This study highlighted the humanistic-transformational perspectives via portfolio assessment which offers a conceptual framework for teaching and assessment. More specifically, it attempted toexplore the effectof portfolioassessmenton EFL learners'reading comprehension ability and motivation in the context of Iran. It adopted the quasi-experimental design comprising the pretest-treatment-posttest paradigm. To achieve the purpose, the researchers collected the triangulated data about the participants. Two classes were selected as the experimental and control groups from TabaranInstitute of Higher Education. They were 65 female university students majoring in translation. The only difference between the two groups was integrating portfolio into learning strategy-based instruction for the experimental group (portfolio-based instruction vs. non-portfolio instruction). At the post-testing stage, the both groups were retested through the reading comprehension test and the motivation questionnaire. A self-report assessment was also utilized to increase the credibility of the motivation test. The resultobtained from Mann Whitney U tests and t-testsrevealed that portfolio assessment as a constructivist strategy empowers participants' reading comprehension and motivation.

This study tended to investigate the effect of culture, as depicted in language, on the use of stance in the applied linguistics research articles of two groups: native speakers of Persian, and native speakers of English. The two corpora comprising the discussion sections of forty research articles from reliable journals were compared for amounts and types of stance. In order to find the cultural differences between native Persian and English researchers, the subtypes of stance devices adapted from Hyland's (2005b) model were used. Results showed that the groups used stance markers differently; more specifically, they employed hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions differently. Furthermore, culture affects stance features as the meta-discourse devices employed by the researchers in writing the research article genre. The findings have implications for EFL learners and novice non-native writers to know the conventions and patterns as thinking devices for effective writing in academic communities of articles.

Dynamic Assessment has recently been voiced of constructivism, the socio-cultural theory of learning. This article, challenging the psychometric and product-based test, makes an attempt to delve into the epistemological and ontological theories of Dynamic Assessment (DA) and their criticisms. DA is the offspring of Vygotsky's theory of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and Feuerstein's mediated learning experience (MLE). It emphasises constructing a future through mediations. Interestingly, this development-oriented process of collaboration relies on the unification of instruction and assessment which is a strong threat to the reliability of the psychometric tests. This study also deals with the battle of views on DA. It discusses the appealing face of DA embracing ethical values, fairness and social equity, and the process based assessment. It also argues the negative face of DA comprising modifiability, interventionism, and stability. It finally concludes that each system should be criticised by certain criteria. Faced with the scarcity of research both theoretically and empirically, the critical analysis of this new generation of test in an L2 setting might be helpful for further discussions, suggestions and implications in the second language learning arena.