Research Paper
Applied Linguistics
Reza Sehat; Parviz Alavinia; Javad Gholami
Abstract
Though research into the dynamic nature of motivation has gained momentum, there are still some aspects of the issue which are in need of further scrutiny. One such under-researched area is the effect of different learning modules on the direction and pattern of motivational changes, particularly in ...
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Though research into the dynamic nature of motivation has gained momentum, there are still some aspects of the issue which are in need of further scrutiny. One such under-researched area is the effect of different learning modules on the direction and pattern of motivational changes, particularly in virtual learning environments. Informed by this gap, the current study explored how EFL learners’ motivation fluctuates based on different learning modules. In so doing, the participants were selected from institute, high school and university contexts. Thus, a major objective of the study was probing the differences among the three contexts as regards motivational fluctuations caused by involvement with different lesson modules. Motometer was utilized as the main means of data collection. Also, in an attempt to triangulate the data collection procedure, retrospective thinking was employed following the collection of Motometer data. Based on the findings, for institute learners, the mid-time of their performance process was the peak motivation time. Furthermore, it was found that the learners experienced more motivation on the activities included in the oral module as opposed to reading activities. Conversely, high school students reached higher levels of motivation on the reading module as opposed to speaking and listening sections. Finally, although significant differences were identified between the institute and school settings concerning mean motivational values for oral modules, no significant difference was observed among the patterns of motivational fluctuations occurring for institute, high school and university students on reading module. The implications of the findings are discussed throughout the paper.
Research Paper
Applied Linguistics
Shiva Azizpour; Alireza Zaker
Abstract
Despite its pivotal importance in comprehension and production, many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners struggle with retrieving and applying new vocabulary beyond class. This study investigated the comparative effects of the Ripple Effect Approach (REA) and the Word Wall Approach (WWA) on ...
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Despite its pivotal importance in comprehension and production, many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners struggle with retrieving and applying new vocabulary beyond class. This study investigated the comparative effects of the Ripple Effect Approach (REA) and the Word Wall Approach (WWA) on vocabulary retrieval and production among Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Sixty participants (30 females and 30 males), aged between 18 and 23 years (Mage= 20.5), were selected through the Preliminary English Test (PET) and randomly divided into two experimental groups. The REA group was taught through interconnected, contextualized vocabulary exercises, while the WWA group received visual aids and interactive word displays. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was employed, with data collected through vocabulary tests. Statistical analyses, including repeated-measures ANOVA and MANOVA, revealed significant improvements in vocabulary retrieval and production for both groups. However, the REA group demonstrated higher retention rates, with a mean increase of 3.6 points in retention from pre-test to post-test, compared to a 3.2-point increase for the WWA group. These findings underscore the effectiveness of interactive and varied instructional approaches in enhancing vocabulary acquisition and retention among EFL learners. Implications for educators suggest incorporating the REA and WWA to meet diverse learner needs and improve teaching practices, emphasizing the importance of integrating innovative, learner-centered techniques into educational curricula. Incorporating these approaches might develop adaptive and responsive educational frameworks, enhancing EFL learners’ learning outcomes and experiences.
Research Paper
Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP)
Reza Bagheri Nevisi; Mohammad Mahdi Hasani
Abstract
Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have transformed how academics communicate, disseminate research, and engage with broader audiences. This study explored intertextuality within academic tweets crafted by applied linguists across five English-speaking countries: the United States, the United ...
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Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have transformed how academics communicate, disseminate research, and engage with broader audiences. This study explored intertextuality within academic tweets crafted by applied linguists across five English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Ireland. By analyzing tweets from prominent Applied Linguistics associations, the research identified intertextual representations and examined how they refer to or incorporate other texts. The study used a qualitative approach to uncover the forms and functions of intertextuality, highlighting the complex relationships between texts and social actors on Twitter. A corpus of 300 tweets from major associations in Applied Linguistics provided a rich dataset for analysis. Key findings indicated that intertextual practices in academic tweets are crucial for self-promotion, publicizing research outputs, and building academic communities. Multimodal quotations, digital mentions, and hyperlinks enhance engagement, extend reach, and provide additional context. Tweets served multiple functions, including community building, networking, and public dissemination of academic knowledge. The study highlighted the evolving nature of academic communication on social media, suggesting that applied linguistics groups strategically use Twitter to enhance their scholarly presence and impact. Practical implications included the strategic use of hashtags, multimodal elements, and active engagement through retweets, mentions, and replies, which improve visibility, impact, and foster a sense of community within the field.
Research Paper
Discourse Analysis
Reza Norouzi; Meisam Rahimi
Abstract
Impoliteness has become a crucial aspect of digital communication, particularly on social media platforms such as Instagram. Despite the vast expansion of online discourse, research on gender-based differences in impoliteness strategies remains limited, especially in the context of English comments on ...
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Impoliteness has become a crucial aspect of digital communication, particularly on social media platforms such as Instagram. Despite the vast expansion of online discourse, research on gender-based differences in impoliteness strategies remains limited, especially in the context of English comments on Instagram’s broadcast pages. This study fills this gap by examining the impoliteness strategies employed by female and male’ Instagram users. For doing this study, a corpus of 520 comments (17,850 words) posted by 256 female and 264 male users on CNN, BBC, Fox News, and The New York Times Instagram pages between 2022 and 2025 based on Culpeper’s (2011) five impoliteness strategies was analyzed. After coding and analyzing comments, a Chi-square test was conducted to determine the significance of gender differences. Results indicated that the bald-on-record strategy was the most frequently used strategy (29.9%), and withholding politeness was the least frequent (11.81%). The results of this study also revealed that, although females exhibited a slightly higher usage of negative impoliteness strategy (19.90%) than males (18.79%), the overall gender differences in the employment of impoliteness strategies were not statistically significant. These findings showed that impoliteness on Instagram is influenced more by platform norms than by gender differences. The study highlights the importance of understanding impoliteness in online discourse for language instructors, online communicators, and digital content developers. For future studies, researchers can explore nonverbal cues, cultural differences, and the evolving nature of impoliteness strategies across multiple social media platforms to gain a more comprehensive understanding of gender and online discourse.
Research Paper
Teacher Education
Jamileh Rahemi
Abstract
With the growing adoption of digital technologies in education, digital literacy (DL) is essential for both novice and experienced educators. Farhangian University, Iran’s leading teacher education institution, plays a key role in fostering DL and technology integration through internship programs ...
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With the growing adoption of digital technologies in education, digital literacy (DL) is essential for both novice and experienced educators. Farhangian University, Iran’s leading teacher education institution, plays a key role in fostering DL and technology integration through internship programs where mentor teachers model instructional practices. Despite its significance, the DL competencies of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching mentees of Farhangian University and their mentor teachers remain underexplored. Grounded in the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) and Teacher Digital Competency (TDC) frameworks, this descriptive study examined self-perceptions and cross-evaluations of DL and technology use among EFL mentor teachers and teaching mentees at Farhangian University. Purposive sampling was used to distribute two parallel Likert-scale questionnaires to 62 female EFL teaching mentees, enrolled in practicum course three, and 53 female EFL mentor teachers in Isfahan. Self‑perceptions revealed that both mentors and mentees rated themselves most proficient in basic digital tools; mentees reported broader confidence across collaborative and content‑specific technologies, while mentors rated themselves lower across specialized applications. Cross‑evaluations showed that mentors viewed mentees as digitally capable but only moderately effective in classroom integration, whereas mentees perceived their mentors as less digitally literate and infrequent technology users. Both mentors and mentees rated their own competencies higher than those of their counterparts, indicating a self‑enhancement bias and underscoring intergenerational differences in DL perceptions. These findings highlight the need for reciprocal DL development, stronger mentor modeling, and structured digital training within teacher education programs to address intergenerational gaps.
Research Paper
ESP & EAP
Masoud Azadnia
Abstract
Although generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping language education globally, its integration into English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instruction in Iran has remained limited by rigid curricula, restricted autonomy, and lack of authentic, discipline-specific resources. This study sought ...
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Although generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping language education globally, its integration into English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instruction in Iran has remained limited by rigid curricula, restricted autonomy, and lack of authentic, discipline-specific resources. This study sought to address this gap by developing a contextualized co-design framework to align AI affordances with local pedagogical realities. Guided by theoretical triangulation, a hybrid methodology was employed that combined design-based research, co-design, and participatory qualitative approaches. The needs analysis phase involved twenty-six ESP stakeholders, including eight instructors and eighteen learners. In-depth interviews were then conducted with a subset of nineteen participants—eight instructors and eleven learners. Three instructors and three learners, chosen purposively among those involved in both prior phases, along with three policymakers and three AI experts, participated in the last co-design phase to ensure multiple perspectives in model development. As revealed by the findings, the learners prioritized personalization, writing support, and disciplinary adaptability, whereas the instructors emphasized controlled prompting, ethical literacy, and assessment redesign. Concerns shared between the two groups included overreliance, epistemic authority, and unequal digital access. The co-design process generated a cyclical instructional model incorporating dual human-check mechanisms, ethical self-reporting, bias-awareness checkpoints, multimodal feedback loops, and institutionalized teacher training. Offering a theoretically grounded and adaptable reference for discipline-specific AI use in ESP programs, this study’s framework can guide educators, curriculum designers, and policymakers in ESP contexts analogous to those investigated in this research.
Research Paper
Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP)
Amir Zand-Moghadam; Behzad Rahbar; Nastaran Rostamzadeh
Abstract
In spite of the increasing attention paid to heritage language education, the pragmatic development of young heritage learners has not gained much momentum. In an attempt to address this gap and following the research trends of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) and heritage language education, this study ...
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In spite of the increasing attention paid to heritage language education, the pragmatic development of young heritage learners has not gained much momentum. In an attempt to address this gap and following the research trends of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) and heritage language education, this study aimed to unpack apology and request speech act production of young Persian heritage learners (HLs). The participants of the study were 85 lower-intermediate Iranian students (41 boys and 44 girls in grades 3 and 4) who were learning Persian as their heritage language in international schools. A researcher-made and validated Oral Discourse Completion Test (ODCT), including ten situations (five situations for each speech act), was used as the pre- and post-test to look into the influence of explicit and implicit instructions on the participants’ pragmatic production. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups and were taught for six thirty-minute sessions. The explicit group was offered direct and metapragmatic instruction, while the implicit group received activities, such as role-plays and storytelling, the purpose of which was to indirectly pick up the pragmalinguistic forms and sociopragmatic norms.The findings demonstrated that the learners' speech act production is significantly influenced by both explicit and implicit teaching. Besides, the results indicated that implicit mode could be equally functional in specific contexts, calling for a reconceptualization of instructional strategies in speech act development, which encourages curriculum and materials developers to move beyond traditional reliance on explicit instruction and adopt a more comprehensive approach that prioritizes both explicit and implicit learning.
Research Paper
Discourse Analysis
Adel Mohammadi; Hiwa Weisi
Abstract
The present study aims to investigate users’ responses to linguistic diversity on Persian-language social media, particularly Instagram, based on Lippi-Green’s theoretical framework of language subordination. The study employs a mixed-methods design. In the qualitative phase, the data were ...
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The present study aims to investigate users’ responses to linguistic diversity on Persian-language social media, particularly Instagram, based on Lippi-Green’s theoretical framework of language subordination. The study employs a mixed-methods design. In the qualitative phase, the data were analyzed using the language subordination framework, which comprises seven core components: Mystification, authority, misinformation, trivialization, accommodators and non-accommodators, threat, and promise. In the quantitative phase, the frequency and proportional distribution of these components were calculated across more than 400 user comments posted on widely followed Persian-language Instagram pages between 2023 and 2026. The findings indicate that the components of misinformation and trivialization occurred most frequently and that social media platforms, contrary to common assumptions, serve as significant sites for reproducing the ideology of the standard language and marginalizing non-standard varieties. Furthermore, the results show that users’ linguistic judgments are largely influenced by entrenched monolingual standard ideologies that, consciously or unconsciously, construct the so-called Persian standard as superior while other language varieties as inferior.
Research Paper
Education
Sara Mousazadeh Allaf; Iraj khoshnevis; Karim Nazari Bagha
Abstract
This article deals with the behavioral intentions of high school English teachers in Iran (hereafter teachers) for the development of computer-mediated courses (hereafter courses). It applies the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the relationship between attitudes, subjective norms, perceived ...
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This article deals with the behavioral intentions of high school English teachers in Iran (hereafter teachers) for the development of computer-mediated courses (hereafter courses). It applies the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the relationship between attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control and intentions to create the courses. A survey was conducted using the social media platforms, namely Shad and Telegram. Four hundred forty teachers participated in the survey filling in a questionnaire consisting of thirty-five 7-point bipolar Likert- scale items. Path analysis was employed to investigate the factors influencing the teachers’ behavioral intentions to develop the courses. Moreover, the analyses revealed that 44 percent of the variance in the teachers’ intentions cumulatively explained by their attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control. The poor model fit indicated that some factors such as contextual limitations or cultural differences might be at work, but the provision of significant relationship between the theory’s constructs is worth considering.
Research Paper
Teacher Education
fatemeh Dabbaghha; Asghar Afshari; bahram Mowlaie
Abstract
This study explores the influence of dialogic reflective journals (DRJ), incorporated with guided collaborative critical reflection (GCCR), on critical thinking skills and professional identity development of Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, framed by Schön's (1983) Reflective ...
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This study explores the influence of dialogic reflective journals (DRJ), incorporated with guided collaborative critical reflection (GCCR), on critical thinking skills and professional identity development of Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, framed by Schön's (1983) Reflective Practice Model and Korthagen's (2004) Onion Model. Employing a mixed-methods design, the research involved 60 EFL teachers (30 in the experimental group and 30 in the control group) over a semester. Quantitative data from pre- and post-intervention surveys were analyzed using Mann-Whitney U and Wilcoxon Signed-Rank tests, while qualitative insights were derived from thematic analysis of DRJ entries and focus group interviews. Findings indicated significant enhancements in critical thinking and professional identity for the experimental group, with emergent themes of Ethical Mission Alignment, Collaborative Agency, Emotional Resilience, and Socio-Cultural Awareness extending Korthagen's model. These results underscore DRJ's efficacy in promoting transformative reflection, offering implications for EFL teacher training programs in Iran to mitigate barriers like workload and institutional rigidity.
Research Paper
Applied Linguistics
Goudarz Alibakhshi
Abstract
Foreign language test anxiety (FLTA) affects learners' cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to language assessments. Despite extensive research on its causes and effects, a comprehensive understanding from the learners' perspective remains underexplored. This study aims to synthesize qualitative ...
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Foreign language test anxiety (FLTA) affects learners' cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to language assessments. Despite extensive research on its causes and effects, a comprehensive understanding from the learners' perspective remains underexplored. This study aims to synthesize qualitative and mixed-methods research on the antecedents and consequences of FLTA, with a focus on learners’ experiences and perceptions. A systematic search was conducted across primary education and psychology databases for studies published from 1990 to 2025. The review adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and Enhancing Transparency in Reporting the Synthesis of Qualitative Research (ENTREQ) guidelines. Studies were appraised for methodological quality using the Enhancing Transparency in Reporting (ETR) checklist of the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP). Thematic synthesis and meta-ethnographic translation were used to integrate findings from the selected studies. The review identified key antecedents of FLTA, including learner-level factors (e.g., low self-efficacy, perfectionism, prior academic failure, and inadequate self-regulatory skills), test-design features (e.g., time pressure, difficulty, unfamiliar formats, and unclear criteria), and broader assessment cultures marked by high stakes, exam-driven teaching, and social pressures. The consequences of FLTA were multifaceted, ranging from cognitive interference and reduced performance to avoidance behaviors, reliance on short-term strategies, and negative impacts on long-term engagement with language learning. Positive changes were associated with alternative assessment practices, such as portfolios and formative assessment. The findings suggest practical recommendations for language teachers, curriculum designers, and policymakers to create assessment environments that reduce FLTA and support learner well-being.
Research Paper
Education
Sepideh Mehraein; Hamed Mohammad Hosseini; Ali Derakhshesh
Abstract
As a relatively new pedagogical approach, flipped instruction has received much attention. Accordingly, numerous studies in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) have delved into the usefulness of flipped classroom for language learning; however, this mode of instruction has yet to be explored ...
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As a relatively new pedagogical approach, flipped instruction has received much attention. Accordingly, numerous studies in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) have delved into the usefulness of flipped classroom for language learning; however, this mode of instruction has yet to be explored in the area of second language (L2) listening. This being so, the current study investigated the effect of a flipped course model on Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ listening performance and L2 listening anxiety utilizing a pretest-posttest control group design. The study divided 39 students preparing for the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam into two groups: One class received conventional instruction (non-flipped), and one class received instruction based on the principles of flipped instruction (flipped). The participants answered two IELTS practice tests and completed two questionnaires, namely the Listening Anxiety Questionnaire and the Perception of Flipped Learning Experience questionnaire. The results of statistical analyses revealed that the listening performance of both groups improved significantly from the pretest to the posttest and that the flipped class outperformed the control group. Furthermore, it was found that not only did flipping the class alleviate participants’ L2 listening anxiety substantially, but also it positively influenced their attitude toward this mode of instruction. Implications of these findings have been elaborated for stakeholders.