Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance and the ubiquity of metaphors in language. Their effect has been instrumental in making significant headway into the pedagogical practice and design of teaching materials. The current study was carried out to explore the efficacy of focus-on-form (FonF) and focus-on-forms (FonFs) instructions on learning metaphorical l...

English language teaching (ELT) writing practitioners have long attempted to improve EFL/ESL learners’ competence in writing with recourse to either instruction or feedback. Likewise, researchers have, to date, mainly focused on either of these treatments to enhance language learners’ composing ability. Which treatment leads to more significant improvements is, however, unclear. Moreover, of th...

1. introduction hyland (2005) defines metadiscourse as a “cover term for the self-reflective expression used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer (or speaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with reader as members of a particular community” (p. 37). hyland has admitted that these rhetorical features convey the relation between the writer, text and reader which i...

Portfolio assessment as one of the alternatives to testing is defined as the systematic collection of student work measured against predetermined scoring criteria. This paper aimed to investigate the effect of portfolio assessment in the oral performance of EFL learners in an attempt to examine its impact on their metadiscourse awareness. To determine the impact of portfolio assessment on the o...

This study intended to investigate the interplay of critical thinking explicit instruction, academic writing performance, critical thinking ability, and critical thinking dispositions of Iranian students. To this end, 140 students of Jahrom University of Medical Sciences (73 males and 67 females) were selected. They were divided into the experimental and control groups. Both groups received ins...

this study examined the effect of explicit instruction of hedging on english forspecific academic purposes (esap) reading comprehension performance ofenglish language learning (ell) university students. a reading comprehensiontest was developed and validated as the pretest and the posttest. the test, includingitems for assessing the comprehension of the students in their area of specialization,...

This essay focuses on metadiscourse, a name for elements of texts that convey meanings other than  those  that  are  primarily  referential.    The  essay  provides  some  theoretical  background  to the  study  of  metadiscourse,  briefly  reviews  a  taxonomy  of  metadiscourse,  and  explores  four reasons why the study of metadiscourse is interesting and important: (a) Such study shows how ...

This study examined the effect of explicit instruction of hedging on English forSpecific Academic Purposes (ESAP) reading comprehension performance ofEnglish Language Learning (ELL) university students. A reading comprehensiontest was developed and validated as the pretest and the posttest. The test, includingitems for assessing the comprehension of the students in their area of specialization,...

The present study investigates the effect of e-mail on Iranian learners of English and focuses on teaching thewriting skillvia e-mail. More specifically, the study investigates (a) whether using e-mail has any statistically significant effect on improving high school students' writing skill, and (b) whether the proficiency level has any relation with students’ writing improvement through using ...