As international student enrollments surge in U.S. higher education, understanding their experiences is crucial for fostering an inclusive and successful environment. This study used a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to explore the challenges and coping strategies of international students during acculturation. Data were collected through…

This article offers a critical review of the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology English Proficiency Test (MSRT), a high-stakes exam required for postgraduate graduation, scholarships, and certain employment positions in Iran. Despite its widespread use, the design and implementation of the MSRT raise concerns about its validity and…

Despite the importance of academic reading in higher education, the current literature lacks a valid instrument comprising different components of academic reading at a graduate level. This article reports on the development of an academic reading instrument for (Iranian) MA students of applied linguistics. To this end, based on a thorough review…

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian…

Purpose: Although English for academic purposes (EAP) courses are vital components of engineering disciplines in the universities of Iran, studies investigating engineering students' English language needs are infrequent, and even more infrequent are studies comparing how the students of different engineering disciplines vary in their English…

The present study aims at exploring the relation of EFL learners' reflective thinking attitudes and language achievement (GPA). The association of the learners' reflective thinking styles with their educational levels as well as their gender, were also estimated. To this end, 196 students from universities of Gonabad and Mashhad, two cities in the…

This study was set to cross-validate a bilingual Persian-English version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) against the monolingual English version and compare Iranian EFL learners' performance on the two versions. Various bilingual versions of the VST have been developed based on the assumption that bilingual versions are not affected by the…

High stake tests are known to drive curricula and affect teachers and learners in numerous ways; what has come to be known as test washback. Thus far, almost all washback studies have focused on national or international language proficiency tests. There are little, if any, researches addressing the washback of high stake tests of English…

The study examines second language identities constructed in small stories around intercultural communication. It presents a detailed narrated-event and narrating-event analysis of small stories narrated by an Iranian user of English as a second language (ESL). The analysis suggests that small stories can become a site where second language…

Dynamic assessment (DA), having its theoretical base in Vygotskyan Sociocultural theory of mind, is a newly developed classroom assessment through which learners are helped to perform beyond their current ability. Drawing upon the theoretical aspect of DA, the present study explored the impact of DA on the development of speaking skills. To this…

It has been found that translation is an efficient means to teach/learn grammar, syntax, and lexis of a foreign language. Meanwhile, translation is good for beginners who do not still enjoy the critical level of proficiency in their target language for expression. This study was conducted to examine the teachers' and learners' perceptions of…

The objective of this study is to explore the probable relationship between Iranian students' socioeconomic status, general language learning outcome, and their beliefs about language learning. To this end, 350 postgraduate students, doing English for specific courses at Islamic Azad University of Neyshabur participated in this study. They were…

Research suggests that a host of cognitive, affective, and perceptual variables are at work when individuals go about the task of second or foreign language learning. Among these variables are learning styles that are habitual ways of perceiving, processing, and storing information. This study was conducted as a response to Isemonger and…

The study scrutinized the interaction between reading proficiency and strategic competence via reading comprehension test performance of Iranian EFL learners. The further concern was to scrutinize the extent to which strategic competence affected the participants' test performance. The participants were 506 postgraduate students who took a reading…

The study scrutinized the probable interaction between using cognitive test-taking strategies, reading proficiency, and reading comprehension test performance of Iranian postgraduate students, who studied English as a foreign language. The study also probed the extent to which the participants' test performance was related to the use of certain…