With the development of technology and due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, most of the ELT courses in Iran have shifted to online learning since March 2020. Therefore, this study aimed at determining the effectiveness of four online technological tools of teaching idioms. To this aim, 106 pre-intermediate learners of English took part in the study. A language proficiency test was administered to ensure the homogeneity of the sample. A total number of 80 students were selected as the final participants who were randomly assigned to four experimental groups: In group A, concept maps of the same idioms were drawn with the help of an online mind-map maker. Group B were presented with online flashcards which included definitions and examples of idioms. Group C received etymological elaboration from an online dictionary of the origins of idioms, and group D listened to online audio stories of all the idioms. Each group of the participants received the treatment for 12 sessions and took part in the pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest. The results of a one-way ANOVA indicated that the most gains were achieved by story-telling. The findings imply implications for teachers, syllabus designers, and materials developers in using appropriate instructional methods for teaching idioms. پرونده مقاله

Researchers have extensively compared different L2 learning contexts, such as EFL versus study-abroad, for their impacts on oral production; however, scant attention, if any, has been paid to comparing EFL settings in terms of input factors such as textbooks, amount of contacts in L2, and teachers. Accordingly, the effects of these factors on the oral production skills were investigated in this study. To this end, in a longitudinal study that spanned nearly three months, speech samples were elicited from three groups of Persian speaking advanced learners of English (N = 72) through oral narrative tasks and were scored for complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). A one-way MANOVA was used to compare the means. The average number of subordinate clauses per AS-unit was used to measure grammatical complexity, “D” was a measure of lexical complexity, the percentage of error-free clauses was an index of accuracy, and the number of dysfluencies was calculated to be an indicator of fluency. After a period of time, the results provided strong evidence for the significantly different rates of progress among the learners of the three EFL settings on lexical complexity, accuracy, and fluency. Evaluation of course materials, amount of learners’ contact in L2, and teachers’ self-efficacy revealed that these different rates of progress might well be attributed to the characteristics of the speaking tasks in the textbooks. One important implication is that gains in a special dimension of oral production can be produced if EFL curriculum developers provide target learners with speaking tasks bearing particular features. پرونده مقاله