Social networking applications such as WhatsApp have been extensively used for language research; however, they have rarely been applied for language assessment purposes. To explore the efficiency of WhatsApp for assessment purposes, 30 Iranian English learners doing self‐ and peer‐assessments on WhatsApp are studied. The changes and the reasons for the changes in their attitudes towards the two assessment types are also investigated. In a multi‐phase study, the participants were trained on the new concepts of mobile‐assisted self‐ and peer‐assessments. They were also involved in the concurrent tasks of self‐ and peer‐assessments as well as think‐aloud protocols and filled out four attitude questionnaires before and after their involvement in the two assessment types. Finally, they were interviewed for the reasons of change(s) in their attitudes. The t‐test and think‐aloud results show that though the participants assigned different grades to themselves and their peers, this is not a procedural difference. The questionnaire results show that the participants generally adopted negative attitudes towards mobile‐assisted assessments after being involved in them. They also gave various reasons for the change(s) in their attitudes. The results can substantially contribute to the ongoing debates on the use of alternative assessments through mobile device applications.

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This paper is concerned with the contrastive analysis of the frequency system of common standard Persian and English consonants. Two corpora were selected from Iranian newspapers. One of them is Keyhan newspaper that is published in Persian and the other one is Tehran Times newspaper that goes under press in English in Iran. Common standard Persian and English consonants were enumerated and analyzed by themselves and with respect to parts of speech, manner of articulation and place of articulation. Results indicated a significant difference between the frequency of eleven Persian consonants and their English counterparts. Nouns comprised the highest frequency of consonants and while prepositions, determiners and conjunctions had the lowest. With respect to manner of articulation, there was a significant difference between both languages in all manners with stops as the most frequent in both. As for the place of articulation, there was a significant difference between both languages and alveolars were the most frequent in both. Regarding manner of articulation, English stops and liquids were more frequent than those of Persian. With respect to place of articulation, just English alveolars were more frequent than the Persian ones. The frequency of all other places was higher in Persian. In spite of frequent differences between both languages, many similarities were also identified in terms of their frequency systems, and the frequency of consonants with respect to parts of speech, manner of articulation and place of articulation.