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The study aimed at investigating the efficacy of written corrective feedback (CF) in improving Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy. It compared the effects of focused and unfocused written CF on the learners’ grammatical accuracy. 75 EFL students formed a one control and two experimental groups. The focused feedback group was provided with error correction in tenses. The unfocused feedback group was provided with error correction in tense, articles, spelling, pronouns, vocabulary, and prepositions. The results indicated a significant improvement in accuracy for the two experimental groups from pretest to posttest. The outcomes demonstrated that giving written CF was effective, which enhanced learners' grammatical accuracy, and that focused and unfocused written CF were not of differential significant effect in such manner. The results on the construct of the attitudinal questionnaire indicated learners’ preference in two experimental groups for the interactional activities, error correction, and the different type of CF techniques. The mean scores on each content area of the questionnaire suggested that learners in the focused group scored higher than the other groups in their attitudes toward the errors to be corrected.

The present study investigated the interplay between language anxiety, locus of control, and language proficiency of EFL students in online classes. The participants of the study were 67 upper-intermediate students between 18 to 30 years old and were selected randomly from a few language institutes in Shiraz. Two questionnaires and a proficiency test were used: Chametzky’s Online World Language Anxiety Scale, Rotter’s Locus of control questionnaire, and The Examination for the Certificate of Proficiency in English. Pearson-product-moment correlation, multiple regression analysis, and independent-samples t-test were run to answer the research questions. The results of the study revealed a strong negative correlation between locus of control and language proficiency, meaning that those who had higher scores on the proficiency test were internal. In addition, a strong negative correlation was found between language anxiety and language proficiency, indicating that anxiety has adverse effects on language proficiency. Thirdly, both locus of control and language anxiety could predict language proficiency, but the former was a better predictor. This means that the effect of locus of control is much higher than anxiety on the language proficiency of Iranian EFL learners in online classes. This research can help students and teachers to recognize individual differences better.

This study sought to investigate the problems and challenges of the current state of teaching translation in post-graduate studies. In so doing, it used a content analysis design within a qualitative method. The participants consisted of 20 (10 males and ten females) translation teachers who were selected through purposive sampling. To collect the required data, a semi-structured interview was used in the form of individual and focus group interviews. To analyze interview data, the content of transcribed interviews was qualitatively analyzed by the researcher to identify the common themes and categories in them, based on an exploratory theme-based approach. The results of the thematic analysis of interview data led to the identification of some problems and challenges including students’ lack of willingness to learn translation, the emphasis on practical elements in teaching translation, lack of an effective teaching translation program, students’ demotivation, and so on. Moreover, a program consisting of five steps was suggested for using technology in teaching translation in post-graduate studies in Iran. The findings have some implications for translation teachers and students, and authorities.

Of the many dilemmas facing the assessment of literary competence, one is the extent to which language should constitute part of the target construct intended to be measured. Some argue for the construct-irrelevance of language and hence recommend that it be eliminated or minimized in favor of an exclusive focus on literary competence. In practice, this does not seem to be the case, as language proficiency considerations seem to creep into assessment, clouding assessment outcomes. The current study sought to examine students' perceptions of the degree to which knowledge of language constitutes part of the construct of literary competence in two departments of English and Persian literature. To this end, a total of seventy students in two poetry courses, one in the English department and the other in the Persian, responded to a questionnaire designed to gauge their perceptions of the extent to which language competence constitutes a component of the literary competence. Data were analyzed through one sample and independent samples t-tests. It was found that language competence is somehow construct-irrelevant in testing literary competence. Interestingly, measurement-invariance was observed regarding Persian and EFL students’ stance on the construct-irrelevance of language in tests of literary achievement and competence.

This study investigated the relationship between classroom environment and teacher behavior, and EFL (English as a foreign language) learners’ engagement and state motivation. To do so, 110 intermediate Iranian EFL learners with an average age of 18.37 were asked to complete What is Happening Inside the Classroom scale (WIHIC), Questionnaire for Teacher Interaction (QTI), Student Engagement Instrument (SEI), and Student State Motivation scale (SMS). The results of statistical analysis showed that there was a moderate relationship between all aspects of classroom environment (student cohesiveness, teacher support, equity, involvement, cooperation, and task orientation) and learners’ engagement (emotional and cognitive engagement). Moreover, there was a relationship between some aspects of classroom environment (student cohesiveness, task orientation, cooperation, and involvement) and state motivation. However, there was no relationship between teacher behavior, learners’ engagement, and state motivation. Implications are discussed and avenues for future research are outlined.

Educators often employ various training techniques to reduce raters’ subjectivity. Negotiation is a technique which can assist novice raters to co-construct a shared understanding of the writing assessment when rating collaboratively. There is little research, however, on rating behaviors of novice raters while employing negotiation techniques and the effect of negotiation on their understanding of writing and rubric features. This study uses a qualitative method to keep track of 11 novice raters’ scoring behaviors and examine their textual foci during three phases of scoring through an analytic rubric: pre-negotiation, negotiation, and post-negotiation. To ensure triangulation, multiple sources of data including raters’ verbal protocols of independent scoring during the initial and final phases, audio-recorded interactions in the negotiation phase, and semi-structured interviews were gathered and analyzed. Results indicated that in their initial independent rating, raters mostly scored based on their understanding of the writing skill and the writing features that were important to them, but negotiation sessions aided them to refine their judgments and attend to a wider array of textual features more consistently and in line with the rubric, thereby expanding their understanding of the rubric categories. Post-negotiation ratings were also more similar to negotiation than prenegotiation ratings, meaning that the raters attended to more features of the rubric for scoring. The findings may have implications for rater training. In the absence of expert raters to train novice raters, negotiation can be considered a useful technique to improve raters’ understanding of the rubric features.

Within the realm of lexis, the area of collocation is of prime importance to producing natural-sounding language for anyone learning a foreign language. This study aimed at investigating the effects of two modes of sentence writing versus multiple-choice test practice manipulation on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ lexical collocation learning. For this purpose, to ensure the homogeneity of the participants, Preliminary English Test (PET) was administered to 87 students studying English at two English institutes of Ofoghhaye Nour and Nourmahdi in Roudsar, Guilan, through which 60 students were selected as the target participants. They were intermediate students with the age range between 17 and 23. They were then divided into two equal comparison groups: Sentence-writing Group (SRG) and Multiple-choice Group (MCG). A piloted pretest of lexical collocation was administered to both groups. Then both groups underwent a 7-session treatment. SRG was treated by the virtue of sentence-writing practice for the target collocations, and MCG was instructed through recognition practice, here multiple-choice practice. After the treatment period, the same version of lexical collocation test was administered to both groups as posttest to examine the effectiveness of the treatments. The results of paired-samples and independent samples t-tests indicated that both groups had collocation gains but the effectiveness of multiple-choice test manipulation on learners’ lexical collocation outweighed that of the sentence-writing mode of test practice manipulation. The implications and recommendations were also presented.

This study investigates the effect of four types of oral corrective feedback, namely, explicit elicitation, implicit elicitation, explicit recast and implicit recast on the most commonly mispronounced phonological features among Iranian EFL learners through immediate uptake and retention. Five classes were randomly categorized into four experimental groups and one control group, each with 18 intermediate-level male learners. The treatment was conducted in the form of a retelling task in nine sessions. During the feedback sessions, the learners’ uptake was recorded. The learners’ retention was also perused in one immediate and one delayed post-test. The results revealed that those learners who received explicit recast obtained the highest score in terms of correct uptake, and that the groups performed differently across different time periods. The learners’ scores enhanced over time; however, the increase then leveled off and even dropped in the delayed post-test in all the experimental groups except for the group which received explicit elicitation, apparently leading to more retention of the target phonological features. The study offers insights to teachers regarding the effect of recast and elicitation in their explicit and implicit form on L2 pronunciation.

The generalizability aspect of Construct validity, as proposed by Messick (1989), requires that a test measures the same trait across different samples from the same population. Differential Item functioning (DIF) analysis is a key component in the fairness evaluation of educational tests. University entrance exam for the candidates who seek admission into master's English programs (MEUEE) at Iranian state universities is a very high stakes test whose fairness is a promising line of research. The current study explored gender and major DIF in the general English (GE) section of the MEUEE using multiple-indicators multiple-causes (MIMIC) structural equation modelling. The data of all the test takers (n=21,642) who took the GE section of the MEUEE in 2012 were analyzed with Mplus. To determine whether an item is flagged for DIF both practical and statistical significance were considered. The results indicated that 12 items were flagged for DIF in terms of statistical significance. However, only 5 items showed practical significance. The items flagged for DIF alert the test developers and users to potential sources of construct-irrelevant variance in the test scores which may call into question comparison of the test takers’ performance, especially when the tests are used for selection purposes.

The male-female differences in burnout and its possible effect on EFL teachers’ performance has not received much attention in the literature of burnout. To address this issue, the researchers conducted this study to investigate the effect of burnout and, more specifically, its three subcomponents–Emotional, Exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (DP), and Personal Accomplishment (PA)–on the teaching performance of male and female EFL teachers in an L2 teaching/learning context. The participants of this study were 30 (15 males and 15 females) English teachers of five private language institutes and 150 students of the same teachers. The data were collected through the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educator Survey (MBI-ES) and Characteristics of Successful Iranian EFL Teachers Questionnaire. Multiple regression analysis, independent-samples t test and descriptive statistics were used in the data analysis process. The results showed that burnout does not influence the teachers’ performance in a significant way. Additionally, it was revealed that there was no significant difference between the levels of burnout in male and female teachers. The findings challenge the common belief that burnout can greatly affect the teachers’ performance and that female teachers are more likely to experience burnout than male teachers, revealing instead that burnout does not significantly affect the performance of teachers and there is no significant difference between male and female teachers in their levels of burnout.