This study was conducted to probe the effect of the observer ring technique on the participants’ writing achievement. In so doing, the researchers utilized a quasi-experimental design with 20 participants in the control group and 18 in the experimental group. Instrumentation included a writing handout, an Oxford Placement Test (standard proficiency test), and a rating scale of writing. As a treatment, the participants in the experimental group were asked to write at home and bring their papers to the class to be corrected by their classmates and the teacher was the supervisor. In the control group, the papers were corrected by the teacher. The results of the pre-test indicated that the participants of the two groups were homogeneous with regard to proficiency level as well as their writing ability. The results of the post-test revealed that the writing ability of the participants in the experimental group had improved during the study. Moreover, the observer ring technique had a positive and significant effect on the participants' writing ability. The findings may promise implications for incorporating this new interactive feedback model into EFL writing classes. پرونده مقاله

The study was aimed at investigating the effectiveness of methods of teaching Translation Courses (TCs) used by Iranian instructors on English-major students’ translation proficiency development. To this end, 156 homogeneous students were selected as the participants to undergo quantitative and qualitative data collection simultaneously through a convergent parallel mixed methods design. The data were collected using a sample language proficiency test (PET), a translation pre- & posttest, the Waddington TQA Ru- bric, and an interview as the instruments of the study. The quantitative data were analyzed using ANCOVA while the qualitative data were extracted through the procedure of content analysis by pin- pointing and condensing meaning units as well as codifying and sorting the commonalities out of the comments extracted from the responses to the interviews. Finally, the two data banks were reported via SPSS software. It was concluded that the modern methods of teaching TCs had a significant effect on students’ translation proficiency, the results of which were confirmed by the qualitative data analysis of the responses in the interview. The research findings contribute to translation studies via providing guide- lines and solutions for the instructors to apply appropriate methods and deal with the challenging aspects of teaching TCs. پرونده مقاله