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Education is not an end, but a means to an end. The ultimate goal of education is to prepare students for their future life. Regarding this fact, English language classes and textbooks can be used as tools for improving learners' life skills. Meanwhile, informative textbooks with rich socio-cultural constructs that foster learners' life skills are needed. To assess the range of the Iranian EFL textbooks richness in these aspects, a life skills questionnaire was distributed among ELT teachers (N=73) and EFL learners (N=1112) almost all over Iran. The results originated from data analysis showed that Iranian EFL textbooks don't improve the EFL learners' essential life skills considerably especially leadership life skills, critical thinking life skills, and decision making/problem solving life skills. The findings of this research and the designed life skills questionnaire can be used by educational policy makers, syllabus designers, materials developers, researchers, teachers, etc. to examine and analyze the socio-cultural constructs of Iranian EFL textbooks for considering in the processes of publishing new EFL textbooks for the Islamic-Iranian society of Iran.

Summary The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of the use of communicative methods and form-focused methods as implemented in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses. To accomplish this, two groups of management students were selected for the study. Each group consisted of 30 participants. Their level of proficiency in English and their subject matter knowledge were tested through a sample of IELTS and a pre-test. The two groups were at the same level of proficiency in both general English and English for Students of Management before receiving treatment in 20 sessions within a period of 75 days. Participants in Group A received a form-focused method with some occasional uses of their L1. In Group B, however, the participants were exposed to a communicative ESP course which exclusively relied on English the L2. After the period of treatment, the two groups were examined via a post-test. Results showed that Group B was more successful in the post-test. Moreover, the learners who were proficient in English and the subject matter achieved more from the communicative methods of language teaching in the ESP course. Findings imply that the nature of the subject matter, or whether it is theoretical or applied, could be a factor in deciding a method of language teaching for ESP courses.