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Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has stood the test of time as a model of text analysis. The present literature contains a plethora of studies that while taking the ‘clause’ as a unit of analysis have put into investigation the metafunctions in research articles of a single field of study or those of various fields in comparison. Although ‘clause complex’ is another unit of SF analysis, by far there has been only one study on research articles where it was the unit of analysis (Sellami Baklouti, 2011). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to put into analysis the ‘taxis’, ‘expansion’ and ‘projection’ deployed in Applied Linguistics research article abstracts (RAAs) by native (N) and non-native (NN) writers. To this end, 20 Applied Linguistics RAAs (10 by N English writers and 10 by NN English writers on the sub-fields of Discourse Analysis and Language Assessment) were analyzed according to Halliday & Matthiessen’s (2013) ‘clause complex’ framework. The results indicated that there is a significant difference in the use of ‘projection’ by Ns and NNs, while the distribution of ‘taxis’ and ‘expansion’ is the same. The findings also showed what types of ‘taxis’, ‘expansion’ and ‘projection’ were deployed by Ns and NNs

The application of critical pedagogy in educational contexts has received adequate research attention over the last decades. The main focus of this strand of research has, however, been on raising awareness of the educators. Nevertheless, little is known about the consequences of the violation of critical pedagogy principles from EFL teacher trainers’ perspectives. To begin to address this gap in research, a qualitative (phenomenological) study was carried out to explore the main consequences of violating critical pedagogy in the higher education system of Iran. The participants were 15 faculty members of TEFL and English Literature at 10 Iranian state universities. The data were collected through in-depth semi-structured face-to-face interviews and analyzed according to Radnor’s (2001) model. The results indicated that the main consequences of the violation of critical pedagogy were educational (related to teaching, learning, and testing), psychological, social, and ideological. Therefore, it was concluded that educators must follow the principles of CP in order to avoid the negative consequences and foster the learning and teaching processes more effectively.

The role of teachers in the educational context could go beyond simply teaching the subject matter. It is not uncommon for some students to be greatly influenced by certain teachers and even consider them as their role models. An interesting and novel way of inferring the impact a teacher has on the students is through revealing the status of the teacher as perceived by the students. The present study pursued two goals: first, to construct and validate a teacher status scale (TSS); and second, to reveal the relative status of English language teachers as compared to other school teachers in students’ perceptions. Regarding the first goal, an 18-item teacher status scale was designed and, using the data collected from 200 students, its construct validity was substantiated through Rasch model. As for the second goal, 650 junior high school students rated their 300 teachers. The data was then analyzed using Chi-square test. In addition, 135 students participated in short interviews and a total of 530 minutes of recorded interviews constituted the qualitative data. Based on the results, English teachers were found to have the highest status of all school teachers as perceived by the students. Finally, statistical results were discussed, and implications were provided for English language teaching in the formal context of education.

Code-switching is known to be a widespread phenomenon among bilinguals and in ESL/EFL teaching/learning process; it refers to any alternate use of two codes or languages within the same conversation or even the same utterance. The present study is an attempt to investigatethe functions, types and frequencies of code switching in students discourse in the context of ELT classrooms.The study also explores the relationship between the language proficiency level of the students and their use of code switching. To achieve this end, two groups of students (at two different levels of proficiency) from two classes of general English courses in an institutional program in Oil Ministry Center of Isfahan were selected as participants. All sessions of an entire semester were videotaped. A coding scheme was developed for classifying students’ instances of CS into relevant functions.The data were tabulated, and frequencies and percentages were conducted by SPSS program. The findings indicate that the majority of CS in the classroom is highly purposeful, and related to pedagogical goals. Also, the research found that pedagogical functions were more frequently fulfilled through CS compared to social functions. The findings of this research suggest that code switching is a necessary tool for teachers due to a number of pedagogical considerations in ET classrooms and can give teachers a clue to have a better understanding of student code switching in ELT classrooms and use CS in the direction of teaching and effective learning.