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This study investigates the effects of teacher-focused feedback (TF) and automatic writing evaluation (AWE) on global writing performance as well as syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical diversity, and fluency (CALF) of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ narrative and argumentative writings. The participants were randomly assigned to TF and AWE groups. During the treatment, the teacher delivered instruction on the narrative and argumentative genres, followed by the participants’ engagement in writing texts and getting feedback either from the teacher or AWE. The results revealed improvements in overall writing performance (formal aspects) as well as CALF measures. While there was no significant difference between the two groups in their overall writing performance, AWE yielded better scores in lexical diversity and syntactic complexity, and the TF group outperformed in fluency. Moreover, an interaction was found between feedback types (TF vs. AWE) and text genres in CALF measures. The narrative writings were characterized by higher lexical diversity, syntactic accuracy, and fluency, and the argumentative genre, yielded higher scores in syntactic complexity. The results suggest that both human and machine assessments were beneficial in improving written products in EFL contexts. Also, engaging students in writing various genres is likely to result in improvement in different CALF aspects.

The primary purpose of the current study was to examine the writing performance and the use of socio-cognitive strategies among monolingual Persian and bilingual Turkish-Persian EFL learners across two proficiency levels. A mixed-method approach was employed to analyze the data gathered from the quantitative analysis of socio-affective writing strategy questionnaires as well as qualitative analysis of sample written texts and semi-structured interviews. Results of a series of two-way ANOVAs showed that bilinguals used more positive affective strategies than monolinguals. While the difference between high-proficient and low-proficient participants in strategy use was not significant, some differences were found between bilinguals and monolinguals across different proficiency levels concerning their overall writing quality. The findings also highlighted the underestimation of writing socio-affective strategy instruction, which can be considered as one of the reasons contributing to the writing problems of EFL learners.

This study investigates the relative effectiveness of online dynamic assessment (DA) compared to the teacher’s explicit feedback in the acquisition of requests in an online learning environment. Thirty-four intermediate-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners were randomly assigned to three groups: expert peer DA (PDA), teacher DA (TDA), and teacher’s explicit feedback (TEF). Following the metapragmatic instruction, the participants were provided with 15 discourse completion tests (three treatment sessions, five items for each session) to complete. Discourse completion tests depicted request scenarios and required the participants to write what they would say in those situations. The participants worked independently, and when the DA groups created poorly constructed requests, they were given online pre-established mediational hints. These hints were arranged from the most implicit to the most explicit, and were provided by either an expert peer (for the PDA group) or the teacher (for the TDA group). The TEF group, on the other hand, received the teacher’s explicit feedback on any pragmatic deviations. The analysis of the pretest and post-test scores by series of t-tests and an ANCOVA showed that the best performance belonged to the PDA group, followed by TDA and TEF groups. The findings underscore the pedagogical value of DA and the superiority of expert peers’ mediation over teacher mediation in the development of L2 pragmatic competence.

This study investigated the strategies Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers perceived to use to promote EFL learners’ engagement in online gamification. It adopted an integrative framework accommodating the four aspects of engagement, including behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and agentic, while concomitantly incorporating the four layers of ecological systems theory (EST) consisting of microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. Participants included 23 EFL teachers within the age range of 22 to 42. They were teaching adults at three language institutes in different cities across Iran. The data were collected via semi-structured interviews. The findings showed that the teachers used various strategies to foster student engagement. The thematic analysis of the data revealed that the strategies embraced behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and affective aspects of engagement, and at the same time, they were aligned with four layers of EST at a conceptual level. This study recommends EFL educators and teachers to adopt a holistic ecological perspective in using strategies to maximize student engagement in online gamification.

This study investigated the strategies Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers perceived to use to promote EFL learners' engagement in online gamification. It adopted an integrative framework accommodating the four aspects of engagement, including behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and agentic, while concomitantly incorporating the four layers of ecological systems theory (EST) consisting of microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. Participants included 23 EFL teachers within the age range of 22 to 42. They were teaching adults at three language institutes in different cities across Iran. The data were collected via semi-structured interviews. The findings showed that the teachers used various strategies to foster student engagement. The thematic analysis of the data revealed that the strategies embraced behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and affective aspects of engagement, and at the same time, they were aligned with four layers of EST at a conceptual level. This study recommends EFL educators and teachers to adopt a holistic ecological perspective in using strategies to maximize student engagement in online gamification.

One of the barriers to deep learning of undergraduate students is their passive role in the classroom. Especially, in the compulsory online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, students are less active compared with face-to-face classes. Here, the effect of online flipped classrooms on the learning and satisfaction of undergraduate civil engineering students was investigated. A semi-experimental study was conducted with 35 civil engineering students who took technical language course at University of Bonab. The same course, which was previously presented by the same instructor using a traditional lecture-based method, was selected as the control group to compare the results. The data obtained from the scores of quizzes and final exams as well as the questionnaires completed by the students were analyzed statistically, and the results indicated that in the initial sessions, the mean scores of the quizzes in the flipped method did not differ significantly from those of the traditional class. In the flipped online class, there was a statistically significant difference between the results of the initial quizzes compared to the subsequent ones. Although the scores of the subsequent quizzes and the final exam in the flipped class were higher than those obtained in the traditional class, it was statistically insignificant. The students’ statements indicated their satisfaction with the online class using flipped model compared to their other traditional online classes. However, there were some objections to the online flipped class, which were often due to lack of experience of the students and the instructor in using the method in cyberspace.Keywords: Personal knowledge management, employability, students, engineering education, academi achivement.