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Intercultural competence and intercultural sensitivity have drawn the attention of a myriad of scholars in the fields of language teaching, communication, culture, gender, and ethnicity. This is the rationale behind the current research aiming at investigating EFL teachers’ beliefs concerning the concepts of intercultural communication competence (ICC) and intercultural sensitivity (IS) and how such concepts are promoted in their real practices in English classes. To this end, utilizing a qualitative design, a sample of 20 EFL teachers (11 experienced and 9 novice teachers) from different language institutes in West Azerbaijan province were selected. A semi-structured interview and a three-session observation were conducted as data-gathering tools. The results of the data analysis indicated that even though Iranian EFL teachers were familiar with the concepts of IS and ICC and they knew that language and culture are not isolated terms, they ignored culture in the classes due to some regularities imposed on them by society. As a matter of fact, for teachers, the concept of language is the top priority while culture plays a second fiddle. The study has some pedagogical implications for EFL teachers and learners in overcoming cultural differences to improve the level of language proficiency.

Instagram is considered one of the most famous virtual social networks among all ages of human beings. Nowadays, the extensive popularity of social networking websites such as Instagram has made new chances for Iranian English teachers and learners. Accordingly, the present study tries to investigate whether Instagram would be a useful learning instrument of vocabulary for Iranian male EFL learners at the pre-intermediate at Shokouh Enghelab English Academy in Babol, Mazandaran, Iran. The participants in this study were 50 male EFL learners, ranging from 8-15 years old, selected randomly from 100 cases. After checking the homogeneity of the participants, they were divided into two groups. The participants in the experimental group were learning English vocabulary through ten Instagram pages for four weeks (12 sessions and 25 minutes per session). But the participants in the control group were only taught by the teacher. Pretest and posttest were applied to evaluate learners' knowledge about vocabulary during the session. Based on the research data, Instagram learning brings valuable technological and pedagogical advantages for Iranian EFL learners despite the popularity of social networks. It has a significantly positive effect on the development of  vocabulary learning. The findings of this paper can be helpful in the English methodology issue.

The traditional face-to-face language school has been replaced with online schooling by virtue of the COVID-19 outbreak. However, recent studies have significantly covered teachers’ emotional attitudes toward online education. What is not yet clear is their cognitive attitudes toward online language education, particularly during the recent pandemic. To fill the current gap, researchers selected Innovation diffusion theory (IDT) as the main theoretical framework and explored 11 Iranian EFL teachers’ attitudes through semi-unstructured interviews. The findings of the deductive content analysis revealed that teachers had positive attitudes toward compatibility features of online education; however, they had negative attitudes toward complexity stemming from Computer Assisted Language Learning) CALL (illiteracy, power cut, and low internet speed. Furthermore, teachers prioritize traditional language learning over online ones. Among many pedagogical implications, this study suggests that pedagogical experts should run some teacher training programs and workshops for English teachers to escalate their pedagogical and professional needs to teach both receptive and productive skills through online platforms. Additionally, English teachers should escalate their CALL literacy to efficiently manipulate their online classrooms, culminating in integrating more online tools in their language classes and placing a premium on online teaching rather than traditional ones.

Despite the voluminous body of research investigating linguistic, disciplinary, and cultural variations in citation practices in research articles, these practices have not been examined in light of the interplay between disciplinary conventions and research methodological underpinnings in the field of linguistics. Adopting a multi-faceted design, this study analyzed 180 research article introductions from two close-knit disciplines (Theoretical Linguistics and Applied Linguistics) to look into the contextualized citation functions and authorial evaluative stance toward citations. The corpus was purposively selected to sample three research methodologies. Comparisons were carried out at disciplinary, research methodological, and combinatory levels. The findings of the study show clear variations in the citation functions and evaluative stances taken toward citations. These variations are thought to be the result of the disciplinary conventions which authors must abide by as well as the paradigmatic underpinnings of the research methodologies which the articles are built upon, though the latter have greater impacts. As a partial contribution to the field of second language writing, a practical taxonomy is also proposed to account for the contextualized citation functions in the two disciplines. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications

This experimental study aimed at discovering the impact of Metacognitive Intervention Program instruction on the reading advancement of Iranian dyslexic primary school learners. The participants consisted of 32 male and female, grade three primary school students, with the age range of 8 to 11 years and 90 to 110 IQ average. They were selected through convenient sampling and divided into two control and experimental groups of equal size. Then, the experimental group was exposed to the Metacognitive Intervention Program instruction for 10 weeks. Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and Dyslexia and Reading (NEMA) tests were used as instruments.  To evaluate the participants’ reading progress, a pre-test and a post-test (NEMA) were conducted. The results of covariance analysis showed that the employed program was effective in the reading comprehension development of the participants. The findings of this study suggest that primary school instructors need to think more about using the Metacognitive Intervention Program instruction on different steps of reading comprehension and do more effective activities to assist students in removing their reading difficulties.    

Over the past decades, writing assessment research has been concentrating on alternative methods with a social-oriented view of assessment, including dynamic assessment (DA). Given the lack of research juxtaposing the interventionist and interactionist DA frameworks in the area of narrative writing, this study sought to compare the effectiveness of Brown’s graduated prompts model vs. Poehner’s model in the development of one-paragraph narrative essays in terms of grammatical accuracy. The study followed a quasi-experimental design, with 15 Iranian EFL learners selected via convenient sampling from among the female students of a language institute in Tehran. The participants were then randomly divided into three groups: Interventionist group, in which mediation was based on Brown’s model in the sandwich format; interactionist group, where mediation was done using Poehner’s model in the cake format; and non-dynamic assessment (NDA) control group with no mediation involved. The research consisted of three pilot sessions and eleven sessions as the main phase. To analyze the data, both descriptive and non-parametric inferential statistics were run. The results conceded the superiority of both DA approaches to NDA, whereas no significant difference was observed between the two DA groups in their general performance on narrative tasks. However, the analysis of the number and types of required mediational moves over the DA sessions indicated the superiority of the interactionist model to interventionist framework in the development of grammatical accuracy in narrative paragraphs. The study offers some theoretical and pedagogical repercussions for educators, curriculum designers, and L2 teachers.

While metadiscourse has been extensively examined across several genres, contexts of publication, disciplines, and languages over the past two decades, researchers have mainly limited themselves to the qualitative checking of candidate metadiscourse markers for the various functions they serve. In the present study, however, we drew on retrospective methods coupled with semi-structured interviews to gain a deeper understanding of metadiscourse features applied linguistics apprentice and professional authors use in their research articles (RAs) in national and international English-medium journals. To achieve this goal, we built on Hyland’s (2019) interpersonal metadiscourse model to analyse RAs in three subsections including introductions, results, and discussion. We ran chi-square tests to examine the RA variations, following the descriptive analysis of the use of metadiscourse markers. A follow-up stimulated recall through semi-structured e-mail interviews was used. We used MAXQDA to analyse the interview data from authors. The results of qualitative and thematic analyses showed that metadiscourse markers play key roles in conveying the writers’ message and intention to the members of discourse communities. The findings of the study suggest raising apprentice writers’ awareness of the way they frame their message in research writing

Cloze tests are gap-filling tests designed to measure overall language ability and reading comprehension in a second language. Due to their ease of construction and scoring, cloze tests are widely used in the context of second and foreign language testing. Previous research over the past decades has shown the reliability and validity of cloze tests in different contexts. However, due to the interdependent structure of cloze test items, item response theory models have not been applied to analyze cloze tests. In this research, we apply a method to circumvent the problem of local dependence for analyzing cloze tests with the Rasch model. Using this method, we applied the Rasch model to a cloze test composed of eight passages each containing 8-15 gaps. Findings showed that the Rasch model fits the data and thus it is possible to scale persons and cloze passages on an interval unidimensional scale. The test had a high reliability and was well-targeted to the examinees. Implications of the study are discussed.