Previous studies on the effect of planning on language production have revealed that planning does have a positive effect on language performance in terms of fluency, complexity, and accuracy. The present study was an attempt to investigate the effects of pre-task, on-line, and both pre-task and on-line planning on fluency, accuracy, and complexity of Iranian EFL learners' written production. Forty five Iranian learners of English performed a narrative task based on a series of six pictures. The narratives, then, were coded to measure the fluency, accuracy, and complexity of the participants' production. The results of one-way ANOVA revealed that on-line planning (OLP) and pre-task plus on-line planning (PTP+OLP) had no effect on the fluency, complexity, and accuracy of the Iranian EFL learners' written narratives. However, pre-task planning (PTP) had a significant effect on one variable of fluency (i.e. syllables per minute) but it had no effect on the complexity and accuracy of the written narratives. Findings have pedagogical implications for language teachers and syllabus designers in EFL context.

Contemporary narrative theory came to being with Russian Formalism and developed through the work of authors and critics such as Sheklovsky, Todorov, and Strauss. Relying on Saussure's linguistic theories, literary structuralism flourished in the 60s. Structural narratology started in 1928 with the publication of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of Fairy Tales. Propp, a Russian anthropologist, claimed that despite apparent differences, all stories follow similar actions and share similar characters. He believes there are fixed and changing elements in the stories. Names and traits may change, but the actions remain the same. Propp categorizes his findings in four formulas: fixed elements, 31 functions, and 7 spheres of action. This paper tries to reread Shahnameh's Bizhan and Manizheh from Propp's perspective to see if it complies with it or not. Finally, it concludes that it is compatible with the 31 functions, though Propp does not go beyond the surface structure and ignores key components such as motives, starting points, ethics, and religious considerations. Also some of the functions are not found in the story.

Structuralism and post-structuralism criticisms are scientific, novel methods of studying Persian stories through which the coherent structure which is intertwined in the story can be revealed. Binary oppositions are basic concepts which exist in structural and post-structural criticism. According to these theories, there are two major functions for the text that advance the story. These binary oppositions can be found in all parts of Masnavi. The authors tried, in this study, first to analyze the lexical meanings of binary oppositions and then to examine the binary oppositions in Masnavi.

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