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As a fascinating and colorful part of English language, idioms highly affect fluency, but they are quite difficult to teach and learn, and they have often been neglected particularly in ESL/EFL settings. Considering the large number of English idioms, corpus linguistics can be of great benefit in prioritizing materials in language classrooms based on the frequency information. Accordingly, the present corpus-based study aimed at identifying the most frequent idioms in English language by analyzing the data coming from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), composed of more than 520 million words. The study involved writing a special script using Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) language which resulted in the development of five idiom lists, each containing 50 most frequently used idioms in each one of the five genres in COCA including academic, fiction, spoken, newspaper, and magazine along with their frequency of occurrences. Comparison was then made across the mentioned five genres. It was found that the spoken genre included more idioms whereas the academic genre was the least idiomatic. Furthermore, various levels of overlap was found among different genres. The least and the highest levels of overlap was found between the academic and fiction genres and between the magazine and newspaper genres respectively. The academic genre had more overlap with the newspaper and magazine genres. The findings can benefit EFL materials developers, teachers, and learners in recognizing and including frequently-used authentic idioms in language classrooms and textbooks.

The first step in the optimization of research is to analyze and review the conducted research to gain a comprehensive overview. Therefore, this study was set to delve into the contributions made to Iranian Applied Linguistics Journals approved by the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology from 2008 to 2019. To analyze the data, frequency analyses were run on 1419 publications. The findings indicated that TEFL-related topics received the most coverage (88%) compared to the other prevalent majors: Linguistics, Translation, and Literature. The study revealed that male contributions (63.7%) far outweighed those of females (34.4%). Furthermore, it came to light that co-authorship (59.95%) was more appreciated among contributors to Iranian applied linguistics journals. Moreover, Islamic Azad University collectively (25.34%) followed by University of Shiraz (11.3%) and University of Isfahan (10.25%) had the highest number of publications. Assistant (32.12%) and associate professors (21.86%) had the highest number of publications. It was also found that the US contributors (28.75%) followed by Australian and Malaysian contributors (13.75%) made the highest number of foreign contributions to the Iranian EFL journals.  Finally, it was revealed that writing-related topics was the most frequently-explored topic (n=164). Corpus-related studies (n=132) and teacher education (n=118) came second and third respectively. The study provides practitioners and researchers with relevant and missing information about the most frequently-explored topics, the most prolific authors, the most productive universities, and the number of foreign contributions.

Flipped learning is a rather recent practice where the teacher provides the learners with the content of the teaching and videos of his or her teaching prior to the class meeting. Students are required to study and be prepared, and the class time is devoted to activities which involve higher-order thinking skills. This study aimed at assessing the perception of students of the flipped classroom and the effectiveness of flipped learning in a university testing and assessment class with bachelor's students of English Language Teaching. The first half of the semester was taught through the flipped strategy and a half was taught through traditional lecturing. Results indicated that students had a positive view towards flipped learning, and flipped learning led to a better performance of the students on the section of the exam which involved higher-order thinking skills such as application, analysis, and synthesis. Results further showed that successful intelligence was a better predictor of academic performance of the learners on the exams than the Big Five (NEO) personality traits, and creative intelligence was the component of successful intelligence significantly associated with students’ performance. It can be concluded that flipped teaching is worth the time and energy spent by the teacher and the learners on preparation for the classroom and it can motivate and engage learners.

Most of the models accounting for L2 oral production have deemed a significant role for vocabulary knowledge in this process. Previous studies have demonstrated a positive relationship between different aspects of lexical knowledge and performance or proficiency of second language skills including the speaking performance. Meanwhile, the findings have suggested a determining role for the task type used for measuring speaking performance when one or more aspects of lexical knowledge are in focus. This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between the EFL Learners’ deep vocabulary knowledge (DVK) and speaking performance by scrutinizing the mediating role of task type. To this end, 102 bachelor ELT students were given Word Associate Test to measure their DVK, and a planned presentation task and unplanned tasks of description, narration and reasoning to elicit speaking performance. The elicited samples of speaking performance were transcribed and analyzed in terms of fluency, accuracy, lexical complexity and grammatical complexity. Structural equation modeling indicated a lack of causal relationship between DVK and aspects of speaking performance as measured with both planned and unplanned tasks. However, mixed results were obtained in the case of the correlations of fluency, accuracy, grammatical complexity and lexical complexity with DVK across different tasks. Although the findings do not provide evidence for a strong relationship between DVK and speaking performance when DVK is analyzed in isolation from other aspects of vocabulary knowledge, the variation witnessed in findings provide further proof for the importance of task effectiveness in the study of lexical access. 

Stated key words after the abstract section in research articles are among those lines of inquiry which have received less attention in Applied Linguists (AL) studies. In this paper, the researcher explored the distribution of stated key terms and expressions as used by 73 researchers in AL domains in both local (NOORMAGZ) and global database publishers (SAGE, ELEVIRE, SINCENCE DIRECT) Those Scimago journal lists, which were abstracted in Thomson Reuters Web of Science [WoS] journals were precisely screened in terms of their compatibility with title vs. topic match index as well as their position in the research articles throughout the whole sampled research papers including Introduction, Review of Literature, Method, Results & Discussion (IRMRD) to explore authors’ tendencies towards art-based utilization of key word selection/assignment for research writing aims. The results over title-topic match indicated that at least one or two stated key words significantly appeared in the title of research paper within both local and global databases with the higher preference for keyword-title match among Iranian researchers. Regarding the most probable positions in the sampled research articles, gained data in this research could not significantly show any differences between local and global researchers. Possible implications were discussed in the light of critical, art-based approaches for key word elaboration/explanation in English Language Teaching (ELT) and AL research.   

The effects different awareness-raising techniques might have on language learners’ performance have been studied by many researchers. The present study specifically focused on improving EFL learners’ oral narrative task performance in terms of accuracy, fluency and complexity by awareness raising through semantic fields. The participants in the study included 40 intermediate learners whose initial homogeneity in terms of language proficiency was assessed via a Preliminary English Test (PET). They were further randomly assigned as one experimental group and one control group, each comprising 20 participants. The amount of instructional time was 17 sessions, during which the participants in the experimental group received an awareness raising technique through 'semantic fields'. Before and after the treatment, an oral narrative test was administrated. The results of the data analysis revealed that the experimental group which received the awareness raising technique outperformed the control group in three measures of accuracy, fluency and complexity on their performance. The participants showed significant improvements in language proficiency as they retold the narratives. The findings of the present study can create the floor for researchers to go deep through the EFL contexts and find more about the probable effects awareness raising techniques might have on language learning and teaching.