In countries in which English is learned as a foreign or as a second language, children’s language education has been recognized as an important factor. The present study aims to investigate the progress of EFL young learners via the two methods of Audiolingual and Natural approach. The focus therefore is on the acquisition of English words and communicative skills in a certain period of time, and on the best method for improving communication in English for EFL young learners. The participants in this study were 40 Iranian female young learners aged between 7 and 9. They were chosen randomly from two elementary schools where English was taught as an extra-program subject. In one school, English was taught through Audiolingual method and in the other, via Natural approach. The final tests’ scores of each group were analyzed to see the improvement of the young learner's vocabulary and communicative skills in each method. The results indicated that young learners' vocabulary learning and communication skills improved significantly in Natural approach compared in that of Audiolingual method.

The lecture in its many forms is the most commonly used method for transferring information. The present study investigates the effects of discourse markers in lectures on students' compositions, i.e., whether the use of discourse markers in lectures has positive effect on producing more cohesive texts. 20 male advanced level learners, aged 25 to 40, were chosen from one of the language institutes in Isfahan. The participants were divided into two groups. Two texts for giving lectures were chosen related to "Science and Technology", as it was the title of one of the units in the students' book. In order to compare the comprehension of the participants from the text, discourse markers were used in the lecture of group 1 (G1) and in the other lecture for group 2 (G2) no discourse marker was used. Finally, the cohesive devices used in each composition were identified and counted by the researcher. Frequency, mean and standard deviation of the cohesive devices in each category were computed using SPSS. The results indicate that G1 used more cohesive devices in their writings and therefore produced more coherent texts, i.e. the use of discourse markers facilitated their comprehension and had positive effect on producing more cohesive compositions.

This paper reports the results of a study on collaborative writing in a foreign language context, Iran, comparing the performance of one group of Iranian intermediate learners on three different writing tasks: individual writing (N=26), pair writing (N=13), and individual writing using a bilingual dictionary (N=26). When writing in pairs, each pair produced a single text. The participants completed narrative writings based on three different picture-cued stories, one working individually, one in pairs, and another individually using a bilingual dictionary. The performance of the participants in three task conditions was compared on the measure of accuracy, focusing on spelling, morphology and structure. The comparison revealed positive effect of pair work on morphological and structural accuracy but there was no effect on spelling. The analysis of pair-talk recordings during the writing activity provides insights into how the pairs worked on different parts of the language. This study has implications for both foreign language teachers, as well as language testers