The paper aims at investigating the idea of a symbolic nature of sounds and its implications for in the acquisition of foreign language phonology. Firstly, it will present an overview of universal trends in phonetic symbolism, i.e. non-arbitrary representations of a phoneme by specific semantic criteria. Secondly, the results of a preliminary study on different manifestations of sound symbolism...

This study examined the effects of task complexity on written narrative production under different task complexity conditions by EFL learners at different proficiency levels. Task complexity was manipulated along Robinson’s (2001b) proposed task complexity dimension of Here-and-Now (simple) vs. There-and-Then (complex) in. Accordingly, three specific measures of the written narratives were targ...

The present corpus-based lexical study reports the development of a Pharmacy Academic Word List (PAWL); a list of the most frequent words from a corpus of 3,458,445 tokens made up of 800 most recent pharmacy texts including research articles, review articles, and short communications in four sub-disciplines of pharmacy. WordSmith (Scott, 2017) and AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2014) were used to sc...

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is reaching an up most position in the pedagogical field of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL). The present study was carried out to study the effect of using phonetic websites on Iranian EFL students’ pronunciation and knowledge of phonemic symbols. Participants of the study included 30 EFL female pre-intermediate students studyin...

This study investigates the effect of homogeneous and heterogeneous peer interaction on the development of Iranian EFL learners’ writing skill. Sixty female students of TEFL participated in the study. The participants were divided into two groups based on their English proficiency test scores. The homogeneous group consisted of 14 participants paired with partners with similar English proficien...

According to authors’ idea this paper presents a new general approach to the theoretic pedagogics and the pedagogical practice. As the substance authors use following terms: pedagogical system, pedagogical process, pedagogical technology. Pedagogical system describes the main bounds and relations, structure and organisation of an object. Pedagogical process describes, what takes place in the st...

This study investigated the quality of metacognition at its inter-individual level, i.e., socially-shared metacognition, across two collaborative writing tasks of different difficulty levels among a cohort of Iranian EFL learners.  Moreover, it examined the correlation between the individual and the social modes of metacognition in writing.  The analysis of think-aloud protocols of a number of ...

Improvement in the quality of teacher education is an issue of considerable concern to every country including Iran. The challenges that student-teachers face during their education can be highly influential in this regard. Consequently, the present study was an attempt to come up with a model for the factors challenging Iranian EFL preservice teachers using a grounded theory approach. For this...

The main purpose of the present quasi-experimental study was to investigate the effects of linear process versus genre-based approach on EFL learners’ written production. To this end, 40 learners of English at intermediate level were randomly selected as the participants of the study and assigned into two groups of experimental (process and genre) which received different types of instruction f...