Teaching language as a second or foreign language, undoubtedly, is so demanding and seeking to find methods for facilitating this prominent practice whets the appetite of any practitioner who works in this field. Research shows that using drama in the classroom as a means of teaching helps students learn socially, academically, and developmentally. This study was an attempt to determine the effect of dramatized instruction on the speaking ability of EFL learners of Imam Ali University. Sixty EFL male students at the intermediate level participated in the study. Their age range was 19-22. Two instruments were utilized in this study; pretest, and posttest. The data were analyzed through t-test. The data analysis indicated that the mean scores of the experimental group students (M = 72.80) were significantly different (3.29>2; df = 58) from the control group students (M = 65.39). In other words, the experimental group outperformed the control group in the posttest significantly. Moreover, the findings indicated that dramatized instruction does have a great effect on the speaking skills. This study supported the idea of effectiveness of dramatized instruction on developing speaking skill and the teachers can help the learners at lower levels promote their speaking skill through dramatized instruction in EFL classes.

This paper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Today, numerous countries utilize unified methods and systematic standardized examinations such as national examinations as formal procedures to select qualified applicants for admission to higher education institutions since higher education is viewed as the major path and criterion to upward mobility. In Iran, the university entrance examination is of primary importance, as it serves a sensitive high-stakes test upon which the Iranian applicants’ academic destinies depend. Considering this significance, the present study aimed to systematically review the recent developments and current state of the National University Entrance Examination (NUEE) in Iran which is locally known as “Konkour”. To this end, a systematic-narrative hybrid literature review (SNHLR) was chosen for the purpose of the study. Following a manual search, 74 peer-reviewed research articles published (inter)nationally were selected and examined in order to identify key themes, patterns, gaps, and trends with regard to the consequences of “Konkour”. The findings revealed that Iranian university applicants have faced various negative consequences such as socioeconomic, psychological, and educational implications as a result of “Konkour”. Several challenges and key gaps in the existing studies are also highlighted which need to be empirically addressed in future research. Some suggestions and potential solutions are finally recommended in order to rectify the higher education admission system.

The present study aimed at exploring how research article writers from two academic disciplines exploit phrasal complexity features (PCFs) to verbalize the results sections of research articles with the eventual aim of assisting advanced EFL writers with their composition strategies. To this end, following a manual search, 200 empirical research articles in the fields of Applied Linguistics and Physics were comparatively examined. Due to the low rate of success of tagging programs in identifying the occurrences of PCFs, the datasets were also manually analyzed. The results revealed that the research article writers drew upon three high-frequency phrasal complexity features, namely, pre-modifying adjectives, post-modifying prepositional phrases, and nominalizations. The study also revealed that the results sections of research articles included different amounts of exceedingly complex patterns of pre-modification, a hybrid of novel appositive structures, and great reliance on hyphenated adjectives. Overall, we believe that these findings can be used to heighten the awareness of academic writers and instructors regarding the linguistic characteristics of academic writing and of the variations of how such phrasal features of compression are constructed in different academic subjects.