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The implementation of a curriculum involves numerous variables and entities, both individual and institutional, which makes it a complex and multifaceted process in education. Implementing Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) curricula has proven challenging in various global contexts. The present study, using a human activity system model, investigated CLT implementation in Iranian senior high schools. There were four groups of participants in this qualitative study, including 20 teachers, 28 students, 10 teacher directors, and 10 parents. We used semi-structured interviews and class observations. The study's findings highlight several significant obstacles to implementing CLT in the examined educational setting. Key challenges include teachers' reliance on traditional methods despite acknowledging the benefits of communicative activities, inadequate professional development, and insufficient familiarity with CLT principles. Students face issues such as demotivation, overdependence on teachers, and limited opportunities to engage with English outside the classroom. Additionally, logistical difficulties, such as overcrowded classrooms, insufficient educational materials, and non-communicative assessments, combined with a lack of cooperation among educators and restricted teacher autonomy, further hinder the effectiveness of CLT. Based on these findings, we proposed several solutions and pedagogical implications to facilitate the successful implementation of this curriculum reform. 

Although researchers have analyzed the formal, syntactic, and functional behavior of cleft sentences in the English language across various genres, their distributional frequencies have received very little attention in academic research genres. Therefore, drawing on a 20,389,297-word corpus including 1,521 research articles (RAs), 116 PhD dissertations, and 48 textbooks, in applied linguistics, this study followed Biber et al.’s (1999) and Collins’ (2002) models to identify and analyze four major types of cleft structures in our corpus. Using a corpus-based research design, we drew on concordances to extract the target cleft structures. The computer program AntConc was used to identify instances of cleft sentences, and the statistical significance of the findings was evaluated through separate chi-square tests. The results of frequency analysis showed varying degrees of these grammatical structures across the three research genres, with textbooks including the highest number of clefts, followed by dissertations, and RAs. The results promise pedagogical implications for non-native English student writers to familiarize themselves with conventions in academic research genre writing for publication purposes. The findings suggest that academic research genre writing affects the frequency and use of these complex grammatical structures.  

Findings on recast as feedback on learners’ erroneous forms tend to be less than conclusive or confirmatory. Also, the conventional formulations in literature give partial accounts of recasting as an effective methodological practice. The present study proposes recast enriched by negotiation (REN) on the learners’ part as an alternative. For investigating the hypothetical effect, three all-female groups were concentrated on, namely explicit feedback, recast and REN. Summary writing task as post-test concentrated on the learners’ accuracy in terms of error-free T units, and complexity regarding word per sentence ratio as well as lexical density. One-way ANOVA for three independent samples and post hoc analyses revealed that accuracy and word per sentence ratio did not vary significantly; however, lexical density improved as a result of REN. Findings and implications of the study are discussed in the light of methodological potentials and literature.  

Objective: The present study sought to explore EFL teachers’ cognition of rapport establishment and maintenance, as one of the aspects of classroom management, in the context of Iran’s foreign language institutes’ face-to-face EFL classes.Method: The study involved 12 Iranian teachers who taught adult learners. The sample size was determined based on reaching saturation, and the participating teachers were selected through purposeful sampling. The main instrument utilized in this qualitative study was a semi-structured one-to-one in-person interview, which aimed to elicit the participants’ cognition of rapport development. These individual interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed thematically.Results: The findings revealed that the participants believed in the importance of rapport creation for efficient classroom management. Besides, they recommended strategies for establishing rapport with learners, such as familiarization, verbal immediacy, non-verbal immediacy, attention to learners’ emotions, judicious L1 use, playing games, and utilizing social media. Moreover, they held that teachers’ personality traits and communication skills could impact their approach to building rapport.Conclusion: Altogether, the participants had a sound cognition of rapport maintenance as one of the aspects of classroom management. The findings of the current study provide implications for teacher educators, teachers, and institutes’ supervisors.

English language teachers’ assessment ability to assess all areas of pupils’ learning is important for comprehending how learners advance across the curriculum and guiding them in their development (Livingston & Hutchinson, 2016). The educational system of Iran decided to shift from traditional teaching methodologies toward communicative approaches. This conversion would not turn into reality unless teachers could apply it in practice. However, teachers have certain needs such as expanding and broadening contextual-related knowledge, cooperating with their colleagues, and developing their assessment literacy (Coombe, Vafadar, & Mohebbi, 2020). To identify the teachers’ understandings of, practices in, and challenges of assessment, 15 English language headteachers (English language teachers who are responsible for moderating the group of the teachers’ activities) participated in the interviews of this study, followed by questionnaires for exploring teachers’ needs. The interviews were coded and content analyzed independently by the researcher and an expert in assessment. The main themes and needs were derived from the interview analyses and are presented in eight pivots. The findings of the questionnaires manifested the priorities that teachers felt concerning assessment literacy and classroom-based assessment needs. The paper will discuss the findings concerning assisting teachers’ professional development in assessment literacy. Implications are also provided.

Written corrective feedback (WCF) refers to the feedback given by writing instructors and tutors on novice writers’ performances. Although extensive importance has been attached to the implications of WCF for improving writing skill in L2 writing studies, there is a paucity of research into research on whether student writers benefit differently from elaborated and evaluative feedback. Having this in mind, the aim of this research was to examine the effect of teacher’s text-specific and rubber-stamped comments on Iranian EFL learners’ writing ability at intermediate level. Quick Placement Test was employed to select 40 pre-intermediate EFL learners as the participants of this research. Then, they were randomly assigned into two experimental and control groups. Prior to the treatment, the participants of both groups were given a pretest to disclose their initial writing ability. After administering the rubber-stamped comments to the experimental group and text specific to the control group, a posttest was administered to seek the effect of two types of instruments. An independent samples t-test was used to see if the treatment was effective. Paired samples t-test was also employed to determine the amount of progression between pretest and posttest of the experimental group. The results of the study revealed that rubber-stamped comments improved the learners’ writing ability. Implicationally, instructors can use rubber-stamped comments to help learners improve their writing ability.

Advocating the inclusion of neurocognitive science concepts in English language teacher training curriculum is gaining more interest. However, little is known about the prospective teachers' perceptions of neurocognitive science core concepts. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the prospective ELT teachers' perceptions of the neurocognitive core concepts and the applications of them through the lens of four neuro-educational models in the classroom practices. Fifteen prospective Iranian ELT teachers were interviewed and the data were analyzed using the phenomenological method. The findings revealed that the prospective ELT teachers lacked a clear understanding of the neurocognitive concepts and their implications in classroom practices. The findings support the inclusion of neurocognitive science core concepts training in language teachers' professional development.

As a special tourism and cultural product,Red Tourism has distinct Chinese characteristics and cultural features. Translation, as an important carrier of Red culture, needs a high degree of cultural awareness which is one of the theoretical achievements of sociology. Only when we are fully aware of our own culture and are full of confidence can we better spread the Red culture. Based on the current research of Zhejiang Red Tourism translation, this paper analyzes the translation problems and causes of these problems from the perspective of cultural awareness. The findings suggest that the translation of Red Tourism should be based on the self-awakening, self-reflection and self-creation of Red culture. This study aims to put forward some strategies to interpret and translate cultural terms and translate without damaging the spirit of Red culture. The proposed strategies can promote the overseas communication of Chinese Red culture, especially Zhejiang Red culture.

Literature theoretically provides many positive contributions that could impact students’ learning performance in reading. It is because literature consists of two fundamental functions that Horace called it dulce et utile (sweet and useful). Besides, literature also contains two important elements, i.e., intrinsic and extrinsic. Integrating these literary elements into literary reading activities builds students’ comprehension skills to analyze various aspects, e.g., character, plot, setting, theme, and stylistics as the intrinsic elements and sociology, psychology, politics, and philosophy as the extrinsic elements. In studying the discourses, this research presented perceptional theory and a study of the LBI approach used in a reading course that analyzed the impacts on students’ learning performance. The methodology used in this research was Cresswell's (2016) mix-method with an explanatory case study approach. To collect the needed data, several instruments were utilized in this research, such as interviews and questionnaires. All the collected data were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. After collecting, analyzing, and discussing the data, the results demonstrated that students perceived that LBI material was enjoyable, challenging, and contains moral teaching. Furthermore, students also felt that LBI material impacted some good learning performance, i.e., LBI material improved students’ reading skills, triggered students’ critical thinking, and transformed students’ learning attitudes.  

Stance has been examined extensively in the past few decades. However, the majority of the studies have been synchronic, with the few exceptions being snapshot diachronic studies without trend-related inferential statistics. This study adopted a trend-related inferential statistical measure and a more continuous diachronic dataset to examine the changes in using stance in the research articles of English applied linguistics from 2000 to 2020. To this end, 416 articles were randomly selected from 10 applied linguistics journals indexed in the first quartile of Scopus and probed using LancsBox for normalized frequency of Hyland’s (2005b) list of stance markers. Results were then analyzed for trends using the Jonckheere-Terpstra test. The results showed significant decreases for the overall stance markers (J=37168, z= -2.85, d= -.28, p= .004)), hedges (J=37014, z= -2.96, d= -.293, p=0.003), boosters (J=36298, z= -3.47, d= -.345, p=.001), and attitude markers (J=36647, z= -3.22, d= -.32, p=0.001), while self-mention markers were found to have experienced a slight, non-significant increase (J=42527.5, z= .94, d= .096, p=0.349). The functional analysis of the selected excerpts showed that the quantitative decrease in the use of stance markers has been compensated for, with an increase in the modification range and strength of the used stance markers as the two ways we could discover. After discussing the findings, the paper ends with some suggestions for further research. 

While the potential of Dynamic Assessment (DA) and its variants (Computerized Dynamic Assessment (CDA) and Group Dynamic Assessment (GDA)) for EFL classrooms has been recognized, there is a lack of research on its practical implementation compared to the well-established field of Summative Assessment (SA). Thus, the objective of this qualitative study was to investigate the evolving perspectives of EFL teachers concerning the integration of DA and SA within their classrooms. To achieve this, 50 EFL teachers in Iran were recruited through convenience sampling to complete an online open-ended questionnaire. The primary purpose was to explore their familiarity with, perceptions of practicality for, and preferences regarding DA and SA. Additionally, a sub-group of volunteer participants was requested to provide narratives detailing their real-world classroom experiences using DA and SA. Content and thematic analysis of the responses revealed that the majority of participants were familiar with DA, with the most commonly employed type being GDA. While DA was predominantly viewed as a form of feedback, SA was still seen as a more formal means of classroom assessment. Consequently, it is highly recommended that EFL teachers exploit the advantages of both assessment approaches in order to ensure more equitable decisions concerning students' abilities.