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Collocation is one of the most problematic areas in second language learning and it seems that if one wants to improve his or her communication in another language should improve his or her collocation competence. This study attempts to determine the effect of applying three different kinds of collocation on collocation learning and retention of Iranian EFL university students. In this study collocations were presented in highlighted (bold), non highlighted and L1 glossed forms and these three groups of collocations were distributed among three 20 member groups of Iranian TEFL university students in Jahad daneshgahi university in Isfahan. Participants were upper intermediate sophomores and juniors. Participants read three passages under three different conditions (bold collocations, L1 glossed collocations, and non highlighted (text only) collocations). Afterwards, participants answered two collocation tests, one administered immediately after reading the texts and another two weeks later. One way repeated measures of ANOVA and follow up Scheffe post hoc tests (p<.05) showed that the students in L1 glossed group outperformed the students in the other two groups and participants in highlighted group out performed non highlighted ( text only) group

One aspect of short message service (SMS) communication through a cell phone is use of politeness strategies. As it is extensively argued that females are more polite language users, the present study sought to describe the strategies used by these two groups and to find out whether there is any significant difference between male and female English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in the use of positive and negative politeness strategies in sending SMS to their professors, considering that there is an asymmetric power relation and social distance between them. To this end, a corpus of 300 L1 (Persian) and L2 (English) request messages was compiled. Results of qualitative and quantitative data analysis showed no significant difference between the two groups. Results of the study have implication in politeness research.

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The variable success in learning a second language (L2) may be best explained by varying degrees of motivation. This study investigated whether individual differences in appraisal dimensions of motivation explained explicit and implicit syntactic knowledge. Participants learned three syntactic structures under implicit and explicit training conditions. They also completed two motivation questionnaires before instruction. Syntactic development was assessed at early and late stages of acquisition. Results indicated superior performance on the tests of explicit knowledge, but a limited effect for the role of motivation in its development. However, with improvement in implicit knowledge at delayed testing, positive relationships emerged with several motivational dimensions. The results support L2 theoretical perspectives that posit different roles for explicit and implicit knowledge at early and late stages of L2 grammar, respectively. The findings also indicate that variation in learners' patterns of stimulus appraisals may contribute to variable success in the development of implicit knowledge.