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Among the four language skills, reading is the conduit through which Iranian EFL learners can keep contact with the outside world. It was predicted that using new technologies in classroom can contribute to enhancing the ability of learners in the skill and can help them develop a positive attitude toward reading in English. To this end, 52 students from a university in Takab, Iran, were selected based on convenient sampling, and assigned to two homogeneous groups of experimental and control. During 10 ninety-minute sessions within five weeks, the experimental group practiced reading through weblog while the control group participated using a traditional non-weblog reading method. A Mixed Between-Within Subjects Analysis of Variance (SPANOVA) was conducted to analyze the effect of two different types of treatment. Results indicated that the main effect was significant for time but not for group. It was further noticed that the interaction effect was also significant. The use of weblog in classroom, although not statistically significant, could enhance the reading ability of EFL learners as compared to the non-weblog method. Furthermore, the attitude questionnaire revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between the attitude of the two groups toward EFL reading before and after the treatment. The results indicated that using weblogs as a teaching aid could develop a positive attitude in learners.

This paper aims at evaluating the English Practicum at Yarmouk University in Jordan from cooperative teachers' and student-teachers' perspectives. Two five point Likert scale questionnaires have been developed to collect data from subjects who participate in this study. The practicum's seven scopes are investigated; organization, cooperative teachers, cooperative school, supervisor, workshop, student-teachers and school students. Findings of the study reveal that problems related to organization are transport, lack of a manual for the training course, appointing too many students for a supervisor and non-outlined teaching skills for the trainees. As for cooperative teachers, the program has problems such as absence of written training plan, lack of training courses for the trainers, infrequency in following students up and insufficient familiarization of student-teachers to essential teaching skills. There are also supervisor-related problems like impressionistic assessment, sensitivity and lack of solutions for students' problems. Concerning workshop, it has weaknesses like focusing on familiar theoretical pedagogical issues, not specifying in advance teaching/learning related subjects for discussion, infrequent workshops held and lack of training on using teaching aids. Problems connected to cooperative schools are scarcity of following trainees up by the principal, not allocating them an office, inappropriateness of the evening classes for training and confining every trainee to one cooperative teacher. On the other hand, student-teachers-related problems are embodied in using Arabic in the classroom, teaching skills to be acquired, academic qualification and classroom management. Being classified as an extremely critical problematic scope, school students show that they unconstructively influence the training process more than any other area in practicum. Problems associated to them include crowded classes, poor performance, lack of preparation and discussion and not doing their daily assignments.

This paper is an attempt to provide a brief review of recast and its various types. Recast has been defined by many researchers whose definitions are subtly but significantly different. In most of these definitions, the researchers have focused on correcting learners’ implicitly in a communicative context. Although recast has some advantages like facilitating the delivery of complex subject matter, the most outstanding disadvantage of it is its ambiguity, which at times, may not help learners notice their mistakes. Up to now there have been many studies of the role of recast in second and foreign language acquisition. These studies have taken place in classroom contexts and in native speaker (NS)/non-native speaker (NNS) dyadic situations in addition to experimental studies in laboratory contexts. In these studies the greater effectiveness of recasts lies in situations where learners are given additional cues that help them recognize recasts as feedback on error.

Inspired by the recent trends in education towards learner autonomy with their emphasis on the interests and desires of the students, and borrowing ideas from philosophy (particularly ethics), the present study is an attempt to investigate the discrepancy in the findings of the studies addressing error correction in L2 writing instruction, and suggest the (oft-neglected) students’ beliefs, interests and wants as what can point the way out of confusion. To this end, a questionnaire was developed and 56 advanced adult EFL learners were asked to complete the questionnaire. The opinions of 20 EFL teachers were also collected using another questionnaire. Twenty-three of the students and 13 of the teachers were then interviewed in an attempt to collect explanations for their answers in the questionnaires. The results indicated that all the learners wanted the errors in their writings to be corrected. About 90 percent of them believed that all the errors in their writings should be corrected and only less than 10 percent of them agreed that there is no need to correct all the errors and that only “important” errors should be rectified. On the contrary, of the teachers who participated in the study, only 20 percent believed that all the errors in the students’ writings should be corrected. While most of the interviewed students attributed their preference of choice to feeling more confident and efficient in learning when they can recognize all the errors in their written assignments, most of the teachers believed that by correcting important errors (and not all errors), learners can get the most of their writings. Given the incongruity between teachers’ and (advanced) students’ beliefs over writing error correction, and considering advanced students as legitimate decision makers for their own learning, some suggestions are offered for EFL writing teachers.

Dyslexia is a first language learning impairment which is observed among primary students. Despite quite a few researches done in the L1 context, research to examine its occurrence in L2 context is sparse. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether Iranian Dyslexic students have difficulties learning English as a foreign language. Ten Iranian students of the second grade of the secondary school with developmental dyslexia and ten normal students were assessed on a constructed test battery of reading, spelling, and phonological processing tasks. The findings showed that the dyslexic group performed significantly lower than the control (normal) group in all the English measures. Moreover, phonological processing skills were found to correlate significantly with English reading in the dyslexic group. The results support the view that there is relationship between phonological skills and reading ability in both L1 and L2.

Rhetorical structure refers to a complex network of relationships and the way the underlying ideas are organized within a text. This study was conducted to see whether explicit instruction of descriptive and causative text organization positively affected L3 reading recall. 240 Turkish students of EFL who had Persian as their second language were assigned to two groups (experimental and control) controlled for language proficiency with only the former receiving instruction in rhetorical organization. Comparison of pre-test and post-test written recall data showed that explicit instruction had a positive effect on L3 reading recall. It was also noted that the amount of L3 reading recall was a function of the type of rhetorical organization of reading texts.

This paper investigated the communicative strategies and topics addressed by Iranian non-native English speaking students (NNESSs) at both undergraduate and graduate levels in their natural, authentic e-mail interactions with their instructors at different universities in Isfahan, Iran during 2006 to 2009. Following the literature, the communicative strategies were analyzed as a) requesting, b) reporting, and c) negotiating. The communicative topics were also categorized as a) facilitative, b) substantive, and c) relational. The subcategories of each group were also analyzed in terms of descriptive statistics, calculating frequencies/percentages, and inferential statistics by employing the Chi-square. The findings of the study revealed that there were significant differences among the percentage of the communicative strategies requesting being the favored strategy. The study showed that at both levels students send e-mails to make some kinds of requests. The results also indicated that there were significant differences among the percentage of the communicative topics and the choice of the topics were different at the two levels.