This study was framed on the theory of Language Socialisation and a Systematic Functional Linguistic (SFL) approach. The aim of the study was to analyse the oral presentation discourse produced by an elemen- tary Iranian English as Second Language (ESL) postgraduate student in an American university four times (September/December, 2015 and March/September, 2016) over one year. The data were collected in terms of textual resources during the discourse socialisation process while in a second language community. The data relating to oral presentations were taken through the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT) and later transcribed for further analyses. The findings revealed that the participant became more competent as he continued his language socialisation in the second language academic community. He made progress through the use of textual resources, through the use of basic cohesive devices, including ‘and’ and ‘so’ over time. The study contributes to the language socialisation research by employing a systemic functional lin- guistics approach as a tool for the discourse development. It is intended that the findings will contribute to the knowledge around curriculum and the delivery of second language oral skills. Manuscript profile

This study aimed to discover the insight of error correction by implementing two correction systems on three Iranian university students. The three students were invited to write four in-class essays throughout the semester, in which their verb errors and individual-selected errors were corrected using the Code Correction System and the Individual Correction System. At the end of the study, the students’ change of verb errors and individual errors from the first to the last in-class essays were calculated to examine the effectiveness of the two correction systems in this study. Moreover, to uncover the students’ perceptions and opinions toward the two correction systems, three researcherstudent conferences were conducted each time after the correction. The findings of this study suggested that (1) Conferences are important for students to clarify confusing ideas and enhance their interaction with the teacher and their errors. It is recommended to be used in error correction to make the correction procedure a two-direction communication; (2) Learner-centered correction in which the control rests on learners may contribute to learners’ autonomy of learning and intrinsic motivation, and may further result in the effectiveness of error correction; (3) While correcting students’ errors, teachers may need to pay more attention to less-advanced students, as they may need more help and may benefit much from the correction; (4) The better way to solve Iranian university students’ problem in using English tenses may be to expose them to more authentic English, but not in over-simplified rules; and (5) Teachers should avoid putting answers directly on students’ written errors, but adopt more implicit error identification techniques for students to reflect on their own errors. Manuscript profile

The aim of the present study was to investigate the importance of skopos in the translation of political texts from English into Persian. To do this, 30 Iranian translators were conveniently selected and equally divided into the in-house and freelance translators. They were asked to translate a translation test encompassing 10 short political texts that were extracted from English news websites. The point was that the in-house translators were provided with the skopos and were informed of the intended audiences, whereas the freelancers were not given the skopos and were not aware of the intended readers. Davies' (2003) taxonomy was applied as a valuable criterionto discover translation strategies used by each group of the participants. Finally, the success of each group of the professional translators was determined according to Vermeer's (1989/2000) skopos theoretical model. The findings indicated that from Davies' translation strategies, the in-house translators employed the target text (TT) oriented strategies that led to very functional and the TT-oriented translations as well as their success in fulfilling the defined skopos. By contrast, the freelance translators applied the source text (ST) oriented strategies and made the translations that were oriented towards the ST. This resulted in their failure to accomplish the translation skopos. The independent samples t test was also applied to find out the difference between the in-house and freelance translators. According to the results, there was a significant difference between their performance and employment of translation strategies. Manuscript profile

This study aimed to develop and validate an instrument to evaluate English language teachers’ lesson plan- ning self-concept. To this end, 30 English teachers were asked to prepare a sample lesson plan and 15 of them were invited to participate in a semi-structured interview. A tentative questionnaire including six fac- tors namely: classroom management, lesson planning conformity, planning efficacy, variety and adaptation, goal setting, and metacognitive knowledge, was then designed. The designed instrument was piloted to 300 English language teachers and validated using exploratory factor analysis. The findings of the study sug- gested a model questionnaire (30 items), including five factors (goal setting and metacognitive knowledge as one factor), for the evaluation of English language teachers’ lesson planning self-concept. Manuscript profile

This study determined whether there was any significant relation between EFL student’s critical thinking and their translation quality. To this end, 60 male and female translation students took part in the study. The participants were chosen from among senior BA students and junior MA students. The subjects were given a translation production test and a critical thinking questionnaire (Honey, 2005) which were to be completed in 55 minutes. Then two raters evaluated the production test. The results of an analysis of correlation between the two variables indicated that there was a significant relation between critical thinking and translation quality. Furthermore, a regression analysis showed that critical thinking was a significant predictor of students’ translation scores. Manuscript profile

Computer technology has influenced the realm of language teaching and testing so drastically that no language teaching program could be imagined nowadays without the use digitized software and mul- timedia. This study aims at investigating Iranian EFL learners' performance on paper-based test com- pared with their performance on computer-based test while considering their attitudes towards the computer and learning language through computer. The sample selected for this study consisted of 205 Iranian male and female EFL learners, having been selected randomly from some language insti- tutes and colleges, their age ranging from 17 to 27 years. To materialize the objectives of the study, the researchers used three research instruments: a test in two versions, a questionnaire and an inter- view. The Objective Placement Test (one computer-based and the other paper-based) including, lis- tening, reading and language use was given to participants in two separate administrations. The for- mat of the computer-based version of the test was designed by the researchers so that it could be the same as that of the paper-based version and could have the same level of practicality. The question- naire was based on Min (1998), designed to measure the participants' attitudes towards the computer in general and computer-based language learning in particular. To confirm the questionnaire data, an interview was also randomly conducted with 20 learners. It was found that Iranian EFL learners are mostly exposed to paper-based tests. The findings revealed that although learners showed positive attitude towards computer-based tests and digitized language learning, they performed better on the paper-based test than on the computer-based test. Manuscript profile

Translating the cultural terms in an understandable way for the target readers can be challenging for translators. Translators should be familiar with the cultures of both languages (i.e. source and target languages). The present study aimed to show that which cultural terms strategies are more common in translation of the novel titled “For One More Day” based on Aixela‟s model. This study also investigated the relevancy of the translation of the cultural terms to Aixela‟s Model. The corpus of this study was the novel “For One More Day” and its Persian translation under the title of “Baraye Yek Rooz Bishtar”, which has been translated by Manizheh Jalali. At the first step, the researchers extracted some part of the original book. They later took out the cultural terms from the original book and looked up for their equivalences in the Persian translation. After these steps, the researchers analyzed those equivalences based on Aixela‟s model. The findings of the study showed that the translator of the so-called novel used conservation and substitution strategies for translating the cultural terms. Manuscript profile

This review article explores the language learning approaches and their applicability in translation classes. Bob Hodge in his work “Teaching as Communication” stated that language, above all, holds a community together. Children learn a language implicitly without having a critical view to it. Academics such as translators and interpreters, who use the language as a professional tool, however, should view the languages more critical. Although it is still a very controversial subject to know how people learn a language. The approaches that may be particularly applicable to adult learners are suggested and defined in this study. Some of the main approaches of learning discussed in this article include the behaviorist approach, which is considered as one of the influential ones, the cognitive approach that can be appropriate to university teaching and the innovative method, which considers students’ learning styles to increase their motivation to learn. Manuscript profile

This study investigated students’ oral performance ability accounting for various oral analytical factors including fluency, lexical and structural complexity and accuracy with each subcategory. Accordingly, 20 raters scored the oral performances produced by 200 students and a quantitative design using a MANOVA test was used to investigate students’ score differences of various levels of language proficiency groups with respect to their oral scores in each analytical factor. The findings showed that students, in each level of language proficiency, were different from each other regarding various measures of fluency, lexical complexity, structural complexity and accuracy when performing the five oral tasks. Besides, the findings showed that language planning, perspective and immediacy were the determining dimensions in oral task difficulty. The findings demonstrated the usefulness of analytical approaches to rater training programs in detecting rater effects and demonstrating the consistency and variability in rater behavior. The analysis confirmed that the nature of second language oral construct is not constant, thus different results are achieved using different oral task dimensions. Consequently, the outcomes have constructive implications in the use of feedback as a reliable indicator of task difficulty and specifically as a basis for test design and validation. Manuscript profile