The present study aimed to examine the effect of activity engagement, age, language proficiency, and time elapse on children's response accuracy to adult's questions. A total of 70, 3- to 6-year-old children participated in the study, engaging in a story-telling activity, a proficiency test, and two interviews. Additionally, 57 of these children…

An Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) may be evaluated either during the interview procedure (direct-method) or from a tape-made oral interaction (semi-direct method). Such variety in methods of assessment can influence test takers' scores extensively. However, it is not conclusive whether such differences are due to test format or something else.…

Compensation Strategies (CpSs) are strategies which a language user employs in order to achieve his intended meaning when precise linguistic forms are for some reasons not available at that point of communication. Different factors may influence the use of CpSs, among which the level of language proficiency is one of the most important ones. The…

Unlike linguistic fossilization, pragmatic fossilization has received scant attention in fossilization research. To bridge this gap, the present study adopted a typical-error method of fossilization research to identify the most frequent errors in pragmatic routines committed by Persian-speaking learners of L2 English and explore the sources of…

The present study investigates the impact of self-assessment (SA) training applied as a writing task and a dynamic assessment on English language learners' writing ability and explores the changes in their language proficiency level. This quasi-experimental research on two homogenised essay writing classes of 60 Iranian university students at…

Social networking applications such as WhatsApp have been extensively used for language research; however, they have rarely been applied for language assessment purposes. To explore the efficiency of WhatsApp for assessment purposes, 30 Iranian English learners doing self- and peer-assessments on WhatsApp are studied. The changes and the reasons…

Exploring opportunities by which learners can internalize new knowledge and consolidate existing knowledge has long been a point of interest in English as a foreign language research. This study investigated how meta-talk opportunities on discourse markers created by four task types including text reconstruction, dictogloss, translation and jigsaw…

Strategy-deficient language learners struggle to develop their language proficiency through limiting and inappropriate strategies. This study aims at exploring experienced teachers' perceptions of strategy deficiency syndrome among EFL learners. To this end, the perspectives of a purposive sample of experienced teachers teaching in private…

The current study was conducted to investigate the effect of task-based and topic-based speaking activities on improving the speaking ability among Iranian EFL learners. The study used quasi-experimental design. The subjects consisted of 60 male and female students who were selected from among 90 EFL learners by applying the nelson proficiency…

Speaking is a crucial form of communication in language learning settings. Through speaking skill, ESL/EFL language learners can communicate and convey information. Pictorial aids have been deployed as efficacious mediatory tools in teaching various disciplines such as language teaching. Still, to the best of the researchers' knowledge, a direct…

General English (L2) proficiency and reading strategies are believed to be highly effective in successful reading performance. However, available studies rarely investigated the combined effects of these two variables on successful reading. To fill this gap, 78 university students were divided into four groups of different degrees of these two…

The present study aimed to examine whether agent-based instruction would privilege English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners any better than mainstream approaches (e.g. analogical reasoning, guessing from context, image formation, semantic analysis, etc.) when it comes to the teaching of English idioms. It also sought to explore whether…

There is still a preference for native speaker teachers in the language teaching profession, which is supposed to influence the self-perceptions of native and nonnative teachers. However, the status of English as a globalized language is changing the legitimacy of native/nonnative teacher dichotomy. This study sought to investigate native and…

This study explored the impact of listening strategy training conducted within two strategy interventions on pre-intermediate and intermediate EFL learners' comprehension of unidirectional listening. Participants were divided into two experimental groups (n = 156) and a comparison group (n = 50). Each experimental group was trained in eight…

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…