since the 1960s the age effects on learning both first and second language have been explored by many linguists and applied linguists (e.g lennerberg, 1967; schachter, 1996; long, 1990) and the existence of critical period for language acquisition was found to be a common ground of all these studies. in spite of some common findings, some issues about the impacts of age on acquiring a second or...

as far as bandura’s (1977) conceptualization of the sense of self-efficacy is concerned, it is argued to be context- and even task-specific, compared to other concepts like self-esteem (brown, 2000); therefore, upon the previous research studies, related theories and definitions, and the ideas and views obtained from the interviews conducted with the scholars, the current research study aimed a...

the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of implicit focus on form through input flooding and the effect of noticing, explicit focus on form on linguistic accuracy. to fulfill the purpose of the study, 86 iranian pre-intermediate efl learners of one of the language institutes were chosen by means of administering ket as the homogeneity test. these learners were pretested throug...

nowadays enhancing critical thinking in learners is considered one of the foreign language teachers’ tasks due to its high position in foreign language classrooms. when it comes to selecting materials for language classrooms, there are obviously some criteria that teachers should apply. the present study aimed at a critical thinking based analysis of ten picture story books and ten folktales th...

this study purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...

abstract this study aimed at investigating the possible relationship between self-assessment in writing and self-regulation of iranian efl learners. the main purpose of the study was not only to report and inform about this relationship, but also to investigate and find practical outcomes of the incorporation of self-assessment in writing, such as improving writing skill. the research was carr...

the present study sought to examine whether a task-based approach could have an impact on raising awareness of collocations. moreover, it sought to investigate the facilitative role of consciousness-raising tasks of collocations in the communicative instances of use. to this end, 68 intermediate learners of english were selected via a placement test. the participants were taught with classroom ...

like any other learning activity, translation is a problem solving activity which involves executing parallel cognitive processes. the ability to think about these higher processes, plan, organize, monitor and evaluate the most influential executive cognitive processes is what flavell (1975) called “metacognition” which encompasses raising awareness of mental processes as well as using effectiv...

the aim of the present study was to investigate the frequency and the type of discourse markers used in the argumentative and expository writings of iranian efl learners and the differences between these text features in the two essay genres. the study also aimed at examining the influence of the use of discourse markers on the participants’ writing quality. to this end the discourse markers us...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of podcasts as a learning and teaching tool on iranian efl learners’ motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. the study also investigated the learners’ perception towards listening to podcasts and examined whether the learners were likely to accept podcasts. out of fifty-five intermediate learners studying e...