Language and Testing

Both Han and Mongolian nationalities have advocated and valued education since ancient times, so teaching idioms are also abundant. Before classifying the semantics of Chinese and Mongolian educational idioms, it is necessary to trace back to the origin and study the origin of the idioms in these two languages. The origin of idioms is the soil that produces idioms, and each idiom has its own unique source. Idioms are derived from the ancestors of different nationalities' summaries of daily life, customs, historical stories, myths, legends, famous people's words and social experiences, as well as people's own experiences and wisdom. Chinese and Mongolian idioms are interlinked it this point.

One of the most important purposes in reading English written texts is to understand writer's messages. However, it seems that the Iranian EFL learners have fundamental problems in understanding and interpreting English written texts. Making EFL/ESL students aware of efficient reading strategies that help in the reading of English texts has been the concern of educators and researchers, and necessarily reading instructors for years. Educators usually use different text structures such as; compare/contrast, cause/effect, problem/solution and a collection of descriptions to convey the message to their readers. Studies have identified that learners performed differently after they have read different text structures. In this research I investigated 2 groups of Iranian students’ performance after reading two kinds of text structures which are compare/contrast and cause/effect. These groups of subjects were 10 intermediate and 10 advanced levels who participated in study. The results of the study through t-test analysis identified that both groups performed differently after reading the different text structures. Findings of this research could provide significant awareness for both teachers and students to recognize how different reading texts can be organized in terms of difficulty.

In recent years, the particular importance of Dynamic Assessment in L2 (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994; Poehner & Lantolf, 2005; Poehner, 2008; Albeeva, 2008; Anton, 2009) has been acknowledged. However, there is a severe lack of research on the two important strands of DA in the L2 domain including Computerized Dynamic Assessment (henceforth, C-DA) and Group-based DA (Poehner, 2008). C-DA mostly follows an interventionist model with mediation offered from a menu of predetermined clues, hints, and leading questions selected in a lock-step fashion (moving from most implicit to most explicit) by the computer (Poehner, 2008. The present study, as an initial attempt in the domain of C-DA, reviews the development of the C-DA software programs designed to promote learners’ development. The study reports the data collection procedures and data analysis of the computer-based dynamic assessment of learners in first and second language contexts. The software program should generate important scores including non-mediated score, mediated score, and an LPS. Just two instances of the designed software generated all of these scores by means of computer. Moreover, the quality of hints offered is of significant value. C-DA can lead to hint-based education as opposed to spoon-feeding education.

This study aims to investigate the similarities and differences of some anger metaphors in English and Mongolian. The study is done within the cognitive semantics framework along with the principle of CMT (Layoff and Johnson 1980, 1987; Kövecses 1986, 1988, 2000) framework in English and Mongolian. To compare the results of the study in both languages, the author selected the three parameters proposed by Barcelona (2001) and Kövecses (2001) including (1) the existence and nonexistence of language-specific mappings, (2) degrees of linguistic elaboration, (3) degrees of linguistic conventionalization. The source domains chosen for the analysis are rooted in the most fundamental human experiences in the sedentary and nomadic cultures.This current study highlights the importance of culture in understanding the relationship between metaphor, culture and cognition, and it provides comparative generalizations for the four basic emotion concept of anger and gives the fundamental explanations in English and Mongolian. This systematic comparative analysis of emotion metaphors in English and Mongolian contributes importantly to the major claims of the Contemporary Metaphor Theory, which states that metaphors are grounded on both universal embodiment and social-cultural experiences. Even though English and Mongolian belong to very different language families representing totally different sedentary and nomadic cultures, they share some universal conceptual metaphors for particular emotions with each other.

The vast amount of information available on the internet makes Reading become more important than ever before. It is possible to say that reading is not a guarantee for someone success but success will be harder to come without becoming a skilled reader. Teaching Reading in EFL setting has always been problematic. This is due to the fact that most students have limited amount of vocabulary, limited opportunity to read, limited access to reading material for practice and low motivation to read. Meanwhile, most of Reading lessons resolved around reading passages and answering comprehension questions which looked more like testing Reading rather than teaching Reading. Moreover, most teachers were not concerned on promoting reading outside of the classroom as a means of practice and expect the students to be able to read without any difficulties. Fluency in Reading, as a matter of fact, is the result of thousands of hours of meaningful Reading. The problems mentioned above, lead the writer to develop a model that integrates intensive reading with extensive reading. The intensive reading is designed to teach reading skills and strategies which are needed to become skilled readers. The Extensive reading is designed as a means of practicing the skills and strategies that are taught in the classroom as well as to develop fluency, improve vocabulary and motivation to read. Therefore, this article will elaborate intensive reading, extensive reading and the integrated model of the two concepts as well as current practice and future possibilities

Based on many studies and research conducted on learning a foreign language, it can be claimed that most of the students experience a great difficulty in reading and comprehending the texts in foreign language. It seems that reading and comprehending foreign language materials can be improved if teachers do research to find ways through which readers could be helped to get more information from the text. Therefore, compensation reading strategies can be considered as certain types of enabling activities because they equip the reader with a base knowledge necessary for dealing with the content of the structure of materials. So the present study was an attempt to answer the research questions considering the effects of teaching explicit vs implicit compensation strategies on the third grade high school students’ reading comprehension performance. 110 students took part in this study. The researcher provided them with a language proficiency test taken from NELSON test. Then based on their scores, the mean and standard deviation were computed .The students whose scores fell in the range of “mean ±1standard deviation” were selected for the research study. Therefore, 36 students in one class and 35 students in the other participated as the subjects of the study. Then a standard pre-test (Master TOEFL and Arco TOFEL) was given to the subjects in both groups before any treatment. Finally, a standard post- test (Master TOEFL and Arco TOEFL) was given to the subjects in both groups to prove or disprove the Null hypothesis. Obtaining the needed data, the researcher ran the necessary statistical procedures. It was proved that the experimental group which being exposed to the explicit compensation reading strategies showed higher level of performance on post-test than the control group. Therefore the main null hypothesis, teaching explicit compensation reading strategies has no effect on the reading comprehension of the third- grade high school students was rejected.

This study strived to show the possible relationship among L2 advanced learners’ pragmatic competence and their emotional intelligence. A total of 80 (32 males and 48 females) advanced M.A. TEFL at two Iran’s universities participated. Two tests of Bar-On EQ-i and Liu’s pragmatic test were administered among the participants. Then, the Pearson product-moment correlation was run. The findings revealed three medium positive correlations (between the participants’ pragmatic competence and their intrapersonal/ interpersonal/ emotional intelligence) and two small positive correlations (between the participants’ pragmatic competence and adaptability/ stress management intelligence). The overall findings may be revealing to L2 pedagogy on the role of pragmatics and emotional intelligence in the L2 learning development.

The article focuses on the problem of foreign language training of future specialists as an integral part of the professional training of students of different specialties. The authors analyze the modern features of a foreign language training at the present stage of the society development. The article considers the potential of professional-oriented language for training future specialists that will enable the 21st century professionals to fulfill their professional responsibilities, to be more adaptable and flexible to the challenges of rapid development of society and technology.

This article investigates learning strategies among English Language students to what extent they apply the Explicit-Deductive/-Inductive Grammar Learning Strategies in their language learning. The students as the language learners need to acquire precisely the English grammar skills to help them fulfil their course requirements. To achieve the objective of the study, the adopted questionnaire from Language Learner Strategies developed by Oxford and Lee (2011) has been distributed to 95 samples. The findings show that there is relatively strong statistical evidence supporting all the alternative hypotheses by showing that there is a moderately significant relationship between Explicit-Inductive Learning Strategies (EILS) and Explicit-Deductive Learning Strategies (EDLS). 

Among the different strategies for teaching reading comprehension, graphic organizers have received much attention by many researchers and practitioners. This study investigated the effects of graphic organizers on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Fifty male 3rd-year high school EFL learners were selected by means of the TOEFL test. They were divided into 2 groups of 25 homogeneous students: one experimental group and one control group. Participants were given a reading comprehension test before the treatment. Subsequently, the experimental group—Group A—received the graphic organizers intervention, and the control group—Group B—received a traditional reading instruction (translation-based). After an eight-week treatment, both groups were given the reading comprehension test again as a posttest. Statistical analysis showed a significant difference in the reading comprehension of the experimental group. It was concluded that the use of graphic organizers had positive effects on the L2 learners’ reading comprehension.