This study examines the potential connections among learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC) in English, their perceptions of autonomy-supportive teaching and two individual difference variables, i.e. motivation and English speaking self-efficacy. Two hundred and five Iranian EFL learners responded to four questionnaires. The data obtained from the collected instruments were...

This study intended to inspect the possible effects of teaching English lexical clusters on speaking accuracy of Iranian EFL intermediate learners. Also it examined the influence of gender on the effect of teaching English lexical clusters on speaking accuracy of the same learners. 41 male and female EFL intermediate learners, studying  English at intermediate level at Zabankade Institute in Te...

Obesity has reached epidemic proportions throughout the globe, and this has also impacted people of the Arabic-speaking countries, especially those in higher-income, oil-producing countries. The prevalence of obesity in children and adolescents ranges from 5% to 14% in males and from 3% to 18% in females. There is a significant increase in the incidence of obesity with a prevalence of 2%-55% in...

BACKGROUND Early recognition of dental fear is essential for the effective delivery of dental care. This study aimed to test the reliability and validity of the Arabic version of the Children's Fear Survey Schedule-Dental Subscale (CFSS-DS). METHODS A school-based sample of 1546 children was randomly recruited. The Arabic version of the CFSS-DS was completed by children during class time. The...

Syntactic trees, or phrase markers, have originally been suggested as a representation of syntax in the mind based on purely linguistic grounds. In this paper, the psychological reality of syntactic trees and hierarchical ordering is explored from another perspective--that of the neuropsychology of language breakdown. The study reported here examined several syntactic domains that rely on diffe...

Good listeners generally produce back-channel feedback, that is, short utterances such as uh-huh which signal active listening. As the rules governing back-channeling vary from language to language, second-language learners may need help acquiring this skill. This paper is an initial exploration of how to provide this. It presents a training sequence which enables learners to acquire a basic Ar...

The application of zone of proximal development (ZPD), as a major tenet of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (SCT, 1978), has recently been invited in the L2 learning/teaching profession. This study mainly examined whether Iranian EFL learners’ interactions in diverse ZPD-activated proximal contexts through the use of storytelling instruction could improve their oral (speaking) proficiency and at...

Mastering vocabulary knowledge has always been a major concern for language learners (Nation, 2002). The present research mainly concerned with the impression comparing the performance of Iranian bilingual EFL students with monolingual groups by means of the treatment of the etymology of unknown English words upon their vocabulary retention. The ongoing research aimed at exploring the significa...

Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucia...