The present study was intended to investigate the roles of test-taking strategies, critical thinking, and self-efficacy in the language proficiency of the female Iranian Ph.D. students at Islamic Azad University (IAU), Shahrekord Branch, Shahrekord, Iran. The participants of the study, who were 98 Ph.D. students from a range of disciplines, were getting ready to sit for the English Proficiency Test (EPT) as a partial requirement for the completion of their courses and take the Comprehensive Exam subsequently. These participants were required to complete the test-taking strategies, critical thinking, and self-efficacy questionnaires, one questionnaire per session, towards the end of their English course with the present researcher. They also took a sample of EPT for their final exam. Standard multiple regression was conducted to see how well self-efficacy, critical thinking, and test-taking strategies could predict the participants’ language proficiency. The obtained results revealed that language proficiency had strong, positive, and significant correlations with critical thinking, test-taking strategies, and self-efficacy. Moreover, it was found that all the three independent variables were significant predictors of language proficiency, with critical thinking being the best predictor, test-taking strategies the second, and self-efficacy the third. The significance of these results lies in the fact that individual attributes like critical thinking, self-efficacy, and test-taking strategies play a significant role in the success of students when it comes to language proficiency. پرونده مقاله

The present study aimed to assess the effects of written corrective feedback (WCF) on Iranian EFL learners' writing at the macro (i.e., rhetorical organization, task response, cohesion, and coherence) and micro levels (i.e., lexical resource, punctuation, grammatical range, and accuracy) with a dynamic assessment approach in focus. To this end, the Oxford Quick Placement Test was administered to 150 male and female Iranian EFL learners, of whom 80 homogeneous intermediate learners were selected and assigned to an experimental group and a control group. The two groups received WCF in the sense that the teacher provided symbols such as WW for the wrong word, SP for spelling, T for tense, WO for word order, etc. while marking their written productions. The difference was that the experimental group experienced dynamic assessment of L2 writing during the term (in which the teacher taught and tested the learners in an ongoing fashion and provided prompts, hints, support, and encouragement every session), whereas the participants in the control group experienced a conventional class, devoid of an ongoing dynamic assessment component. At the end of the treatment, the collected data were statistically analyzed. The results showed that although the experimental group significantly outpaced the control group regarding the micro-levels of writing, no substantial difference was detected between the macro levels of writing in both groups. It was, thus, concluded that written corrective feedback along with the dynamic assessment can significantly improve the writing of the students at micro-levels. پرونده مقاله

One of the biggest challenges IELTS candidates face in the speaking test session is speaking anxiety. To explore techniques to reduce this anxiety among those learners preparing to sit for the above test, the present study was carried out to compare the effect of metalinguistic and clarification request feedback on the aforesaid anxiety. To this end, 58 male and female learners who had been selected through their performance on a sample language proficiency test, were assigned to one control (N = 18) and two experimental groups (N = 20, each). The control group received different types of corrective feedback, the metalinguistic group received metalinguistic clues on the errors they made, and the clarification request group was asked to clarify their intended meaning whenever they made a mistake. Both types of corrective feedback showed a significant decrease in the speaking anxiety level of the participants in comparison to the control group. However, the metalinguistic group was found to have less anxiety after the treatment. This proves that in IELTS preparatory classes where mistakes on the part of the learners could be corrected as far as their accuracy is concerned, providing learners with metalinguistic clues seems to be more beneficial compared to the clarification request corrective feedback. پرونده مقاله