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The well-established affiliation of metadiscourse research tradition to the philosophy of ESP raises some inevitable expectations on how much and how well the concept has been geared to meet the practical necessities of academic writing pedagogy. In light of such an expectation, a corpus of 35 academic writing coursebooks published during the last three decades was evaluated in terms of the possible realizations of key resources of interaction in pedagogical tasks. Due to its theoretical rigor and analytically operationalized nature, Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2005a) was taken as the guiding framework for the current evaluation. The quantitative findings emerging from the analysis of the corpus did not sound sufficiently promising, suggesting that those theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e., the 55 categories emerging from the evaluation of the corpus) suggest that the rigorous tradition of research in metadiscourse has contributed to the effective operationalization of the concept for pedagogical objectives. It has been argued that through the effective introduction of the concept of metadiscourse into pedagogical designs and its appropriate operationalization, novice participants of academic/scientific discourse communities would be enabled to redefine the nature of academic communication and get rid of a large number of misconceptions which have become fossilized through long years of the dominance of positivistic thinking.

Through a descriptive Ex Post Facto research design, the relationship between teacher reflection and classroom management, the predictive power of teacher reflection components regarding classroom management, and classroom management strategies used by high and low reflective teachers were examined. To this end, 113 EFL teachers completed the Attitudes and Beliefs on Classroom Control (ABCC) Inventory (Martin et al., 1998b) and teacher reflection inventory (Akbari et al., 2010). The results of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient showed that there was a significant positive relationship between teachers’ reflection and their sense of classroom management. Moreover, a multiple regression was run whose findings revealed that practical and critical components of reflection are the best predictors of teachers’ sense of classroom management. Twenty teachers were also interviewed and the thematic analysis of the interview showed that high reflective teachers used different kinds of management strategies, for their students’ social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties using proper pedagogical planning and techniques of teachers’ teaching style, expertise, and experience in better assessment of the students in the classroom.

This study intended to investigate critical thinking-based teaching strategies EFL teachers of Iranian high schools integrate into their teaching. To this purpose, the inter-relationship between the teachers' frequency of use of critical thinking-based teaching strategies and their teaching experience, their attendance at critical thinking in-service training courses, and their higher university degree were explored through a survey questionnaire. To analyze the collected data, means, frequencies, standard deviations, percentages, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), correlation coefficient, and five-point Likert scale were utilized. The obtained results showed that teaching experience was negatively correlated with the frequency of strategy use, and that no significant relationship was found between the frequency of strategy use and teachers’ higher university degree. The results further showed a significant relationship between the frequency of strategy use and critical thinking in-service training courses attended by teachers. The findings of this study imply that critical thinking should be reinforced in Iranian education system as well as in high school teaching schedule.

The present study sought to investigate the effectiveness of teacher versus learner assessment activities on the Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ writing ability. In order to find an answer to the questions of this research, 30 intermediate students from Zaban Iran Language Institute in Rasht, Iran were selected via administering Solutions Placement Test (SPT). Next, they were divided into three groups of 10. Learners were randomly assigned into two experimental groups of peer assessment and self-assessment, and one control group, teacher assessment. A pre-test of writing was then administered before the groups received 8 sessions of treatment through peer, self-, and teacher assessment techniques. After the treatment period, a post-test of writing was administered to all groups. The results of descriptive and inferential analyses revealed that the peer assessment group attained the highest scores on the writing test, and a statistically significant difference among the effects of the teacher assessment, peer assessment, and self-assessment on Iranian Intermediate EFL students’ writing ability was reported. Also, the group using teacher assessment technique attained higher scores than the group that used the self-assessment technique. The implications of this study can be considered for EFL teachers, learners, materials developers, and syllabus designers.

General English (GE) is a course offered in all education programs by the Iranian medical education system. However, no curriculum has been developed for the course and teachers develop their syllabus, which largely relies on textbooks. This study aimed to investigate what textbooks used for teaching GE at the Iranian medical sciences universities and what language skills are covered in the textbooks. To this end, six medical universities were targeted and the textbooks used by them were collected and analyzed. The results showed that the textbooks used in the universities differed in terms of number (one or many) and type (medical, non-medical, and a combination of them). Certain textbooks were used commonly in most universities. The textbooks also covered the language skills differentially with vocabulary and reading being the most popular and listening and pronunciation being the least popular ones. The study concludes that there is no harmony in the GE textbooks in the universities, which results from the lack of a unified national curriculum. The study argues that differences in the textbooks can adversely affect the quality of education and educational justice and has implications for organizing English language teaching at medical universities.

Thai students’ writing in English is a chronic problem documented in the literature of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Thailand. However, little research has been conducted on how Thai teachers and students perceive the importance of English-writing and what difficulties and expectations/suggestions they have in teaching and learning this skill at upper-secondary schools (U-SS). This study, therefore, plans to fill this gap by employing two sets of surveys and semi-structured interviews with 114 teachers and 170 students from 30 different U-SS in the Northeastern part of Thailand and two provincial supervisors of Foreign-Language-Education Divisions (Pro-Sup). Besides their various stated personal and contextual problems in terms of time constraint, insufficient resources and poorly-motivated and mixed-ability students, national test structures and the presence of untrained English teachers, the participants acknowledged the importance of English-writing and expected to have this skill taught at all school levels. These findings suggest that to improve the teaching and learning practices of this skill at U-SS in Thailand and other countries with similar contexts, relevant support and necessary reforms from teachers, school leaders and national-test and policymakers are needed.

The present study was conducted to identify novice and experienced Iranian EFL teachers’ beliefs towards the most effective written corrective feedback types and the most serious errors they might address while correcting students’ paragraphs and see whether there exist any tensions between what they believed and what they practiced through the methodology of pre-observation interview, observation, and post-observation interview. The results revealed that for novice teachers, there were fewer tensions between their stated beliefs and observed practices, yet this tension was more obvious while interviewing experienced teachers. Some implications for language teacher education will also be discussed.

Despite the fact that classroom interaction is an indispensable aspect of language learning, many EFL students do not show any willingness to participate (WTP) in classroom activities. In view of this problem, the current study aimed to describe how Iranian EFL learners’ participation in collaborative tasks can lead to WTP. Therefore, primarily discoursal features of collaborative tasks and then behavioral representations of WTP were identified. To this end, nine EFL intermediate learners (five males and four females) participated in the study and were assigned to two groups. First two collaborative tasks were designed: The first group were asked to make a digital story collaboratively and the second group were asked to make an advertisement for selling a house. The classroom interactions among students in different classrooms were video-recorded and transcribed based on conversation analysis principles. Then the frequency of the turns taken by each student was counted as indicator of WTP in the assigned task. Multimodal analysis (gaze, facial expressions, head movement, body posture and gesture) was also used to analyze behavioral representations of EFL learners’ WTP. The findings revealed that discoursal features of WTP include negotiation, elaboration, conflict, sharing expertise, humor, asking for elaboration, conflict.,and behavioral representations include eye contact, body language, and the sitting position of students which can indicate that students’ engagement in collaborative tasks can have impact on their WTP. The findings can have implications for EFL teachers, material developers, and teacher education programs.

As the use of paper-based portfolios and, more recently, ePortfolios began to attract unprecedent significance in many educational learning contexts, many researchers in the field of second and foreign language learning also begun to look more closely into their effects from diverse aspects. Nevertheless, a small number, if any, have addressed the issue from teachers and students' points of view in a comparative frame. This issue is even more noticeable in the Middle East, where portfolio learning has lately been incorporated in tertiary level studies. Hence, the present study compares students and teachers’ perception of the portfolio component of the English Foundation Program at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. Seventy eight students and nine teachers participated in the study, where students expressed their ideas through a questionnaire, the teachers were interviewed to see how they perceive the portfolio element of the course. Using a mixed method for data collection and analysis, several chi-square tests were run to see if there is any significant difference between the perceptions of students and teachers. The results show that although the students generally agreed on the usefulness of the component, the teachers believe that it has lost its meaning.

The study of lexical bundles, known as fixed phrases, chunks, clusters and multi-word expressions, has attracted considerable attention. While there has been much research on lexical bundles across different registers and a number of disciplines, their deployment in some special sections of research articles as the most high-stakes genre has not yet been well explored. Accordingly, the present study aimed at identifying 4-word lexical bundles by analyzing the data obtained from a collection of the abstract and conclusion sections of 1000 English research articles written by L1-persian and L1-English writers in AL and IT , as published between 2015 and 2019. The researchers used Antconc software to analyze the data composed of about 600,000 words; then, the functional analysis was carried out based on Hyland's (2008) framework. Overall, the analysis revealed that AL writers outweighed their IT counterparts in their use of lexical bundles. Also, L1-persian writers used more lexical bundles in the abstract section; despite this, both writers used the same number of bundles in the conclusion section. In addition, both AL and IT writers had a similar use of the three main functional categories; however, there were substantial differences and similarities in regard to these two parts of research articles. The findings of this study can help writing instructors to improve students' academic writing. They can enhance their abilities to better comprehend the role of lexical bundles in different genres and sub-genres.

In this paper, we argue the effects of explicit multimodal metaphor training in developing speaking and listening skills in an EFL context. To examine the effects of using conceptual metaphors in English language classrooms and assess the metaphorical ability of EFL students, we directed two measuring instruments: pre-test and post-test for control and experimental groups in both listening and speaking skills. The pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group who were exposed to explicit multimodal metaphor training were compared with the control group's scores through this bipartite study. The outcomes of this paper can shed light on teaching and learning the multimodal language in an EFL context. The findings showed that learners who were exposed to multimodal metaphors and received explicit instruction from their teacher resulted in better scores. In other words, this paper found that explicit multimodal metaphor instructions can lead to some improvements in metaphor comprehension and production in an EFL context.

Writing a book review is an instance of evaluative academic writing where the writer is involved in an interaction with the author and the reader, evaluates the viewpoints stated in the book and voices his own position and stance in a dialogue with the reader. Working within the framework of Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory as an effective tool for studying the essential resources employed in this interaction and evaluation, the present study examined 60 book reviews from the Humanities academic journals written by native male and female writers, and tried to investigate the type and frequency of the three Appraisal categories (Attitude, Engagement, Graduation). The findings indicate that both writer groups made extensive use of these resources in their writings. However, the male book review writers exceeded the female writers in all the three categories. In addition, the Attitude resources were used the most and The Engagement resources were the least employed resources. The implications of the study for teaching writing skills and developing materials and tasks for writing courses at academic levels are mentioned in detail

This study represents the findings of a systematic review (SR) of literature in the teacher professional development (TPD) domain to outline the research patterns through content examination of 199 research articles (RAs) in the area of TPD over the previous 40 years (1982 -2021). RAs were investigated and their research content areas, utilized research methods, data collection procedures, and findings were analyzed and coded. The broad investigation of the RAs showed a wide variety of themes that corresponded to 22 research areas. TPD program effects, TPD & technology, and TPD & Sociolinguistics were the most searched content areas. It was also found that the qualitative method with 52.26% of occurrences appeared to be the dominant research method used in RAs. Exploring data collection procedures, it was uncovered that interview, questionnaire and observation were the main data collection strategies utilized within the TPD RAs. Analyzing the findings, changes in teacher practices, attitudes and knowledge, learner achievements, and determining priorities for TPD programs were the most reported findings in TPD RAs. This corpus-driven SR underpins the notion that TPD makes a difference in altering teachers’ practices and attitudes and improves learner abilities if specific characteristics are taken into account in the planning and administration of TPD programs.