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Despite the determining role of culture-bound materials in the enhancement of EFL learners’ productive skills, a scarcity of investigation on the influence of culture-oriented content on their productive skills is staunchly perceived. This gap can be partly filled by implementing Content Based Language Teaching (CBLT) program which contrives the EFL content especially in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms. In this respect, a culture-oriented EAP course book was designed based on Tomlinson’s (2001) materials development framework. A total of 100 participants were recruited according to their language proficiency results, and were fractionated into two productive EAP task groups embracing Oral Presentation and Systematic Writing as the two befitting techniques to strengthen productive skills. After practicing and teaching the developed course book in each class in twenty treatment sessions, the participants were given a posttest. Correspondingly, a paired samples t-test indicated that culture-oriented content affected the EFL students’ speaking and writing skills separately. Similarly, an independent samples t-test revealed the influence of culture-oriented content on their speaking skill than the writing skill. The findings suggest the significance of the first culture as the benchmark for incorporating second culture contents in EFL teaching arenas.

The present study aimed at investigating English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ level of reflection and the barriers to their reflection. To do so, based on an experimental research method, 98 EFL teachers were recruited and the English language teacher reflection inventory (ELTRI) was distributed among them. To consolidate the findings of the inventory, 20 volunteers from the same pool were interviewed. As the next phase of the study, to investigate the barriers to the teachers’ reflectivity, the same participants were given an open-ended questionnaire to probe their ideas about barriers to reflective practice. Based on the obtained data and the related literature, a Barriers to Reflective Practice Questionnaire (BRPQ) was developed and distributed among the participants. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics, one sample t-test, and content analysis were employed. The findings revealed that EFL teachers did not practice reflection at high levels. They considered top-down curriculum, disrespect for teachers’ authority, teachers’ inclination to the conventional teaching practice, lack of appropriate context for reflection, teachers’ workload, and lack of appropriate training courses as the most important factors which bar their reflection. Teacher education programs should raise EFL teachers’ awareness regarding the concept and use of reflective practice.

Despite being an important category of multimodal tourism discourse, Inflight magazines and their roles in promoting international airlines’ profile and their host country, are mostly under-researched. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the application of different visual and semiotic strategies regarding social actors' race, age and social class and how people are represented in different international airlines’ inflight magazines. For this purpose, 16 international airlines’ inflight magazine issues were selected depending on the host country's geographical location and availability. Using Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006 [1996]) and van Leeuwen’s (2008) visual grammar, the data were analyzed based on ideational, interpersonal and compositional levels. The results revealed that inflight magazine designers, content developers and advertisement agencies tend to apply certain visual and semiotic resources. They reinforce bias and false stereotypes towards certain groups of people in terms of their age, race and social class originating in political, historical and ideological perceptions and standpoints of higher institutions across the world. The findings also highlight the importance of visual literacy being promoted to the target audience, including air travelers and EFL learners.

Research has shown that classroom management plays a critical role in facilitating effective learning, making it a permanent concern for teachers as well as researchers. In the related literature, one area which needs further consideration is to explore the effect of different personal and contextual factors on the way teachers choose to manage their classrooms. Therefore, the present study aimed at exploring the effects of age, gender, teaching experience, teaching context, and academic degree on Iranian English teachers’ classroom management behaviors. To achieve this, a researcher-made questionnaire based on four classroom management questionnaires was developed. The questionnaire was distributed among 152 EFL teachers teaching in different settings in Iran. To analyze the obtained data, Point-Biserial correlation followed by an independent samples t-test, and one-way ANOVA were used. The results revealed that men and women were quite different with regard to the classroom management behaviors they showed. However, age, teaching context, teaching experience, and academic degree did not significantly affect teachers’ classroom management behaviors. Possible explanations of the results in light of the previous literature are further discussed.

This quantitative study aimed to investigate Iranian EFL student teachers’ perceptions on the use of Machine Translation (MT) for foreign language learning in academic context. To this end, 107 EFL student teachers from a women-only state university in Tehran, Iran, completed a recently developed and validated questionnaire in the field. The findings revealed that most participants were familiar with digital technology including MT and its different types such as Google Translate (GT). Satisfied with MT output, the majority of the participants in the study installed MT apps on their smartphones or used its website on their computers to complete assignments or to translate from Persian to English and vice versa. However, they were neutral about whether their instructors confirmed their MT use, or whether they preferred their teachers know they use MT or not. They were also not sure whether consulting MT was against the regulations. The results showed that authorities in the field of foreign language teaching are required to take a positive stand on this emerging technology; in addition, considering the importance of training for both instructors and learners, they should hold workshops for more responsible and effective MT implementation. 

Assessment of learners affects all processes of their learning. Generally, without assessment, it is very difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching and learning process. Understanding their weak points and difficulties in their writing would help teachers and administrators focus more on these areas. Therefore, this content analysis study was an attempt to investigate the relative contribution of each writing component to the variation in the overall writing performance of TEFL undergraduate students to determine areas of strength and weakness in their writing. To this end, the writing samples of 73 students who were willing to participate in this study at different universities in Tabriz, Iran, were assessed through an Analytical Scoring Scale. These participants were divided into two groups: group 1, first-year and second-year students, and group 2, third-year and fourth-year students. The results of Stepwise Multiple Linear Regression analysis revealed that the greatest contributions to the variance of the total rating of TEFL undergraduate students' writings were related to the grammar and punctuation components in groups 1 and 2, while the least contributions were related to the content and spelling in group 1, and vocabulary and spelling in group 2. In addition, results indicated that the weaknesses and issues of participants in both groups of this research were mostly related to the grammatical structure and using punctuation marks in paragraphs. Moreover, the positive effects of the analytical scoring scale as well as the implications of the findings were discussed.

Visual literacy (VL), despite its significance, has not received deserved attention in EFL classes in Iran. Addressing this pedagogic and research lacuna, the researchers integrated VL practices into a General English course attended by female university learners, and examined the vision competencies developed by them. The analysis of the data collected through class observation, learner documents, and semi-structured interviews revealed that the learners developed the vision competencies regarding compositional, affective, and critical dimensions of visuals. It is hoped that the findings of this small-scale study encourage language planners, materials developers, and English teachers to pay heightened attention to the visuals’ potential and open more spaces for VL development in their curricula, materials, and language teaching practices. 

Recent studies within the past four decades have confirmed the effectiveness of Student-Centered Learning (SCL) over Teacher-Centered Learning (TCL). Furthermore, the emergence of 21st-century learning skills and competencies necessitates education systems to change their previous practices and equip their students with these skills and competencies. However, implementing SCL has not gained considerable attention among education authorities and EFL teachers in Iranian high schools. This study aims to explore EFL teachers' understanding of SCL and their perceptions of the obstacles to implementing it in Kermanshah, Iran. To this end, the study employed a convergent mixed-methods design that combined 24-item questionnaire data with 9 structured interviews using the NVIVO Software Version10. The questionnaire analysis revealed that there is a wide gap between the participants’ perceptions of SCL and their practices in the classroom. Moreover, the analysis of the interviews led to extracting three main themes of institutional, teacher-student-parent, and socio-cultural obstacles that impede implementing SCL in EFL classes and indicate that TCL practices are still running. The results revealed that teachers hold general perceptions of SCL. However, due to some constraints, they adhere to the TCL.            

The present study is a methodological synthesis aiming to evaluate the adherence of Iranian L2 papers to the study quality standards. Ten Iranian journals were selected based on the latest ranking of Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology (MSRT), and all experimental papers (N = 367) published from their beginnings were explored for study quality with regards to sampling, design, statistical tests, reporting practices and data sharing, and visual presentation. In the evaluation of the papers, the protocols proposed by Gass and Plonsky (2011) and Pagout and Plonsky (2017) were moderated and some recent issues proposed by APA’s (2018) Journal Article Reporting Standards and some scholars (e.g., Hu & Plonsky, 2019; Khany & Tazik, 2019; Larson-Hall, 2017) were added. The results showed that while there were issues, like acceptable sample size, use of pre-testing, reporting descriptive and inferential statistics, and ensuring the reliability of instruments, that were acceptably adhered to quality standards, problematic areas existed in all five facets of quality, and the majority of them stayed constant or changed slightly over time. The shortcomings caused by such lack of adherence are discussed to identify the challenges in the way of improving the papers’ quality. Although the results are obtained from a specific context, the implications may be generalizable to other contexts where English is taught and researched as a foreign language .

Vocabulary learning is at the heart of language learning and language use. It is what makes the essence of a language. Having it in mind, most of the students always complain about lexical problems, and unfortunately, they are unaware of the different tools, which can help the students to learn vocabulary and improve vocabulary retention. A useful tool for learning and teaching vocabulary is a tool that uses authentic samples to enhance comprehension. Concordancing software is one of these digital tools that enable learners to explore billions of real-world materials. In this regard, the present study was conducted to investigate the actual effect of using this software on vocabulary retention. To gain this purpose, a sample of 54 intermediate female EFL students took part in this study. Participants were randomly assigned to two equal experimental and control groups. Before starting the treatment, the researcher gave the pretest to both groups. Then the treatment sessions were started for both groups, which lasted 12 sessions (4weeks); ten vocabularies were taught in each session and during this time the vocabulary of each lesson was taught by using concordancing software to the experimental group and by using a list of vocabulary to the control group. After the treatment sessions, the posttest was administered to both groups. The results of this comparison proved that the use of concordancing software improved learners' vocabulary knowledge. The outcomes have the potential to affect language learners' performance and teachers' beliefs about the effectiveness of using CALL programs, especially concordancing programs.

Complexity measures in academic writing have experienced a shift from clausal to phrasal indices in recent years. Drawing on a subset of Biber et al.’s (2011) hypothesized stages of writing development, we explored phrasal complexity across sections (part-genres) of research articles (RAs) in applied linguistics and clinical medicine. A 389,332-word corpus consisting of 80 randomly selected RAs from leading journals in applied linguistics and clinical medicine was compiled for the purposes of the present study. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent-samples t -test, as implemented in SPSS (version 25), were employed to find differences across the RA sections and between two groups of academic writers. The findings indicated that RAs in clinical medicine relied more heavily on noun phrase modifiers in all sections than those in applied linguistics, suggesting that the distributional pattern of these linguistic expressions is discipline-independent. The implications of the distributional pattern of phrasal complexity are discussed in relation to L2 writing pedagogy and the development of genre-based, discipline-specific academic writing.