Esmat Babaii

Considering the widespread use of English as an international language, the current definition of the language proficiency construct in terms of native correctness seems a backward, conservative position adopted in language testing (Jenkins & Leung, 2019; McNamara, 2012). However, before applying strategies to incorporate World Englishes (WE) into...

In his critic of Eurocentrism, Boruch (1984) confronts the myth that “the techniques of applied social research in general and statistical evaluation in particular are more compatible with Western culture than Eastern” (p. 823). He demonstrates how modern concerns of current social research were attended to by many Eastern scholars centuries ago. F...

English language teaching has always been treated as a sociocultural issue in post-revolutionary Iran. Fueled by anti-imperialist sentiment, the political authorities diagnosed Western influence as the major ailment of the society. Having to accommodate for the undeniable virtue of learning English for international communication, educationalists p...

Intercultural communicative competence has been offered as an open-minded replacement for ego-centric biases stemming from dogmatic national prejudice and its associated self-aggrandisement. While being a commendable proposal, its implementation in foreign language education has not been a widespread success story. Recent attempts to theorise inter...

Scientific discourse in general and hard science discourse in ‎particular, are expected to be impersonal and objective. Scientific ‎codes of conduct, implicitly or explicitly, require scientists to ‎avoid ad hominem criticism and limit the evaluation to the work ‎under scrutiny. Nevertheless, the analysis of a corpus of book ‎reviews published in t...

This study aimed to propose a new method for scoring C-Tests as measures of general language proficiency. In this approach, the unit of analysis is sentences rather than gaps or passages. That is, the gaps correctly reformulated in each sentence are aggregated as sentence score, and then each sentence is entered into the analysis as a polytomous it...

Researchers' thorough familiarity with the related literature together with the appropriate implementation of previous studies in academic publications is of crucial importance. Simply put, scientific studies need to address the related literature in a proper manner to get published. The main objective of the current study was to delineate citation...

The present study aims to investigate the portrayal of women in English and Persian proverbs using the multidisciplinary field of Cultural Linguistics as an alternative to critical discourse analysis. Utilizing a corpus analysis approach for Cultural Linguistics ( Jensen 2017 ), 124 English and 186 Persian proverbs representing the theme of ‘woman’...

Despite the recent growth of attention to English for research publication purposes, little is known about how researchers view the role of peer review in their success of publication. In light of this gap, the present study investigated Iranian surgeons' attitudes towards peer review and the challenges they face in getting their papers published....

According to the IELTS official website, IELTS candidates usually score lower in the IELTS Writing test than in the other language skills. This is disappointing for the many IELTS candidates who fail to get the overall band score they need. Surprisingly enough, few studies have addressed this issue. The present study, then, is aimed at shedding som...

The present study aims at exploring the representation of metacultural competence (MC)-a competence that allows negotiation of cultural conceptualizations-in the documents designed at policy and planning stages of ELT curriculum development in Iran. For the policy stage, due to lack of an overt foreign language education policy document, seven majo...

This study adopted a critical discourse analysis approach to analyze the potential ideological differences between the Iranian President and Deputy Health Minister (DHM) in the representation of issues related to the Coronavirus Pandemic. The analysis was based on the meeting of the national task force against Coronavirus chaired by President Rouha...

Despite being an important category of multimodal tourism discourse, Inflight magazines and their roles in promoting international airlines’ profile and their host country, are mostly underresearched. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the application of different visual and semiotic strategies regarding social actors' race, age and soci...

This study explored possible reasons why IELTS candidates usually score low in writing by investigating the effects of two different test designs and scoring criteria on Iranian IELTS candidates' obtained grades in IELTS and World Englishes (WEs) essay writing tests. To this end, first, a WEs essay writing test was preliminarily designed. Then, 17...

Culture is an indispensable part of Foreign Language Education Policy (FLEP), especially in English Language Teaching (ELT). In addition, the spread of English around the globe has resulted in English users" tendency to embed their local culture in their English communication (Kirkpatrick, 2012). However, literature remains silent on culture repres...

The present study investigated the role of semantic priming in the processing of ambiguous sentences containing Relative Clauses (RCs) preceded by a complex Noun Phrase (NP) by Persian native speakers. To this end, in a self-paced reading task using E-prime software, 63 Persian native speakers read sentences containing ambiguous RCs in their L1, i....

This study investigates EFL teachers' perceptions regarding Dynamic Assessment (hereafter DA) prior and subsequent to taking part in workshops and panel discussions. Twenty-five EFL teachers participated in a semi-structured interview, 10 of whom were selected through purposive sampling to take part in a five-session workshop, which was held to fam...

Reflective learning includes learning through reflection and representing the learning process mainly through the medium of writing. This study investigated the effectiveness of the reflective learning process in Iranian EFL learners' reading performance and enhancing their metacognitive awareness as one of the main benefits of reflective learning...

Critical discourse analysis tells us that no text is innocent and neutral, as far as advocating a particular ideology is concerned (see Weiss & Wodak, (Eds.). (2003). Critical discourse analysis: Theory and interdisciplinarity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.). This main doctrine of critical discourse analysis is also true for textbooks, whatever the...

ESP and its celebrated offspring EAP (English for Academic Purposes) are now an indispensable part of the English language teaching enterprise in almost every major academic center around the globe. A brief review of the EAP literature reveals considerable developments in the areas of materials preparation and teaching methodologies (Charles & Peco...

The aims of this study were: 1) to identify the cognitive strategies that Russian EFL learners apply while taking a multi-level C-test; 2) to examine the correlation between the level of complexity of a C-test and the frequency of the usage of the cognitive strategies. The aims of this study were: 1) to identify the cognitive strategies that Russia...

Since the 2010s, the appeal for utilizing mixed methods research in applied linguistics and its related strands has been expanding. However, recent text-based studies highlighted some deficiencies in planning and practicing MMR. As such, the current study, adhering to Guetterman’s (2015) framework, examined applied linguistics’ mixed methods resear...

Directed Motivational Currents (DMCs) postulated as a novel motivational construct in second language acquisition (SLA) research to explain periods of intense and enduring behavior in pursuit of a highly valued goal or vision. Nonetheless, much of the discussion related to this new motivational phenomenon has remained theoretical, and only a limite...

Reading comprehension has a multidimensional nature, and different factors and affordances affect the language learners' read- -Motivational and Textual Factors and Affordances in Iranian EFL Learners' Reading: Using ... ing performance. The present study examined Iranian EFL learn-ers' reading motivation orientations and investigated the motiva-ti...

Science fiction movies could play a pivotal role in making scientific discoveries available to the public. In this study, we explored the dialogue-based strategies these movies employ to appealingly communicate science. To investigate the discursive resources these movies use to represent science, we analyzed the content of 10 award-winning science...

According to Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Mattheissen, 2014; Schlepeggrell, 2004), child language is essentially different from that of adult, in terms of form-meaning congruence which is manifested through certain lexico-grammatical features such as lower ‘lexical density’, lower ‘abstractness’, and higher incidence of ‘material’ an...

Towards a More Child-friendly Discourse in Primary School Textbooks According to Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Mattheissen, 2014; Schlepeggrell, 2004), child language is essentially different from that of adult, in terms of form-meaning congruence which is manifested through certain lexico-grammatical features such as lower ‘lexical...

The present study explored the effect of semantic priming in the resolution of ambiguous sentences containing Relative Clauses (RCs) preceded by a complex Noun Phrase (NP) by L1-Persian learners of L2 English. The type of semantic relationship examined was the one between the RC and one of the NPs in the complex NP to find out whether semantic mani...

The present study investigated non-native speaker (NNS) teachers' data-driven criteria in scoring multiple-rejoinder written discourse completion test tasks (MR-WDCT) and their points of (mis)match with expert-driven criteria. Specifically, this study scrutinized factors considered by NNS experienced and novice teachers in evaluating responses to M...

The problem of plagiarism has been a hot issue of concern to the academic community in recent years. In this study, we probed the factors which overtly or covertly lead to plagiarism growth among graduate students of agricultural sciences in Iran. To this end, we investigated the perceptions of 187 graduate students in the field of agricultural sci...

Complexity of simultaneous interpreting has long attracted the interest of researchers and led them to explore different linguistic, psychological, cognitive, social, and neurological factors involved in enabling the human mind to perform such a difficult task. Within the framework of cognitive studies of interpreting, the authors of this study aim...

While research on teachers' Critical Incidents (CIs) has grown exponentially, little research has been done on teachers' assessment-related CIs, much less examining the contributions of such CIs to their identity sense-making. This study aimed to fill some of this gap by exploring assessment-related CIs of 13 Iranian L2 teachers and the associated...

The recent years have witnessed an increasing awareness in methodological issues in the field of applied linguistics, which brought about what Byrnes (Mod Lang J 97:825–827, 2013) and Plonsky (The Routledge handbook of instructed second language research, Routledge, New York, pp 505–521, 2017) referred to as “methodological turn” and “methodologica...

The current study aimed to explore the nature of discursive strategies academics would use to share their specialist knowledge to both specialists and non-specialists. To this end, a corpus of 40 academic research articles and 40 popular science articles were randomly selected from the archive of four English international peer-reviewed journals an...

This paper seeks to probe cultural agendas pertaining to the images of celebrities in the widely-used English language textbooks. In fact, while visual analysis has solidified its position in ELT (e.g. Hurst, 2014; Mitsikopoulou, 2015; Romney, 2012; Taylor-Mendes, 2009) and caused the pendulum to swing away from the grammatical or textual content t...

Identity construction is a complex, ongoing discursive phenomenon. Besides, it is not necessarily a painless process as we constantly need to handle the potential conflicts among different dimensions of our identity. We also need to select those dimensions we want to reveal to people and those we want to hide.

Language assessment literacy (LAL), an important piece of language teacher education puzzle, has not fully fallen into place as many language teachers remain underprepared for bridging language assessment research-practice gaps in classrooms. Reflection, as another critical dimension of teachers’ professional development (PD), could assist the teac...

In curricula where teachers have agency to make decisions on everyday classroom activities, their cognition exerts strong influences on their pedagogical practices. The present paper reports on a qualitative multiple-case study exploring Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' cognition of interlanguage pragmatics. Through triangulati...

We have recently witnessed a growing awareness of methodological research issues in the field of applied linguistics, which led to what Plonsky (2017) has referred to as “methodological awareness” (p. 517). To make a positive contribution to this nascent movement, this study, drawing on synthetic techniques, sought to describe the cumulative and de...

This nationwide study examines the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) faculty members' engagement in and with research in a major site of EFL context by surveying a representative sample of 140 faculty members. Further, the correlation between the respondents' levels of engagement in and with research and their demographic features concerning acad...

The learning potential of pair/team work in language assessment has been demonstrated in the literature, albeit with little concern about challenges faced by the educators to implement it. To contribute to this line of research, the present study aimed to investigate the impact of paired peer assessment, teacher feedback, and group peer assessment...

The present study aimed at developing a second language pragmatic aptitude test. To do so, the relevant literature was consulted, different components contributing to pragmatics aptitude were identified and tabulated and test items were developed for each component. The outcome was a test comprising four sections, i.e. memory for pragmatic rule lea...

This article examines some main characteristics of online video courses as a new popularizing genre and how the different facets of proximity are realized in such contexts. To this end, 2 courses in the realm of education and psychology from Coursera website were analyzed based on Hyland (2010) model of proximity to shed light on the nature of this...

Textbooks, in general, and English teaching textbooks, in particular, are acknowledged as common sites for social reproduction and disseminating dominant ideologies. In an attempt to contribute to research on textbook ideology, the current study attempted to uncover neoliberal mentality in the highly popular ELT materials taught in Iranian private...

In the present article, I will examine the discourse and practices of multiculturalism as an alleged emancipatory aspect of contemporary social life. I will argue why “one world, many peoples” doctrine has proved to be a far-fetched dream on many occasions. To do so, I will first review the ideals of multiculturalism and then will discuss how these...

The present exploratory study probed Iranian in-service EAP teachers’ cognitions on language teacher role identities. Life history narratives and teaching philosophy statements were employed to collect qualitative data from nine Iranian in-service EAP teachers at one of the state universities in Iran. The data included the teachers’ descriptions of...

The purpose of this talk is to spotlight the issue of textbook ideology in ELT materials ‎development. Drawing on the existing body of research, I will argue why we need to adopt a ‎critical viewpoint when dealing with textbooks in general and EFL materials in particular. A ‎great number of ELT materials, ranging from course books to learning softw...

This study aimed to examine the policies in the Iranian English for Academic Purposes (EAP) education and the extent to which objectives match the policies and are materialized in practice. To this end, course descriptions in the syllabi for the EAP programs were evaluated through document analysis and triangulated with the experts' perspectives th...

With the advent of globalization, especially in its third phase (see Robertson, 2003), global relations of domination have undermined abuse of power at national and local levels (Fairclough, 2001). Global ELT textbooks, as corollaries of the globalization process, are not immune to the embedment of discriminatory discourses, as various studies have...

With the advent of the global perspective on English, the live issues of the ownership and culture of English (Akbari, 2008; Seidlhofer, 2005) have begun to shake up numerous conventional notions of the field. In the wake of this landmark shift, this study attempts to probe EFL teach-ers' cultural attitude toward prospective English words. To this...

Informed by the major tenets of critical discourse analysis, the present study attempted to expose the chasm between veteran English teachers enjoying a nation-wide popularity and those linguistically talented novices achieving locally mediocre fame in the Iranian EFL context. In so doing, two highly competent English teachers, each as a prime exam...

Critical cultural awareness as a component of intercultural competence (Byram, 1997, 2012) has received the extensive attention of scholars in the fields of language teaching, cultural studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, communication studies, etc. in the recent decades. However, no instrument has ever been developed to assess this construct a...

هدف اصل ي ارزش يابي استاندارد - محور تضم ين كيفت و مسئو ليت پذ يري معلمان د ر مح يط ها ي آموزشي است . بدين منظور، 385 معلم شاغل به خدمت در اقصي نقاط ايران به پرسشنامه خودارزي ابي معلمان زبان (عطايي، بابا يي، موسو ي، 2016 ) پاسخ دادند . افزون بر اين، با 25 نفر از آن ها در مناطق مختلف مصاحبه شد و با 32 نفر از اين معلمان به هنگام تدر يس در تهران و حوم...

This paper discusses the feasibility of employing a discourse-based approach in examining the (un)successful portrayal of a given socio-cultural context through translation. In so doing, instances of two Persian translations of Chinua Achebe’s post-colonial novel “Things Fall Apart” were selected to illustrate the congruence as well as incongruence...

The systematic study of EAP teachers" pedagogic content knowledge and their actual teaching practices in class is a fresh avenue in applied linguistics, especially in contexts like Iran, where, EAP courses are taught by two groups of teachers with different specializations; i.e., language teachers and content teachers. This study explored the simil...

The relationship between language learners’ L1 and L2 writing productions has attracted the attention of researchers since Kaplan (1966). Along this research line, the present study aimed to explore the reverse transfer of rhetorical patterns from English (L2) to Persian (L1) in the argumentative essays of EFL students in Iran. Sixty MA university...

Initiation into contextualizing mindful second language teacher education (SLTE) has challenged teacher educators causing their retreat into mindless submission to ready-made standardized directives. To revive the starting perspective in curriculum development in light of the recent trend towards responsive SLTE, this practitioner research investig...

This study analyses reply articles published in academic journals in the field of applied linguistics as an instance of academic conflict with regard to the realization of impoliteness. The study further explores the judgment resources of Appraisal Theory leading to impoliteness in this genre. Taking the theoretical model of impoliteness (Bousfield...

The present study intended to investigate whether test takers’ breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge can contribute to their efficient use of lexical bonds while restoring damaged texts in reduced redundancy tests. Moreover, the moderating role of general language proficiency was investigated in this interaction. In so doing, Vocabulary Levels...

With the increasingly growing technological advances and their consequences for societies, the public has the right to be engaged in the outcomes of science. On the one hand, the public are interested in acquiring information about the results of scientists’ experiments. On the other hand, the scientists are willing to share their feelings about th...

The past decade has witnessed a renewed conceptual interest in higher education research, including applied linguistics discipline, which has led to the crafting of research as one of the most effective forms of professional development. This sequential explanatory mixed research study examines the conception of research the applied linguists’ facu...

This study drew upon Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006 [1996]) visual grammar and Van Leeuwen’s (2008) social ‎semiotic model to interrogate ways through which social actors of different races are visually and textually ‎represented in four award-winning English-learning software packages. The analysis was based on narrative ‎actional/reactional proces...

Several studies have employed the theme-rheme construct to examine the generic profile of research articles (RAs). However, they have mostly focused on the subject matter and nature of disciplines, and other disciplinary characteristics as contextual factors which can impact the genre realization have not been considered in the discourse analysis...

Perceptual (mis)matches between teachers and learners are said to affect learning success or failure. Self-assessment, as a formative assessment tool, may, inter alia, be considered a means to minimize such mismatches. Therefore, the present study investigated the extent to which learners’ assessment of their own speaking performance, before and af...

Research in academic writing has revealed a strong tendency on the part of writers to interactively communicate their scientific findings with their readers. In doing so, the writers should take a position while arguing their propositions. This interaction as proposed by Hyland (2005b) takes places having two sides of stance and engagement. This s...

In this study, we investigated the ability of Iranian students of applied linguistics to discern plagiarism in writing, their perceptions of its ethical aspects, their characterizations of plagiarists, and their perspectives on why they may commit plagiarism. In so doing, a slightly revised version of Deckert’s 1993 questionnaire, collecting both q...

International business communication is associated with cultural norms of both native and non-native business counterparts. It seems that the study of culture presentation from the perspective of English as a lingua franca in business English textbooks has been rather underexplored. To this end, cultural contents in two internationally distributed...

Research in academic writing has revealed a strong tendency on the part of writers to interactively communicate their stance with their readers. This study targets the stance component of writer-reader interaction by integrating Hyland’s (2005b) and Hyland and Tse’s (2005) frameworks to investigate psychology and sociology English research articles...

During the past decades, the washback effect has attracted the attention of many testing specialists. Numerous studies attempted to explore the effects tests may have on teachers and teaching. There are, however, few empirical studies on the washback effect of tests on learners and learning. The current study investigated the effect of high school...

The primary purpose of the current study was to investigate whether there are any differences between high and low performers regarding the nature of errors they commit in restoring the distortions in the C-test. To this end, think-aloud verbal protocols were analyzed to find out what goes on in the mind of C-test takers when they fail to complete...

Despite criticisms questioning its raison d'être (e.g., Giddings & Grant, ), mixed methods research has been welcomed in social research as a methodology in its own right (Greene, ). Recently, it has also been acknowledged and advocated in applied linguistics (Dörnyei, ; Hashemi, ). In an attempt to investigate the status of this relatively new tre...

The current study attempts to explore the characteristics of author-assigned keywords in research articles as important constituents of targeted search in academic communities. To this end, the keywords of 200 research papers in the field of applied linguistics, in terms of domain, degree of specificity, and relation to the titles, were analyzed. T...

In this lecture, I attempted to examine the validity of this claim: "scientists think, the public feels"

The purpose of this study was to investigate some core issues of ELT curriculum implementation in Iran undertaken by policymakers in practice, i.e. teachers. The core issues include: the efficiency of communication channels between ELT planners and implementers, the extent to which ELT textbooks are believed to meet students’ cognitive and affectiv...

Over the past decade, mixed methods research has gained particular attention in social and behavioral research as a considerable number of studies investigated theoretical and methodological aspects of conducting mixed methods research. In applied linguistics, however, mixed methods research is a new approach and little research exists on theoretic...

Abstract—Resisting and outliving the vehement criticisms undermining its existence, ‎English for Specific Purposes (ESP) continues to influence both theory and practice in ‎applied linguistics. Among the sub-branches of the field, nevertheless, testing ‎professionals have not been so clear about how to accommodate for the peculiarities of ‎this phe...

Bio-data is a short genre, highly constrained in terms of length and conventional style, through which a contributor to an academic journal or a conference provides a sketch of one's major academic achievements in a third-person narrative. To examine the possibility and the extent of professional expertise construction in this genre, 512 bio-data p...

Retelling stories, as an instance of guided speaking, can be an effective strategy to enhance learners‘ communicative output and class participation. In many EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classes, however, this effective strategy is rarely exploited to its full potential, and the usual performance on the part of students is hardly anything be...

As two members of reduced redundancy test family, the C-test and the cloze test have been weighed against one another from different perspectives. In line with this tenet, the present research attempts to compare the C-test and the cloze test in terms of (a) the way they might be affected by the test-takers’ cognitive styles, and (b) the extent the...

It is true that analyses of English language texts dominate the literature. It is equally true that a flourishing field of Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) research has begun to address the way various text types and/or genres may differ across cultures and languages (see Connor 1996, 2003). Very much in line with these developments, this study was an att...

Reading in English for academic purposes is directly affected by the rise of ‎English as a global means of professional communication: the percentage of ‎research reports written in English has increased to 70 or 80 percent, and 85 ‎percent of the world’s homepages use English (Swales, 1998). This trend continues ‎to give prominence to proficiency...

Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World. Adrian Blackledge. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 2005. Pp. x+252. ISBN 90-272-2705-5

For decades traditional methods of testing have been criticized for saying relatively little reliably about students’ ability as well as causing anxiety, which can negatively affect students’ recall of learned information. The reform movement with its innovative approaches focusing on learner-centered education perceives assessment as an interactiv...

The purpose of this study was: (1) to identify prototypical generic textual features of BRs that seem to operate at the macro-structural level, and (2) to investigate, whether or not these macro generic features of BRs vary across disciplines. (physics, sociology, and literature). To this end, a corpus of 90 academic BRs from discipline-related res...