Journal of English Language Teaching and Learning
Volume:5 Issue: 11, Spring-Summer 2013

Connor et al. (2008) mention “specifying textual requirements of genres” (p.12) as one of the reasons which have motivated researchers in the analysis of writing. Members of each genre should be able to produce and retrieve these textual requirements appropriately to be considered communicatively proficient. One of the textual requirements of genres is regularities of specific forms and content. Lexical bundles are one of the features which play significant role in building genres’ regularities. Many researchers have tried to define academic writing with resort to the lexical bundles employed in it. Advanced and high intermediate L2 students’ pieces of writing and also post-graduate writing have been analyzed in different aspects. However, the important element in the analysis of post-graduate writing has always been the differences between genres across disciplines. In other words, in investigating lexical bundles in different genres, researchers have not focused on the issue of “nativity of the writer. To be exact, they consider native and non-native writing to share the same features. By considering this gap in lexical bundles studies, the present paper is an attempt to explore the nature of lexical bundles in native and non-native post-graduate students’ writing. In order to do so, a corpus of about one-million words from Iranian students’ applied linguistics theses is compared with a corpus of the same size from native English students’ applied linguistics theses. The results show significant differences in the frequency of lexical bundles used by native and Iranian students and also in structural and functional patterns used.

The purpose of this study is to find a practical solution for improving writing skill among Iranian high school learners of EFL. The main question was whether pragmatics had any priority over traditional methods in improving writing or not. Forty high school students were selected on the basis of their performance in PET (2009). In addition the following instruments were also used in this quasi-experimental research: California Standard Test (2008), Writing Discourse Completion Task, and Discourse Self-Assessment Task. The special treatment of the experimental group on the role of pragmatics lasted for about ten weeks, while the control group received only the traditional instruction on writing. The results show that there is a meaningful relationship between the pragmatic competency and the improvement of the EFL learner's writing skill. Paired t-test was utilized for analyzing the data. The study concludes that the teachers can use insights from pragmatics to teach writing skill appropriately and by improving writing skill through pragmatics, EFL learners will be able to communicate in a more appropriate way.

This research is an investigation of the relationship between the emotional intelligence of a group of Iranian English language learners and the coherence of the essays they produced. A 40-item TOEFLtype test of English proficiency including items on grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension with the Cronbach’s alpha reliability of. 742, was planned to identify the proficient candidates who could produce substantive and meaningful texts. Moreover, a 33- item inventory of Schutte Emotional Intelligence Scale and a task of essay writing on a specific topic were administered. From 110 candidates who took the test, questionnaire and the task, 79 subjects completely submitted them. Forty-five students managed to score above 23 out of 40 on the proficiency test; therefore, their emotional profiles and essays were further analyzed. For objective assessment of the coherence of the essays, Bamberg’s (1984) Holistic Coherence Scale was used with five points ranging from ‘fully coherent’ (4) to ‘unscorable’ (0). The Spearman’s rho test was used in investigating the association between the coherence of the essays and the emotional intelligence of their writers. Flying in the face of the researchers’ expectation, an insignificant relationship was observed.

Vocabulary is an important component in all four skills of language. Issue of vocabulary retention has great importance to EFL teachers in instructional contexts because they always observe students forget the words which are taught to them after a short period of time. The current study investigates whether the use of an interactive web-based tool referred to as „Wordsift‟ can result in a significant improvement in long-term vocabulary retention of EFL students. 60 participants were selected to take part in the study.The participants‟ age ranged from 17 to 24. They were taught 100 words in six contextualized texts. The main experiment consisted of twelve sessions, which were followed by an additional meeting designed to check the treatment effect on the long-term vocabulary retention. The results of T-test and ANOVA analyses indicated that word cloud (Wordsift) does have positive significant effect on EFL learners‟ long-term vocabulary retention.

This study explored the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and self-efficacy in 71 Iranian EFL teachers in private language institutes. The participants’ EI and self-efficacy were rated through questionnaires. They were also administered a demographic sheet. The findings revealed that EFL teachers’ EI was significantly and positively correlated with their self-efficacy, and it could also account for a considerable amount of variance in teachers’ self-efficacy. Another line of the results showed significant differences in the teachers’ EI and self-efficacy with respect to the demographics- marital status and years of teaching experience. Implications are discussed.

Epistemologically speaking, second language acquisition research (SLAR) might be reconsidered from a complex dynamical system view with interconnected aspects in the ecosystem of language acquisition. The present paper attempts to introduce the tenets of complex system theory and its application in SLAR. It has been suggested that the present dominant traditions in language acquisition research are too simplistic to delve into the nature of language acquisition. The belief is that the Newtonian conceptualization of SLA research cannot be comprehensive to deal with the complexities of language acquisition research. So the suggested definition for SLA research in the present paper is a complex dynamical nonlinear open adaptive system of inquiry to find probable solutions to problems.

This study was intended to find out any possible effect of topic bias on the writing proficiency of Iranian extrovert/introvert EFL learners at high/low writing proficiency levels. One hundred participants chosen from among 150 adult language learners on the basis of their personality type (extrovert/introvert) and writing proficiency (high/low) took part in this study. They were arranged into four groups according to their writing proficiency and personality type. They were asked to write on three different topics (one unbiased, one extroversion-biased, and one introversion-biased) and fill out Eysenck Personality Questionnaire for adults (EPQ, Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975). The writings were scored by two raters according to Bailey and Brown's (1984) composition grading scale. The data gathered was analyzed using two-way ANOVA. The final results of the analysis revealed the significant difference between the scores of different groups of participants on all topics – unbiased or biased toward either of the two personality types in favor of introverts but one.