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This experimental study aimed at discovering the impact of Metacognitive Intervention Program instruction on the reading advancement of Iranian dyslexic primary school learners. The participants consisted of 32 male and female, grade three primary school students, with the age range of 8 to 11 years and 90 to 110 IQ average. They were selected through convenient sampling and divided into two control and experimental groups of equal size. Then, the experimental group was exposed to the Metacognitive Intervention Program instruction for 10 weeks. Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and Dyslexia and Reading (NEMA) tests were used as instruments.  To evaluate the participants’ reading progress, a pre-test and a post-test (NEMA) were conducted. The results of covariance analysis showed that the employed program was effective in the reading comprehension development of the participants. The findings of this study suggest that primary school instructors need to think more about using the Metacognitive Intervention Program instruction on different steps of reading comprehension and do more effective activities to assist students in removing their reading difficulties.    

The objective was threefold: (a) to investigate the difference among online teaching performance of EFL student teachers at Iran University of Science and Technology who received peer feedback, expert feedback, and reflected on their own teaching practice; (b) to examine the difference between rating scores given by student teachers and those by instructor to online teaching; and (c) to determine student teachers’ best experiences, challenges, and lessons they learnt from expert feedback, peer observation, and reflection. The results of this mixed methods experimental research revealed no statistically significant difference in the three group’s scores on their second teaching practice; however, there was statistically significant difference between the scores of the first and second practices for all three groups. The results also showed that student teachers mostly underrated their first teaching, while they overrated their second teaching. The findings also indicated that their best experiences were related to using technological tools, working with Adobe Connect, making interesting materials, and using games and songs. Their challenges included lack of face-to-face communication, engaging all participants, and preparing suitable materials, whereas teaching new vocabulary in context, simplifying songs by pre-teaching their unknown words, and using online games and websites were the lessons they learnt.

Over the past decades, writing assessment research has been concentrating on alternative methods with a social-oriented view of assessment, including dynamic assessment (DA). Given the lack of research juxtaposing the interventionist and interactionist DA frameworks in the area of narrative writing, this study sought to compare the effectiveness of Brown’s graduated prompts model vs. Poehner’s model in the development of one-paragraph narrative essays in terms of grammatical accuracy. The study followed a quasi-experimental design, with 15 Iranian EFL learners selected via convenient sampling from among the female students of a language institute in Tehran. The participants were then randomly divided into three groups: Interventionist group, in which mediation was based on Brown’s model in the sandwich format; interactionist group, where mediation was done using Poehner’s model in the cake format; and non-dynamic assessment (NDA) control group with no mediation involved. The research consisted of three pilot sessions and eleven sessions as the main phase. To analyze the data, both descriptive and non-parametric inferential statistics were run. The results conceded the superiority of both DA approaches to NDA, whereas no significant difference was observed between the two DA groups in their general performance on narrative tasks. However, the analysis of the number and types of required mediational moves over the DA sessions indicated the superiority of the interactionist model to interventionist framework in the development of grammatical accuracy in narrative paragraphs. The study offers some theoretical and pedagogical repercussions for educators, curriculum designers, and L2 teachers.

Les défis de la traduction, notamment les enjeux de la traduction audiovisuelle, et plus particulièrement les sous-titres sont fort multiples. D’une part, les difficultés liées aux contraintes spatio-temporelles pour la lecture des sous-titres et d’une autre part, l’utilisation des allusions, métaphores et les implicites émanant de la critique des problèmes sociaux, politiques et culturels, via le « faire rire du public », décuplent la difficulté de cette tâche. La question qui se pose ici est de dépister comment l’interprétation du traducteur/sous-titreur est capable de façonner et d’orienter la réception du public. Pour y répondre, nous hypothétisons qu’en utilisant les outils d’interprétation propices (l’induction de tonalité, l’option des équivalents communs dans la langue cible, l’inclusion des informations supplémentaires et des constations personnelles hors des sous-titres), le sous-titreur pourrait clarifier les messages implicites du (con)texte de départ et ainsi augmenter les capacités interculturelles et réceptives du public. Cet article vise donc à étudier le rôle interprétatif du traducteur sur la performance de lecture et les modes de réception de public. A cet effet, quinze sous-titres multilingues de diverses comédies de stand-up provenant de sites TED et YouTube sont choisis et analysés selon la théorie générale de réception. Compte tenu des limites spatio-temporelles des sous-titres, nous avons constaté que le traducteur, tout en jouant son rôle d’interprète, devrait fournir des explications supplémentaires et acceptable exclusivement dans la mesure où ces dernières conduiraient à une meilleure réception de la traduction et qu’elles ne compromettraient aucunement la perception, la compréhension et la concentration de l’auditoire.

A large body of research has investigated the role of motivational strategy use in EFL learners’ language achievement, teachers’ work engagement, and creativity.  However, there have been very few studies on EFL teachers’ status quo of these variables and the correlation among them. This study was an attempt to investigate the Iranian EFL teachers’ status quo regarding these variables and to explore the correlation among them. To this end, 100 Iranian EFL teachers of both genders were selected. To explore the objectives of this study, the Motivational Strategy Use Questionnaire, Creativity Style Questionnaire, and Work Engagement Scale Questionnaire were employed. Data were analyzed through t-tests and multiple regression. Results revealed that EFL teachers have acceptable levels of motivational strategies usage, work engagement, and creativity. The results of Multiple regression analysis proved a statistically significant relationship between motivational strategy use and creativity in the classroom and no significant relationship was found between motivational strategy use and teachers’ work engagement. Teachers’ gender was found to have no contribution to teachers’ work engagement, creativity, and motivational strategies usage. This study has theoretical and practical implications for teachers.

Discourse Markers (DMs) are pragmatic ties representing the relationship between different concepts in a discourse. As Fraser (2009) puts it, these lexical expressions are free morphemes that signal a special message about or in addition to the basic message. Given the importance of DMs in the written discourse of English as foreign language (EFL) learners, this study investigated the effectiveness of two methods of interaction in improving Iranian EFL learners’ use of discourse markers (DMs) in writing compositions. The data were drawn from comparing the compositions of two virtual groups of EFL learners who were exposed to two types of online interactions within which different flipped instructional activities were assigned. The data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results showed that the learners who engaged in online discussions used higher numbers of DM in terms of both type and token. The results also showed an increase in the length of compositions in the case of those groups who embarked on online interactions and discussions of flipped content. The findings suggest that once supported by the provision of flipped content, online interactions help create authentic opportunities for learner-centered discussions, which lead to an increased authenticity level of the EFL learners’ language production. The findings might also underscore the significance of flipped content and online interactions in developing other aspects of EFL learners’ pragmatic competence.

Simultaneous decoding and encoding of information substantiate the foundations of natural processing of language in translation. The present study analyzed two Persian translators’ pragmatic strategies in translating the Quranic temporal discourse marker thumma into Persian. The source text corpus consisted of 6 sections of the holy Quran and was selected randomly; and the target text corpus is comprised of two Persian translations of the same sections. Theoretical perspectives in discourse and translation studies were applied in approaching parallel corpora analysis in the study. The findings indicate that different types and combinations of Persian temporal discourse markers were applied in 53% of the cases by the translators. Moreover, in 47% of the instances, it was replaced with Persian elaborative, contrastive, and inferential discourse markers. This creative, flexible, and innovative discourse construction approach was substantiated on the basis of the recognition of differences between discourses, cultures, and languages. Consequently, this dynamic approach was employed in the construction of an appropriate discourse for the addressee. The bases, resources, and foundations of these dynamic and discourse sensitive translation strategies were discussed pragmatic awareness raising in explicit teaching of these elements, development of sensitivity to unsteady social contexts in language use, and utilizing the findings in lexicography, translation quality assessment, and syllabus design were suggested.    

Flow, introduced as one of the founding concepts in positive psychology by Csikszentmihalyi (1990), refers to the complete absorption in a challenging mental, emotional, or physical task to the exclusion of attention to any other surrounding thing. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, whole aspects of human life have changed, and language learning is no exception. The present study explored various obstacles in experiencing flow among Iranian EFL learners while completing tasks in three different modalities: face-to-face (F2F), text-based, and audio-based interaction during the Covid-19 pandemic. The data were elicited from 55 upper-intermediate learners divided into three groups completing the tasks in pairs, each through one of the three modalities, as a part of their classroom activity. Immediately following class time, they were interviewed individually or through group chats via WhatsApp. Under the three different modalities, the qualitative content analysis identified obstacles in achieving flow and categorized them into five themes. The results revealed that the main barriers in the face-to-face group were related to contextual or environmental factors as well as to task-induced issues. However, technological, task-based, and teacher-related factors gained higher percentages among text-based and audio-based interaction themes. The findings offer insight into flow perception by second language learners in different task modalities during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Collaborative dialogue (CD) in developing L2 skills known as ‘knowledge-building dialogue’, in spite of its momentum in foreign language acquisition, has rarely been conjoined and empirically investigated with a Task-based approach. To this end, the present research was conducted with a two-fold aim: firstly, investigating the effect of task-based collaborative dialogue on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ speaking ability, and secondly, exploring teachers’ and learners’ perceptions of the exercised treatment process. The participants of the study consisted of 100 Iranian B.A. TEFL and Translation Studies students were identified as relatively homogeneous with regard to their language proficiency through administering Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and ten Iranian EFL teachers. The experimental group was exposed to task-based collaborative dialogues, while the control group experienced conventional mainstream teaching the speaking skill. Upon completing the treatment, CD questionnaires were administered to the experimental group of learners and teachers to investigate their perceptions of implementing CDs in speaking classes. Subsequently, the teachers and 12 students from the experimental group attended the semi-structured interview sessions to explore their views regarding the efficiency of task-based CDs. The findings indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control one regarding speaking skill. The results of the questionnaires and the semi-structured interviews complemented each other and indicated that the teachers and the learners adopted positive views toward applying the task-based CD. The findings offer some implications for the stakeholders, including material developers, EFL learners, and teachers, to incorporate task-based collaborative dialogues in second language education.