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Due to the lack of paralinguistic information, politeness gains a considerable significance in telephone conversations (TCs). The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study intended to primarily investigate the fundamental closing structures of TCs in Persian and English. Furthermore, it examined the effect of two contextual variables and time availability on the closing pattern sand length of TCs. To this aim, 30 English natives, 30 Persian natives, and 30 Persian EFL learners were selected. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) of 12 scenarios was developed considering contextual variables and time limitation. The obtained results demonstrated that the CPT (closing implicative environment + preclosing + terminal components) closing pattern may not be applicable in every context. Furthermore, telephone conversers change the pattern and length of TC closing part to maintain their rapport based on the aforementioned variables. The findings of the present study can guide the researcher to follow more complete and perfect politeness models.

Of the many dilemmas facing the assessment of literary competence, one is the extent to which language should constitute part of the target construct intended to be measured. Some argue for the construct-irrelevance of language and hence recommend that it be eliminated or minimized in favor of an exclusive focus on literary competence. In practice, this does not seem to be the case, as language proficiency considerations seem to creep into assessment, clouding assessment outcomes. The current study sought to examine students' perceptions of the degree to which knowledge of language constitutes part of the construct of literary competence in two departments of English and Persian literature. To this end, a total of seventy students in two poetry courses, one in the English department and the other in the Persian, responded to a questionnaire designed to gauge their perceptions of the extent to which language competence constitutes a component of the literary competence. Data were analyzed through one sample and independent samples t-tests. It was found that language competence is somehow construct-irrelevant in testing literary competence. Interestingly, measurement-invariance was observed regarding Persian and EFL students’ stance on the construct-irrelevance of language in tests of literary achievement and competence.

Research articles have received a wide interest in discourse studies particularly in genre analysis over the last few decades. A vast number of studies have been centered on identifying the organizational patterns of research articles in various fields. While Introduction section has enjoyed a lot of attention, very few studies have focused on rhetorical structure of qualitative and quantitative research articles. This genre-based investigation reports on a study of the Introduction sections of 15 qualitative and 15 quantitative research articles in Applied Linguistics from five high impact journals published from 2008-2012. Based on Swales’ (2004) move structure model, this study focuses on Move 3 (introducing the present work) and examines how qualitative and quantitative research article writers introduce their work in Introduction section. The analysis revealed that there were similarities in the overall presence and use of steps in both groups, some differences in the overall presence and frequency of directive determinants were obvious which could be attributed to the different nature of these research designs.

This study was designed to investigate the effects of providing feedback in the interactive environment of wiki on improving the grammatical accuracy of Iranian EFL learners’ writing skill as well as the attitudes of Iranian EFL learners’ toward receiving feedback via wiki. To do so, 50 intermediate Iranian EFL learners, who were chosen by an OPT (Oxford Placement Test) participated in this study and they were divided into two groups, experimental and control group. Both groups were given identical writing tasks. In control group, though, the first drafts were reviewed traditionally in a pen and a paper fashion, whereas in the experimental group, they were reviewed by peers through wiki to provide feedback on the grammatical accuracy of writings. The second drafts all were reviewed by the instructor. The results revealed that using wikis to provide feedback on students’ writing can have a significantly positive effect on improving their grammatical accuracy in a writing task. Moreover, the experimental group was found to outperform the control group on the post-test indicating that there was a significant difference between the effects of providing feedback in wiki vs. providing traditional feedback on the grammatical accuracy of Iranian male and female EFL Learners. With regards to the students’ attitude toward using wiki, a majority of the learners welcomed the application of wiki for EFL writing.

The present study examined whether the advantage of females on L2 vocabulary recall and acquisition is partly as a result of estrogen secretion or not. In this regard, through volunteer and convenience sampling 15 intermediate EFL female participants aged between 23-31 were selected from the subject pool of 55 participants. The participants were studying at Iranian Language Center located in Bandar-e Anzali, Iran. To ensure the homogeneity among the participants, Babel English Placement test was used. In the course of study, the participants were taught two series of 42 lexical items in each phase of menstrual cycles (i.e., follicular and luteal). The treatment period was held six sessions at each phase. Each session took 30 minutes. To compare the performance of the participants, immediately after the sixth session, a piloted teacher-made vocabulary recall test was administered at each phase. Finally, the mean scores of participants' performance in the two phases were contrasted through a paired samples t test. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the participants' recall scores in the follicular and luteal phases. Moreover, to investigate the impact of estrogen secretion on participants' L2 vocabulary acquisition, two months after the treatment, the participants took a piloted teacher-made vocabulary acquisition test at each phase of menstrual cycle. The results of paired samples t test indicated a significant difference between the participants' vocabulary acquisition scores in the two phases.

The relationship between language and culture has become a rich source of inquiry in the context of English language teaching. Learning materials can depict cultural content in different cultural senses, namely aesthetic, sociological, semantic, and pragmatic. The present study aimed to investigate the way cultural aspects are represented in the reading and dialog sections of global ( American English File) and localized ( The ILI English Series) ELT textbooks which are widely used in Iran. The framework adopted to analyze the cultural contents of the materials was Adaskou, Britten, and Fahsi (1990) to explore how culture in aesthetic and sociological senses is realized in the series. The findings demonstrated that more emphasis was put on the sociological sense and that this aspect of the culture dominated the aesthetic sense in the cultural contents of the two series. The cultural and culture-free contents represented in the two global and localized series were found to be entirely different in frequency and sense realization. Most of the contents in the localized series were culture-free, while the culture-free contents in the global series were reasonably less than the sociological and aesthetic senses. Additionally, the findings revealed that compared with the worldwide series, the localized textbook was less representative of cultural features in sociological and aesthetic senses. The results imply that ELT materials should be inclusive enough regarding the sociological and aesthetic senses of culture to help learners get engaged in the development of their cultural understanding.

Listening is regarded as an interactive process involving decoding of information. This study was launched to find out the impact of bottom-up (BU) and top-down (TD)techniques on Iranian lower and upper intermediate learners’ listening comprehension.We selected a total of 120 participants in six intactclasses, three lower intermediate and three upper intermediate. The proficiency level of the groups was further verified and groups at each proficiency levelwere randomly assigned as aBUgroup who were engaged in BUactivities during the pre-listening stage of each lesson throughout the eight-session treatment, aTDgroup who performed TD activities, and a control group (CG)for whom no pre-listening attention focusing activities were used. The One-way and Two-way analysis of variance of the listening post-test scores indicated that the lower-intermediate BU group and the upper-intermediate TD group did significantly better compared to the other groups.The findings suggest thatBU processing activities were more effective atlower intermediatelevelwhile TD processing activities played a more facilitative role for upper intermediateparticipants.The findings support the interaction between proficiency level and information processing techniques and imply a number of pedagogical implications.

Alternative assessments have evolved from an epistemological change in education. They see assessment and instruction as two sides on the same coin which go hand in hand. The traditional roles of both teachers and learners are, consequently, modified which is essential for better language development. In this line, the present study aimed at comparing the effects of portfolio and journal writing assessment on EFL learners’ autonomy. The study followed a quasi-experimental design with two study groups having a pre-test, treatment, post-test format. To this end, 39 EFL learners whose scores on PET test were one standard deviation above and below the mean were selected for the groups which were then randomly assigned for two treatment types, namely portfolio assessment (PA) and journal writing assessment (JWA). The groups’ autonomy levels were compared by one-way ANCOVA, the results of which did not reveal any significant difference in the positive effects of these two common alternative assessments. It was inferred that language teachers can take the advantage of any or both of these alternative assessment types to improve their learners’ autonomy and make them lifelong language learners. The great role of autonomy in language learning and further pedagogical implications for the findings for language learners, teachers, and curriculum developers are discussed in the paper.