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The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the rhetorical relations between text segments were identified. The texts were read aloud by 18 high-proficient Persian learners of English. We measured pause durations preceding segments, F0-maxima (as a correlate of pitch range) and speech rates of the segments. Results suggested that speakers give prosodic indications about hierarchical level by means of variations in pause duration but not pitch range or speech rate. Furthermore, it was found that speakers articulate causally related segments with shorter in between pauses and at faster rate than non-causally related segments. However, they did not vary any of the prosodic measures to distinguish between important vs. unimportant segments. Overall, the results suggest that (1) variations in pause duration and speech rate are not used systematically by Persian EFL speakers as fully structured cuing devices to indicate organization of spoken discourse, importance of sentences and meaning relations between sentences; (2) pitch change structuring as a cue to discourse prosodic prominence is completely absent in Persian learners' text production. The results are not consistent with earlier findings of prosodic realization of text structure and content in English native speakers' discourse data, but are in line with those obtained for non-native spoken discourse.

Authenticity has always been the concern of test developers in the history of second language assessment. This study was an attempt to investigate the authenticity of the present researchers' innovative idea of “Language Town” as a method for assessing learners’ speaking ability. To this end, a simulated town was designed like a real town in an outdoor space of about 400 square meters. The participants in this study were 31 undergraduate students of Translation Studies at Jahrom University who were taking the 4-credit course of Conversation 2. First, the students’ speaking ability was measured based on the IELTS testing system. Then each student was sent to the Language Town with a few definite missions determined in advance by the teacher; e.g. ordering food in the restaurant, depositing/withdrawing money in a bank, etc. Using IELTS band descriptors, each student’s speaking ability was measured by two raters in both tests. Then the correlation between the two sets of scores obtained from the IELTS test and the one in the Language Town were calculated. Using open-ended questions, a survey was also conducted to extract the students’ attitudes towards the Language Town. The results of the statistical analyses showed a weak correlation (0.36) between the two sets of scores. The survey also revealed that almost all the students were interested in and had positive views towards Language Town as an authentic method of assessment. A Virtual Language Town (VLT) could be a solution to the practicality problems of the Language Town.

Researchers stated that learning and applying certain set of lexical bundles of native lecturers by non-native lecturers would help students improve their proficiency through incidental vocabulary input. The present study shed light on the lexical bundles in hard science lectures used by Native and Non-native lecturers in international universities with the main purpose of analyzing the structural and functional similarities and differences in their usage. The secondary purpose was to finalize and present a list of explored lexical bundles employed by Native lecturers in these lectures which could be helpful for students and also Non-Native lecturers. The corpus of this study consists of five and a half hours of three different native university lecturers’ lectures and about five and a half hours of three different non-native university lecturers’ lectures who were teaching hard science (nuclear physics and electronic engineering). The data were analyzed using n-gram tool in lextutor.ca website which is a free online software to analyze the lexical bundles of more than two corpora and compare them. Functional and structural analysis gave the following results. Findings showed that lexical richness of both Native and Non-Native lecturers was not good enough to expose students to rich environments to help them improve their English proficiency. In light of structural classification, the results revealed that dependent clause fragments in addition to verb structure phrases were the most widespread and Noun phrase + of-phrase fragments were the least employed structures of the identified lexical bundles in the lectures of Non-Native and Native lecturers. In terms of structural analysis, it was concluded that stance bundles were the most frequent function bundles used by both groups. Therefore, there were both similarities and differences in the structural and functional classifications of lexical bundles in the lectures of native and non-native lecturers.

Usually writing teachers feel commitment to provide their learners with corrective feedback (CF) to their linguistic errors. The study investigated whether two types of written corrective feedback, indirect focused corrective feedback and indirect unfocused corrective feedback, produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by high intermediate EFL learners. In this study, 54 female EFL learners formed two experimental groups and one control group. One experimental group received indirect focused written CF, and the other experimental group received indirect unfocused written CF for six weeks.  The control group, nevertheless, received no particular feedback within this period. Results of performing ANOVA with post-hoc tests revealed the accuracy development of both experimental groups.  However, unfocused group achieved the highest accuracy gain scores for simple past tense forms (copula past tense, regular past tense and irregular past tense) subject-verb agreement, articles, and prepositions. It was further found that unfocused feedback can contribute to grammatical accuracy but its long-term effectiveness is not quite as significant as its short-term effectiveness. The study also suggested that unfocused written CF reflects better teacher’s objective as it views writing correction as a whole rather than as a way of practicing grammar.

Two of the central concepts in teaching skills are decision making and pedagogical reasoning. Taking benefit from the dearth of studies on teachers’ actual or real-world decisions, this study aimed to respond to this invitation by keeping track of novice Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ decisions in two different times using six research-oriented teaching scenarios reflecting the student and personal features. Furthermore, their pedagogical reasoning was also attended to once through their responses to imaginary teaching scenarios and once through their actual classroom decisions. The participants comprised of ten novice Iranian EFL (six female and four male) teachers with an age range of 19 to 25 and a male experienced teacher, aged 30, who acted as a researcher-as-participant and was only accountable for the novices’ real-world reasoning. The data were collected through utilizing a total of six teaching scenarios, classroom observation, and video stimulated recalls. The findings, obtained through conversation analysis and pertinent vignettes and excerpts, revealed that the participants underwent a change in their decisions in two of the three scenarios reflecting the student features, while an approximate conformity could be observed in all scenarios mirroring personal features. It was revealed that whenever the teachers’ reasoning changed, their decisions underwent some changes as well. In addition, the findings showed that the flow of conversation in the classroom could be strongly influenced by the teachers’ decisions. A number of implications and recommendations for further research are also pinpointed.

As Farhangian Universities play a crucial role in educating soon-to-be teachers, the program being developed for students of this university needs to be meticulously developed in order to fulfill the crucial role of teacher training centers. Researchers of this phenomenological study tried to evaluate curriculum specified for TEFL students in Farhangian Universities by the implementation of SWOT analysis. Seven professors of Farhangian University in Mazandaran participated in this study to speak for their perspectives regarding the curriculum’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. They took part in interview conducted by researchers and their comments were transcribed to be segmented and codified in later sections. The findings of this study clearly demonstrated that this program suffers more from weaknesses and there are opportunities which might act as compensation for weaknesses and threats. The significant weakness of this curriculum that was elaborated by participants was misplacement of courses without any observation of necessary content knowledge and pre-requisites. Specification of courses exclusively for teaching was mentioned as one of the important strengths of this university. Participants believed that the first opportunity to be made use of, is to maintain connection with other teacher training centers in Iran and around the world.  

One of the most important needs in learning a second or foreign language is vocabulary acquisition. Certainly, failure to keep vocabulary in mind is a problem for both typically-developing learners as well as those with a learning disability (LD). This language demand requires teachers to use techniques in order to reinforce vocabulary recall. The current study is an attempt to investigate the effect of two post-teaching vocabulary learning techniques of diglot-weave and cooperative learning on vocabulary knowledge of LD students and to compare them with the common instruction of picture-word definition. To this end, 90 Iranian female LD students from 10 intact classes in two Junior Exceptional Schools in Shiraz were randomly assigned to one of the three groups. After the intensive teaching sessions, the test was administered to examine their vocabulary recall performance in each group and after a two-week interval, the same test was used to examine their vocabulary retention. The results by conducting the one-way ANOVA indicated that both experimental groups of diglot-weave and cooperative learning techniques outperformed the control group of picture-definition in the vocabulary recall and retention tests. However, there was no significant difference between the performance of diglot-weave and cooperative learning groups. Therefore, the findings of the present study could provide useful implications for foreign language teaching programs particularly in Special Education and students with LD.

This study aimed to compare the effect of listening strategies, namely, metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies, on impulsive and reflective visually impaired EFL learners’ (VILs) listening comprehension. The participants of the study were 58 male and female VILs at pre-intermediate level within the age range of 12-18 in the west of Iran, Khorram Abad. These participants were selected non-randomly from among 10 different classes available to the researcher. To select the participants, the researcher talked to learners of these 10 classes and sought the consent of 58 learners to take part in the study. The Preliminary English Test (PET) pre-piloted on 30 students with almost similar characteristics to the target sample was administered to 72 students for selecting a homogenized group of participants. Then, 58 students were selected. Afterwards, the researcher administered the Personality Questionnaire developed by Eysenck (1975) to categorize them into two experimental groups of impulsive and reflective. Furthermore, the researcher made sure that the two groups were homogeneous regarding their listening comprehension prior to the start of the treatment. In this study, both experimental groups practiced listening comprehension through listening strategies, namely, metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies. The listening section of the PET test was administered as the posttest at the end of the treatment to both groups and their mean scores on the tests were compared through Independent Samples t-test. The results of statistical analyses led to the rejection of null hypothesis with the conclusion that the reflective learners significantly outperformed the impulsive students on the posttest of listening comprehension.

There is a general consensus that critical thinking can be influential in almost every occupation due to its association with the abilities such as problem solving and decision making. This paper aims at probing the role of critical thinking (CT) skills on EFL learners' reading comprehension performance using Bloom's taxonomy. Therefore, the role of CT strategies training across two language proficiency levels, high & low, was investigated. Then the difference between females and males regarding their CT was studied. In so doing, 240 male and female Iranian EFL students were selected and screened into two proficiency levels based on the Longman preparation course for TOEFL test. Each proficiency group was divided into critical and non-critical group. The results suggested CT skills significantly affected EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance. However, the effect of critical thinking strategy training didn’t vary across different language proficiency levels. Overall, the findings provide empirical support for the facilitative effect of critical thinking strategy training on reading comprehension performance of EFL learners.

This study aimed to compare the effect of teaching metacognitive listening strategies through shadowing activity on the listening comprehension of field-dependent (FD) and field-independent (FI) EFL learners. Since the researcher had access only to female participants,85 female EFL learners from a language institute in Tehran, at the pre-intermediate level of proficiency with the age range of 18-35 were selected out of the initial 120 participants based on their performance on a piloted PET. The Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) was administered to the selected participants in order to categorize them into the two experimental groups (49 FD and 36 FI). The participants including both FD and FI sat in several classes. During a five-week instruction period (twice a week), both groups practiced listening comprehension for 45 minutes through a combination of shadowing activity, and metacognitive strategy instruction with no difference in treatment. The results of the independent samples t-test demonstrated that there was no significant difference between listening posttest scores of FI and FD groups. Therefore, it was concluded that metacognitive strategy training coupled with shadowing activity could be equally beneficial in terms of listening proficiency for all students regardless of their perceptual tendency (FD/FI). The findings of the present study have implications for language teachers regarding metacognitive strategy training and listening comprehension enhancement.

Reading is recognized as being the most important skill needed by ESP learners in their field of study, and vocabulary knowledge is the most widely discussed component of effective ESP reading per se. However, research on how much the different types of words exert substantial influences over ESP reading comprehension remains scanty. To address this lacuna, the present study aimed to examine the degree of contribution made by general high-frequency, core-academic, and technical-academic words to 127 Iranian learners studying Psychology at three state universities in Tehran, Iran. Three researcher-made and validated tests were used to measure the three aforementioned types of vocabulary knowledge accompanied by an ESP reading test. Data analysis using multiple regression revealed that the core-academic words and technical-academic words significantly contributed to the ESP reading comprehension, explaining about 92% of the variance in reading scores, but knowledge of general high-frequency words was not a significant contributor. Moreover, teaching core-academic and technical-academic words did not have a significant effect on ESP reading comprehension in the short term, yet a low significant difference was observed for technical academic words in the long term. Findings of this study imply that direct teaching of the core-academic and technical-academic words can help ESP learners improve their reading over time. The article ends with pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research.