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The upheaval time of COVID-19 highlighted the importance of an effective way of teaching English to the front-line healthcare workers such as medical doctors and researchers with different digital-divide status, particularly in non-English-speaking countries because they were first-hand users of critical pandemic-related information in mostly-English articles published online by scientific journals. This study attempted to investigate the pedagogical effects of utilizing the two main User-Generated Content (UGC) platforms in E-learning, namely LMS vs. LXP, on the results of the Electronic Ministry of Health Language Examinations (E-MHLE) among Iranian English for Medical Purposes (EMP) learners across their digital-divide status (digital natives vs. digital immigrants) during the COVID-19 pandemic. A series of focus-group E-interviews were conducted to determine the reasons behind the lowest scores among the participants and to find out possible suggestions for success in high-stake E-tests. To this end, 272 EMP learners who were users of LMS and LXP were conveniently selected from a university of medical science to participate in this sequential explanatory mixed-method research. The results of descriptive and inferential statistics showed that the LXP group outperformed the LMS one in the results of E-MHLE. Moreover, the digital natives obtained higher scores than the digital immigrants in both groups but the difference was not significant in the LXP. The findings of the E-interviews were thematically analyzed and discussed. The findings of this study might offer practical and realistic benefits to the whole EMP community, particularly policymakers for the post-COVID-19 era. 

One of the important abilities of learners is to monitor their own learning process and take charge of their development. To this end and based on the correlational nature of the study design, total of 125 students (for the Winter semester of 2017) educating at Zanjan Universities (89 B.A. students of Islamic Azad University and 60 B.A. students of Payam-e-Noor University) were chosen as the statistical population. Using Cochran formula and stratified random sampling method (each university was considered as one separate strata), the sample size was determined as 108 (65 students educating at Islamic Azad University and 43 students educating at Payam-e-Noor University). To gather the information, Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope’s, Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale, Sternberg’s Thinking Styles Inventory, and Learner Autonomy Questionnaire (LAQ) developed by Zhang and Li were used. The results of K-S test showed that non-parametric test was liable to be used in order to study the research hypotheses. Using Spearman correlation coefficient, a relationship was found between autonomy and language anxiety among Iranian university students. The other research question was an attempt to determine if there was a relationship between learner autonomy and thinking style which was confirmed through the use of Spearman correlation coefficient. Ultimately, the association between language anxiety and thinking style was addressed through the use of Spearman test which confirmed this relationship. Findings of the current study suggest pedagogical implications for second or foreign language teaching and learning as well as textbook writers and curriculum designers.

Therapeutic discourse is a special type of organizational discourse which is used by psychotherapists when treating their patients. The present study uses the conversation analysis approach to find the principles of turn taking in the therapeutic situation. This study specifically examines the therapeutic discourse of treatment sessions for patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) based on the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) approach. The method used in this research is qualitative. The corpus used in this study included 2520 minutes of conversation in psychotherapy sessions. The participants in this study were 16 people of both sexes. ATLAS ti. computer software has been used to construct and present the verbal pattern. The results of this study show that most of turn taking were related to female clients and psychotherapists. This result is related to the relationship between clients and psychotherapists, women's verbal habits, excessive curiosity, and their challenging personality. The presence of overlap in the speech of female psychotherapists and clients and pause in other conversations have been the most widely used signs of turn taking in this type of conversation. The present study has faced some limitations. One of the most important limitations of this research was the prevalence of Covid 19 virus. Also, obtaining the consent of some psychologists and clients to record their videos and voices in psychotherapy sessions has been another limitation of this research. Given the importance of communication and linguistic studies in psychotherapy, it is suggested that future research be conducted on the following topics: “Comparison of GAD Patients’ Speech Pattern with Speech Pattern of Other Anxiety Disorders” and “The effect of direct and indirect expression on anxiety in patients with anxiety disorders”.

This study aimed at exploring the influence of the role that a teacher employs on his/her professional success. The teacher role was investigated from a new outlook, Goffman's footing theory. According to Goffman (1981), a speaker's role can be classified into three categories of animator, author, and principal, characterized as the repeater of the ideas made by the others, the paraphraser of concepts, and the creator of original ideas, respectively. Applying this theory in the educational context, the researchers selected 36 university professors of TEFL in the MA level and asked their students (N=118) to identify their professors' dominant role as animator, author, or principal, both generally and individually, via a metaphor checklist and their professional success via the Characteristic of Successful Iranian EFL Teacher Questionnaire. The results of Chi-square analysis indicated that the professors dominantly take on the author and animator roles respectively. One-way Anova results also demonstrated that the professors taking on the principal role enjoy higher professional success than those adopting the animator and author roles. The results offer implications and suggestions for pedagogical consideration within the Iranian university context.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of pre-speaking activities on Iranian intermediate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ oral performance. The study followed a quasi-experimental design in which subjects of the study were non-randomly selected. Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was used to select 100 intermediate EFL learners as the main sample. Then they were divided randomly into two experimental and control groups. Prior to the treatment, participants of both groups were given a pre-test of speaking to ensure their speaking ability. After a treatment of pre-speaking activities to members of the experimental group, a post-test of speaking was administered to seek the effect of it. A t-test was run to examine the difference between the mean scores of each group in post-tests. It was found that there was a statistically significant difference between the experimental and the control group. That is, the experimental group outperformed the control group in oral performance.

In order to engage students in higher-level thinking, cognitive activation (CA) strategies have been advanced and utilized in mathematics. CA develops when learners are challenged, confronted with conflicts, asked to think and explain clearly on their learning, and realize connections between new and previous content. Extending the theme to English language teaching (ELT), this study investigated Iranian English language teachers’ knowledge and practice of cognitive activation writing strategies (CAWS). In so doing, a model was proposed based on a questionnaire that was developed and validated in the present study. Through this scale, knowledge and practice of CAWS by 213 English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers were explored. During a pilot phase, the reliability of the questionnaire was calculated to be .78 for the knowledge section and .81 for the practice section. Two items in each section were removed after conducting exploratory factor analysis. Ultimately, the confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the proposed model was fit for the data. Five components were confirmed as constituents of CAWS for the knowledge section, and four components were identified for the practice section. The findings revealed that Iranian EFL teachers were already familiar with the CAWS and purportedly practiced them in their writing classes. Using the scale in the process of writing instruction can provide ELT practitioners with a helpful platform for relating to CA strategies and empowers learners to accomplish tasks such as problem-solving in their writing assignments, similar to what is practiced in mathematics.

Although listening is a crucial skill to enhance one’s position in academia, this skill is challenging for most L2 learners. The first step to improve L2 learners’ listening skill is to figure out their listening problems and to provide them with appropriate instruction. The aim of the current study was told-fold: (1) It explored Iranian intermediate L2 learners’ listening problems, and (2) it examined the effect of metacognitive strategies’ instruction on Iranian intermediate L2 learners’ listening comprehension. Participants were a random sample of 31 intermediate L2 learners in Iran. The Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administered to the participants to check their homogeneity. Also, the participants’ listening comprehension was pretested. After 10 treatment sessions, the participants were posttested to check the (possible) changes in their listening comprehension ability. In order to check the participants’ listening problems, they filled Liu’s (2010) Listening Comprehension Processing Problems Questionnaire. Data were analyzed through one samples<em> t test</em> and paired samples <em>t test</em>, whose results indicated that metacognitive strategies elevated the participants’ ability in terms of listening. Results revealed that the participants had problems in the steps of parsing and perception, although the problems were not significant. On the other hand, in the utilization phase, there seemed to be no problem. As a result, applying the findings of this research will help materials developers, curriculum planners, instructional decision-makers, and teachers.

The present study was primarily aimed at investigating how Processing instruction would affect the Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge and how the effectiveness of this method would be modulated by the learners’ individual differences in grammatical sensitivity. To this end, three senior intact high school classes were selected and randomly assigned to two experimental and one control group. Each of the experimental groups was treated with one operationalization of Processing instruction, namely, full PI (n=24), and Structured input (n=24) while the control group (n=20) received traditional output-based instruction (TI) on the English passive structure over three weekly sessions. The results illustrated that Processing instruction was more effective than TI since it improved learners’ both interpretation and production while TI only could improve learners’ production. Additionally, the results demonstrated that the positive impact of Processing instruction was not affected by the learners’ differences in grammatical sensitivity. All in all, this suggests that as long as a grammatical structure is affected by an underlying processing problem, Processing instruction is possibly a more effective pedagogical option compared to traditional output-based instruction. Furthermore, Processing instruction seems to work for all learners irrespective of their differences in terms of grammatical sensitivity.