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The current study investigated the impact of an interventionist model of dynamic assessment, using a repetitive process of pretest-teach-posttest design, on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension and classroom engagement. To this end, 40 intermediate participants were selected through convenient sampling from among the English majors of a university in Kerman, Iran, and assigned to two control and experimental groups, each including 20 students. Then, during 4-month period, the experimental group was exposed to reading comprehension class, using an interventionist model of DA, while the control group did not receive ant dynamic assessment program. At the end of the treatment, the participants’ scores on the pretest and post-test were statistically compared. The obtained results revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the scales of reading comprehension skill. A change was also observed in the classroom engagement of the experimental group, but not for the control group. Indeed, the results showed that dynamic assessment can boost participants' performance in a practical and effective way, not only in terms of reading performance but also in terms of motivating more classroom engagement among EFL learners. This finding has implications for teachers to design more efficient courses which are the ultimate goal of education.  

Since its inception in 1949, over 1,500 studies have investigated the validity of the GRE General Test to predict its performance criteria in higher education (Klieger, Bridgeman, Tannenbaum, & Cline, 2016). The present review paper sought to examine the predictive validity of the GRE General Test. Factors affecting the predictive validity (e.g., range restriction, compensatory selection, criterion unreliability, substantive and artifactual moderators, bias in testing, coaching effects, socioeconomic status (SES), gender, and a host of other intervening factors such as motivation, communication skills, etc.) have been discussed. A brief overview of GRE revised General Test format is also presented. After an account of the related review of the literature, a critical commentary on the predictive validity of the GRE General Test has been discussed with an emphasis on the role of criterion unreliability and SES factor effects. Keywords: Predictive validity, Graduate Record Examination (GRE), criterion unreliability, range restriction, compensatory selection

Large-scale standardized ESL tests such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) are widely used around the world to measure language proficiency of test takers and make different decisions based on their scores. Reading comprehension is an integral part of such tests which requires test takers to read passages and answer a set of questions. Although IELTS is a popular standardized test and is used for making critical decisions about test takers, very few attempts have been made to explore the validity of the exam and especially the reading part of the General Training Module. With this in mind, the purpose of the present study was to use a non-parametric item response theory model, called Mokken Scale Analysis (MSA), to examine the validity of the reading part of the General Training module of IELTS. To this end, item responses of 352 test takers to the reading comprehension test were analyzed. The results of item scalability, total scalability, and item-pair scalability showed that the reading part is a weak unidimensional scale. Using Monotone Homogeneity Model (MHM), monotonicity results also indicated that there are some items which violate the monotonicity assumption, although their values are insignificant. The analysis of unidimensionality using the AISP revealed that there are two scales and four unscalable items in the reading part. Therefore, Mokken scale analysis did not support the unidimensional structure of the reading part of the General Training module of IELTS.

Formative writing assessment can help writing instructors to explore weaknesses and strengths of language learners’ writing performances. The current research aimed to explore firstly writing attributes and secondly examine their reciprocal contribution to one another. To achieve such an objective, the participants (N=200) were asked to write about two different topics. One writing sample before treatment was considered as the pre-test and the other after the treatment was considered as the post-test writing sample. Having scrutinized the pre-writing samples, five raters extracted the writing attributes which appeared in pre-test and post-test writing samples. Results indicate that there is a statistically significant difference among the participants’ performances in terms of using writing attributes. The results can be advantageous for both instructors and syllabus designers to provide pedagogical materials which identify particular frailties and notify them about the more troublesome points to concentrate on in the classroom so as to arrange effective education.

This study analyzes official public talks by two Iranian presidents—Hassan Rouhani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—within the framework of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). The study focuses on discoursal features in addresses of these presidents to the United Nations General Assembly at the micro-level (25 discursive devices) and the macro-level (positive self-representation and negative other-representation). The investigation attempts to determine whether significant differences existing in the micro and macro structures of these political discourses may be reflective of such factors as dissimilarities in political stance, world view and personal background. Combining quantitative and qualitative elements of analysis, the study demonstrates that consensus , illustration , hyperbole and polarization were used more frequently, whereas lexicalization and vagueness less frequently by Rouhani than by Ahmadinejad. At the semantic macro-level, Rouhani employed more positive self-representation s and Ahmadinejad relied stronger on negative other-representation .   Results are interpreted within the CDS framework of political discourse.  

A major part of any graduate program concerns academic writing, but most students do not have sufficient skills pertaining to it. For non-native Ph.D. students who need to write English language dissertations, this issue is particularly troublesome since it causes time-consuming extracurricular efforts, which can, at times, be frustrating. The present study was carried out in the form of an action research project to explore the impact of a process-based teaching of writing on the attitudes of 8 Iranian Ph.D. candidates of TEFL towards writing academically. The course procedure included phases requiring students to send their completed writing assignments by specified dates and receive and apply teacher guidance on the texts’ logic, content, consistency, tone, and grammar. In-person discussions about the progress were also programmed for each student. The findings indicate that the students felt that the teaching process had a constructive effect on developing their writing skills. Implications include providing space for dialogue between teachers and students to complement written feedback, keeping the sense of accountability active in student minds by assisting them to self-organize, and realizing that graduate students may need assistance in very basic writing skills and knowledge.

News headlines like other pieces of writings use rhetorical devices. They are regarded as the initial informative and persuasive part of news stories. The goal of the present study was to analyze COVID-19-related native and non-native news headlines chosen from two main online news websites in Iran and England in terms of number and degree of utilization of sub-types of rhetorical devices. To this end, the 6-week corpus including 489 headlines relevant to corona-virus news (282 headlines selected from the BBC and 207 from the Tehran Times) were analyzed. Shams (2013) and Picello (2018) taxonomies were used to analyze all news headlines. The findings showed that ten rhetorical devices were found in these headlines. Alliteration was used most frequently, following closely behind were metonymy, rhyme, rhetorical question, depersonalization, hyperbole, metaphor, pun, cliché, and euphemism. Both alliteration and metonymy were frequently used in the headlines of the news stories. However, just simile and allusion were found in the Tehran Times headlines, but not with high frequency. The findings can provide insights into the understanding of rhetoric-specific conventions in news headlines for ELT teachers and students. Also, English teachers can use news headlines as authentic teaching materials in their language classrooms.

Having witnessed the unprecedented prevalence of online education during the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, the present research was motivated to explore the challenges facing an EFL teacher throughout an online English course of intermediate level. To this aim, a process-tracing approach (Checkel, 2006) was employed to unravel the causal mechanisms involved in the beginning, middle, and end of the course. The results showed that deficient technological resources caused the greatest challenges throughout the course, especially in the initial and mid-sessions. Also, the two other causal categories, human and content resources, were at their peak at the beginning of the course and were no longer noticeable at the end of the course. The most troublesome challenges the teacher faced were platform limitations, internet connection, and human resources’ unpreparedness for online education. Furthermore, the teacher’s and most students’ technological knowledge, as well as their media literacy, increased by the end of the course, but some students’ rather slow adaptation to the sudden online environment challenged the teacher during the course. Finally, suggestions were made to prevent these challenges or handle them effectively upon occurrence, especially in developing countries, where the required infrastructure for online education is lacking, and the majority of teachers, students, and institutions might not be yet adequately prepared for the online mode of teaching and learning languages.

Global EFL coursebooks are used in numerous educational contexts throughout the world based on the assumption that they are the optimal source of English educational input. Their widespread use calls for a systematic analysis of these coursebooks using a framework that can reveal their defining characteristics. One such framework is the knowledge process framework, which is based on the multiliteracies pedagogy. The present study deployed this framework in an attempt to analyze seven widely taught coursebooks in the Iranian context. The findings revealed that knowledge processes of "analyzing functionally" and "applying appropriately" were more frequent in the analyzed coursebooks and the other knowledge processes were present in lower numbers. Based on the findings of the study, EFL teachers in the Iranian context are encouraged to include more activities with the knowledge processes of "analyzing critically" and "applying creatively" to address the absence of these knowledge processes while teaching the global coursebooks.

Delving into the sources of foreign language writing problems is usually neglected. This necessitates more scrutiny of finding out where these problems originate from. To this end, the present study sought to follow a two-fold aim: finding the roots of the Iranian EFL learners’ writing problems, and discovering how these roots are interconnected with each other and come up with a corresponding model. In the qualitative part of the study, a phenomenological research tradition was adopted and 20 EFL learners were selected through purposive sampling. In the quantitative part, through convenience sampling 120 language learners from an English language school in Gorgan, Iran, were selected to be the participants of the study. A semi-structured interview and a researcher-developed questionnaire were used as the instruments for data collection. The results obtained from the analysis of data revealed that writing problems originate from various sources, mainly linguistic, personal, epistemological and ecological, and enjoy a model in which epistemological, linguistic and ecological sources have direct effects and personal source has indirect effect on writing problems. Recognition of epistemological and ecological sources as a novel finding can make teachers revisit their view of these less-approached issues.  

This study aimed to investigate the syntactic errors that the Iranian deaf and hearing-impaired (DHI) make in their L2 writings. To this purpose, 60 male and female Iranian DHI students with different social status were selected, through convenience sampling procedure, as participants from among the students of a deaf community in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Their general writing performance was assessed through a proficiency test (pre-test) before they received a six-week writing instruction, in which they were provided with model written utterances and common syntactic points such as sentence order, word order, subject/verb agreement, etc. At the end of the treatment, they were given two topics and asked to write short paragraphs (post-test). Then, different syntactic errors were spotted, analyzed and categorized based on Keshavarz’s linguistic taxonomy of errors. The obtained results indicated that the writing quality of the participants improved from pre-test to post-test. It was also found that majority of the participants committed more syntactic omission errors than syntactic addition errors and syntactic substitution errors. It was further found that syntactic errors in written language were not affected by the gender and social class of the participants. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence for teaching syntactic order to deaf and hearing-impaired students in order to enhance their L2 writing performance.

The current comparative study aimed to juxtapose the newly compiled English textbook for the students in the third grade of senior high school, Vision 3, and the previously taught English textbook for pre-university students. To this end, 130 experienced teachers, with the experience of teaching both textbooks, were asked to complete an eclectic checklist comprising 38 items and evaluating the book in terms of nine major criteria, namely general considerations, vocabulary, grammar, speaking, listening, reading, writing, pronunciation supplementary materials, tasks, and activities. Following that, 20 teachers were interviewed to enrich the results of the quantitative data. Overall, the results revealed the teachers’ contentment with the newly developed English textbook. In particular, the mean values indicated that English teachers rated the speaking and listening sections as the most satisfactory parts while they ranked the supplementary materials criterion as the least satisfactory one in Vision 3. Indeed, they believed that notwithstanding the dramatically positive changes in Vision 3, the book still requires undergoing major revisions to act as a rich source for enabling the EFL students to communicate fluently, accurately, and effectively. In this regard, the findings would benefit the materials developers to locate the areas for further modifications.

New technologies can change everything in the world and people can have different reactions to them. Some people tend to use innovations but some people do not, due to the influence of different factors. Personality type can be considered as one of those factors that might have a relation with the feelings toward the innovations. Therefore, this paper explores the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ personality traits and their sense of technophobia and technophilia. Two hundred and ten Iranian EFL teachers participated in this study. The Big-Five Personality Traits Questionnaire (John & Strivastava, 1999) and Technophobia and Technophilia Questionnaire (Martínez-Córcoles, Teichmann, & Murdvee, 2017) were used in the current study. To find the answers to the research questions, Pearson correlation, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), and independent-sample t-test were used. The results showed that all subscales of personality traits were negative significant predictors of technophobia except Neuroticism. Moreover, the results indicated a positive significant relationship between overall technophilia and all constructs of personality traits.

Supervisor’s feedback is both a naysaying and a puzzling concern that has always tormented academics in higher education. Particularly, written feedback on pre-final or final versions of a submitted doctoral dissertation is indisputably the most significant step toward granting a doctoral student supervisee the right to defend his/her research project. It also constitutes a rich source on how students are to academically go about writing their dissertation and even go public as they are supposed to produce one or two articles before their vivas. The present research explores the written comments provided by supervisors on Moroccan doctorate supervisees’ dissertations. It principally focuses on both overall and in-text comments and whether they serve as feed-back to take corrective actions for the errors made, feed-up to focus on strategies to attain the academic goal, or feed-forward to be proactive and avoid disturbances that might affect the quality of the final work. A total of 40 supervisees from the English department at FLLA, Ibn Tofail University belonging to Language and Society Research Laboratory participated in the study. Data were collected using an online questionnaire through available Google forms platform. The results revealed that the total majority of supervisees tended to get a mixture of written remarks with a central focus on the quantity rather than on form. This is therefore a plus as to the agreement as well as the variance of the Moroccan supervisors in the use of these evaluation criteria while evaluating their supervisees’ doctoral dissertations targeting different types of feedback with a huge focus of the cyclicity of their utilization.

  MMetadiscourse as a self-reflective linguistic device plays an important role in both making a coherent academic text and interacting with readers. Using a sequential mixed method design, the present study investigated the use of metadiscourse markers in the abstract section of 70 master thesis abstracts written by Iranian TEFL students at the University of Mazandaran. The study further examined TEFL graduated students’ (n=7) perspectives on the employment of these markers in their thesis abstracts. Based on Hyland’s (2005) model, the interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers were identified in the data. Next, the whole corpus was carefully examined word by word to report on the frequency of metadiscourse marker use. The findings revealed that interactive metadiscourse markers were used three times more than interactional metadiscourse markers. Moreover, transitions and hedges were more frequently employed while evidentials, boosters and self-mentions were less frequently used. Findings from the qualitative data collected through conducting email interviews with graduated TEFL students suggested that they had positive perspectives towards the use of interactive metadiscourse markers in contrast with the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in their thesis abstracts. The results of this study can offer a number of pedagogical implications for explicit instruction of metadiscourse markers in thesis abstracts.

The present study aimed at evaluating the effect of using three types of teacher gestures including representational (iconic, metaphoric) and emblematic gestures on the long-term retention of some L2 (here, English) concrete, and figurative idiomatic structures among a group of volunteering female junior high-school learners in Sabzevar, Iran. Via a multi-stage, mixed-method research design, over a period of eight weeks mainly focusing on an action research design, twelve learners of the eighth and ninth grades of high schools were presented with forty-eight English idiomatic phrases. Post-tests on the immediate and delayed recall and recognition tests served as the primary tools for collecting the essential data along with frequent teacher notes on their performance. The report from Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test indicated that the median delayed post-test ranks were not statistically significantly different from the median immediate post-test ranks Z=12, p≥.754, which proved a positive effect of using gestures on long-term retention of idiomatic phrases. In the second phase, teachers’ and students’ views were also scrutinized which showed positive feedback over the process. Implications for L2 classes were then presented in the light of recent multi-modal strategies for teaching target language forms having idiomatic expressions for the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context.