This study was conducted to investigate the difficulties encountered by undergraduate ESL students in writing the introduction section of their project reports. Five introduction sections of bachelor of arts students, majoring in English language, were analyzed and a lecturer was interviewed regarding the areas of the students’ weaknesses. Swales’ create-a-research-space (cars) model was used as the analytical framework of the study. The results revealed that students confronted problems in writing their introduction for each move especially for move 2, which consists of counter claiming, indicating research gap, raising questions from previous research and continuing tradition. It was also found that the students had difficulty in writing the background of the study, theoretical framework, and statement of the problem which indicated their unawareness of the appropriate rhetorical structure of the introduction section.

Media texts are often filled with strategies to persuade the readers and express ideas beyond the plain meaning of the words. The present study investigated the rhetorical features of Persian news headlines through the analysis of wordplay. A sample of 100 online news headlines of Euronews was selected. Wordplay was analysed because of its role in persuasion. The method was descriptive and the data was analysed on the basis of textual rhetorical analysis. Leigh's (1994) framework including a taxonomy of different types of wordplay was adopted. Results revealed that the Persian news headlines of Euronews contained one or more clearly defined wordplay types. Tropes, or more specifically metonymies, were of the highest prevalence and wordplays such as oxymorons, parodies, anthimerias, polysyndetons, anadiploses, antimetaboles, epistrophes, climaxes and polyptotons were not present. The category of schemes encompassed the majority of unused wordplays. The discussion suggests that wordplay made the headlines more vivid and conspicuous.

Iran’s education system is exam-based and to gain admission to universities at undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels, candidates have to sit a competitive examination. For this reason, developing an EAP course which prepares the candidates for these examinations is of crucial importance. The present study attempted to develop an EAP course for the selected number of undergraduate students of Statistics at Alzahra University and Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. The aim was to prepare these students for the English language section of the entrance examination for MS degree in Statistics and then to determine if there was any significant difference between students’ performance in their pre and post tests. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were applied in this study and different instruments such as a questionnaire, semi-structured and structured interviews, and analysis of texts, were used to gather needs analysis data. The results indicated that the majority of participants preferred the presence of more ESP courses at universities. There was also a significant difference between pretest and posttest scores of the participants who took part in the EAP course.