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Although global English Language Teaching (ELT) coursebooks have been subject to numerous (critical) analyses, the changes occurring to their contents over different editions have received scarce attention. In this study, the researchers examined the transformations over different editions of Interchange series (level 2) regarding some selected aspects of their textual contents. Seeking experienced English teachers’ views of the global coursebooks’ transformations over the past decade was another aim of the study. The analysis and comparison of the included topics and titles, characters, sites and contexts in Interchange series as well as interviews with 12 English teachers revealed that the content-based changes of different editions of this coursebook are superficial and cosmetic-like and despite the claims for globality, fallacies such as real-life-ness, representation and globality are still evident. We hope the findings of the study would aid curriculum and policy makers, institute managers, and language teachers to reconsider the functioning and value of current global ELT coursebooks.

There is scarce systematic research on the role of genres and their associated discourse features in Information Structure and its syntactic representations in Persian. The current descriptive, corpus-based study, therefore, aimed to investigate three different genres of Persian spoken language; that is, political, scientific and daily conversation, in terms of their Information Structure as realized through four syntactic devices of clefting, pseudo-clefting, passive and preposing. To this purpose, 1000 different utterances related to each of the mentioned genres, were extracted from the multi-media archive of IRNA (Iranian News Agency) website and daily conversations of the researchers’ family members and friends, based on Lambrecht’s theoretical framework in modeling the Information Structure. The collected data were then transcribed, the syntactic devices were identified, and descriptive statistics were used to see how the above syntactic devices are represented in each genre type. The results revealed that the devices are represented differently in the three genres of political, scientific, and daily conversations. This finding may be of interest to linguists and language theoreticians.

T The textbook analysis is a vigorous research approach for evaluating the conformity between the content and the purpose of education. Accordingly, the relatively newly-published Iranian ELT textbooks for senior high school, known as the “Vision series” were analyzed for their prominent levels of learning objectives according to Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. Activity sections of textbooks were codified according to the Taxonomy’s coding scheme, and the inter/intra-rater reliability which were measured and approved. Results revealed that the lower-order categories of cognitive domain are more frequently represented in Vision series of 1 and 2, and chi-square statistics indicate that Vision 3 is significantly different from the other two. The inclusion of higher-order categories in Vision 3 creates hope for increasing students’ proficiency and activating students’ need to develop higher-order thinking skills which are prerequisites to critical thinking and autonomous learning. Findings also maintain that the cognitive domain and metacognitive knowledge domain were the least perceived in the three textbooks which call for inclusion of more reflective activities and supplementing higher-order cognitive activities or complementary tasks in Visions 1 and 2.

The need for a strong educational system is felt more than ever due to globalization. In this respect, teacher agency has an important role in educational change. This qualitative meta-study, therefore, addressed the attitude of the teachers towards agency and the way they enact agency to facilitate learning process. To this purpose, the needed data were gathered from the narrative of life, professional history and class observations of five English teachers in Iranian context. Then, based on the Grounded Theory Approach, the data were analyzed and the obtained results showed that teachers’ pre-teaching and during teaching processes were made up of complex relationships among different resources; that is, teachers’ life ideology (their perception towards themselves and their job) and financial status. At the same time, the results revealed that teachers’ instruction experiences highly affect both their magnification of agency and their decision-making processes. It was further seen that agency was not stable at all, meaning that social factors and environmental conditions played important roles in shaping teacher’s agency.

Free riding behavior or not contributing equally in group work, is a common obstacle in many cooperative activities in language learning. The present study aimed at comparing male and female EFL learners' attitude and their free riding tendency to use the benefits of lowering free riding behaviors in order to make group work more influential in language learning. To this purpose, 140 intermediate and upper intermediate Iranian EFL learners and 30 teachers participated in the study. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires were used to investigate the topic. The obtained results revealed that the female learners act better in reducing free riding behaviors. The results further revealed a positive perception of interpersonal activities at both level of language proficiency-- intermediate and upper-intermediate. Actually, the obtained results showed that the intermediate group (males and females) acted more positively than the other group in this respect. The findings of the study bear some implications and suggestions for scholar interested in the topic of this.

This study intended to explore Iranian EFL teachers’ life satisfaction as well as their empathy levels. Furthermore, the relationship between Iranian EFL teacher’s life satisfaction and their empathy was investigated. To achieve these objectives, a group of 245 male and female Iranian EFL teachers with the age range of 20 to 55 years old participated. Data were collected through Life Satisfaction and Empathy Questionnaires. Results revealed that EFL teachers were satisfied with their life and were empathic teachers. Moreover, a significant relationship was found between these two variables. The main conclusion is that life satisfaction can have positive impacts on certain aspects of life; hence, it is recommended that proper conditions be provided for the EFL teachers. Additionally, having empathy with students may create happiness in both students and the teacher. Such happiness can presumably make the student bear a positive perspective towards language learning, thereby making them more motivated to learn English.    

The present study aims at investigating English lexicon polysemy within the cognitive approach to study the way based on which Persian language learners learn English lexicon with the concepts used in cognitive linguistics such as, prototype, polysemy, categorization, etc. The nature of the methodology used in this qualitative research for studying the meanings of English lexicon is a descriptive-analytic method. After the semantic analysis of the English lexicon based on the model of Dirven & Verspoor (2004), it was found that the meanings of the lexicon are classifiable based on theoretical procedures on cognitive semantics. The authors are trying to show the cognitive concepts in cognitive linguistics can be used for teaching English lexicon. The findings, generally, showed that the unconscious knowledge of learners in learning the cognitive structure of the meanings of the lexicon has a meaningful relationship with learning. The results also revealed that the lexicon has a semantic network semantically, in which the notion of core or prototype is located in the center of the semantic network and the rest of the meanings can be examined as the peripheral meanings of a lexicon.

This study aimed to investigate collaborative reading in reading sessions among young Iranian EFL learners. It actually was an attempt to examine the process and components of collaborative reading which are expected to improve young learners’ reading ability in the English language. To this purpose, a group of second year Iranian EFL young learners at a primary school in Tehran together with their teachers participated in the study. The young learners were around eight years old. The duration of the study was 12 weeks. Since the study was qualitative in nature, teachers’ reflective journals, a number of observations and face-to-face interviews with teachers were used as instruments to collect the needed data. The analysis of the qualitatively-elicited data presented a in so far as reading processes and reading comprehension enhancement through collaborative deeper understanding of the importance of the process and components of collaborative reading. In fact, the findings revealed that collaborative reading promote young EFL learners’ reading performance. Thus, the study has practical implications for both teachers and young EFL learners reading in terms of reading performance enhancement.

This study aimed to discover the possible relationship between intrapersonal intelligence and grammatical ability of Iranian EFL male and female learners. To this purpose, 139 undergraduate English students (46 males and 93 females), with the age range of 22-32, were selected through a TOEFL test as the participants. To obtain the needed data, the instruments used were a 119-item Multiple Intelligences Questionnaire (MIDAS) to assess the participants’ intrapersonal intelligence, and a 30-item grammar TOEFL test to the measure their grammar ability. The obtained data were analyzed through descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation and linear regression. The difference between male and female students in grammar ability and intrapersonal intelligence was determined by independent samples t-test. The results indicated a statistically significance relationship between intrapersonal intelligence and English grammar ability scores. The results also revealed no significant difference between male and female students in terms of intrapersonal intelligence and English grammar ability. The findings of this study may assist language teachers, policy makers and curriculum designers to consider the role of intrapersonal intelligence as a helpful construct in learning English grammar.

The present article dedicates to studying the syllable-internal structure in three Iranian Balochi dialects (IBDs) namely Mirjaveh Sarhaddi, Sarawani and Lashari dialects. The data analysis will be based on the onset-rhyme theory (e.g., Kurylowicz, 1948; Fudge, 1969; Vergnaud & Halle, 1979; Selkirk, 1982). Moreover, the syllable weight in IBDs will be discussed in the framework of mora theory (Hayes, 1985, 1989). The data have been collected during the research fieldwork in Sistan and Baluchestan province, Iran. The research findings demonstrate that the Balochi language is an example of a nucleus-weight language in which heavy syllables depend on the number of elements in the nucleus. Thus, CV and CVC are light syllables and CVV(C) syllable is counted as heavy syllable. Besides, the context-dependent weight of CVC syllables occurs in IBDs stress pattern system. Studying the syllable contact (word-medial consonant clusters) in IBDs shows that Balochi is among languages that admit all types of heterosyllablic clusters.

The advent of Web 2 tools and their features have allowed Internet users not only to seek information but also to generate and edit on-line information. However, excessive reliance of students, particularly EFL students, on the Internet has raised the issue of information credibility or quality of the information found online. This study sought to investigate the relationship between Iranian EFL university students’ credibility judgment and their learning styles and critical thinking. It also intended to examine the extent to which the learners employ credibility judgment strategies to verify web-based information. To this end, 212 Iranian EFL students, 165 female(s) and 47 male(s) (or add) students, received three questionnaires: Honey’s (2004) Critical Thinking questionnaire, Kolb's (1984) Learning Style inventory, and the adapted version of Credibility Judgment questionnaire originally developed by Metzger, Flanagin, and Zwarun (2003). The results of descriptive as well as bivariate and multivariate correlation analysis revealed that, first, Iranian EFL students employ credibility judgment strategies at a moderate level, and second, critical thinking is a better predictor for credibility judgment behavior of EFL students than learning style. Moreover, three learning styles were significantly related to the currency sub-scale of credibility judgment. The findings can assist curriculum planners, policymakers, and instructors to develop plans for empowering EFL students with the skills they need to evaluate on-line information for accuracy, objectivity, authority, and currency.