This study is an investigation of certain aspects of classroom verbal interaction with a focus on description and analysis of questions in teacher talk. Transcriptions of recorded classroom sessions were analyzed to identify the type of the questions used by an Iranian EFL teacher, teaching in a language institute in Iran. After data analysis of 8 sessions of instruction, the researcher identified four categories of teacher questions and their related frequency across the discourse of teacher talk

Abstract-The present study has been an attempt to investigate the impact of using story maps as graphic organizers on developing vocabulary learning of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Sixty male and female students, who had scored homogenously in a TOEFL test, participated in this study. Both the control and the experimental groups participated in a vocabulary pre-test. After undergoing a course of 8 sessions of reading short stories, through which story maps were used as post-reading activity in the experimental group and traditional question and answer techniques were used in the control group, both groups took part in a vocabulary post-test. The data analysis revealed a significant difference between the performances of the two groups with the experimental group outperforming the other.

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This study is motivated by Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis and aims to investigate the impact of task grading along reasoning demands dimension on syntactic complexity in English as foreign language writing. The participants of the study were 90 intermediate EFL learners from three intact classes at, and a Control group. At first, the students in all groups took part in the writing pre-test which was a picture story description task. Next, the treatment sessions including 8 sessions of picture description task performance began, during which the first experimental group received a series of picture description tasks in a randomized order of cognitive complexity. The second experimental group received the same tasks, but ordered from simple to complex based on their required reasoning demands. The control group, however, did not receive any picture description tasks; rather they received some typical writing activities and performed extra writing tasks from the course book. Finally, during the last session, the post-test was administered to all participants. The results of the data analysis through Analysis of Variances (ANOVA) using the SPSS software showed a significant positive impact for sequencing tasks from simple to complex on syntactic complexity of Iranian intermediate EFL learners.

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