Ali Derakhshan

Golestan University · Teaching English Language and Literature

Our study aims to culturally analyze the textbook series for English as a Foreign Language Learner (EFL) Senior High School learners in the context of China using a questionnaire taken from Kilickaya (2004). To this end, 635 EFL students completed a questionnaire. In addition, 31 students were randomly selected for a semi-structured interview. The...

Special issue information: The rapid and continuous development of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened up new avenues for different fields, and language education is not an exception by any means. While many assume that artificial intelligence in education (AIED) means students being taught by robot teachers, the reality is more prosaic yet sti...

Teaching a second or foreign language has long been considered a complicated task depending on several internal (psycho-emotional) and external (social) factors (Derakhshan, 2022; Madrid, 1995; Martín & Escabias, 2007; Pawlak et al., 2020). To get along with these complexities, educational systems all around the world inspire teachers, as the archi...

The study of teachers’ cognitive processes has received considerable attention in the past decades. However, the scope of research on the way teachers cognitively represent and understand emotions and how such representations relate to the sociocultural particularities shaping their identities demands further attention. Inspired by the phenomenogra...

We set out to collect research studies that scrutinize the impact of positive emotions and behaviors on teachers' and students' psychological states. Special issue information: With the value of positive emotions and behaviors in mind, several educational researchers worldwide have studied these positive factors and their potential applications in...

Over the past decades, the prominence of academic writing competency and literacy has soared given its vital role in educators’ academic and professional success (Wang et al., 2023). However, writing in another language, especially in an academic genre, is a labor-intensive task for non-native speakers of that language (Fang, 2021; Xu & Zhang, 2019...

Teachers’ emotions have been approved to play a pivotal role in higher education. However, the interface of university teachers’ emotions and assessment practices has been widely ignored in second/foreign language contexts. To fill this lacuna, this study examined the perceptions of 35 Iranian EFL university teachers regarding the types, triggers,...

This study aimed to validate the 70-item Grammar Learning Strategy Inventory (GLSI), originally developed in Poland, in the Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) context. A heterogeneous sample of 605 Iranian EFL university students completed the GLSI. Results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a seven-factor model, allo...

The psychology of second language (L2) teachers has captured a growing interest among educational researchers in the past decades. However, the interaction among teachers’ job-related metacognition, diversity acceptance, and self-efficacy beliefs has been left under-researched. To fill this lacuna, this study examined the levels of metacognitive kn...

Dear Colleagues, [ Education involves challenging experiences that can lead to unpleasant emotions, such as anxiety, apprehension, stress, and boredom, leading to cognitive, emotional, and behavioral disengagement. To address this issue, identifying the factors that help teachers and learners to tolerate challenges, manage emotions, and engage in i...

Pragmatics has been introduced as the study of the relationship among the signs of the interpreters, and it has been defined as one of the most fertile grounds for research. It is postulated that learning linguistic norms and acquiring sociocultural conventions are essential constituents of becoming a proficient L2 speaker. It is thought that inter...

It is pretty unanimously believed that communication would not make sense without pragmatic knowledge, and the only solution to counter this problem is pragmatic instruction. Over the last few decades, a large body of research has considered second language pragmatics in various experimental and quasi-experimental studies. In this regard, several s...

Pragmatic instruction appears to be complicated and challenging as pragmatic behavior changes to a large extent depending on the sociocultural contexts. Although pragmatic features have been instructed in different EFL contexts for quite a while, the effectiveness of instruction in this field of study has not been scrutinized on a large scale. The...

Studies on pragmatic instruction have been carried out on various speech acts in different contexts over the last decades. Among the speech acts, request, apology, and refusal are considered the most frequent and valued. The purpose of the present chapter is twofold: first, it aims to unravel the overall effectiveness of pragmatic instruction for t...

Considering the inclusion and exclusion criteria we developed in the previous chapter, out of the 144 primary studies, 84 were selected to be analyzed in the present study. Among the primary studies, some papers did not have enough data, or they had descriptive or frequency-based analyses, so they were excluded from the analysis. In this chapter, t...

Interlanguage pragmatics has been the focus of many studies since its inception in the 1980s, with several issues being investigated and a variety of approaches being applied. However, studies on the learning processes and strategies which are specifically responsible for the acquisition of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) knowledge are rare. Therefo...

Although theory and research on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners have grown recently, there is little documented research on their emotions and identities. This study explored the emotion of 12 Iranian EAP practitioners and their role in their identity construction. Adopting a narrative inquiry methodology, the study examined the p...

There has been ongoing research contrasting online vs. Face-To-Face (FTF) interactions for more than a decade. This study fills the gap in the literature considering FTF vs. online contexts by comparing the norms and patterns of complimenting in Persian and explores the complimenting strategies, syntactic patterns, and internal and external modifie...

Over the past decade, there has appeared a surge of research interest in language learners’ academic engagement and psychological well-being as important factors in improving the quality of education. However, research on the roles of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ affective scaffoldings in enhancing the academic engagement and psych...

Classrooms provide a context in which teachers and learners co-construct meaning in light of their sociocultural understandings and profiles. However, to date, few studies have scrutinized the way such profiles contribute to teachers’ classroom discourse. Informed by the methodological framework of conversation analysis and drawing upon a corpus of...

This study examined the relationship among foreign language enjoyment (FLE), second language L2 grit, online learning self-efficacy (OLSE), and online learning engagement among Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The study involved 578 Iranian EFL learners who completed self-report measures of the four constructs. Confirmatory fac...

This study sought to probe the relationship between perceived affective L2 teacher variables (i.e., teacher support, teacher enthusiasm, and teacher appreciation) and students’ L2 grit. Drawing on a quantitative research design and a sample of 285 Turkish ELT undergraduate students, we employed structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis to identif...

Teacher feedback plays a crucial role in various aspects of second/foreign language education. It can signpost teaching effectiveness and foster students’ learning. However, the role of feedback in assessing language skills and the literacy required to deliver feedback during assessment has remained a desideratum. As an important language skill, wr...

Drawing on the rhetorical/relational goal theory, this study examined the role of instructor clarity and non-verbal immediacy in affective learning through the mediation of instructor understanding. Data were gathered through close-ended questionnaires from 756 Chinese and 715 Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) students, the factor structu...

This mixed-methods cross-cultural study examined the role of instructor confirmation and care in EFL students’ willingness to attend classes (WTAC). For the quantitative phase, 1006 and 605 EFL university students were chosen respectively from Chinese and Iranian universities, and for the qualitative phase, sub-groups of 43 Chinese and 34 Iranian p...

This study intended to explore the relations between 259 Turkish EFL students’ L2 grit (i.e., the persistence of effort and consistency of interest) and boredom coping strategies (i.e., cognitive approach, behavioral approach, cognitive avoidance, and behavioral avoidance) as well as the moderating role of their emotion regulation strategies, viz.,...

According to positive psychology (PP), positive emotions contribute to language learning by helping learners recognize their strengths and overcome obstacles. One form of PP is altruism (altruistic teaching), which requires teaching without self-focus. The present study aimed to investigate how altruism affects the emotions and second language (L2)...

This is a longitudinal study of foreign language teacher professional identity development. We traced a single teacher’s sociohistorical identity development at three temporally different moments during the first eight years of his teaching profession. The data, collected mainly through classroom observations and semi-structured interviews, were an...

As a growing approach to assessment, learning-oriented assessment (LOA) has recently flourished to position learning at the center of assessment practices. It aims to unify assessment, teaching, and learning. However, little is written and known about its benefits, challenges, and practices in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. To shed l...

Call for Papers of 2024 Special Issue Dear Colleagues, Please submit your full paper based on the timeline given at the end of this description. I. Title Applications of Psycho-emotional Traits in Technology-based Language Education (TBLE) II. Guest editors 1. Associate Professor Ali Derakhshan, Golestan University, Iran 2. Professor Lawrence...

This book argues that, in line with the tenets of positive psychology in SLA and the rhetorical/relational goal theory, positive teacher-student interpersonal relationships are deemed to be of great significance for empowering students to accomplish favorable academic outcomes and to successfully learn a second/foreign language (L2), whether at its...

In the previous sections, the theoretical and empirical backgrounds of the study were described. In the current section, the information about the aims and research questions of the study, its design, setting, participants, research instruments, data collection procedure, and data analysis are explicated. A group of 739 students studying English-re...

In the previous chapter, the findings of the study were discussed in light of the theoretical and empirical backgrounds of the work. In this final chapter of the book, conclusions are made based on the results, the study limitations are outlined, pedagogical implications are put forward, and avenues for further research in this domain are presented...

In the previous chapter, based on the positive psychology movement and the rhetorical/relational goal theory, it was explained that the five positive teacher-related variables of care, clarity, credibility, closeness, and confirmation can contribute to students’ empowerment and learning outcomes. In this chapter, the theoretical and empirical backg...

It is quite unanimously believed by educational researchers that “the key figure in any learner’s educational life is the teacher”.

In the previous chapter, information regarding the aims, design, participants, research instruments, data collection procedure, and data analysis was presented. In this chapter, the results obtained from the analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data are presented. First, the results pertaining to the quantitative phase (i.e., responses to t...

With the rise of positive psychology (PP) and its emphasis on the affordances of positive emotions to second/foreign language teaching and learning, numerous studies have been conducted on different PP constructs all over the world. Nonetheless, the status of researching this school of psychology in L2 education is still imprecise. To fill this gap...

Because of its fundamental role in improving learners' communicative competence, willingness to communicate (WTC) has been the focus of attention in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). A bulk of SLA research has investigated the antecedents of WTC in the English-as-a-Foreign-Language setting. However, this construct has not received muc...

With the flourishing of positive psychology (PP) in foreign and second language teaching research, interest has grown in a range of positive psychological variables including the new concept of foreign language teaching enjoyment (FLTE) that mirrors that of learners' Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE). The present study investigates how positive psyc...

Simulation in the new generations of games has paved the way for employing flipped classes. Given the significance of learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP), this complementarity study with a full-factorial design using Augmented Reality- (AR)-mediated English for Nursing Purposes (ENP) classrooms was administered in the fall semester of the...

Based on multifarious levels of social status, education, and occupation, people have certain values which construct and reconstruct their identity. In the Iranian culture, "Devaluation" means blemishing these values that make people ignore individuals' values and virtues through certain linguistic expressions. Studying these expressions, one can a...

This study aimed to test a model of classroom social climate, growth language mindset, boredom, and student engagement among English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. In addition, the mediating role of boredom in this structural model was examined. To this end, 287 English major students from various universities in Iran participated in the stu...

This study investigates the validity of three psychometric scales—the Disposition towards Loving Pedagogy (DTLP), Teaching for Creativity Scale (TCS), and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES)—to uncover the relationship between these constructs with a multinational cohort of language teachers. The results obtained from Exploratory Factor Analysis a...

Despite recognizing the importance of criti- cal incidents (CIs) in teachers’ professionalism, there is a need for more research on novice teachers’ CIs, especially emotional CIs. This study describes the emotional CIs of a novice language teacher during her first year of teaching by relying on Schutz et al.’s (in: Schutz, Hong, Francis (eds) Resea...

Due to the novelty of the concept of language teacher immunity, conceptualized as a robust armoring system that helps language teachers cope with threats to their well-being, scant multi-cultural research has been dedicated to the investigation of its correlates. The present study seeks to explore the interplay of immunity, psychological well-being...

English-Medium Instruction (EMI) is a rapidly growing global phenomenon in countries where English is a second or foreign language. This book focuses on empirical research studies conducted on this growing trend in the Middle East and North Africa, an under-researched area with regards to the effects and challenges of the implementation of EMI in h...

While research on teacher identities has received a surge of attention in the past decades, there is a need for further exploring how teachers’ professional profiles contributes to their engagement in action research. To this end, the current action research-oriented study explored two novice and two experienced language teachers’ identities across...

Studies have shown that educational technology can promote college language learning and performance and provide higher education stakeholders with more efficient means for dealing with academic and professional needs. Today, higher education programs can only be successful with the use of new educational technology tools in the teaching and learni...

This study endeavored to discuss certain aspects of Emotional Intelligence (EI) that are related to foreign language (FL) teaching and learning in two different contexts (Iraq and the Czech Republic). It outlined the areas that could be important for FL teachers and may be useful in FL learning. The countries of Iraq and the Czech Republic are cult...

Following Positive Psychology Perspectives on Foreign Language Learning and Teaching (Gabryś-Barker and Gałajda 2016) and Positive Psychology in SLA (MacIntyre, Gregersen and Mercer 2016), the present volume, entitled Positive Psychology in Second and Foreign Language Education, edited by Katarzyna Budzińska and Olga Majchrzak, is the third c...

To expand the literature on the rather new concept of student burnout, the present study examined the influence of teacher immediacy and stroke variables on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' experience of burnout. To fulfill this aim, a group of 631 undergraduate EFL students from various universities in Iran answered questionnaires inc...

A convergent parallel mixed-methods approach was used to explore teacher care, teacher-student rapport, and engagement in pursuing academic goals in a foreign language (L2) context, as perceived by 223 Iranian and 208 Polish L2 students. Quantitative data were obtained through three scales, the cross-cultural validity and factor structure of which...

With the emergence of the positive psychology trend, studying teacher resilience has gained tremendous momentum in mainstream education. Nonetheless, it has yet remained an underappreciated concept in English language education and research. The challenges that teachers experience in maintaining their resilience have also been the focus of a limite...

The concept of boredom has recently attracted the attention of researchers in L2 education. As most of the available literature has focused on traditional, in-person classes, very little is known about how L2 students experience this aversive emotion in online classes, especially those prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. To fill this gap, this large...

Although boredom has been the subject of increasing scrutiny in second language (L2) learning recently, very little is known about how this emotion can affect teachers and students involved in Covid-19 prompted online English education. To address this gap, through maximum variation sampling, this qualitative study surveyed the opinions of 34 teach...

Recently, the new-generation-of-game-assisted practicums have been widely utilized in college language education to reduce the teacher-student psychological distance and promote teacher immediacy. In tandem with the attempt for elevating the ubiquity of teachers' tutelage, extensive instantiation of healthcare fields through the multiplayer scenes...

The ground-breaking Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics is edited by Naoko Taguchi, a prolific trendsetter in L2 Pragmatics. This unprecedented handbook is composed of a collection of papers, all of which scrutinize second language acquisition (SLA) with the prime focus on pragmatics. The pivotal significance of SLA at...

Given the importance of complimenting and responding to compliments in everyday interactions, several studies have investigated the strategies used to compliment and also to respond to compliments. This systematic study offers a thorough review of research on Compliment Responses (CRs) in the Persian language conducted over the past three decades....

During the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty members and students had to leave their face-to-face (FTF) classes and move into emergency distance education (EDE) contexts. Due to this drastic change in the system of education, investigating the probable effects of EDE on the quality of education seems essential. As such, this study has attempted to probe t...

Among daily speech acts, compliments and their responses are of high frequency and carry a special cultural-sociological load. As such, the present study aimed at investigating compliment responses (CRs) employed by Iranian EFL learners on Instagram. In doing so, 360 CRs were collected from 60 Iranian male and female EFL students. Using Maíz-Aréval...

Following the overall trend regarding the predominance of the questionnaire as a data collection method in behavioral and social sciences, it has been identified as the most widely applied instrument in EMI research. This extensive use originates from the many advantages that questionnaire use brings to researchers in terms of its practicality, eco...

To expand the line of research investigating individual teacher-related variables, the present research sought to test a structural model of teacher reflection, self-efficacy, burnout, and emotion regulation among Iranian EFL instructors. Moreover, a mediation model was examined, hypothesizing that emotion regulation would mediate the influences of...

Despite the growing body of research on boredom in traditional, in-person English classes, little is known about how this silent, aversive emotion is experienced by students learning English in online classes prompted by the current COVID-19 health crisis. To fill this gap, the present study explores causes of and solutions to boredom as well as th...

In spite of the fact that such concepts as willingness to communicate (WTC), language anxiety, and motivation have seen increasing prominence and popularity, boredom, known as an aversive, silent emotion, is still under-appreciated in the SLA literature. Furthermore, while there has been an exponential growth in the number of studies focusing on th...

While aptitude has been seen to contribute to second language (L2) development, most studies have examined its contribution as a fixed trait, rather than viewing it as a dynamic, changing variable. There appears to have been little or no investigation of the role that aptitude plays in the development of L2 pragmatic ability. Therefore, this study...

This article investigates the contribution of vocabulary size and depth to second language (L2) speaking proficiency as well as its two dimensions of fluency and lexical resource. To this end, 46 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners took the Word Associates Test (WAT), Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT), Lex30, and the speaking tasks of Internati...

We investigated the home culture effect with respect to students’ perceptions about themselves and their instructors. This study was concerned with the cross-cultural analysis of Iranian and Iraqi students’ perceptions of teacher success, credibility, and stroke variables. Willingness to Attend Classes (WTAC) was evaluated. Two-hundred-seventy-six...

Interlanguage pragmatic learning strategies (IPLS) are a specific class of learning techniques that are responsible for enhancing pragmatic competence. Given the importance of such strategies and the scarcity of research in this area, the current study attempted to examine the contribution of IPLS to L2 speech act pragmatic knowledge among a sample...

Studies examining culture representation in language textbooks have rarely adopted the semiotic approach, despite its potential for presenting and (re)creating cultural meanings at their various levels (i.e. cultural, intercultural, multicultural, and transcultural) in the co-instantiations of texts, tasks, and images. To address this issue, a qual...

Identity processing styles are those psychological, sociocultural, and so-cio-cognitive mechanisms that shape, reshape, and establish different individuals' identities both in their mother tongues and in the second or foreign language they are striving to acquire. The relationship between these identity processing styles and L2 learners' pragmatic...

With the exponential expansion of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), internationalization of education, globalization and marketization contexts, and the pressing need to integrate the curriculum with learning English to facilitate educational exchanges of students and teachers, English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) has gained considerable moment...

Due to the crucial role of student academic engagement in learning a second language, teacher interpersonal variables which affect second language learners' engagement have gained momentum. To keep up with this line of inquiry, this study attempted to probe the role of Persian language teachers' nonverbal immediacy and credibility in their Turkman...

Employing a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach, this study investigated the role of emotion regulation and psychological well-being (PWB) as predictors of work engagement through using 108 British and 255 Iranian English language teachers as a sample. A multi-group structural equation modelling was performed to identify differences and s...

Although researchers, postgraduate students, and university professors are under tremendous pressure to publish or perish, there exist few widely acknowledged rating scales or checklists for evaluating manuscripts submitted to journals in applied linguistics. To top it all, the existent peer-reviewing criteria are typically not publicly shared; thu...

Due to the significance of teachers’ beliefs and individual variables, a bulk of studies has focused on teacher characteristics over the past two decades. As an attempt to further clarify the interplay between teacher-related constructs in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context, the present study set out to explore the structural model hypothe...

Compliments (Cs) and compliment responses have been a prevailing topic of study in pragmatics due to their pivotal role in effective intercultural and transcultural interactions. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of research on compliments in the Persian language conducted over almost about the past four decades. It summarizes key findings...

The present study investigated the significance of teachers’ Continuing Professional Development (CPD) needs and views of research with regard to their success among a group of 177 Iranian EFL teachers. To fulfill this aim, the participants responded to three questionnaires; the Teacher Professional Development Needs Questionnaire, an English Langu...

The interconnectedness of language and culture has attracted the attention of scholars in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and applied linguistics. In this regard, inspired by the ideas of Halliday (1975, 1994), Vygotsky (1978, 1986), and Sapir and Whorf (1956), which imply the relationship among culture, thought, and language, Pis...

Many books have been written to illustrate the position of the new technologies in teaching and learning a foreign or second language (L2); nonetheless, most of these books have not been successful. The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning edited by Caral A. Chapell and Shanon Sauro and published by Wiley Blackwell in 20...

1. Introduction One of the main roles compliments play is to “grease the social wheels” and serve as “social lubricants” (Wolfson 1983: 89). Moreover, through the expression of admiration and approval, compliments serve to “create or maintain rapport” (Wolfson 1983: 86) and to negotiate and consolidate solidarity between complimenter and compliment...

The present study investigates variability among raters from different linguistic backgrounds, who evaluated the pragmatic performance of English language learners with varying native languages (L1s) by using both self- and peer-assessments. To this end, written discourse completion task (WDCT) samples of requesting speech acts from 10 participants...

Proverbs are short utterances in verse or prose, showing parts of the culture of people using them. They will be transmitted to the next generations and their origins can be traced. They can be considered a case of cultuling, that is (culture in language), and demonstrate the culture, worldview and the attitude of the speakers. The present study, a...

The close relationship between language and culture is rooted in the analysis of language and culture in historical knowledge, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Inasmuch as the fact that language and culture are inextricably bound, examining the pivotal role of the language of a speech community can yield significant information...

The indispensable role of multilingualism as a ubiquitous phenomenon in schools, in academia, and in society is indubitable. Given the timely convergence of pragmatics, task-based language teaching (TBLT), as well as multilingualism, and regarding the challenges of fostering foreign language learning with an eye to promote and protect linguistic an...

Within the broad domain of SLA, 'pragmatic competence' was brought to the fore following the assertation of communicative competence, but explicitly premiered in Bachman's (1990) model of communicative competence, accentuating the significance of the relationship between "language users and the context of communication" (p.89). The vitality of L2 p...

Literature is replete with the studies focusing on the role of vocabulary knowledge in second language receptive skills. However, the relationship between the aspects of vocabulary knowledge and productive skills in general, and the speaking performance in particular has remained scanty in the related literature. This paper examined the relationshi...

Because of the importance of instructor success in the adequacy of instruction and learning, this study aimed to explain the impact of two factors, namely language teachers' professional identity and autonomy, with respect to their success. To this end, 190 Iranian EFL teachers, including university lecturers and language institute teachers, partic...

Inasmuch as the fact that writing is a cognitively demanding task and as a step toward overcoming some of the barriers English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners face during writing performance, this study attempted to investigate Iranian EFL learners’ perceptions toward the most common writing difficulties. To this end, 120 Iranian EFL learners...