Investigating how foreign language learners' discourse mediates their demotivation construction is a relatively new area of inquiry. This paper examined the discursive construction of four (two males and two females) Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' demotivation at Shiraz University, Iran. Employing Fairclough's (2003)…

Traditionally, many studies of second language acquisition (SLA) were based on the assumption that learning a new language mainly involves learning a set of grammatical rules, lexical items, and certain new sounds and sound combinations. However, for many second language learners, learning a second language may involve contact and interactions…

This paper asserts that English teachers' understanding of their professionalism enables them to "put the learner in the spotlight" through their highly-developed awareness of local contexts of English use. Changing attitudes to English language teacher identity include a revaluation of the "native-non-native speaker" dichotomy…

In the field of language and identity, the subcategory of gender has been an area of growing interest (Pavlenko, 2001; Norton & Pavlenko, 2004; Menard-Warwick, 2008; and Higgins, 2010). Adopting the view of gender as "a system of social relationships and discursive practices" (Norton & Pavlenko, 2004, p. 504), social context is…

Based on Robinson's (2005) Cognition Hypothesis and Skehan and Foster's (2001) Limited Attentional Capacity Model, the current study attempted to investigate the effect of manipulating task complexity on argumentative writing quality in terms of lexical complexity, fluency, grammatical accuracy, and syntactic complexity. Task complexity was…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of portfolio assessment as a process-oriented mechanism on the autonomy of Iranian advanced EFL learners. A particular concern was to examine the potential effect of gender on portfolio assessment by taking the learners' writing ability into account. The participants were 80 male and female…

Idiomaticity is central to linguistic theory. Despite the pervasiveness of idioms in language, pedagogical articles in professional journals have yet to pay attention to the benefits of idiom instruction in the second language (SL) classroom. Addressing this concern, this article reports the results of an exploratory qualitative research study…

Teachers can reflect on their practices by articulating and exploring incidents they consider critical to themselves or others. By talking about these critical incidents, teachers can make better sense of seemingly random experiences that occur in their teaching because they hold the real inside knowledge, especially personal intuitive knowledge,…

In the field of English language teaching, there has been increasing interest in the way literacy development is influenced by institutional and community practices, and the way power is implicated in language learners' engagement with text. In this paper, I trace the trajectory of my research on identity, literacy, and English language teaching,…

Two studies were carried out in order to create distinct motivational profiles of students, examine the way in which context had an effect on motivational styles, and attempt to collaborate these findings with the L2 Motivational Self-System. The research questions for this study were concerned with ascertaining whether or not it is possible to…