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Pragmatic failure is an issue usually occurring in cross-cultural communication when L2 learners cannot express themselves appropriately. This study aimed to discern the factors leading to cross-cultural pragmatic failure (CCPF) and the challenges EFL learners face in trying to overcome miscommunication problems. Following a qualitative research design, in the first study phase, one of the researchers observed 10 EFL teachers’ classes for 90 minutes each, twice a week during the term to take the required field notes for further analysis. To obtain more in-depth information, in the second phase, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 EFL teachers and learners, and the data were collected. The EFL teachers were from private English language institutes, and the student participants were EFL learners studying either in state-run universities or private language centers. The results of the thematic analysis revealed that EFL classroom context, time and budget, assessing pragmatic knowledge, ELT textbook, and teacher education were perceived as the causes of CCPF by the interviewees. Moreover, the extracted themes associated with learners’ challenges included linguistic incompetency, investing insufficient time and effort, psychological factors, cultural and sociocultural differences, inappropriate teaching methodology, and teachers’ pragmatic competence.

The researchers in the current study were pinpointing the factors contributing to teacher motivation. Among the myriad of variables which were deemed liable to influence teacher motivation, the researchers opted for teacher motivation, namely teacher burnout, self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, and teaching style as the main predictive variables for teacher motivation. To conduct the study, a total of 200 English language teachers were asked to fill the study questionnaires. The target group encompassed teachers from both public school and language school contexts. The teachers were from both genders and came from a variety of age groups, years of experience, and language backgrounds. The participants were recruited from 10 cities across West Azarbaijan. To facilitate the data collection process, the questionnaires were sent to participants via Google forms link. The obtained data were analyzed through SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) to find the exact interrelationships between the four variables considered as predictors and teacher motivation. The findings pointed toward the existence of significant paths from burnout, self-efficacy, emotional intelligence (EI), and teaching styles toward teaching motivation. Additionally, EI, self-efficacy, and teaching styles were depicted to be significant predictors for burnout. The path from EI to self-efficacy was also significant. Furthermore, teaching style was significantly predicted by EI and self-efficacy. Finally, the findings obtained via interview analysis demonstrated that teacher motivation can be influenced by a variety of factors including low income and lack of environmental/social support, which can, in turn, lead to increased levels of burnout and hence diminish teaching efficacy and hence motivation. The implications of the findings are discussed throughout the paper.

Today, technological applications provide language learners with many possibilities to improve their learning. Online learning environments create opportunities for more flexibility, interaction, and collaboration in a way different from face-to-face learning environments. This study attempted to investigate the effects of synchronous distance education on the oral comprehension of Iraqi English language learners. The participants were 19 Iraqi English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in a language institute in Karbala, Iraq. All learners were following the same language course at the B1 level. These learners were randomly divided into three groups: the face-to-face control group, the experimental group taught via the Adobe Connect platform, and the experimental group taught via the Skype application. The data were collected through pre- and post-oral proficiency tests. The findings showed significant differences in the improvement of oral comprehension among the three groups. Experimental groups scored significantly higher than the control group. Moreover, the results indicated that the Adobe Connect-based instruction had a better effect on the learners’ oral comprehension in comparison to the Skype-based instruction. Concerning the performance of males and females in the experimental groups, the findings showed a significant difference between females and males in the Adobe Connect condition, with females showing more improvement. However, no significant difference was observed between males and females in the Skype group. The study stresses the mediation of virtual classrooms in enhancing EFL learners’ learning achievements. Relevant pedagogical implications for classroom practice in EFL education are presented and discussed and some suggestions are made for future research

The present study was conducted to investigate the comparative impacts of three types of EFL teachers' mindsets on EFL learners' mindsets. The participants of the study were English Translation undergraduate students (both female and male with the age ranging of 18-35) who were selected according to convenience non-random sampling from three classes of English Grammar 1 at both Islamic Azad Universities of Karaj and Shahriyar. The total number of students in each class was 30. The course lasted 16 successive sessions. Participants were assigned into three experimental groups. At the outset, a Mindset Assessment Profile (MAP) adopted from Mindset works, INC (2002-2012) on a scale of disagree a lot to agree a lot was administered among participants in all three experimental groups. The researchers provided interventions in terms of fixed, growth, and mixed mindsets to teach English grammar. At the end of the course, the same Mindset Assessment Profile (MAP) as the one administered in the pretest phase was administered among participants in all three groups and it was demonstrated that the EFL teacher’s type of mindset can significantly influence EFL learners’ mindsets. Consequently, it was determined that helping students adopt growth mindset hinges on raising teachers’ awareness about the importance of their own mindsets as well as helping them to grow their mindsets. This study includes a variety of instructional implications for both EFL teachers and EFL learners.

This quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the effects of dynamic assessment employed by teachers on promoting Iranian EFL learners’ stances in academic writing. For this purpose, three intact writing classes were selected by convenience sampling from BA students of English translation at Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University. The Quick Oxford Placement Test (QOPT) was administered to them, and those whose scores matched the intermediate band score of QOPT were selected. In general, 35 homogeneous students were selected from each class and randomly assigned into two experimental groups and one control group. A writing test was administered to all groups as the pre-test at the onset of the semester. The experimental groups were taught by the researcher and passed five different quizzes during the semester. The three groups were post-tested at the end of the semester. The results illustrated that both teacher and peers’ dynamic assessment effectively improved Iranian EFL learners’ stance in academic writing.

Studies in literary religious discourses, including recent Quranic studies, suggest that speech act theory provides the researchers with variable pragmatic tools to interpret meanings that are constructed upon the intention of the speaker. This study draws upon speech act theory (SAT) to analyse the two ubiquitous speech acts of promise and threat in the Holy Quran. Employing the speech acts of promise and threat in the Quran to the detailed analysis of felicity conditions, this study, while arguing for the compatibility of SAT to the language of Quran, concludes that the main impetus behind the speech acts of promise and threat is creating the motivation in the addressees to conduct good and avoid evil deeds; therefore, the rules and conditions that drive the illocutionary force of promise and threat perfectly align with the motivational language of the Holy Quran.

Iranian high school students confront various challenges in understanding reading passages and learning vocabulary since appropriate process-oriented assessment techniques with constructive and communicative feedback are not practiced to consolidate instruction and learning. The effect of formative assessment (FA) retelling strategy on vocabulary knowledge and understanding passages was investigated and scrutinized in this quasi-experimental study in the EFL context. Thus, a sample of 48 intermediate EFL students was selected and assigned to two intact groups. The retelling assessment was implemented for the experimental group (EG), while the product-oriented summative assessment was applied to the control group (CG). The pre-test scores were taken at the first phase of the study followed by the eight-week assessment process. Finally, the post-test scores were taken. For the purpose of the analysis, the Independent Samples T-test and the one-way  ANCOVA were utilized to compare and contrast the mean scores. The findings were in favor of the retelling technique which developed the vocabulary command and text comprehension in the EG. Moreover, little or no significant impact was revealed for the product-oriented assessment in the CG. The findings can be pedagogically rewarding for learners, teachers and theoreticians and may cast light on SLA research in applying FA techniques.

Considering the body of research on the intersection of psychology and assessment that suggests assessment is not only under the influence of the model against which a translation is assessed, the present study aimed to investigate the role of raters’ personality traits in their assessment. It was also intended to see if the application of an agreed-upon unified assessment tool could change the way evaluations are made, and if this possible change is the same among raters with different personality traits. To this end, seven raters were asked to score an English text translated by 23 students twice with an interval of at least two weeks. In the first scoring, they were asked to assess the way they usually did with no specific guidelines. However, the second assessment was done through the application of an agreed-upon model. Moreover, the raters were scored on the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness as it is believed that these two traits are predictors of leniency. The data analyzed revealed (1) a significant correlation between the raters’ score on agreeableness and the scores they assigned to the translations, and (2) a significant negative correlation between the raters’ score on conscientiousness and the scores they assigned to the translations. This proved that more agreeable less conscientious raters are prone to be more lenient. The value of Cronbach alpha also revealed that more conscientious less agreeable raters were more consistent in their assessments in both rounds of scoring. This, however, turned out not to be the case for less conscientious raters.

Synesthesia, among other rhetorical devices, has played a prominent role in conveying the intended messages in the realm of poetry. Nonetheless, it has not grabbed adequate attention to its nature and function. Belonging to the domain of comparative literature, this essay has benefitted from analogy studies as its methodology to render novel perspectives in the meaning and reading of the poetry of Sitwell and Ebtehaj. Here, we have attempted, firstly, to foreground the function of synesthesia and, secondly, to enrich the understanding of the mentioned poets. This paper concludes that the realization of synesthesia heavily and helpfully affects the perception of literary poems. In addition, to showcase such influence, a reasonable number of poems by Sitwell and Ebtehaj were subjected to scrutiny, indicating that a great deal of their poetry is best understood only after investigating synesthesia. This essay is merely concentrated on two poets, yet its findings can be helpful for the whole field of poetry.

Annually, researchers in various scientific fields publish their research results as technical reports or articles in proceedings or journals. The collocation of this type of data is used by search engines and digital libraries to search and access research publications, which usually retrieve related articles based on the query keywords instead of the article’s subjects. Consequently, accurate classification of scientific articles can increase the quality of users’ searches when seeking a scientific document in databases. The primary purpose of this paper is to provide a classification model to determine the scope of scientific articles. To this end, we proposed a model which uses the enriched contextualized knowledge of Persian articles through distributional semantics. Accordingly, identifying the specific field of each document and defining its domain by prominent enriched knowledge enhances the accuracy of scientific articles’ classification. To reach the goal, we enriched the contextualized embedding models, either ParsBERT or XLM-RoBERTa, with the latent topics to train a multilayer perceptron model. According to the experimental results, overall performance of the ParsBERT-NMF-1HT was 72.37% (macro) and 75.21% (micro) according to F-measure, with a statistical significance compared to the baseline (p<0.05).