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The present study investigated the impact of language learning strategy instruction on the enhancement of less successful Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ L2 achievement. To this end, 40 less successful EFL students took part in the study, 20 of whom were trained based on CALLA (Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach) and the rest formed the control group. A complete TOEFL PBT test was administered to the 40 participants of the study to homogenize them in terms of language proficiency.The results of two independent samples t-tests and two separate paired samples t-tests indicated that explicit strategy instruction had a significant positive impact on L2 achievement of less successful Iranian EFL learners as the participants in the experimental group significantly outperformed their counterparts in the control group. The results of the current study might contribute to the educational policymakers, materials writers, syllabus designers, curriculum developers, and foreign language teachers to incorporate learning strategies in their policies, curricula, syllabi, materials, and instructional tasks if they intend to boost EFL learners’ L2 achievement.

Following a case study research design, the present paper reports on a cross-cultural project (called Ibunka2019), in which the author monitored his English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing classes. The project is an email-based exchange among learners of English from six countries (Algeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands). For data collection, the Algerian participants’ emic perspective was accessed via their self-reports, gained by a post-project online survey; besides, their messages produced as well as the discussions with them during and after the project made valuable retrospective data for the present study. Particularly, the study discusses the merits of the project relative to the writing module, manifestations of learner autonomy, and the challenges encountered. Moreover, it tackled other relevant issues, namely the integration of interculturality, EFL learner mindset, and lingua franca perspective. This study adds to the scarce literature within the Algerian context on telecollaborative EFL teaching and learning

This quantitative study aimed to investigate the combined effects of two types of strategic planning, namely collaborative and teacher-led planning conditions and task complexity on Iranian intermediate language learners' oral production in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To achieve this purpose, 90 EFL learners were selected through convenience sampling from a language institute in Shiraz, Iran, and randomly assigned to two control and four experimental groups. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design in the form of pretest, treatment, and posttest. In the first step, all participants took part in a speaking pretest in which they were required to narrate a story based on a series of picture description tasks. While the experimental groups underwent 10 treatment sessions of picture description task performance along with two planning types i.e., teacher-led and collaborative planning conditions, the control groups were not allowed to plan the task performance. In the last session, the language learners took a posttest whose results were compared with those of the pretest. The findings revealed that the language learners in the collaborative planning groups outperformed the other groups in terms of both fluency and complexity. Further, teacher-led groups did better than the other groups in terms of accuracy. This study carries crucial implications for EFL teachers, material developers, syllabus designers, and speaking skill examiners.

The present study was an evaluation attempt to investigate the practicality of interpretation procedures proposed by Fairclough (1989) in the critical analysis of Persian texts. The evaluation was implemented on the basis of a goodness criterion, analytical induction (AI) framework developed by Silverman (1993). In so doing, we went about the interpretation of the inaugural speech made by the president of Iran, Dr. Rohani to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2013. The interpretation was done according to the Fairclough’s interpretation model in light of AI theoretical framework. The outcome of the study supported the practicality of the overall interpretation model in the Iranian context. However, considering Iranian special sociolinguistic context, the study also put forward some suggestions with respect to the interpretation of local coherence and text structure in the lower section of the model as well as situational context and intertextual context in upper section.  

The advent of postmethod pedagogy has completely changed today's conceptualization of language teachers, and the importance of powerful teaching has increasingly gained momentum in the field of TESOL. However, contemporary English language teaching contexts suffer a dearth of a workable package to educate the much-needed autonomous postmethod language teachers who are able to have their own contextualized praxis. As such, the present research aims to nurture the required self-growth and self-development in language teachers through forming collaborative professional and critical discussion circles. Enjoying a mixed method research design whose quantitative section included a quasi-experimental design consisting of three phases--a pretest, an educational 12-week long treatment phase, and a posttest--the results of the study gained by two instruments, namely, the reflective teaching questionnaire developed by Akbari et al. (2010) and two similar language teaching episodes, bore witness to the significant changes in the level of reflectiveness of all 13 language teachers who partook in these discussion circles. Developmentally speaking, participating language teachers were found to initiate the whole process, direct it, and finally evaluate the new experiences further along the road. Hence the ideals of teacher development, self-growth and personal development, were accomplished through the study.

Culture is an integral facet of teaching and learning English as a foreign language. This qualitative study examined EFL teachers’ perceptions toward fostering their students’ cultural awareness in Iranian language schools. Based on a researcher-developed protocol, semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve EFL teachers from Tehran, Karaj, and Urmia, Iran, whose teaching experiences ranged from 6 to 19 years, with the purpose of identifying their perceptions, experiences, and challenges regarding fostering students’ cultural awareness. The interviews drew upon emergent methodology to categorize the interviewees’ value-laden comments into six major attitudinal themes of meaning of culture, the role of English culture and social norms in EFL teaching and learning, the materials and activities teachers employ to foster their students’ cultural awareness, benefits of teaching English culture in Iranian language schools, EFL teachers’ challenges regarding teaching English culture, and teachers’ suggestions or recommendations regarding teaching culture in the Iranian EFL context. The findings illustrated that despite the fact that Iranian EFL teachers preferred to include cultural content in their courses, they faced a variety of challenges regarding teaching English culture and social norms. Further, Iranian policymakers, stakeholders, and educators are expected to provide professional training opportunities for EFL teachers in teaching English culture. Thus, teaching culture should be underscored in EFL classes and instructors are required to explore and apply various effective strategies and authentic materials to enhance their language learners’ cultural knowledge. The implications are presented and discussed in more detail in the paper.

Morphological complexity is one of the dimensions of complexity that has been increasingly analyzed over the last few years. However, results from previous studies drawing on only a single text type are inconclusive. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of text types (descriptive, narrative, and expository) on the morphological complexity of essays written by Iranian English language learners. The participants included 87 lower-intermediate male and female L2 learners at six language institutes in Qazvin, Iran, who were selected from 127 language learners taking an Oxford Quick Placement test. The participants wrote on each text type in three consecutive weeks as a part of their classroom activity. The morphological complexity of verbs and nouns was separately calculated using the morphological complexity index. The data were analyzed using a series of Friedman and Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests. The findings did not show any statistically significant differences across text types for nominal inflectional diversity; however, verbal inflectional diversity was statistically significant across text types, with narrative essays morphologically more complex than descriptive and expository essays. The findings may have theoretical and pedagogical implications for researchers and L2 teachers.

Abstract Addressing the limitations and criticisms of cloze tests, Klein-Braley and Raatz suggested a modified version of the cloze test called the C-test where the ‘C’ stands for cloze. They introduced the C-test as a better representation of the reduced-redundancy principle. In C-tests, several shorter texts involving a larger number of items completed within a shorter amount of time while cloze tests usually consist of one or two longer texts with less items. This study reports on the results of a research program carried out to validate the C-test amongst Afghan EFL learners. One hundred advanced English majors were administered two different language tests namely a language proficiency test (composed of listening, reading, and writing) and a C-test composed of four different texts to measure the overall language ability of the participants. Various analyses were to measure the validity and reliability of the C-test. The results of the study confirmed that the C-test is a reliable and valid test which can be used as a general English language proficiency test among Afghan students of English as a foreign language.