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The coronavirus pandemic affected education enormously, and despite numerous previous efforts to achieve digitalization, virtual teaching revealed deficiencies in both the EFL teachers’ digital competence and in the peripheral use of Information and communication technologies (ICTs). This study focused on a sample group to analyze the relationship between the implementation of this model and the pre-pandemic digital approach in order to identify deficiencies that need to be strengthened to achieve increasingly effective integration of blended learning. A questionnaire was used to collect data from participating teachers in the areas of school digital strategy, digital competence, and teaching practice in blended learning. The data were analyzed through structural equation models, verifying the relation between variables and also according to specific training on ICTs. An active but insufficient effort on the part of the participants’ schools to promote digitalization was revealed. The implementation of blended learning has been favored more by the responsiveness of participating EFL teachers than by the provision of specific training on the part of schools, which lacked common guidelines from the public administration. These EFL teachers can respond to changes, but the schools’ support is essential for the successful implementation of blended learning, updating the approach of the digital strategy adopted so far.

Children need to start learning English from a very young age in this fast globalizing world. The knowledge of the English language can assist in providing several opportunities for them in the future. It is also essential to know how very young children acquire a foreign language and which content and activities should be selected for their age. This study aimed to observe and describe the procedure of the language development of very young children. Researchers employed a descriptive case study design to portray and assess foreign language learning of two three-year-old twins’ grammar acquisition, vocabulary gains, and fluency in the early years of life (3-4/5). Besides the methods firmly associated with qualitative study and case studies, there were four sources of data collection: observation, audio-video recordings, and diary records. The central unit of the twins’ language development analysis was their utterances. The findings supported using a naturalistic environment where very young children could be exposed to the English language informally in everyday contexts and activities. This research can share its findings with education communities and very young children’s teachers to promote a new professional development model for fostering language development in very young learners’ classrooms, assessments, and curricula.

The interaction between the writers and the experts while using citations is one of the main features of academic texts. For the integration of external experts into the text, writers usually use reporting verbs, which seem to function differently. Furthermore, selecting reporting verbs (RVs) by the researchers of disciplines seems to vary. This paper explored the functions of RVs across sciences. To this end, 200 “Results and Discussion” section of RAs from the four sciences, namely Life Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Health Sciences were gathered and used as the data, and their functions of RVs were analyzed based on Hyland’s framework (2002). Hyland (2002) considered three basic RV types based on their function, including research, cognitive, and discourse acts, subsequently dividing each category into several subcategories. The results showed that the writers in Life Sciences used more research acts in comparison to the other disciplines. In terms of cognition acts, the rates of tentative verbs were high in all sciences since the researchers tried to report the results with caution as they were uncertain about the findings. The results approved this claim, indicating the high frequency of tentative verbs under the category of discourse acts, across disciplines using verbs like hypothesize, indicate, and suggest to show doubt with different rates. The obtained results can guide novice writers of the above-mentioned four disciplines to advance an authorial perspective and adjust to the expert conventions of the relevant research areas.

Test de Connaissance du Français (TCF), a French knowledge test for any non-native speakers of French, is an official language exam for the certificate of proficiency in French designed by France Éducation international (FIE) and accredited by le Ministère Français de l’Éducation Nationale, de la Jeunesse et des Sports (French Ministry of National Education, Youth and Sports). To meet the need triggered by American TOEFL and British IELTS, TCF was created in 2001 by FIE (formerly Centre International d'études Pédagogiques) and has been administrated in more than 120 countries by more than 700 centers around the world and has served for more than 2,000,000 candidates by the year 2022 for personal, academic or professional purposes (France Éducation International, n.d.). The increasing number of French learners worldwide and the growth of popularity French enjoyed give rise to the need of more reviews of test fairness and usefulness on recognized French competence tests such as TCF. However, unlike the large number of assessment practices focusing on English language testing, only a few studies available show awareness about the assessment on world languages other than English. With the hope to enrich the body of research in the field of language testing and to expand the scope of assessment on world languages, this review aims at examining the overall usefulness and fairness of TCF using Kunnan’s (2018) most recent theoretical framework of test fairness and justice. As a result, our review shows that TCF test developers have made great efforts on addressing core issues of validity, reliability, and authenticity, while there might be room for improvement to provide more meaningful and useful information to all stakeholders.

Literature review confirms that TBCOA and ST were effective in improving EFL learners’ writing skills. However, a new study is necessary to compare the rate of effectiveness of these activities and techniques on Iranian intermediate L2 learners' writing performance. Moreover, the impact of two types of TBCOA versus two types of ST on intermediate EFL learners' writing performance was compared. This research followed a quasi-experimental design. A sample of 80 intermediate-level EFL learners, selected through convenience sampling from a private language school, constituted the participants. The learners were divided into four groups. The homogeneity of the participants in terms of writing performance was checked through a quick placement test at the outset of the study. Furthermore, the effects of debating vs. dictogloss., teacher scaffolding vs. peer scaffolding, and overall TBCOA vs. overall ST were compared through ANCOVA, with the pretest scores treated as the covariate. Debating outperformed dictogloss, teacher scaffolding was more effective than peer, and the overall TBCOA group significantly performed better than the general ST group in writing performance. The learners' interview results concerning the role of TBCOA and ST in their writing production resulted in several common themes, which were categorized into 16 codes for debating, 11 codes for dictogloss, six common codes for teacher scaffolding and peer scaffolding. This study provides implications for EFL writing instruction.

English as a First Language (EFL) and English as an Additional Language (The results indicated that both EFL and EAL students used a diverse array of linguistic features to express their ideas in academic prose, with the prospective categories being the most commonly used.