The Authors Elahe Ehsanifard finished her MA at the University of Tehran. She has been published in the Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics. Her research interest areas are CALL, teacher education, second language acquisition, and curriculum design and materials development.

This study seeks to investigate the possible role of the social media applications in promoting and developing both the motivation and listening skill of Iraqi EFL learners at an academic environment. As a case study, seventy-majoring English sophomores at Mustansiriya University in Iraq were randomly divided between two groups, experimental and control groups. The pretest and posttest were conducted to the participants of the study based on a curriculum assigned to them to be taught throughout their academic year. A 25-statement designed questionnaire and an 8-statement designed test were distributed among the respondents of the study on the suitable methods of developing and improving motivation and listening skill respectively. Using the Likert Scale, SPSS and LISERAL programs, the statistical data of the two previously mentioned variables were collected. The final findings of the study revealed that male and female participants were highly motivated after receiving their instruction via Skype device. As a result, a significant difference was noted in the listening skill achievement of the testing group participants who subjected to Skype device as a means of teaching. Grounded on these findings, educators can seriously take social media applications in their account in the process of learning language and in developing more language skills.

This study was designed to determine whether there is any association between Iranian EFL learners ' Cultural Intelligence (CQ)

This study examined the influence of language knowledge, metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategy use on speaking and listening proficiency. Ninety six freshman and sophomore Iranian university students (male=6, female=90) were participated in the study. Two kinds of questionnaire and one language knowledge test were administered. Pearson product moment correlation was applied to find the relationship between the variables and speaking and listening proficiency. Multiple regressions were used to test the variance accounted for language knowledge, metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive strategy use in speaking and listening proficiency. The results demonstrated that all the variables correlated significantly with speaking and listening proficiency. All the variables uniquely contributed to speaking proficiency, however; in case of listening, just language knowledge and strategy use were predictors of listening proficiency. Other findings and pedagogical implication of the study are discussed.

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