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This study aimed, firstly, to investigate the underlying components of Iranian cultural identity and, secondly, to confirm the aforementioned components via Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis. In order to achieve these goals, the researchers reviewed the extensive local and international literature on language, culture and identity. Based on the literature and consultations with a group of 30 university undergraduate and post graduate learners English language learners and a cadre of four university professors in the field of sociology, an Iranian EFL Language Learners’ Cultural Identity Model with six components (Nationality, Religion, Arts, Persian Language and Literature, Media, and Globalization) was hypothesized. In order to test and validate the model, a questionnaire was developed. To probe the reliability of the questionnaire, Cronbach’s Alpha was used. The reliability of all the items in the questionnaire was 0.78. To estimate the construct validity of the model, Exploratory Factor Analysis using PCA was performed, which indicated five components (Religion, Arts, Persian Language and Literature, Media, and Globalization) underlying Iranian Cultural Identity. Then, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis through AMOS 22 was performed to test the model and the interaction among the components. The SEM results confirmed the existence of five factors. Finally, statistical results are discussed and implications are provided.

The major objective of this experimental research was to assess the differences between two varieties of focus on form instruction, namely proactive and reactive across multimodal vs. traditional input settings in both comprehension and production of modal auxiliaries. The participants of the study were 75 Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) high school students at the elementary level in three classes. The students in each class took part in a pre-test including both comprehension and production items. Then, they were randomly exposed to one of the three types of grammar instruction, i.e. proactive focus on form in which students were exposed to multimodal input through preplanned techniques of input enhancement and input flood, reactive focus on form in which the tasks occurred in multimodal episodes including negotiation and correction by the instructor through recasts, clarification requests, and repetition techniques. Lastly, in the control group, the students were provided with a pamphlet and their teacher’s explanations. The post-test was then administered to the three groups, and the results were analyzed by conducting a one-way-analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) which revealed a significant difference among these three groups. The results showed that the proactive group outperformed the reactive and control groups both in the comprehension and production of modal auxiliaries. At the end of the experiment, a brief survey which was accomplished through an interview revealed that the majority of the students highly favored PowerPoint presentations, teacher's explanations, and video clips respectively.

Textbooks play a crucial role in English language teaching and learning. One of the methods for selecting the most appropriate textbook for a particular educational purpose is comparing two or several similar textbooks with each other. Textbook evaluation can provide useful information about the strengths and weaknesses of textbooks and can lead to the selection of the most suitable materials for specific purposes. The present study is a critical comparison of Prospect 2, taught in junior high schools in Iran, and English Net 6, taught in junior high schools in Turkey, in terms of their physical and utilitarian attributes, efficient outlay of objectives and supplementary materials, learning and teaching contents, and language skills. The participants of the study were 20 English teachers who completed two evaluation checklists. The textbook evaluation checklist that was used in the study was based on the guidelines and framework of AbdelWahab’s checklist (2013)with 123 items. The results of the study indicated that the Turkish textbook surpassed the Iranian one in many aspects of the text book evaluation checklist. The results revealed that in comparison with English Net 6, Prospect 2 had more weaknesses in terms of physical and utilitarian attributes, efficient outlay of objectives and supplementary materials, learning and teaching contents, and language skills.

This quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the effect of task repetition under four conditions on the three dimensions of oral production (accuracy, complexity and fluency) and grammatical knowledge gain of learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). 40 young learners of English as a Foreign Language in four classes were randomly assigned into one of the following groups: repetition in three successive sessions during a week, repetition once a week over three weeks, repetition with one week interval in between over five weeks, and repetition with two weeks interval in between over seven weeks. A Grammatical Judgment Test (GJT) including the prepositions of movement as the target structure was designed to measure learners’ grammatical knowledge both before and after the study. Also, tasks were developed for measuring oral performance of the participants. The findings indicated significant differences in the performance of the groups from pre-test to post-test in terms of accuracy (ratio of error-free clauses) and complexity (syntactic and lexical) dimensions of oral production as well as gains in grammatical knowledge; they however failed to show significant effects for fluency development across distinct time intervals. The paper discusses further findings and implications.

This paper attempts to investigate and compare the conceptual metaphors of FEAR in Persian and English. FEAR is one of the basic emotions, conceptualization of which shows both similarities and variations in different languages. Investigating features of conceptualization is an essential part of the semantics of emotions. The cross-linguistic analysis of the concept of FEAR is based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory put forward by Lakoff (1987) and the extensions of this theory provided by Kövecses (2002). We have attempted to compare and contrast FEAR metaphors and elaborate on some cultural and language-specific aspects in the two languages. We adopted a corpus-based method to gather the metaphorical expressions and then to extract the name of the mappings. We compared and contrasted these name of the mappings, and identified the commonalities and differences. Certain source domain concepts such as human, motion verbs, animals, and colors were explained in detail.

The article deals with some “generic” features of Russian literature. The works of Russian thinkers are permeated by the idea of Russian writers’ exclusive fate, which consists in these writers’ discovering their own selves. Their artistic quest was aimed at comprehending the spiritual substance of a human being within themselves. Russian artistic school also implies the period of growth, the development of Russian national culture, its historical and cultural character, and according to N.Ya. Danilevsky and A.S. Khomiakov, it was convinced that our writers should take in the European heritage, but they should not limit their works to it. One should embrace works of different schools and become a free artist. The central and the most intense questions to consider for each thinker are those of Russian artists’ worldview, their spiritual and creative act (their unique “artistry”), the subject matter, lyricism, the artistic word, and particular types of creative works. It is not a coincidence that in their articles they have dwelled on the European (Catholic and Protestant) lifestyles and that of the Old Testament. They concluded that the Russian artistic type is characterized by “completeness and integrity of mind”, maturity and manhood, unparalleled sincerity, simplicity and directness in treating the subject matter, and artistic ingenuousness.

The current study, setting a two-fold goal, attempted to see whether the preemptive focus on form (FonF) under either planned or unplanned conditions could contribute to increasing lexical diversity in written narratives and, second, to find whether there was a trade-off between the lexical diversity and accuracy. To this end, 32 beginner learners were selected following a Quick Oxford Placement Test and assigned into two groups to receive preemptive FonF under no-planning and pre-task planning conditions. The analysis of the results through a set ofrepeated measure ANOVAs and independent-samples t-tests revealed that the first group with unplanned condition outperformed the one with pre-task planning in lexical diversity. The results also revealed the trade-off between the lexical diversity and accuracy. That is, both lexical diversity and accuracy were significantly taken care of under unplanned preemptive condition whereas pre-task planning hindered attendingto lexical diversity and, thus, both aspects simultaneously. It was concluded that providing learners with appropriate conditions through form-focused instruction can set the ground for activating their linguistic knowledge and letting them attend to different linguistic aspects during writing.

Teacher enthusiasm and its impact on students’ learning and emotions have remained unnoticed in the realm of second language learning and teaching. This study aimed at exploring the possibility of boosting language teacher enthusiasm and its potential relationship with language learners’ effort and attitude for language learning. In order to foster teacher enthusiasm, the highly novel concept of vision was utilized and a vision enhancement program was conducted to improve language teacher enthusiasm. Four EFL teachers and their 46 students participated in the research project. Two of the teachers were assigned to the six-week visionary intervention and the other two received no treatment. A Likert-scale questionnaire measuring perceived teacher enthusiasm, intended effort, and attitude to language learning was administered to all the students before and after the treatment. Results of ANCOVA revealed that those students whose teachers were subjected to vision enhancement were significantly different from the students whose teachers did not receive the treatment. Moreover, linear regression analyses demonstrated that students’ perception of teacher enthusiasm can positively predict their effort and attitude. The efficiency of visionary training for improving teacher enthusiasm gained empirical support. Besides, the findings underscore the link between teacher enthusiasm and students’ effort and attitude.

The present study investigated the effect of pragmatic eliciting tasks on EFL pre-intermediate learners speaking proficiency. Thus this study aimed at comparing the English language learners who practiced pragmatic eliciting tasks and the ones who used traditional speaking activities such as questions and answers, discussion, etc. In doing so, 40 learners out of 80 were selected through Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) with the band score of 30 to 39. Then they were non-randomly divided into two equal experimental and control groups through convenience sampling method. Both groups took a teacher-made pre-test on speaking proficiency and the scores were recorded. The experimental group received pragmatic eliciting tasks including explicit uses of pragmatic functions of speech (i.e., greeting, thanking, etc.) while the control group received these pragmatic tasks implicitly. Finally, both groups took a posttest which was the modified pre-test. Data were analyzed through independent and paired sample t-tests and the results showed that explicit instruction on pragmatic eliciting tasks were effective than the implicit ones in the control group. Implications of the study suggest that the learners should learn pragmatic eliciting tasks for effective uses of language functions in their conversations.

This study is an attempt to extend our current knowledge by exploring the relationship between spiritual intelligence (SI) and multiple intelligences (MI) on one hand and the relationship between spiritual intelligence and language learning strategies (LLS) on the other hand among 30 MA TEFL learners of a state university in Tehran. To this end, King's Spiritual Intelligence Self-Report Inventory, Oxford's Language Learning Strategy Inventory, and Multiple Intelligences Inventory developed by McKenzie were utilized to gather data. The obtained results revealed a moderate positive correlation between some subscales of SI and MI including: personal meaning production and musical intelligence, and also between existential intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence and critical existential thinking. Furthermore, a moderate positive correlation was found between conscious state expansion and metacognitive strategies as two subscales of SI and LLS. Based on the results, implications for further research are discussed.

In an attempt to liberate teachers from deficiencies of the conventional methods, Kumaravadivelu (1994) proposed the concept of “post method condition” to overcome the challenges caused by the very nature of methods. The literature regarding post-method pedagogy has indicated that most of the studies focus on its theoretical aspect, while the practical realization has been largely untouched. To this end, the present study was an endeavor to unveil the perspective of Iranian EFL teachers concerning the applicability of this pedagogy. 21 male and female in-service EFL teachers from different cities in Iran (Shiraz, Marvdasht, Bushehr, Tehran, and Gonbad-e-Kavus) participated in this qualitative research where data came from semi-structured interviews as the primary source of data collection. The interview data were transcribed and coded using Straus and Corbin’s (1998) constant comparative method, including three codification processes of open, axial and selective codings. The finding indicated that absence of required autonomy among teachers, teacher’s job security, students’ passivity, absence of critical thinking skills among students, dominance of transmission model of teacher education, inefficiency of the textbooks, teacher’s focus on coverage and grade pressure, and demanding nature of post-method pedagogy as the main pedagogical barriers which prevent language teachers from applying this pedagogy in their teaching practices.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation as focus-on-form tasks tending to encourage the acquisition of nominal clauses (NCs) in English. It explored (a) whether textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation would promote and enhance the knowledge of NCs, (b) whether these two tasks would differ in terms of enhancing learners' knowledge of nominal clauses, and (c) whether learners' use of self-regulatory capacity for grammar acquisition would have differential effects on textual enhancement and explicit explanation groups. A test of recognizing noun clauses and a test of producing combined sentences were used as both the pretest and the posttest to measure the achievement of first-year undergraduate university students in four intact classes. A grammar self-regulation questionnaire was also administered to measure the use of self-regulatory capacity. The findings demonstrated that both textual enhancement and explicit instruction contributed to developing grammatical knowledge of the learners at both recognition and production level. The results also showed that the learners who received textual enhancement used their grammar self-regulatory capacity more effectively in developing their receptive knowledge of NCs. It can be concluded that textual enhancement, which provides learners with less explicit instruction, pushes them to use their self-regulatory capacity more effectively in improving receptive knowledge of grammar.

From a Systemic Functional perspective, Grammatical Metaphor (GM) as is taken to be a chief driving force in the discourse of different genres, an important adult language machinery for ideational meanings to be semantically cross-mapped and realized through a different form in the stratum of the lexico-grammar, in order to convey changed meanings and tinker with the discursive flow and development of text in real time, mainly through nominalization of adjectives and verbs. Using a number of established works of the English novel as data, this study draws upon the author’s previous model for the categories of GM used in modern prose fiction, with the main focus placed on one of the six categories, Prepositional GM (PGM). PGM figures with a very high frequency in fiction and occurs when a GM is preceded by a preposition. This study finds that the language of prose fiction in English deploys some of these PGMsin either of two different meaning sof the adverbial, varying according to context. Again, as seen to be the hallmark of GM by many, GM is found to open up vast ideational meaning potentials in the semantics stratum, from which the lexico-grammar makes choices according to context and intended meaning. As argued elsewhere in the literature and here, and as backed up by the author’s own experience of the advanced teaching of writing and reading, broadened understanding of GM is a critically important component to writing instruction and its effectiveness, as seen in the large-scale horizons and agendas for effective teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Iran and beyond.