in the past couple of decades sociocultural theory of sla and its implications in efl contexts have attracted attentions of research circles worldwide and aroused some controversies. firth and wagner (1997) have questioned the principles of the cognitive view which gives importance to mental constructs in favor of sociocultural view which highlights social and contextual constructs. but if soci...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of podcasts as a learning and teaching tool on iranian efl learners’ motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. the study also investigated the learners’ perception towards listening to podcasts and examined whether the learners were likely to accept podcasts. out of fifty-five intermediate learners studying e...

the following question poped up: is there any relationship between iranian high school efl learners reading comprehension and listening comprehension? then the following null hypothesis (ho) was developed to the test the above, mentioned question. "there is no relationship between high school efl learners reading comprehension and listening comprehension. for nearly 16 weeks, the experimental g...

according to coates’s (2004, as cited in zhang, 2010) definition of "conversational dominance" (p.111), it refers to the phenomenon of a speaker dominating others in interaction. specifically, it means how a speaker makes use of certain strategies to get the floor and maintain the floor. thus, the amount of talk is the main measurement for the dominance of the conversation. whether a speaker do...

the purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the relation between efl teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and their success. moreover, the study was an analysis of the teacher age, gender and years of teaching experience, to examine the manner in which these factors relate to teacher self-efficacy as defined by bandura (1997) and teaching effectiveness as evaluated by their own student...

abstract pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. communicative action includes not only using speech acts (such as apologizing, complaining, complimenting, and requesting), but also engaging in different types of discourse and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity. the present study aimed to investigate the assessment of pragm...

the primary goal of the current project was to examine the effect of three different treatments, namely, models with explicit instruction, models with implicit instruction, and models alone on differences between the three groups of subjects in the use of the elements of argument structures in terms of toulmins (2003) model (i.e., claim, data, counterargument claim, counterargument data, rebutt...

the world wide web becomes very popular recently and plays an influential role in english learning. by burgeoning role of source-based writing as partial fulfillment of tefl courses and vast use of the internet, lack of empirical studies to explore these areas is obvious. this study aimed to explore the effect of the amount of familiarity with the web (internet literacy) on junior english stude...

abstract the present study deals with a comparison between reactive and pre-emptive focus-on-form in terms of application and efficiency. it was conducted in an intermediate english class in shahroud. 15 male learners participated in this research and their age ranged from 18 to 25. a course book, new interchange 3, and a complementary book were used. every session the learners gave lectures o...

the present study is an attempt to investigate the potential impact of inspirational quotes on improving english abstract vocabulary recall. to achieve this goal, a multiple choice language proficiency test of 60 items including vocabulary and grammar component was administered to a sample of 63 second-semester male and female students whose age ranged between 17 to 22 and they were studying en...