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Metaphor shapes our language as well as our thoughts by grounding the concepts related to our body within an experiential framework in which we can accommodate abstract concepts. Being aware of their underlying structure and mastering them are believed to be integral in developing metaphoric competence and communicative competence in a second language. Body-related metaphors are among the prevalent, yet under-researched metaphors of Persian that can pose substantial challenges for foreign learners of Persian. This study explores the body-related metaphor constructions utilizing Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptualizations in Persian language that can be problematic for learners of Persian. It was found that the Persian body metaphors are relatively rich and pervasive. In many cases, Persian speakers tend to use different metaphors as a kind of hyperbole to show the repetition and/or significance of a phenomenon or concept (both negatively and positively). It was also suggested that the primary function of metaphors in Persian could be explained based on the narrowing and expanding of meaning. The findings suggested that while systematicity is universal, there are also differences among the metaphor structures cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. The results could also provide another evidence for cognitivists’ claim that the conceptual system by which we understand and communicate (about/with) the world around us is mostly metaphorical. Finally, the significance and implications of studies of this nature for the learning and teaching of Persian as a second/foreign language were discussed.

This study was designed to highlight the potential effects of different types of Explicit Syntactic Markers (ESMs) on the sentence comprehension of EFL learners of different age-range and proficiency levels. Consequently, two hundred and forty beginners, intermediate, and advanced Iranian EFL learners were selectedfrom an initial pool of six hundred and sixty learners. They were selected based on their McMillan Placement Test (MPT) performance. Subsequently, they were categorized into two age groups teenagers and adults. An online software application (Com-Chron) was utilized to provide learners with a set of ESM and non-ESM English sentences on the screen to measure the accurate comprehension and the elapsed time needed for the perception of the presented sentences. Data analyses revealed that participants had a significantly superior performance for comprehending the ESM items (though they were longer sentences than non-ESM items). Furthermore, it was revealed that proficiency level, unlike age, caused a statistically significant difference in comprehending the ESM sentences. It was also concluded that different types of explicit syntactic markers imposed different degrees of comprehension difficulty both in terms of accuracy and the needed time for the participants’ comprehension; sentences with punctuation marks and conjunctions were the easiest for the participants, while those including determiners and link breaks were the most challenging. Results also indicated that all the ESMs (except for the link breaks) can significantly account for English sentence comprehension and can be assumed as comprehension predictors to various degrees .

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 were 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 that theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e. the fifty five 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 a positivistic thinking.

In recent years, the personal characteristics and attitudes of teachers have attracted the attention of various scholars. The teacher’s immunity level is one of the newly proposed concepts in this area. The present study aimed at exploring the difference between the immunity level of the Iranian EFL teachers at language centers and public schools. In order to achieve this objective, one hundred EFL teachers teaching in public schools (N = 50) and language centers (N = 50), in Isfahan, were selected through convenience sampling to participate in this study. Then, the Teachers’ Immunity Level questionnaire was administered to them, and they were interviewed as well.  The obtained results revealed that teachers working in public schools have higher levels of immunity compared to the ones working in language centers. This finding can have some implications for the decision-makers in the Iranian Ministry of Education to provide adequate amenities to improve teachers’ immunity in language centers.

The present study strived to determine the degree to which collaborative tasks and EFL learners’ gender affected their flow experiences. To this end, first, the researchers selected 56 intermediate-level EFL learners in two intact classrooms at a private language institute in Urmia (Iran) as the participants. Second, they randomly assigned the classes to an experimental group and a control group. Third, they used a flow state questionnaire to determine the participants’ flow experiences prior to the onset of the study. Fourth, they provided the experimental group with collaborative language learning treatment during 12 sessions. Nonetheless, they deprived the control group of this treatment. Finally, they administered the flow state questionnaire to the groups anew to appraise the efficacy of collaborative tasks for augmenting the participants’ flow experiences. The results indicated that the above-mentioned tasks had an advantageous impact on the EFL learners’ flow state of mind. Furthermore, based on the results, female learners’ flow experiences were more positively affected by the collaborative tasks in comparison with the male learners’ flow experiences. The obtained results may empower the teacher educators, syllabus designers, and researchers to take account of the flow state of mind during the process of language acquisition.

Translation quality assessment with its focus on the formulation of a comprehensive model for translation evaluation has gained a growing interest in the field of translation studies. However, little attention has been paid to the use of linguistic theories in the evaluative judgment of a translation. The aim of this study was to apply a particular kind of linguistic analysis based on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as a framework for the translation quality assessment of a novel. Meanwhile, it aimed to identify the kinds of overt errors and the used translation strategies in English to Persian. To this end, thirty pages of The Sound and The Fury by Faulkner (1329) and its translation by Bahman Sholevar (2003) were selected and the mismatches across the three metafunctions of ideational, interpersonal, and thematic meanings were identified based on SFL. The comparison of the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) revealed that the ideational meaning had the greatest number of errors as produced by the translator. Moreover, omission constituted the largest kind of overt translation error. Thus, the translator mostly used reduction strategies and text expansion strategies in translating the ST. The results showed that SFL can successfully be applied to evaluate the correct translation of the three metafunctions of language. This study has important implications for syllabus designers of translation studies, translation teachers, and literary translators.    

Dictation is a traditional technique for both teaching and testing overall language ability and listening comprehension. In a dictation, a passage is read aloud by the teacher and examinees write down what they hear. Due to the peculiar form of dictations, psychometric analysis of dictations is challenging. In a dictation, there is no clear boundary between the items and every word in the text is potentially an item. This makes the analysis of dictations with classical and modern test theories rather difficult. In this study, we suggest a procedure to make dictations analyzable with psychometric models. Our strategy entailed using several independent short passages instead of a single long passage. The number of mistakes in each passage was counted and entered into the analysis. Rasch model analysis was then applied to the passage scores (mistakes). Our findings showed that dictations fit the Rasch model very well and it is possible to measure examinees’ ability on an interval scale using dictations.

Flipped classroom is a learning model where assignments are shifted, and learning happens outside of educational settings. This modern concept fundamentally refers to lesson input being conducted at home by the learner for sharing and applying knowledge. FL approaches have received considerable focus in recently with the power to encourage involvement and cooperative learning. The FC is a technique that flips the conventional education setting. The FC is accordingly appropriate for online or mixed learning. In this research, the effects of FLA on autonomy and EFL skill-learning of EFL learners were examined. The research questions were pertinent to the basic outcomes of the implementation of FC. The results demonstrated that those getting benefit of FC approaches more enthusiastically perused using them compared to those who had not employed them before. The research outcomes indicated contribution of FL on autonomy and EFL skill-learning of the EFL participants in the experiment group. 

Early-career language teachers, who are struggling with transitory stages of identity development from students to teachers, can experience an array of negative emotions known as identity tensions. Coping strategies are used by resilient teachers to overcome these tensions. However, the nature and dynamics of such coping strategies employed by EFL teachers are still under-researched in the Iranian context. In order to address this gap, the present exploratory mixed-methods study probed the coping strategies Iranian EFL teachers most frequently use by first interviewing 16 teachers and, subsequently, administrating a developed questionnaire to a cohort of 150 participants. Thematic analysis and between-groups analyses of t-tests and ANOVAs were used for the qualitative and quantitative phases of the study respectively. The results of both phases revealed that Iranian EFL teachers tend to use active coping strategies significantly more often than passive ones. Also, it was shown that female teachers as well as more experienced teachers above the average age of 28 use more active strategies than their younger colleagues. However, type of training did not seem to play a significant role in their choices, which implies a need for a more systematic integration of coping strategy instruction in training programs. The findings of this study can help English teacher trainers, supervisors, and novice teachers form a deeper insight of coping strategies to deal with identity tensions.

A close look at the education system reveals that too much attention is attached to text while visuals, such as pictures and cartoons, are often deemed as “decoration”, or are not incorporated in the textbooks at all. Visual texts constitute a part of daily communication, which can potentially bear many layers of meaning. Such a complexity involved in visuals turns them into an ideal resource for not only L2 learning but also the improvement of intercultural communicative competence (ICC), along with cultural awareness. The status of cultural elements and representation of culture in English instruction has proved to be a tricky issue. This is mainly because of the diverse range of contexts where English is used on an international scale globally. Given the integral relationship between language and culture, it is essential to teach cultural elements in L2 classes, in particular, the representation of cultural values and elements as an integral part of the L2 curriculum of English language teaching (ELT). Furthermore, from a critical linguistics viewpoint, language textbooks should be viewed as social and cultural vehicles. Therefore, the incorporation of cultural symbols and raising cultural awareness are considered essential issues in ELT textbooks, particularly in the context of English as a foreign language (EFL). Furthermore, multiple approaches to the analysis of textbooks and cultural contents have been adopted by different researchers. Here, the present study is based on the core principles of semiotic analysis which implies that texts, pictures, and other modes of communication can be used as potential semiotic resources. This review study can yield important theoretical and pedagogical implications for researchers, L2 instructors, and the developers of ELT textbooks to take the images into account to represent culture in the textbook.

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.