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Alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. These approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996). The present study tries to explore the effect of two alternative assessment approaches (self-assessment and conference) on students’ production of four speech acts (apology, complaint, request, and refusal) plus politeness markers. A sample of 64 EFL students participated in this study. Metapragmatic explanations were given to three groups of university students studying English as a foreign language. The two treatment groups received instruction through self-assessment and conference and a comparison group was exposed to the conventional one-shot testing. The results of the One-Way ANOVA conducted after the treatment revealed an outperformance of alternative assessment approaches to the conventional one in the production of the four speech acts and politeness markers in WDCTs. A qualitative analysis of students’ self-ratings in the self-assessment group revealed that they focused more on linguistic criteria during the initial sessions and on pragmatic ones by the end of the treatment. It can be concluded that alternative assessment approaches are beneficial to students’ production of speech acts and politeness markers. In the end, the applicability and the positive effect of alternative approaches in pragmatic assessment are emphasized.

Various studies have confirmed the influential role of corrective feedback (CF) in the development of different linguistic skills and components. However, little, if any, research has been conducted on comparing types of linguistic errors treated by teachers through CF. To bridge this gap, this study sought to investigate the linguistic errors addressed and the types of CF provided by teachers. To this end, the classes of 40 teachers teaching at the intermediate level were audio-recorded for two successive sessions. The detailed analysis of around 128 hours of classroom interactions showed that explicit correction was the most frequent CF type, accounting for 48.5 percent of all CF types provided, and recast was the second most frequently used CF type, constituting 29.5 percent of all CF types. All the other CF types (i.e. request for clarification, confirmation check, repetition, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, and multiple feedback) constituted 22 percent of the CF. Repetition was the least frequently used CF type, amounting to 0.66 percent of the CF given by teachers. As to the linguistic focus of CF, pronunciation errors were found to be the mostly noticed target for teachers’ CF, constituting 47 percent of all errors addressed, while vocabulary was the least frequently addressed linguistic target, accounting for 17.5 percent of all errors. The study suggests that teachers prefer explicit corrective strategies over implicit ones and that they provide CF mainly to correct pronunciations errors. The study suggests that there is a need for change in the types of CF teachers use and the relative attention they assign to different linguistic error types they treat through CF

ELT has recently witnessed a shift away from a method-bound orientation and toward a post-methodic view of teaching English. Consequently, the focus of some second language teacher education programs has shifted toward sociopolitical aspects of ELT (Miller, 2004) and its contributions to reinforcement or transformation of the status quo (Kumaravadivelu, 2003a). Yet, in many countries, including Iran, ELT teacher education has maintained a relatively method-bound focus on technical dimensions of teaching English and has avoided adopting a critical and sociopolitical approach to ELT. In order to investigate the ways in which teacher education as currently practiced facilitates or stifles implementation of postmethod in ELT, the present study explored English teachers’ perceptions of the dominant approaches to teacher education in ELT centers in Iran and their ideological and pedagogical bases. To this end, 23 language teachers were interviewed about the logistics, content, and procedures of the teacher education programs they had attended. The analysis of the interviews, as directed by grounded theory, yielded three themes, namely no/little teacher learners’ involvement in course design and implementation, dominance of a transmission model, and dominance of a linguistic and technical focus