This study examines the effect of native "vs." non-native prosody instruction on developing interpreter trainees' speech comprehensibility in English as a foreign language (EFL) using a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design. Twenty-three groups of 28 interpreter trainees at a University in Iran (six different branches) took part in…

This study investigates the relationships among working memory (WM), syntactic parsing ability (SP), and L2 reading performance across varying proficiency levels. A cohort of 120 L1-Persian EFL learners was categorized into beginner, intermediate, and advanced proficiency groups based on their IELTS scores. Participants completed a reading span…

Although the effective role of instruction in developing L2 learners' pragmatic competence has been acknowledged in the literature, very few studies have investigated the effect of a specific language teaching method on the development of pragmatic competence. Thus, to address the existing gap, this study was conducted (1) to investigate the…

The present study explored the effect of task repetition with and without explicit instruction on EFL learners' (n = 26) explicit and implicit English regular past tense structure development. One group (REP) repeated the same task (n = 12) while another group (EI + REP) received explicit instruction between performances of the same task (n = 14).…

The present research aimed to investigate how field-dependent and field-independent learners perceived and processed information when they were engaged in an implicit foreign language learning task and to explore differences between them in this regard. The majority of studies in the pertinent literature have adopted quantitative methods to date.…

There have been plenty of research studies which have demonstrated the efficacy of focus on form (FonF) approach in language teaching. However, processing instruction as a kind of FonF approach has not been given due attention. As such, the present study is an attempt to shed more lights upon the effects of the processing instruction (PI) on EFL…

As language acquisition research supports the value of the interactive scaffolded environment and awareness-raising communicative tasks for the development of pragmatic knowledge, the present study attempted to investigate the effect of Collaborative Translation Task (CTT) on learning and retention of request speech act strategies. The main…

This mixed two-way experimental, cross-sectional study investigated fast-mapping (FM) of novel nouns and verbs in 63 Persian-speaking toddlers aged 30 months, including 31 late-talking (LT) and 32 typically developing (TD) matched with respect to age and maternal education. Toddlers were classified as LT if they had limited expressive vocabulary…

In the present cross-linguistic study two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of age and linguistic background on response tendencies of preschoolers toward forced-choice questions. A total of 163 2- to 5-year-old children, including 63 Persian speakers, 57 Kurdish speakers and 43 English speakers, were asked a set of…

Willingness to communicate (WTC) has recently been researched as a dynamic variable, with some investigations viewing it as a complex dynamic system (CDS). One important property associated with CDS is the notion of attractor states, which are characterized by stable patterns of behavior. The present study employed an idiodynamic method to monitor…

Recent findings in the field of pragmatics have revealed that pragmatic accuracy (knowledge) and pragmatic speed (processing ability) function as two distinct and non-parallel components of pragmatic competence. Anderson's adaptive control of thought--rational (ACT-R) model, which emphasises the development of skill through repeated practice,…

Analysing the effects of second language (L2) production on L2 learners' interlanguage (IL) modifications is the main scope of this paper. For this purpose, English L2 learners' output production and IL modifications in performing two different task types, one-way and two-way tasks, are compared. The one-way task used in this study was a story…

This study investigates the combined effects of task-based careful online planning and the storyline structure of a task on second language performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency). Sixty intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 15). Participants were asked to perform two tasks with different degrees of storyline…

The purpose of the study reported in this article was twofold: First, to see whether guided careful online planning assists intermediate learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in accurate oral production of English articles ("an/a" and "the"); and, second, to see whether guided careful online planning has any effects…

This article reports on a study that was primarily aimed at investigating the effects of simultaneous use of careful online planning and task repetition on accuracy, complexity, and fluency in the oral production of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The effects of four planning and task repetition conditions (i.e. careful online…