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The studies on the merits of processing instruction (PI) and output-based instruction (OI) have mostly treated the two approaches as mutually exclusive. To address the potentials of combining interpretation and production activities, this research compared the two isolated approaches of PI and OI with two combined approaches in which processing and output tasks were used in two opposite orders suggested by the researcher, i.e.  processing-output-based instruction (POI) and output-processing-based instruction (OPI). The target structure was English passives. Participants included 185 Iranian EFL students from five intact classes, with four assigned to each treatment and one comprising a control group. Results on sentence-level interpretation and production tests administered before, immediately after, and one month following instruction indicated similar improvement for the treatment groups on the first interpretation posttest, and the superiority of POI over OPI and PI over the delayed posttest. On the first production test, POI, OPI, and OI performed equally well and better than PI, while more accurate uses of the target form were observed by POI and OPI on the delayed posttest. It was concluded that the combined approaches, particularly POI, could produce more persistent outcomes by giving learners the opportunity to both process a form and produce it.

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The present study was undertaken to investigate the effects of varying frequency patterns (FPs) of words on the productive acquisition of a young EFL learner in a home setting. Target words were presented to the learner using games and role plays. They were subsequently traced for their frequencies in input and output. Eighteen immediate tests and delayed tests were administered to measure the oral production following the treatments. To examine the efficacy of varying FPs, target words were grouped into four sets: High Input/High Output (HIHO), Low Input/Low Output (LILO), High Input/Low Output (HILO), and Low Input/High Output (LIHO). The findings revealed that the differences among the FPs were statistically significant. Meanwhile, Wilcoxon signed-rank test identified a significant discrepancy between the words with LILO and HIHO frequency patterns. The findings demonstrated that the differences in FPs led to different productive gains, and higher word production cropped up when words occurred very frequently both in input and output. This study shows that higher teacher talk in tandem with higher learner talk could boost lexical production by a young learner in meaning-focused instructions.

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Knowledge representation, defined as the way individuals structure their knowledge and cognitive processing of events and the associated sense-making processes, is believed to influence teachers’ reasoning/thinking skills. While extensively researched in mainstream teacher education, this line of inquiry is essentially lacking in the L2 teacher education literature. To fill some of the void, the present study explored 36 – 18 novice and 18 experienced – EFL teachers’ representations of classroom management events. The teachers were presented with 8 fragments involving management problems in a novice teacher’s performance and were asked to provide their representations of the scenes. To explore likely differences between the two groups’ representations, the Mann-Whitney U test was used. Data analyses indicated that experienced teachers provided a significantly higher number of representations across majority of the categories of the coding scheme, except for disciplinary issues which were of prime concern to novice teachers. The implications of the study for pre-service and in-service teacher education are discussed.

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The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of mediation on the development of a novice teacher and in turn the effect of transformation of the teacher on the behaviors and emotions of the learners using Vygotskian sociocultural view of learning. For this purpose, a novice teacher teaching the general English course at an Iranian university was selected. To develop an understanding of the instructional setting and to diagnose her weaknesses and strengths, she was observed by a teacher educator during the first five sessions. Different instruments and tools like the teacher and students’ narratives, stimulated recall of voice-recorded actual teaching, and observation were also used during the study to trace the teacher’s cognitive and emotional development. As most of her practices displayed over-reliance on translation and deductive teaching of grammar, and her oral narration showed instances of cognitive/emotional dissonance, strategic mediations, both implicit and explicit, based on her needs were offered after the fifth session in a face-to-face interaction to help her develop gradually. Analysis of the results showed the gradual development of her and the positive attitudes and active engagement of the learners during she was being mediated. Implications of the findings are presented and discussed.

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Research on the effect of implicit and explicit instruction on developing learners’ explicit knowledge by the use of measures of explicit knowledge abounds in the literature. However, measuring learners’ implicit knowledge employing fine-grained measures has rarely been the concern of researchers in the field. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to scrutinize the effectiveness of implicit and explicit instruction through administering a Word Monitoring Task (WMT), as a more valid psycholinguistic measure of implicit knowledge. The necessary data were collected from 47 pre-intermediate participants in three different groups, i.e., (1) the implicit group received textually enhanced texts of verb complementation, (2) the explicit group was presented with metalinguistic explanations and examples of the target feature, and (3) the control group was deprived of any instruction. The results of the mixed between-within subjects ANOVA revealed that although both implicit and explicit instructions facilitated the development of the implicit knowledge of the target feature, the learners in the explicit group outperformed their counterparts in the implicit and the control groups in both the immediate and delayed post-tests. Moreover, the results indicated more durable effects of implicit instruction compared with those of explicit instruction. Overall, the findings provided evidence for the superiority of explicit instruction and the long-term effect of implicit instruction in developing relevant knowledge of verb complementation. The findings of the study can benefit both teachers and learners in developing teaching/learning strategies to improve and facilitate the grasp of both explicit and implicit knowledge.

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In the area of teaching translation, investigating the effectiveness of technological solutions in developing translation skills is both timely and in demand. As the first step, one can try to explore feedback generated by machines compared to humans. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of electronic feedback provided by the designed translation software on the translation skills of Iranian EFL students compared to the feedback given by an expert human observer. To this end, 60 intermediate male and female students were selected as participants after the administration of Oxford Placement Test (OPT), followed by a translation skill test as pretest and posttest. The analysis of the pretest and posttest data revealed that after receiving the two types of feedback, both groups performed significantly better on posttest. Further analysis of the data, however, indicated that sustained electronic observer feedback was superior to human observer feedback in terms of developing translation skills. It can be discussed that taking advantage of an efficient electronic tool which enjoys the potential of providing some feedback would drive the focus away from the repetitive mistakes and frees up the time and focus on students’ personal problems. The findings may have implications for translation education, training, and practice.

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Procrastination pervades the long and taxing process of foreign language learning and working against it is crucial. This study attempted to elicit and investigate the strategies and solutions from English teachers and learners which can help in dealing with procrastination over weekly assignments, term projects, and preparing for exams. To achieve this aim, suggestions were sought from 46 English teachers who had at least three years of teaching experience. Out of a total of 384 suggestions, higher-frequency ones were listed and solutions and strategies in related literature were sifted through to draw up a 21-item Likert-type questionnaire, which sought the reaction of English learners to the teacher-suggested strategies. A revised version was distributed among 97 English learners comprising 65 females and 32 males, whose ages ranged from 17 to 29 years. The English language teachers believed that to help students abandon their procrastination, they should encourage them with extra points for duly completed assignments, check the progress of projects, and give quizzes and exams during the term atop of other strategies. The most frequently endorsed strategies by the English learners included: adjusting the quantity of assignments to learner’s ability, selecting attractive and diverse assignments, teacher’s proper guidance and providing sample projects to reduce anxiety; and identifying the most important topics and disregarding unnecessary contents.

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The present study aimed to examine the translator's solutions to the translation of conversational implicatures from English into Persian. To do so, 120 conversational implicatures were extracted from the novel the Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954) and classified based on Grice's (1975) categorization of Maxims, including quality, quantity, relevance, and manner. Mur Duenas's (2003) taxonomy of translation strategies was used as a valid framework to find out the translation strategies the translator employed to transfer the 120 conversational implicatures. Furthermore, the most /least frequent translation strategies applied by the translator were investigated. At the end, the effectiveness of the source text (ST)-and target text (TT)-oriented strategies in transferring the same meaning of implicatures to the target text was determined. As the results indicate, the translator employed five out of six of Mur Duenas's translation strategies, namely TL cultural cognate, SL cultural and linguistic borrowing, replacement of the SL cultural reference by explanation, TL cultural reference suppression, and TL cultural reference literal translation, of which SL cultural and linguistic borrowing and replacement of the SL cultural reference by explanation were the most/least frequently-used strategies. Moreover, the translator preferred to employ the ST-oriented strategies rather than the TT-oriented ones that referred to the employment of the ST-oriented strategy for the whole text. Based on Grice's theory, the researcher concluded that the ST-oriented strategies were more effective than the TT-oriented ones and helped the translator to produce comprehensible translations and convey the meaning of implicatures to the target readers.

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The present research aims to examine the effects of using culturally oriented texts in project-based classes on the views of EFL university students regarding their L1 culture. To this end, three experimental groups of intermediate EFL freshmen, assigned to classes A, B and C, participated in this study. Each of the classes were presented with reading passages focused on L1 culture, L2 culture, and a combination of both L1 and L2 culture, respectively.  A written two-question structured interview was designed by the researchers to gain in depth detailed information about the students' views regarding L1 culture in each class. The interviews were then examined using content analysis. Findings revealed the effectiveness of the combined approach (i.e. the use of reading materials focused on L1 and L2 culture) in establishing more positive views about L1 culture in students. The results can provide insightful recommendations and implications for EFL instructors, educational materials developers and educational policy makers.

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This study aimed at investigating the comparative effect of using self-assessment vs. peer-assessment on young EFL learners’ performance on selective and productive reading tasks. To do so, 56 young learners from among 70 students in four intact classes were selected based on their performance on the A1 Movers Test. Then, the participants were randomly divided into two groups, self-assessment and peer-assessment. The reading section of a second A1 Movers Test was adapted into a reading test containing 20 selective and 20 productive items, and it was used as the pretest and posttest. This adapted test was piloted and its psychometric characteristics were checked. In the self-assessment group, the learners assessed their own performance after each reading task while in the peer-assessment group, the participants checked their friends’ performance in pairs. The data were analyzed through repeated-measures two-way ANOVA and MANOVA. The findings indicated that self-assessment and peer-assessment are effective in improving young EFL learners’ performance on both selective and productive reading tasks. Further, neither assessment method outdid the other in improving students’ performance on either task. These findings have practical implications for EFL teachers and materials developers to use both assessment methods to encourage learners to have better performance on reading tasks.

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Finding out which lexico-semantic features of cognates are critical in cross-language studies and comparing these features with noncognates helps researchers to decide which features to control in studies with cognates. Normative databases provide necessary information for this purpose. Such resources are lacking in the Persian language. We created a dataset and determined norms for the essential lexico-semantic features of 288 cognates and noncognates and matched them across conditions. Furthermore, we examined the relationship between these features and the response time (RT) and accuracy of responses in a masked-priming lexical decision task. This task was performed in English by Persian-English speakers in conditions where the prime and target words were related or unrelated in terms of meaning and/or form. Overall, familiarity with English words and English frequency were the best predictors of RT in related and unrelated priming conditions. Pronunciation similarity also predicted RT in the related condition for cognates, while the number of phonemes in the prime predicted RT for the unrelated condition. For both related and unrelated conditions, English frequency was the best predictor for noncognates. This bilingual dataset can be used in bilingual word processing and recognition studies of cognates and noncognates.

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Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has recently been the focus of numerous studies in language education since it aims to overcome the pitfalls of form-focused and meaning-focused instruction by systematically integrating content and language. This meta-analysis aims to synthesize the findings of 22 primary studies that tested the effect of CLIL on language skills and components. Guiding the analysis are three questions: What is the overall combined effect of CLIL on language skills and components? How do moderators condition the effect of CLIL? To what extent the overall combined effect is conditioned by publication bias? The overall effect size was found to be g=0.81, which represents a medium effect size with respect to Plonsky and Oswald’s (2014) scale. The results of moderator analysis show that CLIL has the highest effect on students’ grammar and listening proficiency and in lower levels of education, especially in elementary schools. It also has the highest effect when combined with hotel management as the subject matter. Fail-safe N test of publication bias shows that the significant positive outcome of CLIL cannot be accounted for by publication bias. The findings have clear implications for practitioners, researchers and curriculum developers.

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Considering the fact that engagement with political economy is central to any fully rounded analysis of language and language-related issues in the neoliberal-stricken world today, and that applied linguistics has ignored the role of political economy (Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012),  for the first time, this study investigated the representations of neoliberal ideologies in the Interchange Third Edition Series. To this end, both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted based on Du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, and Negus’s (1997) model of ‘Cultural Circuit’, especially their concept of ‘Representational Repertoires’. Furthermore, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996) ‘visual grammar’ was used for the analysis of the artwork. The results of the quantitative analysis revealed that more than 50% of the total number of units in each of the textbooks featured neoliberal-related content. Moreover, the results of the qualitative analysis confirmed Du Gay et al.’s (1997) argument that textbooks are not only curriculum artifacts but also cultural artifacts or communicative acts which serve to make English mean in particular ways - in this case the hegemonic culture of neoliberalism. As a result, it is necessary for EFL/ESL teachers and students to collaboratively develop counter-hegemonic discourses through critical thinking and dialogic interrogations of neoliberal discourses.

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Quality of Classroom Life is considered as a serious issue in academia around the world, and it has recently received global inquiry in EFL and ESL contexts. However, no questionnaire has been developed to assess the Iranian students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards the quality of life in the classroom. After developing a conceptual framework, the final draft of the developed questionnaire with 71 items was administered to the main sample of participants (n=150). An Exploratory Factor Analysis was performed to identify the components of the instrument, followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis to measure its construct validity. As a result, the final draft of the Quality of Classroom Life Questionnaire comprised 71 Likert-point items. In phase 2, a number of EFL students and teachers (50 teachers and 322 students)  participated  in the study which was intended to observe the impact of Modular Instruction on the Quality of Classroom Life. Findings of the study suggested that: (a) the Iranian students and teachers had highly positive attitude towards the Quality of Classroom Life, and believed that educational view, teaching quality, classroom environment, classroom management, quality of classroom interactions and puzzle content played a crucial role in exploratory practice; and (b) the modular instruction which was the descendant of Postmethod instruction had a positive impact on the Quality of Classroom Life. The findings promise implications for teachers and teacher educators as well as the materials developers as the knowledge of classroom quality and modular instruction can enhance their understanding of the nature and conditions of learning.

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The present study investigated the educational objectives of the English literature curricula at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Iranian universities based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Using a detailed checklist based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy and the respective classifications, the educational objectives associated with knowledge (factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive) and cognitive (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create) dimensions were analyzed. The results of the content analysis revealed the dominance of the lower-order thinking skills in the undergraduate curriculum and the prevalence of the higher-order thinking skills in the graduate curriculum. The results showed that the most frequent objective in terms of the knowledge domain was understand in both curricula. Regarding the knowledge dimension, conceptual and procedural knowledge occurred most often at both curricula, confirming that acquiring the knowledge of concepts and the processes safeguards the commended quality for the curriculum designers. Moreover, it was found that the metacognitive-related categories were almost missing from the categories. The results of the cross-tabulation revealed the superiority understand/conceptual in BA and the supremacy of understand/procedural in MA objectives. The findings entail the revisions of the educational objectives to accommodate critical thinking. The findings have pedagogical implications for EFL teachers, the curriculum developers, and policy makers. 

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In educational psychology, mindsets refer to a set of core beliefs about intelligence and its role in successful learning in a specific domain. This study investigated the extent to which, the EFL learners’ mindsets might predict their English achievement considering the mediating roles of engagement and self-regulation. The data were collected by means of three questionnaires: The Language Mindset Inventory (LMI), the University Student Engagement Inventory (USEI), and the Academic Self-Regulated Learning Scale (A-SRL-S), as well as the institutes’ reports on their English achievement. We analyzed the data quantitatively using the SPSS 20 and Amos 8 Software. The results revealed that there was a significant direct relationship between language mindsets and English achievement of the EFL learners. Besides, this relationship was significantly mediated by the learners’ engagement and self-regulation.  Drawing on the findings of this research, the challenge for teachers is to cultivate in students the mindsets that emphasize growth and potentials rather than constraints and stagnation.
 

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The aim of this study was to provide evidence on the construct validity of the ‘What is Happening in this Class’ (WIHIC) questionnaire in the context of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in Iran. The field of language teaching has made a number of claims about the role of language learning environments (particularly the classroom) in L2 acquisition and use, but it does not provide teachers and researchers with reliable and valid instruments to assess the accuracy of these claims. To serve the purpose of the study, a sample of 607 Iranian EFL learners from both university and institute contexts was requested to complete the WIHIC questionnaire, and the obtained data were then submitted to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis for construct validation. The results indicated that the deletion of one dimension and several items from the original WIHIC questionnaire enhanced its psychometric properties, thus confirming the validity of the questionnaire with six factors. In addition, the psychometric properties of the validated questionnaire were found to be invariant across the teaching context (i.e., university versus institute contexts). The implications of these findings for research on language learning environments are discussed, and some suggestions are made for further validation studies.

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In order to establish the why of noticing, it is imperative to empirically explore the factors that potentially mediate noticing. This study aimed to explore two factors that are believed to affect noticing:  the complexity of target structures and learners’ second language (L2) proficiency level. English relative clauses (RCs) were selected as the target structures, and Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis (AHH) was taken as the measure of the complexity of the RCs. A sample of 113 freshmen English language majors were selected as the participants of the study. A test of English RCs was developed as the placement test, and Key English Test (KET) was used to classify the participants into three groups of High (N=38), Mid (N=37), and Low (N=38) L2 proficiency level. Note-taking was used as the measure of noticing. After administering the RC test and the proficiency test, the participants were given a number of authentic reading texts containing instances of RCs and were required to take notes during reading activity. The non-parametric Friedman’s test demonstrated that the complexity of RCs positively affected the participants’ noticing while the non-parametric ANCOVA indicated that the participants’ L2 proficiency level had no significant effect on noticing. The findings of this study can be helpful to both teachers and material developers in providing learners with optimal conditions for noticing linguistic forms, which in turn, could facilitate L2 learning.