Iran’s educational system has undergone new reforms during the last decades. To investigate the effectiveness of the new reform in English as the lingua franca of the world, the current study emphasizes the reading comprehension abilities of grade twelve Iranian female students in English as a foreign language. To this end, 167 students' responses per item of three tests of English reading comprehension were gathered from four different high schools of Malayer. Students' responses in three different item types (three literal, three reorganization, and three inferential comprehension items) from three different reading texts were analyzed altogether. A quantitative design was employed to descriptively analyze the students' responses. The results of the analysis revealed that grade 12 students in Malayer are stronger in literal comprehension compared to the other two comprehension levels: reorganizational and inferential items. This indicated the students' lack of skill in reading between the lines as well as the inability to synthesize and analyze different implicit information in the text that leads them to make meaning. The results can be beneficial for language institutes, English Teachers, and practitioners. Keywords: Inferential Comprehension, International Reading Comprehension Assessment, Reorganizational Comprehension Manuscript profile

The purpose of this article was to study the emotional feelings of Iranian novice and experienced EFL teachers. A group of 63 experienced and novice language teachers (33 men and 19 women) were selected by a purposeful sampling from the statistical population (77 people). The Persian version of the TES questionnaire was used to measure the emotional feelings of the participants toward their professional lives. About 80% of the novice teachers reported having the first stage of emotional feeling: fantasy. They described various fantasies about their students, the parents, and the school staff and the pleasant or unpleasant environments they think they will have in their future classrooms. This stage (unrealistic positivism) seemed quite pleasing to them since students and their parents respected them for their hard work, and no one wanted to misbehave. Moreover, 79% of novice teachers reported experiencing the "survival" stage, in which they fought for their professional identity and a sense of worth among students and colleagues, and 92 % reported a sense of failure when their students failed their classes. Manuscript profile

The present study was an attempt to demystify the role of paired task and test-taker speaking ability in assessing co-constructed discourse in paired oral assessment across Iranian EFL paired examinees with different ability combinations. To accomplish this aim, non-experimental qualitative research was devised in which 36 participants were purposely recruited from three distinct speaking competence levels; namely, upper-intermediate (High-Level), lower intermediate (Mid-Level), and elementary (Low-Level), with 12 learners in each. Participants with similar and different proficiency levels were randomly assigned to six different paired group combinations and were given a discussion task as a paired-test speaking task in which they were asked to discuss the topic of the conversation and attempt to develop the co-constructed discourse. The voices of each couple discussing the assigned topic were then record-ed. Following the transcription of the examinees' performances, the researcher analyzed the learners' conversations using Young's model of interactional competence, which deals with the speakers' ability to organize interactions in terms of turn-taking, break-down repair, and mutual understanding using ver-bal communication in relation to the situational context. The findings demonstrated that low-ability partners employed gestures and postures in turn-taking, as well as a lot of breakdown repairs while fail-ing in mutual comprehension, particularly in talks with more skilled interlocutors. Mid-ability pairs struggled to provide an adequate response in the second position to demonstrate understanding of an interlocutor's comment or statement but could advance the communication in terms of mutual under-standing and moderate success in proper breakdown repairs in their own similar and balanced pairs. However, they lost confidence in taking turns and relied heavily on fixes when conversing with more experienced interlocutors. Similarly, low-ability paired persons seldom tropicalized portions of other speakers' contributions in their own talk. High-ability speakers were more likely to demonstrate prior talk knowledge through contingent answers. These findings revealed that task direction and progress might have an impact on interactional behavior and how understanding is expressed. Additionally, the findings have some implications for teaching, learning, and testing L2 speaking through paired-test tasks for the purpose of improving EFL learners' speaking skills sub-skills. Manuscript profile