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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.

The present study was undertaken to investigate the effects of varying frequency patterns (FPs) of words on the productive acquisition of a young EFL learner in a home setting. Target words were presented to the learner using games and role plays. They were subsequently traced for their frequencies in input and output. Eighteen immediate tests and delayed tests were administered to measure the oral production following the treatments. To examine the efficacy of varying FPs, target words were grouped into four sets: High Input/High Output (HIHO), Low Input/Low Output (LILO), High Input/Low Output (HILO), and Low Input/High Output (LIHO). The findings revealed that the differences among the FPs were statistically significant. Meanwhile, Wilcoxon signed-rank test identified a significant discrepancy between the words with LILO and HIHO frequency patterns. The findings demonstrated that the differences in FPs led to different productive gains, and higher word production cropped up when words occurred very frequently both in input and output. This study shows that higher teacher talk in tandem with higher learner talk could boost lexical production by a young learner in meaning-focused instructions.

The aim of the current study was to investigate whether Podcasts would have an effect on Iranian autonomous and non-autonomous EFL learners’ listening comprehension ability at pre-intermediate level. For this purpose, 60 Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners at some Iranian institutes participated in the experiment of the study. Then they were divided into two groups based on an OPT and an autonomy questionnaire. The participants of each group were assigned randomly into two experimental groups (N=15) and two control groups (N=15). A pre-test was administered to the four groups of the study and then, the experimental groups received 5 sessions of teaching podcast. After the treatment, a posttest of L2 listening comprehension was administered to all groups of the study and finally the data were analyzed via a series of paired sample t-tests to see whether there is progress between the pretest and posttest scores of the groups, and a Two-way ANOVA was used to see the differences between posttests. The results revealed that Iranian autonomous and non-autonomous EFL learners’ listening comprehension ability got better after the treatment.

The present study has aimed at finding out whether or not students’ language background and gender bring about a distinction between the frequency and types of metadiscourse elements occurring in their papers. To this end, a dataset of 40 student papers in four series written by native male, nonnative male, native female, and nonnative female writers was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the use of metadiscourse resources following the metadiscourse model proposed by Hyland and Tse (2004). The results of the frequency count and chi-square tests (p-value

This study examined academic articles and journalistic reports in 5 disciplinary areas to explore how similar contents might attitudinally be realized in two different genres. To this end, 25 research articles and 210 news reports were carefully selected and underwent detailed discourse semantic and grammatical analyses with the purpose of identifying the evaluative linguistic patterns. The findings showed that academic texts are attitudinally charged with appreciation rather than other categories of attitude. This suggests that markers of appreciation are responsible for detachment, impersonality, and objectivity. On the contrary, notwithstanding the frequent use of appreciation in journalistic texts, other categories of attitude (affect and judgment) are also effectively used. This suggests that affective and judgment markers account for the subjectivity of journalistic texts. One of the findings emerging from this study is that frequent instances of appreciation in the different parts of an RA might be attributed to the development of language use within an individual which does not lead to lowering the level of objectivity in academic texts but enhancing interpersonal communication.

Of paramount importance in the study of cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) is the absence of tests developed for small-scale diagnostic purposes. Currently, much of the research carried out has been mainly on large-scale tests, e.g., TOEFL, MELAB, IELTS, etc. Even so, formative language assessment with a focus on informing instruction and engaging in identification of student’s strengths and weaknesses to guide instruction has not been conducted in the Iranian English language learning context. In an attempt to respond to the call for developing diagnostic tests, this study explored developing a cognitive diagnostic reading comprehension test for CDA purposes. To achieve this, initially, a list of reading attributes was prepared based on the literature and then the attributes were used to construct 20 reading comprehension items. Then seven content raters were asked to identify the attributes of each item of the test. To obtain quantitative data for Q-matrix construction, the test battery was administered to 1986 students of a General English Language Course at the University of Tehran, Iran. In addition, 13 students were recruited to participate in think-aloud verbal protocols. On the basis of the overall agreement of the content raters’ judgements concerning the choices of attributes and results of think-aloud verbal protocol analysis, a Q-matrix that specified the relationships between test items and target attributes was developed. Finally, to examine the CDA of the test, the Fusion Model, a type of cognitive diagnostic model (CDM), was used for diagnosing the participants' strengths and weaknesses. Results suggest that nine major reading attributes are involved in these reading comprehension test items. The results obtained from such cognitive diagnostic analyses could be beneficial for both teachers and curriculum developers to prepare instructional materials that target specific weaknesses and inform them of the more problematic areas to focus on in class in order to plan for better instruction.

Although the importance of reading in higher education as an index of success has been highlighted, the metacognitive knowledge or beliefs of graduate students have remained under-researched. This qualitative study reports on a study that, first, examines how graduate students of applied linguistics conceive of academic reading and academic readers in their graduate programs; second, what factors they believe can contribute to the development of those self-conceptions; and, third, if there was the possibility of adding a course on academic reading to their MA programs, how they would judge the advantages and disadvantages of such a course. In so doing, in-depth interviews were conducted with 31 graduate students at eight different universities. The findings revealed considerable changes in the participants' conceptions as the result of taking part in their graduate programs. They attributed those self-conceptions to their efforts and struggles as well as their teachers' help and guidance. Their perceptions of an academic reading course were positive. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Translation can have long-term effects on all languages and cultures. It is not a mere linguistic act, but mostly a cultural act, since language is by nature one of the major carriers of cultural elements. Thus, the translator’s job is not just transferring the meaning of words and sentences from the source text to the target text. Culture-specific items often cause translation problems. Identifying such items in the source text and locate their rendering in the target text has been the focus of the present study. This study has attempted to spot culture-specific elements in the source text; i.e. Matilda, and to check the extent of the translator’s fidelity in rendering such elements and dealing with the concept of domain of discourse in Lefever’s (1992) words. To conduct the study, the researchers have applied a qualitative-descriptive (as well as a quantitative) method, focusing on the analysis of the text and classifying the cultural elements in the source text on the basis of Newmark’s (1988) taxonomy. The findings thereof revealed that universe/domain of discourse has changed in several cases, mostly when the translator has used domestication strategy.

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.

In this study, the use of speech-like pragmatic markers in Iranian EFL students’ academic writing was investigated. Speech-like pragmatic markers, such as I think, well, I guess, actually, anyway, anyhow, etc. are linguistic components that are more specific to conversation than writing, and writers may wrongly include them in their academic writing. To examine the students’ use of speech-like pragmatic markers when writing an essay, samples of Iranian students’ and English native students’ argumentative essays were analyzed using Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA). Moreover, the overuse or underuse of such items was compared between English native students and Iranian EFL students. Native English data were collected from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) and non-native English data were gathered from Iranian students’ essays during an academic semester from Islamic Azad University of Najafabad, Islamic Azad University of Abadan and Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz in Iran. Iranian participants were 71 EFL upper-intermediate (based on the Oxford Placement Test) graduate students that were selected randomly from male and female students. A frequency analysis of pragmatic markers indicates significant differences between Iranian students’ and English native students’ use of speech-like pragmatic markers. Quantitative analyses of the non-native corpus data revealed that students apply these spoken components in their argumentative essays, which may adversely affect their text in terms of a correct style and tone. By investigating the results, the language teachers and materials writers are recommended to recognize the features of Iranian English students’ interlanguage and to provide them with planned input about appropriate use of pragmatic markers.

This study sought to compare Iranian EFL novice and expert teachers regarding their professional knowledge at Iranian language institutes and universities. To achieve the aim of study, a questionnaire was developed based on the literature, the theoretical framework and the results of a qualitative study carried out by Yazdanpanah and Sahragard (2017). This questionnaire was administered to the whole sample of the study who was 200 Iranian EFL teachers from different genders and educational contexts. The participants were selected conveniently as going through random sampling was not possible. Based on the results of the exploratory factor analysis, six factors emerged under the main category of professional knowledge for Iranian EFL teachers. The findings of this study revealed that: (a) Iranian EFL expert teachers have higher levels of professional knowledge than Iranian EFL novice teachers (b) expert teachers have higher levels of knowledge about language and knowledge of language skills and components than novice teachers (c) expert and novice participants of this study are more or less similar in the modification they make in their teaching presentation, and d) there was not a significant difference between Iranian EFL expert teachers and Iranian EFL novice teachers due to knowledge of language teaching, knowledge of teaching methods and knowledge of language learning.