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It is substantiated that particular features of pragmatics are teachable, and instruction is both necessary and effective. Determining what kind of intervention is most effectual for facilitating learners’ pragmatic development has been a central issue for researchers. To respond to the inconclusive findings in intervention studies and to extend the instructional studies in L2 pragmatics to less studied and more complex teaching targets, such as implicatures, the current study inquired into the effects of metapragmatic awareness, interactive translation, and discussion through video  vignettes on the comprehension of implicatures of 51 (15 male and 36 female) Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners, who were selected based on Oxford Quick Placement Test (2004) from students majoring English Literature and TEFL at Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran. Fifty-six video prompts containing implicatures from Friends sitcom series and Desperate Housewives TV series were taught to the participants who were randomly assigned to four groups (metapragmatic awareness, interactive translation, discussion, and control). The participants attended the classes twice a week for eight sessions. Results of multiple-choice implicature listening test revealed that all three intervention groups outperformed the control group. Results of Tukey’s Honest Significant Difference (HSD) test illustrated that the metapragmatic awareness group outperformed the interactive translation and discussion groups. No meaningful difference was found between the interactive translation group and the discussion group. The paper concludes that providing learners with contextually appropriate input through video using methods of pragmatic instruction (metapragmatic consciousness-raising, translation, and discussion) is effective to promote their ability to comprehend implicatures and signposts some avenues for future research.

This study examined Iranian EFL learners’ preferences regarding oral Corrective Feedback (CF) in a TOEFL speaking course. A 30-item questionnaire was administered to 32 participants in a TOEFL preparation course to elicit EFL learners’ views concerning their CF expectations. The results showed that based on the nature and objective of the course, students cared about their accuracy while fluency for these students was of secondary importance. Therefore, CF was regarded as crucial and necessary by the participants and they considered their grammatical errors as the most important one to be corrected followed by vocabulary and pronunciation errors. In terms of CF type, explicit and delayed corrective feedback were the most preferred error correction forms. Furthermore, males preferred their teacher to correct them, females favored self-correction and peer correction more than males. Finally, it can be concluded Attitudes to different feedback types and types of errors that they prefer to be corrected were mostly affected by the nature and the objective of the tasks and the course in general.

English is taught all over the world either as a foreign or second language. It is taught as a foreign language in the Iranian educational system as well. However, it has always been the issue that EFL programs have been developed without conducting a systematic needs analysis from the learners’ perspective. The present study examined the effect of employing critical needs analysis on the learners' speaking skills improvement. To this end, 128 Iranian intermediate learners from three language institutes were selected and assigned to two experimental and control groups. The learners' Necessities, Wants and Lacks through a questionnaire and semi-structured interview were investigated. The experimental group received treatment based on the results of the interview and questionnaire. The results of the inferential statistics showed that the students' highest mean score was in the Necessities sub-dimension, followed by the Lacks, and Wants sub-dimensions which revealed that the students' needs were mostly the items which were necessary for the learners' use of language. In contrast, the control group received treatment based on the pre-determined syllabus of the course. The results of an independent sample t-test indicated that in the post-test, the speaking scores of the participants in the experimental group were significantly higher than the scores in the control group.

The current study was conducted to discover the impact of the positive assessment on Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners speaking skill and their self-efficacy. To accomplish the research, 40 Iranian females (17 to 8 years old) were selected from Shokooh Andishe Language Institute in Mashhad. A KET test which administered to determine the participants’ level of proficiency. Then, they were divided into two groups, one control group and one experimental group (each included 20 participants). Two instruments, including KET speaking test and a self-efficacy questionnaire, were administrated to both groups as pretests. The experimental group received the treatment based on the principles of positive assessment i.e. using phrases such as very good, excellent, giving small gifts, using thrilling labels and so forth. At the end of the study, the same instruments (as post-tests) were conducted to collect the required data for the analysis. To measure the statistical differences between the means of two groups, some independent samples T-tests were calculated. The results of the analyses indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group both in the case of speaking skill and self-efficacy. The findings of this research might be useful for EFL teachers and EFL learners, also they can be helpful for training programmers, institutes, and course designers.

This study aims at investigating the Medical students’ English language needs as the first step for designing an alternative curriculum for teaching English for Medical Purposes (EMP). It also tries to examine if the needs of medical students are perceived differently by stakeholders in medical sciences. For so doing, a structured questionnaire was developed and distributed among 282 Medical Students, 12 instructors, and 15 practitioners studying and working at Birjand University of Medical Sciences, Iran. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS using statistical tests of Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis. The findings indicated that medical students need to be competent enough in all four language skills, considering the demanding nature of their profession in the future. They ranked the importance of language skills like reading, writing, speaking, and listening, respectively. Besides, the results of four Kruskal-Wallis tests indicated a statistically significant difference among the responses of the three groups regarding the importance of the subcomponents of speaking and listening skills. Six follow-up post hoc analyses showed that the differences lay between medical students and practitioners. The findings are discussed and the implications for policy and practice are made.   

This study examined the combined effects of two task complexity levels (i.e., high- and low-complex) and two planning conditions including pre-task planning and on-line planning on Iranian intermediate language learners’ speech production regarding complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To this end, 90 intermediate EFL learners from a language institute in Shiraz were randomly assigned into two control and four experimental groups. At first, the language learners in all groups participated in the speaking pretest. Presented with a series of picture description tasks, the participants were asked to narrate a story. During 10 treatment sessions of picture description task performance, the experimental and control groups attempted different planning time conditions including pre-task planning, online planning, and no-planning along with task complexity levels. Finally, following the last session, the posttest was administered to all participants. The narrations analysis, as well as the results of Mixed between-within groups ANOVAs and a series of one-way ANOVAs, manifested that language learners in the pre-task high complexity group outperformed all other groups in terms of complexity. Moreover, the online low complexity group and online high complexity group outperformed the pre-task planning low complexity, no-planning low complexity, and no-planning high complexity groups regarding accuracy. With regard to fluency, the pre-task planning low complexity group significantly outperformed the no-planning low complexity, no-planning high complexity, and online high complexity groups. It was also concluded that pre-task planning affected language learners’ speech fluency. The implications of the results are also addressed.

The present research probed the sociocultural challenging variables which may affect EFL learners’ identity formation during their language studies in an Iranian context. A thorough analysis of the literature encompassing EFL teachers’ opinions and EFL coursebook analyses was performed to develop a comprehensive view of the recognized sociocultural domains and variables. Furthermore, an open-ended questionnaire was designed and distributed among 50 adolescent male and female EFL learners at the age range of 13-21 years (M=16) as Erickson’s identity confusion stage to identify the newest sociocultural challenging variables in the present Iranian context. The result of the research led to compilation of a Sociocultural Variables Inventory presenting an extended range of variables operating in the context of Iranian EFL learners’ identity formation. The inventory could act as a basis for research in the fields of TEFL, sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and further interdisciplinary research.

Even though many classroom-based studies reported the possible advantages of oral corrective feedback (OCF) for language learning, little information is available about teachers’ beliefs about OCF in classrooms and its relationship with their experience. This study attempted to compare the stated beliefs and classroom practices of three female English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers about OCF. In so doing, data was collected through video-recording three sessions of their teaching procedure and the follow-up stimulated recall interviews. The results of the study showed that irrespective of their teaching experience, the participating teachers unanimously believed that provision of OCF in the class is of prime importance. However, the use of all types of OCF practices was just observable in experienced teachers’ classes and the novice one preferred the duality of explicit correction and metalinguistic feedback and did not provide any recasts and elicitations. It was also found that learner-related issues seemed to be working within the limits of teaching experience in shaping the three teachers’ beliefs about providing OCF practices. Moreover, the novice teacher showed to resort to her own language learning in justifying her OCF practices. Implications of the findings are discussed and some suggestions are provided for further research.