The current paper intends to exploit the Many Facet Rasch Model to investigate and compare the impact of situations (items) and raters on test takers' performance on the Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) and Discourse Self-Assessment Tests (DSAT). In this study, the participants were 110 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at…

The present study explores the status of argumentative essay writing strategy use and identifies the problems a convenient sample of Iranian EFL learners face while writing argumentative essays in English. Adopting a complementary process-genre approach and a mixed-methods research design, the researcher designed a genre-specific argumentative…

Estimating the difficulty of reading tests is critical in second language education and assessment. This study was aimed at examining various text features that might influence the difficulty level of a high-stakes reading comprehension test and predict test takers' scores. To this end, the responses provided by 17,900 test takers on the reading…

In today's environment of growing class sizes due to the prevalence of online and e-learning systems, providing one-to-one instruction and feedback has become a challenging task for teachers. Anyhow, the dialectical integration of instruction and assessment into a seamless and dynamic activity can provide a continuous flow of assessment…

The current study focused mainly on the role of the linguistic complexity of IELTS writing Task 2. In other words, it investigated the differential effects of two interrelated linguistic complexities of writing Task 2 on the three levels of discourse representation and what IELTS candidates perceived through analyzing IELTS writing topics both at…

In spite of the existence of writing courses for postgraduate students in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) contexts, their academic writing proficiency remains low. Therefore, EFL students' academic experiences and expectations need to be explored to identify their needs. To this end, a dynamic narrative approach was adopted to examine the…

This study aims at comparing the effect of single- and dual-annotation modes, working memory (WM), and three tasks of different involvement loads (sentence writing, close deletion, and paragraph writing) on passive and active vocabulary development of proficient English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. While listening to an expository text,…

Listening has long been recognized as a challenging skill for teachers, students, and researchers working within the English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Moreover, up until the recent past, it was the least researched of the four language skills in second language acquisition studies. One of the issues…

This study investigated the effects of different text difficulty levels on Iranian EFL learners' foreign language reading motivation and reading comprehension. To fulfil this objective, 40 Iranian participants were selected among 50 students based on the results of Interchange Placement Test (Richards et al, Placement and Evaluation Package…

This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of choice theory-based instruction on Iranian EFL learners' vocabulary achievement. To fulfil the purpose of this study, 60 female advanced EFL learners were selected from among a total number of 90 learners through their performance on a piloted sample Cambridge ESOL Certificate of Advanced…

This study examined low-proficiency Iranian EFL students' affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement with oral corrective feedback (OCF) on interdental fricative errors: /?/and/ð/. The data were collected from 27 learners with favorable and unfavorable perceptions about OCF. After receiving OCF on 30 tested and 30 untested lexical items in…

Considering the vital role of comprehensible input, this study attempted to compare the effects of input with various difficulty levels on Iranian EFL learners' reading comprehension and reading motivation. To fulfil this objective, 54 Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners were selected from two intact classes (n = 27 each). The selected…

Collocations are one of the areas that create problems for EFL learners. Iranian EFL learners like other EFL learners encounter serious problems in producing collocations. The current study is an attempt to examine the Iranian EFL learners' ability to produce English collocations. It also attempts to identify the strategies that they usually adopt…

Following an emergentist approach, the authors examined the comprehension of four different types of restrictive relative clauses (direct object/oblique vs. subject/indirect object) with animate/inanimate referents by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, an Oxford placement test and two sets of comprehension tests within a week's interval were…

The notion of "textuality" encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether "cohesion" was a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text was a structural unit or not or even if there were semantic or structural relationships within a text.…