Locative constructions, as an instance of double object constructions with various cognitive-linguistic concepts, have been successful in attracting the linguists. This paper tried to evaluate the acquisition of English locative constructions by Persian native speakers in the absence of negative evidence, focusing on the influence of L1 and participants’ proficiency level in the course of acquisition. The participants of the study were a group of 90 Iranian EFL learners divided to low, mid, and high proficiency groups asked to carry out a production and a grammaticality judgment task on English locative constructions. The gathered data were analyzed, using one-way ANOVA and the following post hoc tests. The results of the study revealed that L2 learners’ mother tongue (Persian) was an influential factor, and proficiency level affected the performance of participants in the grammaticality judgment task and to a lower degree in the production task. The findings of this study are expected to have pedagogical implications for EFL teachers, making them aware of possible problems EFL learners may be faced with in the course of acquisition of these structures in a foreign language. تفاصيل المقالة

This study aimed to explore the function and frequency of textual metadiscourse markers (MDMs) in scientific English and Persian texts. Based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of textual markers characterizing the selected genre, four different textbooks, two written in English and two in Persian were analyzed to identify the textual metadiscourse categories (including logical markers, code glosses, and sequencers) used in these texts and to determine the sociopragmatic differences existing in these languages, chi-square test was run and the findings suggested that textual MDMs were present in both English and Persian texts, but they differed in their frequency of occurrence. The contrastive comparison between the English and Persian texts revealed that the frequency of the textual MDMs was greater in the Persian texts. Therefore, it was concluded that such discrepancy could be attributed to the differing rate of explicitness in these two languages. The Persian writers were more interested in explicating their ideas for readers through the text via the use of textual markers (TMs) to a greater extent. It was further found that different factors may influence the use of MDMs, namely the culture, the writer's preferences, the text, and its genre. The implications could include the precaution that Iranian EFL writers ought to be advised to approximate their writing style, in terms of using MDMs, to that of native speakers of English while writing in English. تفاصيل المقالة

There is controversy on the conditions under which cooperative learning methods can improve academic achievement. Group-specific motivational aspects might contribute to the effectiveness of cooperative learning among which classroom goal structures were focused on. More specifically, the study aimed at investigating the efficiency of cooperative writing technique through performance versus mastery-oriented classroom goal structures in improving academic writing of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, 83 intermediate EFL learners took part in this quasi-experimental pretest, post-test study. The participants were required to write a 5-paragraph essay for pretest and post-test. The collected data was analyzed based on an analytic writing rubric (Hedgcock & Leftkowitz, 1992). The results of one-way ANOVA tests indicated that the experimental group which practiced cooperative writing through performance goal orientation outperformed the individual and mastery-oriented classes. It was concluded that performance goal orientation, between-groups competition, and extrinsic motivation, can help EFL teachers in setting a more effective classroom structure for cooperative writing practices to improve the writing proficiency of L2 learners. تفاصيل المقالة