The present study investigated EFL learners’ perceptions of classroom ethics, and 60 EFL learners participated in an interview and an ethics questionnaire. The analysis of collected data resulted in 13 categories of classroom ethics, including ‘teacher punctuality’, ‘fairness and discrimination’, ‘respect and politeness’, ‘being humorous and energetic’, ‘discipline’, ‘rapport’, ‘commitment to the profession and colleagues’, ‘appropriate content of discussion’, ‘responsibility’, ‘adaptability’, ‘reliability and trust’, ‘avoidance of misuse’, and ‘dress code’. The findings showed that all the learners recognized ethics as an essential part of the classrooms while their views differed in ranking some ethics. The most and the least valuable ethics for the participants were ‘punctuality’ and “dress code and appearance” in order. The most important ethics perceived by the learners were ‘punctuality’, ‘rapport’, and ‘being humorous and energetic’. The findings illustrated that the learners’ consideration of ethics was focused on the teachers’ manner and morality in the classroom. Manuscript profile

Learning a second/foreign language is a complicated process involving many factors and elements to occur effectively. It requires an investigation of variables and issues related to EFL learners in the process of learning. A limited number of studies have been performed concerning student-related factors to realize EFL learners’ spiritual intelligence and its relation to language learning. The study helped fill this gap by exploring the correlation between EFL learners’ Spiritual Intelligence (SI) and Learner Autonomy (LA). A total of 365 EFL students were chosen from different branches of Islamic Azad University. Two validated and reliable questionnaires on SI (Azadi et al., in press) and LA (Dixon, 2011) were distributed among the participants. The SI questionnaire is a 27-item self-report measure consisting of four main factors, and the LA questionnaire contains 38 questions covering six factors. The correlation between the two variables was determined through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results showed a significant relationship between SI and LA. Manuscript profile

The pedagogical roles of teacher educators (TEs) in recruiting and educating future language teachers have recently gained attention among language researchers and scholars. Hence, this study set to investigate the pedagogical roles of Iranian non-native teacher educators (TEs) in educating preservice and in-service EFL teachers from the viewpoint of language institute managers. To this end, following a qualitative survey research design, a total of 30 institute managers were selected via the snowball sampling method and engaged in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The participants’ responses were voice recorded and then thematic analysis was conducted to extract the main themes and subcomponents. The findings of the study showed that institute managers assigned three main instructional roles to TEs: holding preservice/in-service teacher education courses, revising the assessment system, and designing effective language syllabuses. Accordingly, language institute managers believed that effective TEs should not only be responsible for running teacher education courses but also engage in the evaluation process by checking and revising the testing procedures and designing and developing relevant instructional syllabuses in cooperation with educational managers of the institutes. The pedagogical findings of the study are also discussed. Manuscript profile

This study sought to examine the type and frequency of tasks in the Iranian high school English course books (Prospect 1, 2, 3 & English Book 1, 2, 3). The corpus was analyzed based on Nunan’s (1999) framework composed of five main task types, namely cognitive, interpersonal, linguistics, affective, and creative. To this end, the whole content of the aforementioned course books went through content analysis separately and accordingly descriptive and inferential results were reported regarding the frequency of each task type. The results showed that the linguistic tasks were the most recurrent type, whereas some task types (e.g., affective and creative) were totally absent. Furthermore, based on the results of Chi Square test, a significant difference was observed in the frequency of task types. While, according to communicative approach, communicative competence necessitates the inclusion of grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, and strategic competencies, the findings of the current study revealed that linguistic competence was overemphasized in these course books. This fact may lead to learners who are competent in producing linguistically appropriate utterances, which may at the same time be inappropriate with regard to context. The findings can have significant implications for EFL teachers and materials developers in making them conscious of the fact that the application of different types of tasks in textbooks is an important standard leading to more competent language users, especially in an EFL context like Iran. Manuscript profile

The present study developed a questionnaire (Appendix 1) based on the relevant literature and interviews with 22 EFL learners, resulting in a 27-item questionnaire that was distributed among 360 EFL learners. A sequential mixed methods design was used. The analysis of the qualitative data revealed the elements of EFL learners’ spiritual intelligence. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of EFL learners’ responses generated four factors, namely: (1) Learning English for personal, social, and educational benefits, (2) learning English for personal, social, and academic achievement, (3) learning English to promote religious values, and (4) learning English for intercultural communication. The results of the study suggest that this scale is a reliable and valid measure of EFL learners’ SI. This study also revealed that SI has a significant relationship with gender and educational levels. The findings can help researchers define SI and how EFL learners’ SI can be measured. Educationists, practitioners, academics, theorists, teacher training centers, teachers, curriculum constructors, and pedagogic planners may find the results of this study beneficial if they are concerned with the importance of SI in the educational context and its influence on the performance of EFL learners. Manuscript profile