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Although global English Language Teaching (ELT) coursebooks have been subject to numerous (critical) analyses, the changes occurring to their contents over different editions have received scarce attention. In this study, the researchers examined the transformations over different editions of Interchange series (level 2) regarding some selected aspects of their textual contents. Seeking experienced English teachers’ views of the global coursebooks’ transformations over the past decade was another aim of the study. The analysis and comparison of the included topics and titles, characters, sites and contexts in Interchange series as well as interviews with 12 English teachers revealed that the content-based changes of different editions of this coursebook are superficial and cosmetic-like and despite the claims for globality, fallacies such as real-life-ness, representation and globality are still evident. We hope the findings of the study would aid curriculum and policy makers, institute managers, and language teachers to reconsider the functioning and value of current global ELT coursebooks.

Dans cet article nous analysons les procédés stylistiques et les artifices romanesques employés par Flaubert dans  Madame Bovary  afin de résoudre le problème de l’inadéquation du langage et du réel. Nous étudions ces techniques d’écriture dans la parole d’Homais. L’apport de cette étude réside dans l’application de la méthode génétique qui permet de suivre l’évolution de l’écriture de Flaubert à travers les différents états rédactionnels des manuscrits. En étudiant le style de cet écrivain à l’état naissant, nous essayons de puiser dans les brouillons comment il représente cette parole et avec quels procédés stylistiques. Homais est un personnage très important dans le roman car il incarne la parole défectueuse, celle qui trouble l’écrivain dans sa quête du style parfait et dans sa lutte contre le problème du « chaudron fêlé ». C’est un homme qui parle non pour communiquer mais pour émouvoir et quoique redondante et incomplète, sa parole cherche à tout dire. A travers le personnage d’Homais et employant ses mots, le romancier vise à subvertir le langage incrusté dans la Bêtise humaine.

The present study aims at scrutinizing the inference complexity level (henceforth ICL) of test items of the Iranian State University TEFL Ph.D. entrance exam (ISUTPEE) from 2010 to 2017 through the lens of Kintsch's construction-integration theory (C-I) (Kintsch, 1988, 1998). Though there is ample research on inferencing in the field of reading comprehension, the existing literature reveals a serious gap in relation to inferencing complexity of test items in high-stakes exams that exert profound effects on the academic achievements of the individuals. Inferencing is examined in this study to explore the ICL of the test items of the Special Knowledge Test (SKT) according to three levels of memory representations of Kintsch's model: the surface model, the textbase, and the situation model. To this end, the test items for eight consecutive years of the ISUTPEE were examined in relation to the three distinct kinds of mental representations. To ensure the reliability of coding by the researchers, two other specialist coders assessed the ICL of 33% of the items. The intraclass correlation among the three sets of codes was 0.91. The results of the study showed that a large number of questions, accounting for more than 80% of the items, merely activate the surface and the textbase model of information representations in memory. Furthermore, the ICL for each of the four parts of SKT was examined. This analytical study carries a stark warning regarding a deficiency of systematic attention to ICL in the development of test items.

The need for a strong educational system is felt more than ever due to globalization. In this respect, teacher agency has an important role in educational change. This qualitative meta-study, therefore, addressed the attitude of the teachers towards agency and the way they enact agency to facilitate learning process. To this purpose, the needed data were gathered from the narrative of life, professional history and class observations of five English teachers in Iranian context. Then, based on the Grounded Theory Approach, the data were analyzed and the obtained results showed that teachers’ pre-teaching and during teaching processes were made up of complex relationships among different resources; that is, teachers’ life ideology (their perception towards themselves and their job) and financial status. At the same time, the results revealed that teachers’ instruction experiences highly affect both their magnification of agency and their decision-making processes. It was further seen that agency was not stable at all, meaning that social factors and environmental conditions played important roles in shaping teacher’s agency.

Processability Theory (PT) is regarded as one of the prominent theory of second language acquisition (SLA) developed to illuminate the developmental sequences in SLA as well as some other linguistic phenomena (Pienemann, 1998a; 2011).Since 1990s, Processability has been at the center of attention in second language acquisition research. Within the framework of Processability theory and through analyzing the written performance of Iranian EFL learners, the present research focused on the acquisition of “Copula inversion” and “Negation” across five proficiency levels, from elementary to advanced and compared it with the stage-like development model of morpho-syntactic structures proposed by Pienemann (1998a, 2011). The study followed a descriptive method of research and the data was collected from 350 participants in five different proficiency levels from elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced. The participants were asked to provide samples of their written performance on different tasks such as introduction task, habitual action task, story retelling task, audio-video-retelling task, picture description task, composition, communication task. The data in this research was analyzed both qualitatively, in order to identify and classify the type and order of the morpho-syntactic structures; and quantitatively, by calculating means. The results of Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that “Negation” emerged at the elementary level of the language learners’ performance and “copula inversion” emerged at the intermediate level. Just the same, the competence of the learner grows stronger in concern with these variables through the higher proficiency levels. These findings imply that PT is valid for Iranian EFL learners, as well.   

The demand for learning English as a foreign language has significantly heightened the need to recruit efficient teachers. Related literature confirms the lack of studies on teacher characteristics that can affect their job satisfaction. This study aimed to study the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ professional development, job satisfaction, and reflective thinking. One-hundred and fifty-nine teachers from different universities, language institutes, and schools wer e requested to answer the professional development questionnaire, the Minnesota satisfaction questionnaire, and reflective thinking scale as the main data collection instruments. These questionnaires were given in three different ways: in person, email, and social networks. Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine the hypothesized model of associations. This model was confirmed following the application of the modification indices proposed by the software (Normal chi-square = 3.4; RMSEA =.03; RMR =.02; GFI =.94; AGFI =.91; NFI =.94; CFI =.94; IFI =.94). The findings showed that there were significant internal correlations between all the latent variables and their sub-scales. Furthermore, findings of multiple regression analysis revealed that professional development and reflective thinking positively predicted job satisfaction, with professional development exerting more predictive power compared to reflective thinking. Pedagogical implications of the results have been discussed.