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Despite the abundance of research investigating general and academic vocabularies and developing dozens of word lists, few studies have compared academic vocabulary with general service word lists such as conversation vocabulary. Many EAP researchers assume that university students need to know all the words in West’s (1953) General Service List (GSL) as a prerequisite to academic words (e.g., Coxhead’s, 2000) and teachers at language institutes recommend conversation students to learn words in Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) as a follow-up to the GSL. The present study compared the academic and conversation vocabularies by exploring frequency and coverage of words in academic and conversation corpora. The GSL and AWL words were investigated in a conversation corpus and an academic corpus, each containing around 12 million running words. The analysis revealed that 1200 GSL word families were highly frequent in both corpora and 645 GSL word families were highly frequent in the conversation corpus but of low frequency in the academic texts. Also, a new academic word list of 700 word families was developed, which proved to be much more rigorous than Coxhead’s AWL. Further analysis indicated that the abovementioned 645 GSL words had a very low coverage of academic texts (0.7%), while they covered 4.05% of the conversation corpus. The new academic word list covered only 1.6% of the conversation corpus, whereas it had a high coverage of the academic texts (9.1%), much higher than that of the AWL (7.5%). The analysis of some other academic corpora revealed identical results.

Teachers need to know new applications for developing online materials and then they should become aware of different ways to present them to online audience. This study tries to help ELT teachers to overcome challenges and difficulties of vodcasting by recognizing their social and biological motives (Activity Theory), and using Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). It can alter teachers’ negative attitudes towards online materials development via providing useful tools and techniques to become better producers of their knowledge to survive professionally. This QUAL-quan inquiry initiated with 10 University professors of Islamic Azad University-South Tehran Branch. All these participants answered ‘Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)’ questionnaire, ‘Personality Test and Job Satisfaction’, ‘Three-D Test’, and ‘Spatial Recognition Test’. The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with those whose data were grounded and initiated from open coding, down to axial coding, and finalized with selective coding. Participants produced vodcasts as pre-test. Then, they received the treatments on an exclusively launched ‘MArt’ Telegram group in the form of the researcher-designed audios and videos and YouTube samples. As a post-test, each of the participants made another vodcast. Then, two experts who are ELT university lecturers evaluated the two sets of recorded data. Finally, all the interpretations and analyses were presented in different graphs and charts along with researcher’s interpretation based on theoretical frameworks. The results show that whether ELT teachers are capable of producing vodcasts or not. Besides, VTS help teachers to become much more visually literate and produce more successful vodcasts. Both treatments of the present study and the derived codes can be used in teacher education, and they can turn into a task-based digital or paper-based coursebooks benefiting M.A. TEFL students.

Grades represent one of the most common sources of evidence of student achievement in classrooms, though their relationship with test scores has remained understudied, particularly in settings such as in Iran, where English is taught as a foreign language. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between graded and tested achievement with respect to gender and proficiency level differences. Teacher-assigned grades and standardized achievement test scores of 693 Iranian learners of English taught by 15 teachers were examined. Primary analyses focused on the validity of teacher grades and the subsequent Pearson correlation coefficients revealed that grades associated positively with externally-validated test scores obtained from reliable tests, an indication of the validity of teacher grading. Additionally, the results of independent-samples t-tests showed that female students outperformed male students on achievement tests, but with fluctuations across proficiency levels. Higher proficiency levels gave male participants an advantage over female participants in achievement tests. Moreover, male teachers were found to grade female participants more accurately than their female counterparts. Implications are discussed for informing teachers about the validation of their grading practices, as well as for teacher education programs and teachers’ professional development.

The worldwide spread of English as the dominant language of globalization has accelerated the development and implementation of Foreign Language Education Policy (FLEP) in many countries. However, Iranian macro policymakers seem to be reluctant to develop an overt FLEP due to ideologized agendas. This study employs document analysis to explore FLEP in eight major national policy documents in Iran including, inter alia, National Vision 2025, Comprehensive Scientific Roadmap, and National Document of Education. This analysis was based on Kaplan and Baldauf’s (1997, 2003) framework for language-in-education planning, which covers Access, Curriculum, Methods and Materials, Evaluation, Personnel, and Resourcing policy as its major components. The data, coded through MAXQDA Software, revealed that the documents relatively deal with almost all components of FLEP excluding the Resourcing policy. Curriculum policy and Methods and materials policy receive the highest attention. Further, some contradictions, conflicts of interest, and gaps are observed in the documents regarding FLEP. Although these documents deemed English necessary for the development of the country, there are worries that it may lead to Westernization. The findings also show that FLEP in Iran is top-down and hardly reflects the needs and attitudes of the community. This has resulted in the failure of ELT in public schools and, in turn, its boom in the private sectors.

Because of the importance of instructor success in the adequacy of instruction and learning, this study aimed to explain the impact of two factors, namely language teachers’ professional identity and autonomy, with respect to their success. To this end, 190 Iranian EFL teachers, including university lecturers and language institute teachers, participated in this study. As for data collection, the Teacher Autonomy Questionnaire (TAQ), the Teacher Professional Identity Scale (TPIS), and the Characteristics of Successful Language Teachers Questionnaire (CSLTQ) were distributed among the respondents. Using Cronbach’s alpha estimates and correlational analyses, the reliability of the questionnaires and the associations among the TAQ, TPIS, and CSLTQ were examined, respectively. The results of Pearson correlations revealed that there were significant positive correlations among all three teacher factors. These findings were also confirmed by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) results; teacher success was predicted positively and significantly by both professional identity and autonomy. Outcomes of this research suggest that teachers’ professional identity and autonomy are highly beneficial to their success. This study also outlined the elements of teachers’ professional identity that could be more useful for their success. In the end, relevant pedagogical implications are discussed.

: Corrective Feedback (CF) provision on performance involves calling attention to learners' erroneous utterances, which stimulates classroom language learning. Despite widespread research in this area, a controversy still exists as to the time of CF in communicative tasks especially when learners' task engagement is targeted. Employing 60 intermediate-level Iranian learners, a four-week study examined the effects of immediate versus delayed CF types on oral engagement, grammar gain as well as on Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency (CAF) in the context of a dictogloss task. The statistical analysis showed that despite statistically significant improvements in the case of Grammaticality Judgement Test (GJT) from the pre-test to the post-test, no statistically significant difference was found between the two groups with regard to their grammar gain, complexity, accuracy, fluency, as well as on their social and cognitive engagement. However, results in the case of behavioral and emotional engagement revealed that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups of immediate and delayed CFs. The findings of the present study call for more flexibility and confidence on the part of the teachers in providing either immediate or delayed CF whenever appropriate and without being concerned about the adverse effects of feedback

Due to the importance of idioms, many researchers and teachers have long sought to find ways of making idiom teaching and learning more effective. This study compared three visual mnemonic devices (pictures, mental imagery, and movie clips) in terms of their effect on EFL learners’ recognition and recall of English idioms. Ninety intermediate level EFL learners who were preparing themselves for IELTS participated in this study. They were in three groups of thirty members each. Each group was taught idioms using one of the afore-mentioned visual mnemonic devices. Receptive and productive tests of idioms were administered to all groups after the treatment. The one-way ANOVA procedure was used to analyze the collected data. The results revealed statistically significant differences among these devices, with pictures method being the most effective on both recognition and recall of idioms. The findings of the study can have significant theoretical as well as pedagogical implications for language researchers, textbook designers, curriculum developers, teachers, and language learners. 

This study set out to check the addressing behavior within men’s and women’s talk in the written conversations in English language textbook series titled ‘New Interchange book’ by Richards, Hull and Proctor, (1998) from Cambridge University Press. In line with this aim, the present researchers initially prepared descriptive tables for both formal and informal contexts in three theme categories (Social, Cultural & Economic) vis a vis four case appropriations (men*men, men*women, women*men, women*women). The distributions of interlocutors were coded through content analysis techniques. The major findings indicated that the highest percentage of detected address terms belonged to pronouns (67.7%). The proportions for gender appropriations between interlocutors for this address term showed that the case condition with women to men (52.3%) and men to women (36.4%) had the highest rates as compared with other cases. Then, in the final stage, the datasets were scrutinized in terms of theories on gender disparity in the instructional materials. This paper has some pedagogical implications in terms of addressing term inequality as mapped on gender status within ELT books, which might indirectly change the balance against full and rich contexts for effective learning to occur.