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Fair assessment of language proficiency and use is one of the challenges language assessment experts have faced. In Iran, according to the parliament’s ‘Act of Student Admission to Universities’, University Entrance Examination (UEE) should be gradually substituted by the students’ schooling backgrounds mostly reflected in their high school exam performances. In spite of this upcoming change, however, various English language exams students take during high school have not been assessed in terms of their ethical effects. In the present study, 80 students who had graduated from high school determined the degree to which teacher-made exams in the second grade and pre-university level, national third-grade exam and English part of UEE can be regarded as fair. The data obtained were analyzed by ANOVA. In addition, the contents of students’ essay-type responses to the items of another questionnaire were analyzed and qualitative data were collected. The results showed the extent to which students could remember cases of unfair assessment associated with each type of high school English exam. It was finally concluded that the English part of UEE and national English exam are perceived as the most ethical forms of assessment. It also seems that authentic assessment of the language, which is the most noticeable in the pre-university English examination can contribute positively to fair assessment. The findings can be utilized for filling the fairness gap after UEE is removed from the educational system.

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In this qualitative study, through studying the thought patterns of two master candidates of the International Relations discipline, the process of development in their disciplinary genre awareness has been investigated. In so doing, academic writing skills were taught to the two cases of the study in a period of 18 months. In this period, one of the researchers held regular training sessions. The theoretical framework used for this study was the interaction model of Hyland (2005) and the methodology in the phase one to three of the study was descriptive ethnography and in phase four it was analytical and quantitative. Several rounds of interviews, stimulated recall sessions, field notes, and document analysis were used to collect the data. Based on the definitions provided by IELTS organization, the two cases improved from the level of limited user (band score 4) to the level of good user (band score 7). Finally, the result of the investigation of the stages of development in the disciplinary genre awareness of the participants was presented in a model of development. This study can shed light on the future perspective of curriculum design for academic and ESP writing courses.

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One of the central issues in second language acquisition research has been whether grammar should be learned consciously or it can be acquired in meaningful language use. On the one hand, researchers question the possibility of learning without awareness and on the other hand some raise the concern that implicit learning may not lead to spontaneous automatic retrieval of language knowledge. The present study aims to investigate the effect of implicit and explicit instruction on L2 syntactic processing of Persian natives who learn French as a novel language. Thirty-two graduate students with no previous background in French participated in the study. A Timed grammaticality judgement task consisting of 60 syntactically correct and 60 syntactically violated stimuli were presented through Pychtoolbox. The participants pressed the right or left button to judge each sentence. Independent T-test and mixed ANOVA were run to analyze the data. The results showed that the syntactic processing speed is not affected by the training condition as there was no statistically significant difference between the performance of two groups in terms of accuracy of the responses. Separate analyses on the reaction times showed that learners in both groups responded more quickly when judging the grammaticality of correct sentences and the ungrammaticality of syntactically violated sentences which implies that all learners had gained implicit knowledge.