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The present study scrutinized the probable significant correlation between Iranian language learners’ emotional intelligence (EQ) and reading proficiency. Moreover, the significant predicting role of the participants’ EQ for their reading comprehension proficiency was investigated. To this end, 196 Iranian B.A. English language teaching students at Islamic Azad university of Neyshabur attended the study. They formed unequal proportion of gender. The study followed a quantitative descriptive design, in which the significant correlation between the variables and the significant predicting role of EQ were investigated. As the normality of data was proved through Kolmogrow-smirnow test, the parametric statistical analyses, including descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient, independent sample T-test, and linear regression analyses were employed. The data collection instruments were an ETS TOEFL reading comprehension test and Bar On’s (1997) inventory of emotional quotient. The findings demonstrated significant positive correlation coefficients between the participants’ reading proficiency and overall EQ as well as most of its subcategories. Three highest positive significant correlation coefficients were seen among the participants’ reading proficiency level, happiness, problem-solving, and emotional self-awareness successively. The results of linear regression analysis also reflected that EQ significantly predicted the participants’ reading proficiency. No significant differences were found between the genders concerning EQ. The findings laid emphasis on the influential importance of psychological non-linguistic factors in improving linguistic competence of language learners. Language teachers should be acutely conscious of the highly influential role of psychological paradigms in boosting language learning process of language learners.

The current study aimed to explore the nature of discursive strategies academics would use to share their specialist knowledge to both specialists and non-specialists. To this end, a corpus of 40 academic research articles and 40 popular science articles were randomly selected from the archive of four English international peer-reviewed journals and four English popular magazines and newspapers in the field of Nutrition. Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), a discourse framework to examine evaluative and/or persuasive language, was used to analyze the data. The results revealed significant areas of similarity and difference in terms of certain discursive elements leading to discernible degrees of persuasion. The findings imply that in order to develop a scientifically literate society, scientists should appeal to diverse discourse resources to provide the public with their findings in an informative and entertaining way. The results of the study carry some pedagogical implications for EAP courses held in EFL settings since being able to both comprehend and produce scientific texts of different professional levels at international scale seems to be a requirement for the future scientists.

The rapidly growing demand for incorporating the latest technological developments in language pedagogy has contributed to scholars’ devoting more serious attention to web-based assessment (WBA). That being so, this study set out to uncover perceptions of four groups of stakeholders who had been involved in WBA via Moodle since 2018 regarding its challenges and opportunities in the context of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction. To this aim, a convenient sample of nine students, seven parents, eight teachers, and three curriculum designers at an Iranian private language institute was recruited to be interviewed. The results of the study suggested that the perceived challenges were the insufficient provision of technical support, lack of security, low-speed internet connection, the need for teachers’ presence during the exam, lack of provision of intrinsic incentives for learners, lack of detailed feedback, and complexity of online test development. The opportunities, on the other hand, were perceived to be well-suited computer and internet literacy, educators’ competency in the utilization of online educational resources, absence of computer and internet anxiety, provision of immediate feedback, and access to items and responses after the exam.

Objective: Research on corrective feedback (CF) in L2 pragmatics instruction, especially in online teaching, is still in its infancy. To address this gap, this study sought to examine the types of CF provided by EFL teachers in online classes in response to the learners’ pragmalinguistically and sociopragmatically inappropriate production of the binary speech acts of request and refusal.Methods: Eighteen hours of online classroom interaction data were analyzed using conversation analysis and a taxonomy that classifies feedback into implicit and explicit input-providing and output-prompting CF.Results: The findings of the study showed that explicit output prompts were largely applied by teachers as the most frequent type of CF. The teachers tended to use prompting questions and metapragmatic clues to help learners better understand request and refusal speech acts, rather than directly offering input or reformulation. In addition, because of the face-threatening nature of speech acts of refusal and request, the teachers applied explicit output prompts as corrective feedback to reinforce the accuracy of learners’ production.Conclusions: It can be concluded that the online mode of instruction can impact the explicitness of pragmatic CF. This research is of great value for teachers to employ both implicit and explicit types of CF to develop learners’ competency in pragmatics in online instruction.

This article reports on a study of interaction amid beginners with the use of the technological resource WhatsApp . Its major objective was to analyze online oral negotiated interaction characteristics, using mainly WhatsApp audio-recorded messages, but also multimodal interaction (text, images, GIFs, emoticons, etc.). It was a qualitative, interpretive, and exploratory case study applied to 33 participants from a public technical school in Brazil, in which participants were in the first year of High School. The analysis revealed that negotiated interaction was the main component of interaction, although in a different sense if related to the theoretical framework held in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Therefore, this study added a discussion on interaction in SLA, which considered the peculiarities of the online oral negotiated interaction among beginner learners of English using WhatsApp . The interpretive findings discussed in this article may enlighten pedagogical practices in SLA as well as broaden possibilities in terms of activities development to work on online oral interaction amongst beginners, with the aid of technological resources. Finally, this study may serve the purpose of promoting reflections on SLA theories about interaction.

The expansion of mobile wireless technology into education in recent decades has offered an incredible opportunity to design learning differently and to enhance students' learning experiences that extend beyond the typical teacher-led classrooms. Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent closure of educational institutions around the world, distance/mobile learning has become a widely accepted form of information and communication technology-enhanced education. Given the infancy of technology-enhanced education at Iraqi educational institutions, this study was conducted to determine how Iraqi EFL learners preferred information and communication technology-enhanced education and how ready they were to adopt mobile learning for English learning purposes in higher education. This study also examined whether there were any significant differences in the learners' preferences and readiness for mobile learning considering their gender. Methodological triangulation was undertaken using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with some Iraqi EFL learners at four public universities so as to seek the research objectives. Descriptive analysis was used to analyze the data from the questionnaire. The data of the interviews were then analyzed using thematic analysis to identify and report the common themes of the two coders of the interviews. The findings revealed a plethora of evidence indicating learners' positive attitudes towards using mobile learning as a viable medium for language learning purposes in intra- and extramural situations, as it expanded the boundaries of learning beyond the limitations of traditional pedantic educational settings. Besides, no significant differences were found in the preferences and readiness of Iraqi EFL learners considering their gender for the adoption of mobile learning in higher education, though females liked mobile learning better than males.  

The well-established affiliation of metadiscourse research tradition to the philosophy of ESP raises some inevitable expectations on how much and how well the concept has been geared to meet the practical necessities of academic writing pedagogy. In light of such an expectation, a corpus of 35 academic writing coursebooks published during the last three decades were evaluated in terms of the possible realizations of key resources of interaction in pedagogical tasks. Due to its theoretical rigor and analytically operationalized nature, Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2005a) was taken as the guiding framework for the current evaluation. The quantitative findings emerging from the analysis of the corpus did not sound sufficiently promising, suggesting that that theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e. the fifty five categories emerging from the evaluation of the corpus) suggest that the rigorous tradition of research in metadiscourse has contributed to the effective operationalization of the concept for pedagogical objectives. It has been argued that through the effective introduction of the concept of metadiscourse into pedagogical designs and its appropriate operationalization, novice participants of academic/scientific discourse communities would be enabled to redefine the nature of academic communication and get rid of a large number of misconceptions which have become fossilized through long years of the dominance of a positivistic thinking.

Language transfer refers to the application of previous language knowledge to the target language learning. Using questionnaires, this paper investigates the lexical transferring behaviors of 230 Dongxiang-Chinese bilingual and monolingual students who are in the early stage of learning English vocabulary. The results display that Chinese predominates the transference, while bilinguals’ Dongxiang Language is described as a barrier during the process of English learning. To show the individual-level differences, several learner-based factors: age, linguistic background, social background, cognitive level, emotion, and learning attitude are also confirmed, which appear to promote or inhibit this transferring behavior. The experiment data suggest that there are two different types of the factors mentioned above, which depend on whether they are affected by context-based factors---learner-based factors and learner-context-based factors. The paper also concludes with suggestions to teachers and policymakers in Dongxiang area for the modification of current teaching methods based on the quantitative analysis of surveys.

With the rapid development of technology, multimedia comes into English classes and positively improves learners’ language proficiency. The present study attempted to consider the use of animated infographics on the vocabulary gain and retention of Iranian intermediate EFL students. The classes were held online through the Jitsi meet website in the autumn of 2021. To this end, 60 EFL students were selected among 90 students through a homogeneity test. At the beginning of the treatment period, a pretest was administered to both groups, and then, the participants attended 13 sessions. In these sessions, the animated group (AG) was taught through animated infographics, while the control group (CG) was instructed conventionally. The posttest and delayed posttests were administered to test the student’s vocabulary gain and retention. The findings indicated that the AG outperformed the CG significantly in the posttest and delayed posttest. Therefore, the animated infographics proved to be more effective in learning English vocabulary for these students. The results could have implications for teachers because it heightens their understanding of using technologies in general and animated infographics in particular and leads to more effective teaching methodologies.