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Learning styles are assumed to be consistent with personality characteristics of individuals (Brown, 2003 Kolb, 1984). Teachers’ teaching efficacy (Bandura, 1997, 1977, 1995 Wheatley, 2001) has also been found to be important in educational reform. However, the impacts of gender and personality on language teachers' teaching efficacy and teaching activities preferences have not been adequately explored. This study was an attempt to investigate the impacts of personality and gender on Iranian English teachers' teaching activities preferences and their teaching efficacy. To accomplish this, 280 male and female English language teachers participated in the study. Myers -Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), teaching efficacy, and teaching activities preference questionnaires were used. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics and Two ANOVA tests were used .The results of the study showed that ESTJ (extroverted, sensing, thinking, and judging) and ISTJ (introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging) were predominant personality types among Iranian EFL teachers. Results also indicated that both male and female teachers with different personality types have the same sense of teaching efficacy. It was also revealed that gender and personality influence teachers' teaching activities preferences.

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The present article, first, examines the relationship between EFL university students' critical thinking (CT) and emotional intelligence (EI). Second, the roles of gender and age as moderating factors in the relationship between students' CT and EI are investigated. Third, the relationships between students' age and gender with their EI are studied. To attain the goals of the research, 86 EFL students completed the "Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal" (Form A) and the "Bar-On's EQ-i test". The findings of the study indicated that there was a significant relationship between EFL learners' CT and their EI. Among the components of EI, flexibility and social responsibility were found to have the highest correlations with CT and were also shown to be positive predictors of CT. The results also revealed that age and gender did not moderate the relationship between CT and EI. Furthermore, it was found that neither age nor gender played any significant roles in learners' level of EQ.

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Socioculturally oriented developmental Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) studies have just recently drawn the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers' attention, and the role of concepts like peer scaffolding, and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in ILP development are among rich areas in need of attention. The present study investigates the significance of the effect of expert peers' ZPD-wise, co-equal peers' ZPD-insensitive and teacher fronted ZPD-insensitive scaffolding on EFL learners' pragmatic development. The number of students who participated in this study was 85 of which 27 were male and the rest were female. They were organized into three experimental and one control groups. The subjects in the experimental groups were given either explicit ZPD-wise or implicit ZPD-
wise scaffolding by the expert peers, or ZPD-insensitive scaffolding by their co-equals, while the subjects of the control group received ZPD-insensitive teacher scaffolding. The study reveals that the expert peers' ZPD-wise explicit and implicit scaffolding are more effective than the other two intervention types for the ILP development, however, the co-equals' scaffolding proved to be the third effective procedure for the subjects' co-construction of ZPD and ILP development. An implication of the study is that different forms of peer scaffolding are relatively effective for the EFL learners' ILP development.
 

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This study has as its main concern focusing on the assorted ways Iranian language learners view their language educational system and the impact of these views on their success in learning a foreign language.  For the qualitative aim of this study, metaphors being stated by the learners were collected by some unfinished sentences which learners were required to complete to demonstrate their beliefs about their teachers, the teaching process and how they view themselves as learners. Then, the analysis and categorization of these metaphors based on Martinez (2001) taxonomy of metaphors revealed the kinds of learning principles which seem to be more favourable to learners than others. Results of the analysis of the metaphors showed that the public school learners mostly attribute their level of failure in language learning to the ‘behaviouristic’ methods in their classes while the private school learners attribute their apparent success to the ‘cognitive’ style of learning. Finally, the results were discussed in the context of second language acquisition. 

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This study investigated the probable relationship between Iranian EFL learners' language proficiency and intercultural sensitivity. It also looked into the feasibility of enhancing their intercultural sensitivity through actual classroom training. To this end, 36 male and female college seniors were randomly selected from two classes after being homogenized. The participants were required, initially, to complete an Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS).They, then, attended a half-a-semester-long intercultural sensitivity training course and completed the same scale once again at the end of the semester. The data obtained through pre-test and post-test were subjected to some statistical techniques such as the Wilcoxon Signed-rank test and the Chi-square test. The results of data analysis indicated that intercultural sensitivity training promoted Iranian EFL students’ intercultural sensitivity level significantly and that there exists a statistically significant relationship between students’ language proficiency and intercultural sensitivity. This study in turn confirms the possibility of teaching intercultural sensitivity and is hoped, if generalized nationwide, to enrich foreign language teaching. It can also encourage ELT practitioners to give due weight to intercultural competence as a crucial component of modern language education.  

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This study focuses on the use of communication strategies in teacher talk. While previous studies have presented communication strategies largely from an outside researcher's perspective, the aim in this paper is to move the focus to that of classroom contexts, especially EFL teaching contexts. Furthermore, it is argued that communication strategies should also be studied in the situated talk of the classroom teacher, and not just second language learners. Showing some examples from our database, we underscore the crucial role these devices play in classroom interaction. The participants were five non-native Iranian teachers. The data consisted of a total of fifteen recordings, made up of three lessons for each teacher. The detailed examination of the database revealed that the teachers in the study made frequent use of different types of communication strategy in their talk with students and these strategies were potentially an important aspect of teacher talk. The most important implications of this finding are that, first, an extended concept of communication strategies that moves beyond learners to include teachers' communication strategies should be taken into account and, second, developing these strategies are necessary for effective L2 communicative language use.    

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In recent years the notion of teachers' professional development has featured regularly in the field of second language teaching and received great attention as a result of concerns for teacher education, particularly factors affecting teacher's principled pragmatism in the postmethod era. One such factor functioning as the focus of this study is teacher efficacy. Using Dellinger, Bobbett, Olivier, and Ellett's (2008) Teachers’ Efficacy Beliefs System-Self Form (TEBS-Self) (consisting of the six sub-scales of communication/clarification, management/climate, accommodating individual differences, motivation of students, managing learning routines, and higher order thinking skills), this study investigated the relationship between EFL teachers' expectation of their efficacy and the three teacher variables of gender, years of experience in EFL teaching, and relatedness of their education to ELT. As many as 59 EFL teachers were administered the TEBS-Self. Results showed that the three selected teacher characteristics did not affect teachers' evaluation of their efficacy. The findings imply that teachers need reflective teaching practice to develop a good understanding of their efficacy.

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The present study examines the impact of focused tasks on the development of Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. To this end, we compared the effectiveness of the dictogloss (DIG) as an output-based task and the consciousness raising (CR) as an input-based task in teaching English requestive downgraders. Prior to the experiment, 147 Iranian EFL learners participated in the study to develop the instruments. Also, 43 American native English speakers provided the baseline data for the construction of the recognition test and the instructional treatment.  We matched 60 Iranian EFL learners in two groups based on their scores on the Oxford Placement Test (2004). The groups were then randomly assigned to instructional conditions namely, the DIG and CR tasks. The instructional treatment continued for 8 sessions. The results revealed that neither the effects of instructional treatment nor the effects of time were significant between the groups on pragmatic measures. The findings also demonstrated that participants in both tasks preformed significantly better in the immediate and delayed posttests than in the pretest. Similarly, participants in both groups maintained the positive effects of the treatment in the delayed posttest on the production and perception measures. For the recognition measure, however, the participants in the DIG condition significantly fell to a lower level in the delayed posttest.

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Nowadays, teachers are receiving more attention in the studies done in mainstream education since it is believed that they play the most important role in educational settings, and therefore their different aspects, such as teacher efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence, have received great attention. Moreover, demographic characteristics of teachers are more examined these days since they are thought to play major roles in teachers’ performance in the classroom. Despite great attention to different aspects of teachers and their demographics in mainstream education, such studies are rare in the English Language Teaching field. This study was therefore designed to explore possible relationships among English language teachers’ sense of efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence on the one hand, and to document probable differences among them with respect to teachers’ gender, degree, and experience on the other hand. To this end, four different instruments, one for each of the variables, were administered among 264 Iranian English language teachers. The findings showed significant even though not high correlations among some of the components of teacher efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence, as well as significant differences among some the components of these variables with respect to teachers’ gender, degree, and experience. The results of this study can help teacher educators in dealing with different teachers since they will know about the variations among teachers’ performances in the classroom and the problems any teacher with certain characteristics may have.  

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Uptake is believed to be an indication of the effectiveness of focus on form practices and a possible facilitator for language acquisition. All the accounts of uptake in the literature have been based on the observational data derived from the audio-recordings of the meaning-focused classes. The present study is a novel attempt to account for instances of uptake in 18 hours of meaning-focused instruction in an intact EFL class through an elicitation instrument called uptake sheet. To this end, all instances of teacher- and learner-initiated preemptive Focus on Form Episodes (FFES) and uptake moves following them were identified and coded in the audio-recorded data. Then, the researchers cross-checked the audio-data findings with the ones in the uptake sheets. Compared to the oral uptake moves captured through the audio-data, the analyses revealed a significantly higher frequency of uptake moves in the uptake sheets following teacher-initiated FFEs, but a lower frequency of uptake moves was found in the case of learner-initiated FFEs. The findings would, hopefully, further clarify our conception of the nature and rate of uptake and would pave the way for further research on exploring multiple instances of uptake not accounted for so far in the literature.

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This study investigated the main sources of Iranian students' demotivation in L2 learning and examined demotivation in relation to students' gender and level of education. To find the major demotivating factors, a questionnaire consisting of 32 items was developed and completed by 327 students. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to explore the factorial structure of the questionnaire. Based on the results, five categories of demotivating factors were identified: Learning Contents, Materials, and Facilities, Attitude towards English Speaking Community, The Teacher, Experience of Failure, and Attitude towards Second Language Learning. To examine demotivating factors in relation to students' gender and educational level, two one-way analyses of variance were run. The results indicated significant differences between male and female students in terms of three demotivating factors. Significant differences were observed between students at different levels of education with regard to the three demotivating factors. Finally, a multivariate analysis of variance was performed to examine demotivating factors in relation to students' gender and educational level. Significant differences were found between male and female students across educational levels in terms of all demotivating factors except one. 

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Considering the future of the application of a dual explicit-implicit learning system to the L2 theory and research, Ellis (2006) argues that further investigation of the distinction is useful for modeling, understanding, and measuring second language proficiency. This study explored the differential accessibility of EFL learners' explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge to their language proficiency. The participants were 160 EFL graduate and undergraduate students at Shahrekord University (Iran). A test battery including a timed grammaticality judgment test (GJT), an untimed GJT, and a TOEFL was used to gather the data. A set of correlation coefficients was computed to explore the contributions of implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge to the TOEFL and its sub-components. The results showed that there was no statistically significant correlation between the EFL learners' implicit grammatical knowledge and their TOEFL (sub-components) scores, but there was a strong relationship between the EFL learners' explicit grammatical knowledge and their general proficiency. A medium relationship also existed between the explicit knowledge and the TOEFL sub-components. Then, a Standard Multiple Regression demonstrated that explicit knowledge better predicted the EFL learners' general L2 proficiency. The results suggest that learning explicit grammatical knowledge is necessary in EFL contexts and needs much more consideration when the primary focus is on the cognitive academic language proficiency or skills.

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This study explored EFL learners’ pragmalinguistic awareness in processing implicit pragmatic input and the extent to which their awareness of the target features was related to motivation and proficiency. It was carried out in an EFL context to explore the roles of these two variables, particularly intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, in noticing bi-clausal request forms in implicit pragmatic input. The participants in this research were 121 advanced EFL learners from a language center, participating as members of intact classes. All participants took a proficiency test and completed a motivation questionnaire in order to explore the factorial structure of motivation. Then, out of them, 35 learners were randomly selected to form the treatment group. They then took part in a noticing-the-gap activity as a treatment task. The degree of learners' awareness of the target pragmalingustic features was assessed through a respective awareness questionnaire administrated immediately after the treatment. However, the current study shows that EFL students are rather extrinsically motivated and instrumentally oriented to notice pragmalinguistic features, which is incompatible with what Takahashi reported on students’ intrinsic orientation to notice pragmaliguistics in the Japanese EFL context. This suggests that learners in different contexts have different motivational dispositions to pragmalinguistic awareness.

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The current study tries to investigate the particular role familiarity with the genre of the text plays in EFL learners’ performance on two types of tests, i.e. cloze test and C-test. It also attempts to determine whether C-test is a measure of language proficiency like cloze test. The participants of the study were fifty-one intermediate undergraduate students majoring in English Literature at the University of Isfahan. In two sessions, the participants took a battery of measures (a) two newly developed cloze tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres, and (b) two newly developed C-tests of familiar (literary) and unfamiliar (political) genres. The results of data analysis revealed that familiarity with genre has a significant impact on the performance of EFL learners on both cloze test and C-test. The results further disclosed that there is a significant correlation between cloze test, as a measure of language proficiency, and C-test with the same genre. 

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This study was designed to assess the relative contributions of vocabulary and syntactic knowledge as predictors of reading comprehension performance. It also sought to investigate the interrelationship between syntactic and word knowledge and reading comprehension performance. Participants included 159 male freshman and sophomore Iranian high school students. Data were collected through the reading section of a retired version of Preliminary English Test (2004), Vocabulary Levels Test, Word Associates Test, and Syntactic Knowledge Test. The results revealed that both grammar and vocabulary scores correlated positively with reading comprehension scores. Also, vocabulary correlated significantly with reading comprehension but not as strongly as syntactic knowledge did. Our analysis revealed that syntax explains a larger portion of the reading variance. To examine whether depth / breadth of vocabulary knowledge or syntax may have more predictive power in reading comprehension performance, multiple-regression analysis was conducted. Beta values indicated that grammar made statistically significant contribution to reading comprehension, although other variables explained the variance on the reading test. The results offer new insights into the significant mediating influence that learner’s knowledge of grammar may have in reading comprehension at low intermediate level.  

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Metaphors and images, as part of the learners' belief systems, seem to play a large part in language learning (Cortazzi & Jin, 1999). So, awareness of them can be of substantial value to teachers in dealing with language learning problems. Aiming to contribute to this awareness, this study sought to explore the images/metaphors English language learners hold about grammar learning. To elicit learners' images, a questionnaire was delivered to 350 adult English learners, including both males and females, with at least one year of serious language learning experience. It demanded the respondents to provide one or more images about learning grammar of English as a foreign language. One hundred and thirty-nine completed forms were content-analyzed and specific metaphors were identified and grouped under descriptive rubrics. Next, the specific images were examined and general and conceptually oriented categories were identified. The results of the content-analysis and categorization are reported and discussed in terms of their implications for language teaching practice.

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This pseudo-longitudinal study adopted typical-error and corrective feedback approaches to investigating interlanguage fossilization. The errors in the argumentative essays of 76 Iranian EFL learners within and across three proficiency levels were identified and classified using the model proposed by Gass and Selinker (1994). The learners were first provided with implicit and then explicit feedback to see if the two feedback types would improve written production, and if there were errors that persisted. The results indicated that word choice, plural, word form and article “the” were the most frequent types of errors, with word choice topping the list. The results also showed that, although providing learners with feedback could lead to a reduction in errors, explicit feedback was a more effective strategy. However, the t-test results demonstrated that the short-term impact of feedback could not be sustained over time, a finding congruent with those of Truscott (2007) who questioned the efficacy of error correction. Moreover, the findings revealed that the error categories of pronoun, word order, passive and possessive were likely candidates of fossilization because, although for all the other error types implicit feedback could be beneficial, these showed resistance to correction and needed explicit feedback to be eliminated.

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The main purpose of this study was to construct and validate a Computerized version of Dynamic Assessment (C-DA) and examine its effectiveness in enhancing reading comprehension. Feasibility and concern for psychometric properties of testing are issues that have limited the use of DA approaches. In this study, C-DA is offered as a solution for overcoming such limitations. To this end, a software package named Computerized Dynamic Reading Test (CDRT) was developed. The software is capable of providing test takers with strategy-based hints. For each test taker, two scores are assigned by the software a non-dynamic score which is based on test takers' first try of each item and a dynamic score which is based on the average hints they have employed. One hundred and four university students took the test. The findings of the study indicated that while observing the psychometric standards of testing namely, reliability and validity, C-DA was useful both in improving students' reading comprehension ability and in obtaining information about their potentiality for learning which goes beyond and over the initial performance level. While some test takers made the best use of the hints and could enhance their comprehension of the text, others could not use them to their advantage. The Information obtained from DA enables teachers to provide students with more individualized and consequently more effective instruction. 

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This study explores the relationship between metacognitive awareness and 2 aspects of vocabulary knowledge (i.e., declarative versus skill) in “more explicit” and “less explicit” language learning groups. Also, it investigates whether declarative aspect, operationalized in vocabulary size, and skill aspect, operationalized in the productive use of vocabulary, differ in the more explicit and less explicit language learning groups.  To these ends, 80 Iranian EFL learners, majoring in English Translation at Shahrekord and Esfahan Payam-e-Noor Universities were selected through Oxford Placement Test. Schraw’s (1994) Metacognitive Awareness Test was used to measure the participants’ degree of the explicit knowledge Nation’s (1990) Vocabulary Levels Test and Laufer and Nation’s (1999) Productive Vocabulary Levels Test were also used to measure their skill and declarative knowledge, respectively. Correlational statistics indicated a significant and positive correlation between metacognitive awareness and declarative knowledge, but a significant and negative correlation between metacognitive awareness and skill aspect of vocabulary.  Moreover, t tests indicated that the more explicit group was better in the declarative aspect whereas the less explicit one was better in the skill aspect of vocabulary knowledge. The findings shed light on the cognitive dimension of vocabulary learning.

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Although a great deal of research has been done to probe the effects of task complexity variables on the specific features of L2 learners’ output along the resource-directing dimension of the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2001a, 2003, 2005), only a few studies (e.g. Gilabert, 2007 Robinson, 2001a, 2001b Yuan & Ellis, 2003) have explored the effects of the resource-dispersing variables of task complexity on L2 output. Neither is there a rich literature on the effects of mutual interaction of these variables and task condition variables on the output. In addition, few studies have directly involved learners in oral tasks on the contrary, most of the previous studies have focused on written tasks and the oral production resulting from the performances of those tasks. This study investigated the effects of resource-dispersing variables and task condition variables on the complexity of L2 output. To this end, Preliminary English Test (PET) and an interview were administered to 20 EFL learners. After ranking the scores from the highest to the lowest, two expert/expert pairs and two novice/novice pairs were chosen to perform four tasks. The tasks were sequenced from the least to the most complex and the pairs were required to perform each task at a session, one pair after another. Their performances were tape-recorded and transcribed, and the data were subjected to statistical analysis. The results of the study indicated that, no matter whether the pairs were novices or experts, their output became more and more complex as the tasks increased in complexity. This is incompatible with the claim made by the Cognition Hypothesis that task complexity along  the resource dispersing variables does not lead to the complexity of the output (Robinson, 2001a, 2005).