Nowadays, writing has received a great degree of attention not only because it plays a significant role in transforming knowledge and learning but also in fostering creativity and when acquiring of a special language skill is seen as important, its assessment becomes important as well and writing is no exception. This study intended to investigate the effect of portfolio assessment technique as a teaching, learning and assessment tool on writing performance of EFL learners. Writing sub-skills has also been taken into account. To this end, forty Iranian EFL learners who were all English teaching majors were randomly divided into two groups: experimental (n=20) and control (n=20). The experimental group received the treatment i.e. portfolio assessment while the control group underwent the traditional approach of writing assessment. The result of statistical analysis indicated that the students in experimental group outperformed the students in control group in their writing performance and its sub-skills of focus, elaboration, organization, conventions and vocabulary. The findings suggest that portfolio assessment technique improves writing ability of the students. The results have also some implications for assessment, teaching and learning of L2 writing.

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge of Iranian high school students. Nation's Vocabulary Level Test (VLT) was used to test students' knowledge of words drawn from the 2000, 3000 and 5000 most frequent occurring word families. Two morphological awareness tasks (a morpheme identification task and a morphological structure test) were also used to assess students' morphological awareness. The VLT results reveal that the students performed better at the 2000 level than the two higher frequency levels. There existed a significant relationship between the learners' performance on the vocabulary level test and the morphological awareness tasks. These findings implicate the importance of facilitating the students' morphological awareness in English vocabulary learning for EFL learners in Iran.

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This article was conducted on 150 EFL teachers investigating the conceptions of research. An understanding of this issue is very important to the development of conditions for encouraging teachers to be research engaged in order not to be subservient and take a much more pioneering role in curriculum development. Questionnaire responses were analyzed to determine the teachers' view of research. The findings of this research present that the teachers' conceptions of research are very close to conventional scientific theories and findings. Teachers also reported lack of time, knowledge, and institutional support as influential factors which restrict their abilities to be research engaged. On the whole, this research points to a number of attitudinal, conceptual, and external obstacles to teachers' research engagement. Understanding these is a necessary part of trying to make teachers' research engagement a more possible and doable activity in ELT.

The primary goal of this investigation was to explore the existence of any possible relationship between willingness to communicate (WTC) and emotional intelligence (EI) among 60 EFL learners. The data for the research were gathered using WTC and EI questionnaires which were presented in the participants' native language. The modified version of likert-type WTC questionnaire developed by MacIntyre, Baker, Clement, and Conrod (2001) was employed to assess the participants' degree of WTC. Students' EI was measured via a ninty-item Emotional Intelligence Inventory (EQ-i). The findings revealed that the EI profile of learners has a significant correlation with their willingness to participate in L2 communication and that the link between EI and WTC has been affected by gender. In general, as learners' EI increased, so did their willingness to use the L2 in class. The results of the present study can encourage authorities and EFL teachers to incorporate skills and abilities associated with EI in their curriculum and classroom activities.