This study investigates the metaphor’s central position in the memorization, retention and prediction of the meaning of phrasal verbs. To this end, 45 Iranian EFL learners from Chabahar Maritime University were divided into three groups. In control group, the phrasal verbs were presented with their Farsi (students' mother tongue) equivalents and students were asked to memorize them on their own as it is the traditional method of teaching phrasal verbs. Experimental group I received the phrasal verbs in the context of a sentence, and students were asked to make new sentences with them in the class. And the experimental group II received the orientational metaphors underlying the meaning of the particles of phrasal verbs. All the three groups took three tests in which the correct particles of the phrasal verbs had to be provided. The first test, carried out just two hours after the instructions, dealt with the taught phrasal verbs. The same test was conducted five weeks later to measure the long term retention of phrasal verbs' meaning. But the third test dealt with 20 untaught phrasal verbs which had the same particles as the taught ones. One-way ANOVA results revealed that the difference between the groups’ performances on the immediate test was not statistically significant, while the efficiency of metaphorical conceptualization, and sentential contextualization on the delayed test, and untaught test was considerable. There was a slight difference between the two experimental groups, but it was not statistically significant. The study ends with some suggestions for the teaching of phrasal verbs and the possible factors contributing to their difficulty

This study investigates the Iranian EFL learners' Knowledge of Lexical Collocation at three academic levels: freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. The participants were forty three English majors doing their B.A. in English Translation studies in Chabahar Maritime University. They took a 50-item fill-in-the-blank test of lexical collocations. The test included five types of collocations: verb-noun, adjective-noun, noun-verb, adverb-adjective, and verb-adverb. Descriptive statistics, t-test, and One-way ANOVA were employed in the data analysis. According to the results, Iranian English majors are weak in lexical collocations, answering just more than 50% of the questions. A significant difference was found among the performance of the students at three academic levels, but there was no significant difference between boys and girls in their knowledge of lexical collocations. While noun-verb collocation was revealed to be the easiest type of collocation, adverb-adjective collocation proved to be the most difficult type. These findings have immediate implications for language learners, EFL teachers, and material designers.

This study investigated the effects of lexical collocation, topic and cultural familiarity on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension. There were thirty-eight English Translation students in Chabahar Maritime University participating in the present study, 15 freshmen and 23 sophomores. They were chosen from among 45 students based on their scores in the reading comprehension tests. In the treatment period, all the students received three different types of instruction in three consecutive weeks, and took a reading comprehension test after each type of instruction. . In the first week, they received a text that was culturally familiar to them; it was about the origin and development of banks and corporations in Iran. In the second week, they were taught the difficult lexical collocations of the reading text along with their Farsi equivalents before taking the test. And finally in the third week, the students read a reading passage which had the same topic as the reading test before; it was about the communication and behavior of ants. All the students were requested to complete a reading comprehension test, adopted from the paper-based TOEFL tests, after each type of instruction. According to the results demonstrated by the statistical program, a significant difference was found in reading comprehension among the participants based on the type of instruction they received. The highest mean belonged to the third week, when the students read a passage with the same topic before the test as the treatment, followed by the collocation instruction. However, there was no significant difference between boys and girls, and freshmen and sophomores as a result of different types of instruction

Considering the importance of sustainable development (SD) in developing countries and lack of research on this topic among Iranian English teachers, this study aims at investigating the Iranian English teachers’ awareness and understanding of this concept and the effects of demographic features on their understanding. To this end, a researcher-made 48-item validated Questionnaire that consisted of eight scales was administered among 233 English teachers teaching at high schools, private language institutes, and universities. The data were analyzed through content analysis of the open-ended question and quantitative analysis of the Likert-scale items. One-way ANOVA was used to find out about the effects of gender, workplace, teaching experience, and academic degree on teachers’ understanding and awareness. The results revealed that although some teachers could not define the term, or provided a general or wrong definition of the term, more than half of the teachers rightly emphasized the economic aspect, protecting natural resources, and caring for present and future lives of people. It was also found that Iranian English teachers highly supported equity, appreciated and protected the nature, enjoyed diversity, asked for education for sustainable development, and led a frugal life. Finally, it was revealed that none of the demographic features influenced teachers’ awareness of SD, except for academic degree and workplace factor that affected three out of eight scales measuring SD. The study ends with several implications for materials developers, English teachers, and syllabus designers.

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