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The popularity of integrating technology in language instruction and its fundamental effect on the language learning dimensions has been widely acknowledged whereas learners’ motivation and attitude are expected to be improved in a web-based Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environment. Therefore, this paper aimed to investigate the Iranian EFL learners’ motivation to learn English and attitude in a CALL environment. The participants of this study were 120 intermediate EFL learners from two private English language institutes in Isfahan, Iran. They were divided into two equal groups; one experimental group (EG) and one control group (CG). Then, a motivation questionnaire pretest was administered out to check the participants’ motivation at the beginning of the course. As the treatment, the EG learners were taught through CALL-based instruction and the CG learners were taught traditionally. After the treatment, a posttest of motivation and an attitude questionnaire were administered. The outcomes indicated that the CALL-based instruction promoted the participants’ motivation as checked by the Motivation Questionnaire. Moreover, as measured by a 20-item A-CALL attitude questionnaire, it was discovered that the learners in the EG had positive attitudes toward using CALL-based instruction. In light of the findings, a number of conclusions are obtained and several implications are put forward.

This study analyzes official public talks by two Iranian presidents—Hassan Rouhani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—within the framework of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). The study focuses on discoursal features in addresses of these presidents to the United Nations General Assembly at the micro-level (25 discursive devices) and the macro-level (positive self-representation and negative other-representation). The investigation attempts to determine whether significant differences existing in the micro and macro structures of these political discourses may be reflective of such factors as dissimilarities in political stance, world view and personal background. Combining quantitative and qualitative elements of analysis, the study demonstrates that consensus , illustration , hyperbole and polarization were used more frequently, whereas lexicalization and vagueness less frequently by Rouhani than by Ahmadinejad. At the semantic macro-level, Rouhani employed more positive self-representation s and Ahmadinejad relied stronger on negative other-representation .   Results are interpreted within the CDS framework of political discourse.  

This study compared the use of lexical bundles in authentic spoken language data with those of two English learning textbooks developed for IELTS preparation courses in Iran. The aim was to see if the language chunks available in the said textbooks were representative of the real-life language for which learners need to prepare. To achieve this aim, firstly, a list of lexical bundles was compiled based on Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and British Academic Spoken English (BASE). Further, the list was used as a reference tool to analyze the language data of two IELTS preparation books published and widely used in Iran. The results highlighted some considerable differences between MICASE and BASE with regard to the use of lexical bundles in terms of their frequency, structure, and function. Moreover, it was revealed that the books under investigation shared only a scarce number of similar lexical bundles with MICASE and BASE as a whole. Therefore, they failed to be representative of the authentic language that people use in real world. Finally, the implications of the study are discussed, and several practical suggestions are made in order to inform teachers, material developers, and syllabus designers of the importance of related corpus linguistic studies.

The main objective of this qualitative-quantitative content analysis study was to compare IELTS Academic and TOEFL iBT four modules in terms of the cognition and knowledge dimensions of Revised Bloom’s taxonomy. To this end, two authentic tests including all major modules of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in each domain, namely iBT TOEFL and IELTS Academic exams were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. These tests were randomly selected from the collection of authentic tests available in trustworthy resources. The contents of these tests were codified using a coding scheme developed by Razmjoo and Kazempourfard (2012). In this coding scheme, English alphabets and numbers were assigned to levels of cognition and knowledge, respectively. The results indicated that in general TOEFL iBT codes are more inclined toward the higher orders of thinking and knowledge and the codes are not noticeably divergent; while, the majority of the codes in the IELTS Academic test are skewed toward the lower codes of the BRT. This shows the higher stance of the TOEFL iBT test concerning the higher orders of thinking and knowledge in the BRT. A significant difference was also found between the TOEFL iBT and IELTS Academic tests concerning the highest and the lowest levels of BRT.

The present study aims at investigating the differential effects of two types of instruction (explicit versus implicit) on the learning of English articles by Iranian EFL learners. To achieve this aim, 90 intermediate undergraduate students at Islamic Azad University, Shahreza Branch, whose major was English Translation were selected for the experiment. Then, they were divided into three groups namely, explicit group (EG), implicit group (IG), and control group (CG). The EG received instruction on English articles through two popular grammar books-- namely ‘Essential Grammar in Use’ by Murphy (1998) and ‘Oxford Practice Grammar’ by Eastwood (1999). The second group received instruction on English articles by employing the technique of textual input enhancement. The third group received similar instruction like IG except that English articles were not enhanced for this group. After analyzing the data on pre- and posttests, the results showed that the three groups of EG, IG, and CG improved significantly from pretest to posttests. Moreover, on the posttest, the EG learners significantly outweighed the IG learners, who were in turn found to be significantly better than their counterparts in the CG. The results of this study have several important implications for the classroom practice concerning the controversial issue of teaching English articles.

Supervisor’s feedback is both a naysaying and a puzzling concern that has always tormented academics in higher education. Particularly, written feedback on pre-final or final versions of a submitted doctoral dissertation is indisputably the most significant step toward granting a doctoral student supervisee the right to defend his/her research project. It also constitutes a rich source on how students are to academically go about writing their dissertation and even go public as they are supposed to produce one or two articles before their vivas. The present research explores the written comments provided by supervisors on Moroccan doctorate supervisees’ dissertations. It principally focuses on both overall and in-text comments and whether they serve as feed-back to take corrective actions for the errors made, feed-up to focus on strategies to attain the academic goal, or feed-forward to be proactive and avoid disturbances that might affect the quality of the final work. A total of 40 supervisees from the English department at FLLA, Ibn Tofail University belonging to Language and Society Research Laboratory participated in the study. Data were collected using an online questionnaire through available Google forms platform. The results revealed that the total majority of supervisees tended to get a mixture of written remarks with a central focus on the quantity rather than on form. This is therefore a plus as to the agreement as well as the variance of the Moroccan supervisors in the use of these evaluation criteria while evaluating their supervisees’ doctoral dissertations targeting different types of feedback with a huge focus of the cyclicity of their utilization.

  MMetadiscourse as a self-reflective linguistic device plays an important role in both making a coherent academic text and interacting with readers. Using a sequential mixed method design, the present study investigated the use of metadiscourse markers in the abstract section of 70 master thesis abstracts written by Iranian TEFL students at the University of Mazandaran. The study further examined TEFL graduated students’ (n=7) perspectives on the employment of these markers in their thesis abstracts. Based on Hyland’s (2005) model, the interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers were identified in the data. Next, the whole corpus was carefully examined word by word to report on the frequency of metadiscourse marker use. The findings revealed that interactive metadiscourse markers were used three times more than interactional metadiscourse markers. Moreover, transitions and hedges were more frequently employed while evidentials, boosters and self-mentions were less frequently used. Findings from the qualitative data collected through conducting email interviews with graduated TEFL students suggested that they had positive perspectives towards the use of interactive metadiscourse markers in contrast with the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in their thesis abstracts. The results of this study can offer a number of pedagogical implications for explicit instruction of metadiscourse markers in thesis abstracts.

The present study aimed at evaluating the effect of using three types of teacher gestures including representational (iconic, metaphoric) and emblematic gestures on the long-term retention of some L2 (here, English) concrete, and figurative idiomatic structures among a group of volunteering female junior high-school learners in Sabzevar, Iran. Via a multi-stage, mixed-method research design, over a period of eight weeks mainly focusing on an action research design, twelve learners of the eighth and ninth grades of high schools were presented with forty-eight English idiomatic phrases. Post-tests on the immediate and delayed recall and recognition tests served as the primary tools for collecting the essential data along with frequent teacher notes on their performance. The report from Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test indicated that the median delayed post-test ranks were not statistically significantly different from the median immediate post-test ranks Z=12, p≥.754, which proved a positive effect of using gestures on long-term retention of idiomatic phrases. In the second phase, teachers’ and students’ views were also scrutinized which showed positive feedback over the process. Implications for L2 classes were then presented in the light of recent multi-modal strategies for teaching target language forms having idiomatic expressions for the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context.

In order to engage students in higher-level thinking, cognitive activation (CA) strategies have been advanced and utilized in mathematics. CA develops when learners are challenged, confronted with conflicts, asked to think and explain clearly on their learning, and realize connections between new and previous content. Extending the theme to English language teaching (ELT), this study investigated Iranian English language teachers’ knowledge and practice of cognitive activation writing strategies (CAWS). In so doing, a model was proposed based on a questionnaire that was developed and validated in the present study. Through this scale, knowledge and practice of CAWS by 213 English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers were explored. During a pilot phase, the reliability of the questionnaire was calculated to be .78 for the knowledge section and .81 for the practice section. Two items in each section were removed after conducting exploratory factor analysis. Ultimately, the confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the proposed model was fit for the data. Five components were confirmed as constituents of CAWS for the knowledge section, and four components were identified for the practice section. The findings revealed that Iranian EFL teachers were already familiar with the CAWS and purportedly practiced them in their writing classes. Using the scale in the process of writing instruction can provide ELT practitioners with a helpful platform for relating to CA strategies and empowers learners to accomplish tasks such as problem-solving in their writing assignments, similar to what is practiced in mathematics.

L’identité et l’ethos sont deux des notions importantes qui servent à révéler les traits de caractère intradiscursifs et extradiscursifs du sujet parlant dans les analyses du discours. Cet article a pour but de jeter quelque lumière sur les traits identitaires et l’ethos discursif d’un leader exceptionnel qu’est Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, commandant de la Guerre d’indépendance turque et fondateur de la République de Turquie. Le corpus étudié a été délimité par certains extraits de discours tenus entre 1919 et 1939, où Atatürk a utilisé le pronom « je » (et « nous »). Le cadre théorique est composé de deux notions relevant de l’analyse du discours : l’identité et l’ethos. Dans les analyses effectuées, il a été traité d’une part l’identité personnelle, l’identité de positionnement et l’identité discussive d’Atatürk, de l’autre, la dimension catégorielle, expérientielle et idéologique dans les extraits de discours d’Atatürk. Et les différents ethos ressortis à travers le corpus ont été précisés comme ethos combatif, solidaire et honnête ; ethos résolu et hardi ; ethos humble ; et ethos collectif.

The aim of the current study was to examine conjunctions in academic texts. The corpus included 200 conference abstracts, of which 100 were written by Iranian novice writers and 100 by English native speakers. Each group of texts consisted of 50 abstracts from soft sciences and 50 from hard sciences. Following Liu's (2008) taxonomy, the frequency and type of conjunctions were examined. The results revealed that non-native writers use more conjunctions in their conference abstracts. Furthermore, it was found that compared to hard sciences, more conjunctions are employed in soft sciences. Regarding the role of L1, the results showed that non-native writers in soft sciences are more likely to use conjunctions. Moreover, the findings indicated that the most frequent conjunction type used by both native and nonnative writers are adversatives and additives in soft sciences, and additives and adversatives in hard sciences, respectively. The findings of the study have implications for teaching academic writing and material development for writing courses.

With the advancement of technology and its role in making life more convenient, some EFL teachers prefer to use it in their classrooms. In view of this, the current study aimed to explore the effect of Anki and WhatsApp on the vocabulary retention of Iranian EFL learners. The study’s design was quasi-experimental with three groups of WhatsApp-based vocabulary instruction, Anki-based vocabulary instruction and the traditional one. Sixty EFL learners studying English in a language institute participated in the study, and were divided into three groups of twenty. To ensure their homogeneity, a Solution Placement Test was given to them. After the treatment, the post-test was given to them to check their vocabulary retention. The results of the repeated measures ANOVA indicated that Anki-based and WhatsApp-based vocabulary instruction were effective in enhancing their vocabulary retention. The results of MANOVA showed that there were significant differences among the three groups in their vocabulary retention.