The invisible hands of peer reviewers play a determining role in the eventual fate of submissions to international English-medium journals. This study builds on the assumption that non-native researchers and prospective academic authors may find the whole strive for publication, and more specifically, the tough review process, less threatening if they are aware of journal reviewers’ expectation...

following a thorough survey of the available literature and concentrating on the wax and wane of testing pragmatic competence so far, the present study firstly is an attempt to develop a comprehensive test of inter-language pragmatics mainly focusing on academic situations in the iranian context. secondly, the study aims to investigate the criteria required for the selection of speech acts of a...

abstract literature review indicates that an effective and good teacher has an important role in students' performances and their success. pivotal roles of teachers may affect students’ attitudes and motivations to language learning. improving the field of foreign language teaching and learning without improving the qualities of efl teachers seems impossible. this attempt, at first hand, r...

abstract   introduction: the aim of present study was the investigation of simple and multiple correlations of motivational strategies (self-efficacy, achievement goals and test anxiety) with english language academic performance.   methods: for this purpose, 296 pre university students (139 girls and 157 boys) were selected by clustery random sampling and motivational strategies and achievemen...

Following a thorough survey of the available literature and concentrating on the wax and wane of testing pragmatic competence so far, the present study firstly is an attempt to develop a comprehensive test of inter-language pragmatics mainly focusing on academic situations in the Iranian context. Secondly, the study aims to investigate the criteria required for the selection of speech acts of a...

The present study investigated how syllable structure differences between the first Language (L1) and the second language (L2) affect L2 consonant perception and production at syllable-initial and syllable-final positions. The participants were Mandarin-speaking college students who studied English as a second language. Monosyllabic English words were used in the perception test. Production was...

We present a study of Native Language Identification (NLI) using data from learners of Norwegian, a language not yet used for this task. NLI is the task of predicting a writer’s first language using only their writings in a learned language. We find that three feature types, function words, part-of-speech n-grams and a hybrid part-of-speech/function word mixture n-gram model are useful here. Ou...

In this paper we present the first application of Native Language Identification (NLI) to Arabic learner data. NLI, the task of predicting a writer’s first language from their writing in other languages has been mostly investigated with English data, but is now expanding to other languages. We use L2 texts from the newly released Arabic Learner Corpus and with a combination of three syntactic f...

We present the first application of Native Language Identification (NLI) to nonEnglish data. Motivated by theories of language transfer, NLI is the task of identifying a writer’s native language (L1) based on their writings in a second language (the L2). An NLI system was applied to Chinese learner texts using topicindependent syntactic models to assess their accuracy. We find that models using...