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Acknowledging the strengths of the national curriculum, the present study aimed at evaluating its approach towards foreign language education from three perspectives: (1) analyzing the foreign language section of the national curriculum based on the methodological and theoretical underpinnings, and its internal consistency; (2) examining its content based on the basic assumptions mentioned in the literature for setting foreign language policies and (3) evaluating its content based on the macro-documents of the country. In so doing, first, the relevant sections of the national curriculum were analyzed. The results indicated that, although the foreign language section of the national curriculum has some strengths such as a move toward decentralization and increase in hours of instruction, it suffers from some weaknesses such as vagueness of the content and lack of consistency and connection among the aims of the instruction. In order to examine the document from the second perspective, 6 criteria that foreign language education policies should follow were extracted from the relevant literature, and the document was evaluated based on these criteria. The results indicated both consistencies and inconsistencies between the content of the document with these principles. The national curriculum, then, was evaluated to find its matches and mismatches with the policies and orientations of macro-documents. The results indicated that the foreign language section of the national curriculum cannot set the ground for achieving the goals proposed in the macro-documents of the country. Finally, the paper offers some guidelines for developing national English language curriculum.

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This study is intended to report the effect of age of acquisition on lexical decision latencies in a group of Persian-English bilinguals. Forty freshman university students were requested to perform the lexical decision task in a counter-balanced design using DMDX software on laptop. Forty five English words and several pseudowords as fillers were selected for the stimuli. The stimuli were selected based on three different levels of AOA, and were checked against the Persian version of Snodgrass and Vanderwart Naming Battery. Thirty words were matched in their AoA in both Farsi and English, and then divided into early acquired (Group 1) and late acquired words (Group 2). The third group consisted of 15 words, which were later acquired in Persian but early acquired in English. In so doing, we wanted to explore whether processing of L2 words was dependent on the first language AoA of the same words or not. The findings revealed that the second language (L2) age of acquisition had an effect on lexical decision latencies regardless of the age of acquisition of words in Persian. The means of both groups (1 and 3) pertaining to the early acquired words in English were significantly lower than those of the late acquired group (2), implying that perhaps L2 mental lexicon has its own system of representation and processing in beginner bilinguals contrary to the majority of models on L2 mental lexicon and theories, supporting a critical period in learning a second language. The findings of this study have implications for form-meaning interface and dissociation of declarative vs. procedural memory in bilingual mental lexicon research. Accordingly, future research should take into account the important role of AoA in foreign language mental lexicon representation and processing.

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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.