Mentoring, a main constituent of teacher education, has taken new shape in recent years, with educators incorporating technology and social media into their practices. This study investigated the use of a Facebook group as a form of informal mentoring among teachers with reference to qualitative and quantitative data collected from the entries, responses and comments of group members. Findings included a list of mentoring topics along with the number of comments and words for each entry. In this way, we were able to analyse quantitatively the contents of each mentoring topic and provide as qualitative evidence clear examples from member comments and exchanges. The findings revealed that EFL teachers shared experiences and knowledge on various topics such as pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, content knowledge, resources and career development.

Two main opposing approaches exist regarding the impact of first-language (L1) use in the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language: the monolingual and bilingual approaches. Some linguists assume that students' L1 should be banished from their English classes, whereas others assert that it facilitates the process of learning a target language. The purpose of this study was to investigate learners' attitudes towards the use of L1 in their English classes, both by the students themselves and by their teachers. The current study also determined which factors caused the learners to switch from the TL to their L1. This study was conducted at Salahaddin University, Erbil, at the end of the first semester of the 2016-2017 academic year. It employed a mixed-method approach of data collection and analysis. Two hundred and fifty-eight EFL learners participated in the quantitative data collection, by completing a questionnaire and the qualitative data were collected via face-to-face semi structured interviews with eight EFL learners. The findings revealed that participants had a slightly positive attitude towards the use of their L1 in the facilitation of their TL learning. By referring to current theories of TL acquisition and reviewing recent literature, it can be inferred that learners' L1 has a necessary and facilitating role in acquiring a foreign language under certain conditions.

This study investigates the relationship between learner motivation and vocabulary size in English as foreign language (EFL) classrooms at Duhok University. The participants included 100 students (55 male, 45 female). All participants were pursuing their third years of study in an English department. Two instruments were employed: questionnaires regarding Motivation for Foreign Language Learning (MFLL) and Vocabulary Size Test (VST). The primary goal of this study is to determine which factors of motivation profoundly affect the foreign language learning processes of Iraqi EFL students and to what extent they should develop their depth and breadth English vocabularies in order to sufficiently acquire the language and elaborate the importance of both components in language acquisition. Findings showed that female students experienced both types of motivation, with the mean score of extrinsic motivation being 29.91, and that for intrinsic motivation being 31.20, while the mean score of male students was 27.10 for extrinsic motivation and 28.00 for intrinsic motivation. The VST ranged from 1,000 to 14,000 wordfamilies, and the vocabulary size of both groups was over 6,000 word-families. Correlation analysis was conducted to determine the relationship between learner motivation and vocabulary size. For both groups, the results indicated no relationship between these two aspects of students' foreign language leaning. To investigate the difference between MFLL and VST, an independent samples t-test was utilized and no difference was found to exist between the vocabularies of both groups.

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