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…

Anaphoric expressions are among the most frequent language forms which depend on context for their resolution. Among efforts made in theorizing referential choice, distance approaches take into account how accessibility/continuity is reflected by choice of referring expressions. The thing is that individual's choices are made under major and minor…

Drawing upon Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory (SCT), this study aimed at investigating the effect of two writing modes, namely, peer-mediated/collaborative vs. individual writing on measures of fluency, accuracy, and complexity of female EFL learners' writing. Based on an in-house placement test and the First Certificate in English writing paper, a…

In the present study we investigated the effect of test format on oral performance in terms of test scores and discourse features (accuracy, fluency, and complexity). Moreover, we explored how the scores obtained on different test formats relate to such features. To this end, 23 Iranian EFL learners participated in three test formats of monologue,…

This article reports on a study that set out to investigate how Iranian EFL learners respond to compliments in English. The data were collected using a discourse completion task (DCT) consisting of a variety of situations that required the participants, 26 EFL learners (13 males and 13 females) to respond to compliments directed at them. The data…

To determine the issue of whether there were any significant differences between the groups including Iran ISI, Iran non- ISI, and native authors in binary comparisons as for employing interactional markers, the present study was conducted. To collect the data, 90 "method sections" of English medical research articles within Iranian ISI,…

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…

This study was an attempt to investigate the functional role of textual and interpersonal metadiscourse markers in English and Persian Economic news reports. To this end, 10 news articles, 5 in each language, were randomly selected from the Economic sections of the leading newspapers published in 2013-2014 in Iran and the United States. Based on…

The analysis of raters' comments on pragmatic assessment of L2 learners is among new and understudied concepts in second language studies. To shed light on this issue, the present investigation targeted important variables such as raters' criteria and rating patterns by analyzing the interlanguage pragmatic assessment process of the Iranian…

The current study set out to compare the effect of traditional and non-traditional instructional treatments; i.e. explicit, implicit, task-based and no-instruction approaches on students' abilities to learn how to write classified ads. 72 junior students who have all taken a course in Reading Journalistic Texts at the Payame-Noor University…

The authors report on a study aimed at exploring the role of a teacher education program (TEP) rested upon the tenets of critical pedagogy in influencing teachers' cognitions and practices concerning first-language (L1) use in second-language (L2) classrooms. Participants were 10 Iranian English as a foreign language teachers, whose cognitions…

The purpose of this study was two-fold: first, it aimed at examining the impact of expository text topics on the listening comprehension of L2 learners; second, it aimed to investigate the impact of macro, micro, and macro-micro discourse markers on the listening comprehension of expository texts by L2 learners. The participants (N =105) were male…

Learning a foreign language requires students to acquire both grammatical knowledge and socio-pragmatic rules of a language. Pragmatic competence as one of the most difficult aspects of language provides several challenges to L2 learners in the process of learning a foreign language. To overcome this problem, EFL teachers should find the most…

Many studies have shed light on rater criteria for assessing the performance of language skills (e.g., Eckes, 2005). However, the interface between rater assessment and interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has remained largely unnoticed. To address this interface, this study explored the ratings native (NES) and nonnative English speaking (NNES)…

This paper reports a textual analysis of letters written by 21 male and 21 female participants in Persian. Each writer wrote two letters, one to a dating service and another one to a hypothetical person chosen and introduced by the center. Therefore, a total of 84 letters were collected from the participants. Schema theory was used to find the…