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In recent years teacher cognition research has attracted a great amount of attention among different scholars. The current study aimed to discover what the most prevalent perspectives of English language center teachers in Iran are regarding teaching grammar and how much these perspectives are consistent with teachers' actual grammar teaching practices as well as current principles of grammar teaching. An adapted version of Burgess-Etherington questionnaire was used for data collection. Data were gathered from 120 teachers, and the classroom teaching practices of 10 of them were observed and video recorded for further analysis. The results of the study showed that the teachers mostly had a proper understanding of grammar teaching issues and its current principles. However, their actual practices did not always go together with their stated perspectives.

Communication in society happens chiefly by means of language However, the users of language, as social beings, communicate and use language on society's premises; society controls their access to the linguistic and communicative means. Pragmatics, as the study of the way humans use their language in communication, bases itself on the study of those premises and determines how they affect, and effectualize, human language use. Hence, Pragmatics studies the use of language in human communication as determined by the conditions of society (Mey, 2001, p. 6). In this paper I shall deal with indirect reporting (the social practice of indirect reporting) and with slurs (and slurring) in indirect reporting, in the spirit of societal considerations by Mey (2001).

Research on discourse forms is becoming more and more common in an attempt at explaining daily linguistic paradigms in specific documents. In the field of business, this interest may be related to enhancing corporate communication and marketing techniques. The aim of this paper is to discuss the uses of personal pronouns in the 'About Us' pages of banks' corporate websites. This study is based on a compilation of previous works from researchers who focused on the analysis of pronoun, concerning both style and function. In this experiment, 64 webpages from bank websites were selected for the corpus and subsequent data compilation and analyses were performed. The results revealed the most frequent personal pronouns which had been used in the different sections of banks' webpages. This research helps us to better understand academic English discourse in the field of banking.

Although the existence of L1 transfer is not so much of a controversy any more, the extent to which L1 influences L2 acquisition is still debatable. To address this issue, the present paper reports on an empirical study. 48 pieces of English composition written by 48 native Mandarin speaking students were collected for the study. The following results were obtained: (1) among 477 errors occurring in 48 pieces of composition, 266 errors were committed due to the influence of Mandarin, the L1. (2) Tense errors, tense inconsistency and verb form errors occur most frequently, with the percentage of L1 influence on them coming up to about 80%, 98% and 45% respectively; and (3) The area in which L1 has a most profound influence is within grammar or syntax, rather than within lexis.

As dynamic assessment (DA) continues to come to prominence as a procedure that endeavors to ameliorate learner performance and further development through mediators' assistance with the intent of discerning learning potential, a plethora of research has delved into the applicability of DA in second/foreign language education. This article employed methodical procedures for qualitative meta-synthesis of the target research domain to synthesize available quantitative and qualitative primary research reports. The discursive reading and systematic review of research findings and discussions across study reports revealed a primary theme, that is, 'DA: Shifting Focus from Postpositivism to Pragmatism', and a shared set of 2 secondary themes, that is, 'Classroom-Based L2 DA: Post-Achievement Test Condition' and 'Mediators' Sense of Accountability' that can provide a refined worldview on DA and a window on contemporary opinions on the relevance of assessment to classroom context and can develop a more informed understanding of the ascendency of mediators over the effectiveness of DA.

This study sought to specify whether English articles appearing in Iranian scholarly journals include intensifiers and to determine the frequency of informal hedges vs. formal ones. To this end, 50 articles randomly selected from five different Iranian scholarly EFL journals were analyzed in terms of a taxonomy of different types of hedges and intensifiers. Frequency counts were made in the light of a taxonomy of hedges and overstatements developed by the current researcher on. The taxonomy was prepared on the basis of Hinkel's (2004 & 2005) outline. The results indicated that contrary to expectations, hedging devices had been used much more frequently than intensifiers in the papers analyzed; a comparison of formal and informal hedged words also indicated that formal hedges are used more frequently than informal ones. The findings have implications for academic writing in EFL contexts.

Based on their scores on a proficiency test, the 894 participants in this study were grouped into three experimental groups (EG) and three control groups (CG). They attempted an argumentative writing task and the Cornell Critical Thinking Test, Form Z (CCTT-Form Z) as the pre-test. While CG participants received no treatment or placebo, EG participants received a three-week workshop treatment aimed at reconstructing their critical thinking and argumentation abilities. Two weeks after the workshop, all participants in all EG and CG groups attempted the same writing task and the Cornell Critical Thinking Test, Form Z (CCTT-Form Z) as the post test. SPANOVA analyses revealed that EFL writing performance will boost if EFL students’ are helped to deconstruct, and then reconstruct, their cognitive and thought patterns for appropriate argumentation.