The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on…

This study probed EFL learners' negotiation of meaning and negotiation strategy in two unfocused and two focused tasks using a counterbalanced design. Each of the focused/unfocused tasks included one opinion-exchange and decision-making task type, which resulted in four particular task conditions. To this end, 36 Iranian intermediate EFL learners…

The study reported in this article examined the impact of task type on the ways in which learners resolve grammatical language-related episodes (LREs) and whether the level of engagement affects subsequent language development. Data were collected over a six-week period. Thirty-two Iranian second language (L2) learners were paired up to complete a…

The development of speech-act theory has provided the hearers with a better understanding of what speakers intend to perform in the act of communication. One type of speech act is apologizing. When an action or utterance has resulted in an offense, the offender needs to apologize. In the present study, an attempt was made to compare the apology…

For Vygotsky, language is a cultural-psychological concept emerged from social interactions and is applied for higher cognitive functions such as thinking, meaning making, and knowledge construction. In this study, a sociocultural perspective was applied to analyze the language produced by 40 sophomore Iranian EFL learners during dialogic…

The current study aims at identifying particular ways through which social actors are represented in Summit Series ELT textbooks. It examines cultural load in the textbooks within critical discourse analysis framework, in this case van Leeuwen's framework. Particularly, the study attempts to explore if values, norms, and roles are…