Computer-assisted language learning has received respectable amount of attention among researchers and language teachers. In this regard, innumerable large or small-scale projects blazed a trail for other teachers to follow. The present study is primarily concerned with the students' attitudes towards computer-assisted language learning. Its main purpose is to investigate what the Iranian high school students' general attitudes are towards computer-assisted language learning (CALL), and using CALL for teaching EFL receptive skills including reading and listening. The methodology employed a replication design and questionnaire approach. The findings demonstrate that most of the students have positive attitudes towards CALL and using it in language receptive skills teaching.

In this article we argue that Second language learners need Metaphorical Competence (MC) which is the ability to comprehend and use metaphors in natural communication. The lack of knowledge of metaphorical concepts often leads learners to get off on a wrong foot. Learning idiomatic expressions helps learners for better communication as well as language learning in the target culture and society. This paper reports on a study done to inspect the development of conceptual fluency and metaphorical competence in Persian students of English. A group of intermediate language students were selected to be examined for the usefulness of idiomatic expressions' instruction. At the end of the instruction it was revealed that it is possible to improve learners' conceptual fluency (CF) by the extended exposure to idiomatic expressions

It is said that one important aspect of education is the production of coherent discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). This is the speaker's or the writer's ability to organize relevant meanings in relation to each other, and this in turn requires the establishment of 'chain interaction' -relations between components of a message -in a text. The more chain interactions we have in a text, the more coherent and, as a result, the more comprehensible it will be. Based on the above argument, the present study aims at investigating the effects of chain interaction impairment which may cost the test-takers' comprehension of texts -itself being an object of measurement in cloze (Alderson, 1983;Francis, 1999) -and account for their low performance. It also aims at suggesting 'chain-preserving deletion' (CPD) as a pedagogical procedure.

Abstract—In line with the studies in EFL/ESL contexts confirming the positive relationship between critical thinking ability and reading comprehension, this study intended to investigate how frequently critical thinking is used in EFL Reading Comprehension textbooks at university level in Iran. The study investigated the course books used in order to understand to what extent critical thinking is advocated in such books. To this end, all question types in general and Critical Reading Questions (CRQs), Vocabulary In Context (VIC), Literal Comprehension (LC), and Extended Reasoning (ER), in particular were identified. The focus of the study was on ER questions, leading to critical thinking. The reason was that the crucial problem of the students lies in textually implicit information of the texts, that is, ER questions. To classify the questions for CRQs, Peterson`s (2008) model was employed, and to specify critical thinking question types, a framework proposed by Academic Skills Unit (2008) was used as reference. To collect the data entirely, the researcher identified the total number of percentages of frequencies of questions related to the passages in the course books of Reading Comprehension I, II and III. The findings seem to indicate high attention to critical thinking within the objectives of the questions of their course books and the authors of the passages

Abstract-This study was an attempt to investigate the effects of three different task types, that is dictation task, individual reconstruction task, and collaborative reconstruction task on EFL learners' acquisition of two grammatical structures, gerunds and infinitives. These tasks were also accompanied by either explicit or implicit instructions to see whether explicit or implicit instruction was effective and useful in the final achievement of grammatical structures. 40 low-intermediate male High School learners of English in Lordegan, Iran, were selected as the participants of this study. A timed Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) was used for data collection. In order to compare the three groups under the study, both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed. To compare the means, one-way ANOVAs as well as t-test were used. The results of statistical analysis supported this hypothesis that significant differences existed in the performance of three groups of participants when they completed the treatments including dictation, individual reconstruction and collaborative reconstruction. The students who completed the collaborative reconstruction task outperformed the other two groups who completed the dictation task and individual reconstruction task. In addition, dictation group outperformed the individual reconstruction group. Moreover, the difference between explicit and implicit groups was significant. In addition, the explicit group outperformed the implicit group after receiving the special instructions. In other words, the explicit group performed better than the implicit group in acquisition of grammatical structures.