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This quantitative, qualitative study investigates the usage of mobile phone applications in teaching and learning processes. The study aims to identify the benefits, difficulties, and resolutions of using mobile phone applications. The study was conducted in the English Department at Hebron University at the second semester of the academic years 2015/2016. The study focuses on the Business English course. A questionnaire was used to show the general attitudes of the students towards the effects of using mobile phone applications in the classroom. Interviews were administered to reveal the general attitudes of the students and instructors towards the difficulties and the solutions. The results showed that most students responded positively to using mobile applications in teaching and learning processes. In addition, all students had smart phones, and they used varied brands applications in the learning process. Moreover, the results indicated that students understand and learn better through using the applications.

Beliefs are an important aspect of any learning program as they affect the way teachers and students define their roles, and the way they approach their duties and responsibilities. Besides, they highly affect teachers’ practices, methods, and lesson plans. The importance of beliefs inspired the present researchers to evaluate and compare EFL teachers’ beliefs before and after a teacher training course (TTC) at language institutes in Isfahan to see if teacher training program influence the enrolled teachers’ beliefs about different aspects of a learning situation. To this purpose, a modified version of Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) was administered to a total of 110 Iranian EFL teachers in Isfahan. The teachers came from different majors (TEFL, translation, English literature, and other non-English majors), and were further divided into two groups: those who had participated in at least a TTC, and those who had no experience of attending a TTC. The BALLI scores of the teachers were then classified and analyzed by a t test and an ANOVA. The results revealed that beliefs about language learning did not significantly change in the wake of attending a TTC, and that no significant difference was observed as far as the participants’ field of study was concerned.

Intercultural contact (IC) among students has received a great prominence in EFL and ESL contexts in recent years; therefore, this study was an attempt to modify and validate a questionnaire as an instrument to elicit the resources from which Iranian EFL students obtain their IC information. To reach this aim, a modified version of Peng and Wu’s questionnaire with 26 items and five factors was administered among 200 male and female Iranian EFL students from different language institutes in Tabriz, Iran. To determine the reliability and validity of the modified questionnaire, the statistical analyses of the model and fitness of the questionnaire were conducted by SmartPLS3 software. The results of reliability analyses using three measures of Cronbach’s alpha, combined reliability (CR) and average variance extraction (AVE) demonstrated that the questionnaire has a good reliability. Moreover, the results of construct crossvalidated communality (Q²) proved the construct validity of the questionnaire. Additionally, the results of correlation coefficient matrix and p value for all the latent variables demonstrated that all the paths and relationships in the model are significant and the model is a good fit. This study also clarifies the implication of such a questionnaire for ELT and presents some suggestions for future studies.

This research sought to investigate the relationship between simultaneous interpreters’ oral cloze performance, their emotional intelligence, and gender. In other words, the study tried to predict the variability in performance on simultaneous interpreting (SI) oral cloze test based on the variability in gender, emotional quotient (EQ) and its subscales. To this end, a number of seventy participants majoring in English Translation attending the course Oral Interpretation were selected. The Emotional Quotient Inventory (Bar-On, 1997) questionnaire was given to participants to gather the data. The students were also asked to take an oral cloze exam. The results of the study showed that no significant relationship was found between total EQ and oral cloze performance. However, two of the subscales of EQ, i.e. Flexibility and Stress Tolerance were found to be positive predictors of SI oral cloze score together. The results of the study indicated that the mere acquisition of oral cloze skill as one of the skills required for simultaneous interpreting, cannot guarantee students’ achievement in interpreting. Rather the consideration of personality traits can have a facilitative effect. Moreover, with regard to gender no association was found between student interpreters’ performance and their gender.

The present study was an attempt to provide a psycholinguistic account of cognitive processes underlying responding and questioning. It also strived to identify the potential differences between responding and questioning cognitive processes in Target Language Use Situation tasks. To accomplish the objectives, 65 Iranian general IELTS applicants from two foreign language learning institutes in Shiraz, with two different language proficiency levels (intermediate and advanced), were randomly selected. They were administered a normal responding and a reverse questioning IELTS oral tasks. Two seven-point Likert scale questionnaires were also used to measure the task difficulty and mental effort that the applicants perceived while doing the tasks. Additionally, the applicants’ recorded voices in tasks were transcribed and analyzed to assess the number of grammatical errors and pause lengths. The analysis of the numerical data through descriptive statistics and paired-samples t-tests indicated that, in general, the cognitive processes underlying oral responding and questioning are significantly different in terms of mental effort, task difficulty, length of pauses, and the number of grammatical errors. More specifically, the results suggested that the applicants took more mental effort and perceived more task difficulty while constructing the questions for given responses irrespective of their proficiency levels. Both groups also paused significantly longer and committed significantly more grammatical errors when completing the questioning tasks. The paper discusses the study implications for second language teachers and assessors.

This paper investigates a special type of recurrent expressions, lexical bundles, defined as a sequence of three or more words that co-occur frequently in a particular register (Biber et al., 1999). Considering the importance of this group of multi-word sequences in academic prose, this study explores the forms and syntactic structures of three- and four-word bundles in English abstracts written by Iranian scholars in three disciplines; business studies, history, and linguistics. Applying a frequency-based approach suggested by Biber et al. (1999), the data were drawn from a corpus consisting of 660 English abstracts of research articles published by various leading academic journals. As regards syntactic structure, the structural characteristics of the lexical bundles were first explored through careful analysis and then classified using a modified version of Biber et al.’s (1999) structural framework. The study also compares the forms, frequencies, and structures of the lexical bundles in the corpus to those found in Hyland’s (2004) research article corpus. This comparison shows that not only are there relatively large differences between the two corpora in the forms and frequencies of bundles employed, but also there are some discrepancies in terms of distribution of the different structural types and tokens.

This study investigated the comparative effects of audio-visually prompted collaborative dialogue on the listening comprehension development of symmetrical, asymmetrical, and asymmetrical teacher-fronted EFL learner groups. Besides, it explored the attitude of the participants of the groups concerning the effectiveness of collaborative dialogue for their listening comprehension improvement. The participants of the study were 120 Iranian female EFL learners who were conveniently chosen from several English language institutes and put into three experimental and one control groups, each with 30 learners. In the first experimental group, coequal learners engaged in collaborative dialogue. In the second experimental group, the expert peer(s) and less knowledgeable peers applied collaborative dialogue, and in the third experimental group, in addition to the peers, the teacher was involved in collaborative dialogue with the group members. As for the control group, the collaborative dialogue was abandoned and the participants worked individually. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that collaborative dialogue in asymmetrical teacher-fronted, asymmetrical peer and symmetrical peer groups were respectively the most effective procedures for listening comprehension development of the EFL learners. Also, it was found that the participants of the asymmetrical teacher fronted group had a more positive attitude towards the efficacy of audio-visually prompted collaborative dialogue compared with asymmetrical and symmetrical peer groups. The findings underscore the cognitive and affective efficiency of a more knowledgeable source, either a teacher or a peer, in asymmetrical dyadic interactions for the less knowledgeable partners' ZPD sensitive development.   

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of meaning-focused versus form-focused input-oriented and output-oriented task-based instruction on elementary level Iranian EFL Learners’ vocabulary comprehension and recall. For this purpose, a sample of 120 male students from a private school in Tehran was selected through convenience sampling and based on availability. The participants were divided into four groups, and each group was given a different treatment. The first group was taught through meaning-focused input-oriented vocabulary tasks; the second group was instructed through meaning-focused output-oriented tasks; the third group received form-focused input-oriented vocabulary tasks, and the fourth group received form-focused output-oriented vocabulary instruction. At the end of the treatment, the participants in all the four groups were given a vocabulary comprehension and a vocabulary recall posttest. The results indicated that meaning-focused tasks were more effective than form-focused tasks on both vocabulary comprehension and recall. At the same time, input-oriented tasks turned out to be more effective than output-oriented tasks on only vocabulary comprehension. In vocabulary recall, input-oriented tasks were more effective when they were form-focused, while output-oriented tasks were more effective when they were meaning-focused. The results of this study can have implications for teachers, learners, and curriculum designers.

The practice of ‘writing to learn’ has been propounded as fast-tracking the dynamic process of noticing problems in L2 writing. However, a marked melioration in learners’ attempted output requires a form of corrective feedback, among which modeling has proven to bear vigorous input enhancement effects. The present study attempted to inspect what EFL learners notice throughout their own output and exposure to model texts and how this noticing acts upon their short-term and long-term writing performance. In a repeated measure quasi-experimental design, the performance of 43 Iranian EFL learners on narrative writing tasks was collected upon pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test. The participants indicated their noticing of linguistic problems through note-taking during the writing task followed by the exposure to two model texts and two revisions of the original writing, immediately, and two months later. The type of linguistic features noticed was studied through qualitative analysis. Paired-samples t-tests were conducted to compare students' accuracy performance before and after noticing. The results indicated that learners’ grammatical accuracy was improved by noticing. As to the nature of incorporated features, learners' noticing played a prompting role in the effectiveness of models since learners retained those lexical and grammatical features compatible with their own noticing. It is argued that the participants' engagement in output activity has increased their awareness of the required linguistic features, facilitating their noticing of those features through exposure to positive feedback. The findings provide further evidence for the constructive role of output in language learning.