This study investigated the effects of internal and external factors on learning English as a foreign language from Iranian EFL learners' points of view. Copies of a 30-item Lickert-scale questionnaire, addressing internal and external factors or principle components, were distributed among about 140 postgraduate students of ELT in three universities in Iran. The collected data were then subjected to Principle Component Analysis (PCA). The findings revealed that while internal and external components are distinguishable, many of the variables do not heavily load on the principle component to which they theoretically belong. After separating the non-correlating variables it became clear that most of these variables are very important variables. Further analysis indicated that it is possible to divide internal variables to cognitive and affective and external variables to environmental and curricular. The conclusion reached was that the importance of variables should not be judged based on their nature but based on the importance accorded to them by the respondents. It was also concluded that extreme attention paid to internal variables should be balanced against external variables.

Abstract-The present study investigated the impact of topical knowledge and language proficiency on the reading comprehension of Iranian EFL students. The Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was used at the beginning of the study to divide the students into two groups of low and high proficiency. Both the high and low proficiency students later read two texts of almost the same level of difficulty but different in terms of their familiarity to the students. The obtained results indicated that topic familiarity cannot override language proficiency in reading comprehension; that is, low-proficiency students could not catch up with highproficiency students even in familiar topics.

This study tried to find the possible relationship between listeners' cultural schemata and its activation and their performance in EFL listening comprehension. The participants of this study were two groups of 37 Muslim Iranian students. Firstly, the students were divided into two groups of high and low proficiency. Then, they were exposed to two audio files, one about mosques and the other about cathedrals. In one of the classes the recording about the cathedrals was played first, but in the other the order was reversed. The collected data were inputted into the SPSS program. The null hypothesis of the study was whether listening to a culturally unfamiliar topic (cathedrals) can activate low-level learners' schema of the culturally familiar topic (mosques). The hypothesis of the study was accepted implying that an unfamiliar text, even if it is conceptually similar, cannot activate a culturally familiar schema in the low-level students. This study has pedagogical implications for teaching listening comprehension.

This study tried to find the possible relationship between listeners' cultural schemata and its activation and their performance in EFL listening comprehension. The participants of this study were two groups of 37 Muslim Iranian students. Firstly, the students were divided into two groups of high and low proficiency. Then, they were exposed to two audio files, one about mosques and the other about cathedrals. In one of the classes the recording about the cathedrals was played first, but in the other the order was reversed. The collected data were inputted into the SPSS program. The null hypothesis of the study was whether listening to a culturally unfamiliar topic (cathedrals) can activate low-level learners’ schema of the culturally familiar topic (mosques). The hypothesis of the study was accepted implying that an unfamiliar text, even if it is conceptually similar, cannot activate a culturally familiar schema in the low-level students. This study has pedagogical implications for teaching listening comprehension.

This study investigated the importance that students accord to behavior and knowledge of teachers. A five-point Likert scale questionnaire with 28 items, fourteen of them, i.e., the odd ones, representing knowledge, and the other fourteen, i.e., the even ones, representing the behavior of teachers, was designed. The values of responses to each question ranged from 1 to 5. One represented the least important and five represented the most important. Copies of the questionnaire were distributed among 26 B1 (pre-intermediate level) prep school students (17 females and 9 males) who had already spent five months with six different teachers at English prep-school at Uskudar University in Istanbul, Turkey. The data were collected in the second week of the third module in the second semester in 2017-2018 academic year. The collected data were then fed to SPSS. A Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test revealed that there was not a significant difference between the importance of knowledge and behavior of teachers from the points of view of the students who attended the study. A Chi-square test also indicated that gender does not play a significant role in assigning importance to teachers' behavior or knowledge by students. The findings of this study could be revealing to teachers.