writing, and then each group received its own intervention (direct written corrective feedback, indirect written corrective feedback, and task manipulation) for four sessions during four weeks. Subsequently, all the groups took the pre-test prompt of writing for their post-test performance after which the data were collected for the statistical analyses and fed into SPSS. The findings of the study confirmed the significant effects of direct written corrective feedback on increasing the grammatical accuracy of learners’ writings. There were implications, then, based on the results, highlighting the role of meaningful context of task application in the classroom.

Japanese exhibits a large degree of flexibility in terms of word order. Thus, not only SOV but also OSV (scrambling) and SVO (postposing) are grammatical. In terms of discourse function, there are some similarities between scrambling and (non-pause type) postposing. According to Author (2017) and Shimojo (2005), scrambled objects and postposed elements are anaphorically salient but cataphorically non-salient. Yet, Shimojo (2005: 202) observed no example with a postposed object. In order to explain this tendency, I propose that scrambling is not as costly as postposing due to the following two reasons. First, scrambling follows given-new-ordering whereas postposing does not. Second, rightward movements are more costly than leftward movements in Japanese (Fukui: 1993). Therefore, postposing is expected to be selected when scrambling cannot be chosen. As scrambling can be used for the object but not for the subject in SOV, postposing is dominantly utilized for subjects.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of various online techniques (word reference, media, and vocabulary games) on reading comprehension as well as vocabulary comprehension and production. For this purpose, 60 language learners were selected and divided into three groups, and each group was randomly assigned to one of the treatment conditions. In the first session of treatment, a vocabulary test was administered as the pretest of the study. During treatment, the language learners in those three groups were instructed through online vocabulary games, online media along with transcript and online word reference. At the end of the treatment, a reading comprehension test, a vocabulary comprehension, and a vocabulary production test were given as the posttests. The collected data were analyzed using three one-way ANOVA procedures. The results showed that the online media group outperformed the other groups. Based on the findings of this study, it can be concluded that different online tools may have differential effects on learning different aspects of language. This implies that adhering to any single online tool may not necessarily bring about desirable results. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that teachers need to make use of a combination of these tools.

This study examined academic articles and journalistic reports in 5 disciplinary areas to explore how similar contents might attitudinally be realized in two different genres. To this end, 25 research articles and 210 news reports were carefully selected and underwent detailed discourse semantic and grammatical analyses with the purpose of identifying the evaluative linguistic patterns. The findings showed that academic texts are attitudinally charged with appreciation rather than other categories of attitude. This suggests that markers of appreciation are responsible for detachment, impersonality, and objectivity. On the contrary, notwithstanding the frequent use of appreciation in journalistic texts, other categories of attitude (affect and judgment) are also effectively used. This suggests that affective and judgment markers account for the subjectivity of journalistic texts. One of the findings emerging from this study is that frequent instances of appreciation in the different parts of an RA might be attributed to the development of language use within an individual which does not lead to lowering the level of objectivity in academic texts but enhancing interpersonal communication.

The present study aimed at investigating the relationship between interpersonal intelligence of Iranian bilingual and multilingual EFL learners and their reading comprehension achievement. To do so, 60 intermediate EFL students were selected from a group of 80 based on their OPT scores. They were non-randomly divided into two experimental groups. Data collection took place during the summer semester 2017. Once the interpersonal intelligence questionnaire and the reading comprehension test scores had successfully been collected, the results of Pearson product correlation coefficient analyses showed that there was a significant relationship between Iranian bilingual and multilingual EFL learners’ interpersonal intelligence and their reading comprehension achievement: higher interpersonal intelligence was associated with higher levels of reading comprehension achievement and higher statistical significance among bilingual learners. Therefore, it was suggested that Multiple Intelligence Theories could still serve as determining factors in planning programs to teach reading in spite of the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical criticisms of the idea.