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Learning collocations has been regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of language learning which has grabbed much attention in the teaching and learning processes. Therefore, the main purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of intentional and incidental instruction of English collocations on Iranian advanced EFL learners’ noticing. To this purpose, of 65 participants, 40 (13 male and 27 female) of them who aged between 18 and 32 were chosen based on Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) from Golestan University engineering students. Being homogenized based on OQPT, the participants firstly took a pre-test to check their prior knowledge. They were then divided into three groups, namely intentional (N:13), incidental (N:14), and control (N:13). Then, the participants in the intentional group received explicit instruction on English collocations, while the participants in the incidental group received implicit instruction. The participants took a post-test immediately after five treatment sessions. Stimulated recall sessions were also held to check their noticing of the collocations. After a two-week interval, the participants took a delayed post-test and stimulated recall sessions again to check their noticing. The results of One-way ANOVA and a post hoc test of Tukey (HSD) indicated that there was a significant difference between the intentional group and incidental group in the post-test and delayed posttest. Moreover, the intentional group outperformed both the incidental and control groups. Besides, there was a significant difference between the incidental group and the control group in the post-test and delayed post-test. It is hoped that the findings can be fruitful for language learners, teachers, and syllabus designers.
 

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Pragmatics, which is one of the most eminent concepts in the world of language learning and teaching, has established itself in various academic fields. The teachability of pragmatics has been investigated in a plethora of studies (Derakhshan & Shakki, 2020; Shakki et al., 2020), though scant attention has been given to assessing and testing pragmatic features. It has been a long time that practitioners and teachers use traditional assessment to assess students, but with the emergence of new approaches in teaching, there should be new ways to test and assess learners. The present study is theoretically underpinned by Vygotsky’s (1978) Socio-Cultural Theory (SCT), which postulates that a person’ cognition is mediated socially during the interaction, and it emphasizes a mediated relationship not a direct relationship which is the basis for Dynamic Assessment (DA). He believes that the development of a child consists of two levels, namely actual level and potential level of development. Activating the Zone of Proximal Developmnet (ZPD), which is the distance between the actual developmental level and the level of potential development, requires guidance and collaboration. Since assessing the speech acts of apology and request through DA has not been taken into account so far, the present study aimed to find out the effects of DA on the acquisition of Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ speech act of apology and request. To this end, 66 students, selected from Shokouh Language Institute in Kalaleh, Golestan Providence, Iran, participated in this study.
Research Question:
Does dynamic vs. non-dynamic assessments (NDA) have any effect on the acquisition of Iranian intermediate EFL learner’s speech act of apology and request?
Three groups of language learners whose language proficiency was determined by Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT), participated in the present study. The total number of the participants was 85 Iranian learners, from whom 66 were selected as intermediate level whose scores ranged from 24 to 30, according to OQPT. The gender of the students was both male and female, and learners aged from 15 to 19. Their native language was Persian, and they were studying English as a second language. After homogenizing learners, they were divided into three groups, one DA, one NDA, and one control group. Listening pragmatic comprehension test, devised and validated by Birjandi and Derakhshan (2014), was utilized as the pretest and posttest of the study. First, the participants were tested before the intervention; after teaching speech acts to learners (30 apology and request video vignettes that were taken from seasons and episodes of 13 Reasons Why and Suits), the learners were tested by the listening pragmatic comprehension test to compare the results. In this study, to have homogeneous learners for all three groups, the mean and standard deviation of the proficiency test were calculated. To answer the research question, the scores taken from pretest and posttest were submitted to the Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS).
To find the effectiveness of the treatment, the means of control group, NDA group, and DA group were compared. In order to make sure whether or not the groups were statistically different, One-way ANOVA test and post hoc test of Tukey were run. Based on the mean scores for the pretest in one DA and two NDA groups, which are 58.88, 55.92, and 55.67, it is shown that little difference exists among the three groups. However, in order to make sure whether or not the groups are similar statistically, One-way ANOVA test was conducted. The Sig. value is .92 which demonstrates that since this is more than .05, it can be concluded that there is not a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the three groups. On the other hand, the mean scores for the posttest in one DA, NDA, and control group, respectively, were 117.42, 72.83, and 61.58, showing that the groups are different. Furthermore, the Sig. value is 0.00, which is smaller than .05, so this means that the intervention which was implemented in the DA group was effective. Since the obtained value does not show where the significant difference exists, post hoc test of Tukey was used to find the statistical significance between the groups.  The values corresponding with the comparison between the DA group and NDA groups are smaller than .05.
 For this reason, it can be concluded that the difference between DA group and the other two groups is statistically significant. However, the comparison between the two NDA groups revealed that they are not significantly different from each other (p=.392>.05). The results of one-way ANOVA test indicated that there were statistically meaningful differences across groups, and the results of post hoc test of Tukey revealed that dynamic group outperformed both non-dynamic and control groups, but no meaningful difference was found between non-dynamic and control groups although non-dynamic had a better mean score compared to that of control group. Considering the findings of the present study, it is suggested that harmonizing the instruction and testing provides opportunities for the learners, and learning should be individualized in order to have better outcomes. To put it in a nutshell, giving students contextually appropriate input has been a pivotal factor to increase learners’ pragmatic ability while understanding and performing the speech acts. In light of the gained results, the present study offers some implications for teachers, learners, and materials developers. It is suggested that teachers apply DA in their language classrooms to maximize interaction, mediation, and negotiation.

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Given that L2 engagement serves a vital role in students’ academic success, studying the predictors of this construct seems critical. Notwithstanding, factors influencing one’s engagement in an L2 context have remained unclear. To respond to this gap, the present research sought to unravel the effects of teacher support and teacher-student rapport on Iranian EFL students’ L2 engagement. To this aim, 216 Iranian students majoring in Applied Linguistics, Linguistics, English Translation, Teaching English as a Foreign Language, or English Literature were invited to cooperate in this investigation. To obtain the required data, three pre-designed scales were virtually distributed among the respondents. Then, through correlation tests, the association between teacher support, teacher-student rapport, and student L2 engagement was measured. Following that, the impact of teacher support and teacher-student rapport on Iranian students’ L2 engagement was assessed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The correlational analysis uncovered a strong, favorable association between constructs. The SEM analysis also indicated that teacher support and teacher-student rapport can strongly influence Iranian students’ engagement in EFL classes. The implications of the results are further discussed.                
 

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Considering one of the earliest calls for applying pragmatics in the second language, Kasper and Rose’s (2002) study “Is Pragmatic Teachable?”, pragmatic features have been analyzed during the last 20 years in EFL/ESL contexts. The amalgamation of studies has been conducted on many speech acts around the world within the two decades, among which request, apology, and refusal are considered as the most-appreciated speech acts in Iran. The purpose of the present paper is to unravel the overall effectiveness of the intervention on the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal in an Iranian EFL context. To this aim, out of a total number of 80 studies, 57 papers were chosen based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, which were coded for the analysis. The results of the study revealed that the instruction of request, apology, and refusal is effective and generated a mean of (g = 1.43) which is significant, reflecting a quite large gain of instruction. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies.   
It is about four decades that pragmatics has been at the center of constant theoretical and empirical attention among the theoretician and practitioners around the world (Derakhshan & Shakki, 2021). In order to appropriately construct and reconstruct the meaning of spoken and written utterances, speakers need to have shared background knowledge. Hence, it may be a burden for a person to convey what she/he intends to communicate in a way that enables the interlocutors to find out it in the way that it was intended.
In a nutshell, teaching and assessing pragmatics are justified on the ground that language learners may encounter difficulties to produce and comprehend language appropriately due to cross-cultural mismatches regarding the linguistic and social appropriacy of target language norms, and negative pragmatic transfer from their L1 to L2, to just name a few (Shakki et al., 2021). More importantly, among those studies which have investigated pragmatic instruction (Derakhshan, 2014; Derakhshan & Arabmofrad, 2018; Derakhshan & Eslami Rasekh, 2015, 2020; Derakhshan & Shakki, 2020a; Derakhshan et al., 2020; Jeon & Kaya, 2006; Kasper & Rose, 1999, 2002; Kasper & Roever, 2005; Martínez-Flor & Alcón-Soler, 2005; Plonsky & Zhuang, 2019), none of them thoroughly synthesized the empirical studies on pragmatics to find the lacuna regarding teachability of the pragmatics.
The amalgamation of mentioned studies has been conducted on many speech acts, among which request, apology, and refusal are recognized as the most-appreciated speech acts in Iran. Due to the lack of adequate meta-analyses on the effectiveness of L2 pragmatic instruction (Derakhshan & Shakki, 2021; Shakki et al., 2021), which is under-researched in an Iranian EFL context, this study aimed to meta-analyze the body of research in L2 pragmatic instruction to check its effectiveness. Considering the substantial prominence of ILP in learning and teaching in EFL contexts, the purpose of the present study, as far as meta-analysis is concerned, is to summarize the magnitude and directions of the effects obtained in a series of empirical studies. The aim is to identify the effectiveness of teaching methods in the instruction of pragmatics in an Iranian context.
Apology, request, and refusal are the speech acts that were investigated in the present study. More specifically, the present study was an attempt to pursue the effectiveness of teaching L2 pragmatics, particularly the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal to EFL learners in an EFL context like Iran.  Following a comprehensive search, 80 studies were found to be coded based on the inclusion/exclusion criteria, and in the aggregate, 98 effect sizes reported from the 57 original studies generated a mean of (g = 1.43) which is significant, reflecting a quite large gain of instruction.
Despite the fact that this study may divulge several findings and implications in the field of teaching, and learning of pragmatics, like any other study undertaken so far, the present study is not exempt from limitations as well as delimitations which are enumerated as follows: One limitation is the lack of transparency and subjectivity inherent in this approach. Various reviewers might use different criteria to decide which studies should be included in their review, they may come to contradictory results and opposite conclusions. The second limitation is that the process of the analysis becomes hard and eventually untenable as the number of studies increases whereas a reviewer may be able to synthesize data from a few studies in his/her head. Some of the important studies may be ignored during the data collection, and it can be considered as another limitation. A common limitation of meta-analysis is that researchers combine different sorts of studies (apples and oranges) in the same analysis, so it leads to the argument that the summary effect will ignore possibly important differences across studies. There are still some unpublished studies lying dormant in the researchers’ filing cabinets contributing to the use of the term file drawer problem for meta-analysis which were not included in the current study.
The first delimitation refers to those dimensions of pragmatics that were not included in this investigation. Since pragmatic knowledge includes many more dimensions in each component like speech acts, politeness principles, deixis, conversational structure, presupposition, implicatures, routines, and so on. The present study tried to include the most influential components in ILP which are speech acts, among which request, apology, and refusal were selected to be investigated in this study. Though there appears to be a large amount of research in ILP, the studies which were published between 2000 and early 2020 were included in the present study. One conspicuous delimitation is the number of studies in which instruction was employed and the ones which do not implement instruction were removed from the study. The primary subcategories based on which the current study was conducted can also be extended and other moderator variables can be scrutinized.
Conducting this study brings some implications and suggestions for the researchers whose area of interest is L2 pragmatics. The results may have pivotal pedagogical implications for L2 pragmatics and future research. One of the tremendous implications of this study is that while searching for the speech acts, surprisingly, there were some speech acts that have received no attention such as congratulations, condolences, threats, and challenges, so the researchers may use these untouched areas of English pragmatic instruction for their future studies. The other implication is that the teachers would be able to utilize the most effective treatment types, which led to better performance, comprehension, and production, and they also should take care of other factors such as gender, age, and proficiency level of the learners to have better outcomes. The findings of the present study may be useful for researchers whose area of interest is pragmatics, particularly the speech acts to check the moderator variables which are helpful and predictor in teaching the speech act of request, apology, and refusal.
 

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The success of language teachers and learners is definitively pertinent to the emotions they experience in academic environments. Accordingly, the factors impacting language teachers’ and learners’ emotions must be recognized. Many scholars have scrutinized emotional variables in response to this necessity through various methodological approaches. The present study aims to evaluate some of the innovative approaches to assessing emotional factors to see how innovative they are and review their positive points and shortcomings. To do so, Q Methodology (Q), idiodynamic method, Latent Growth Curve Modeling (LGCM), Process Tracing Approach (PTA), Social Network Analysis (SNA), Nested Ecosystem Model (Ecological approach), and Retrodictive Qualitative Modeling (RQM) methods have been selected to be reviewed in this research. The findings highlight several strengths and weaknesses of each of the methodological approaches. It has also been reported that these approaches need to be context-specific and person-sensitive to generate more accurate data. Among the approaches, PTA and SNA have received scant attention in the investigation of emotional factors since the data in these two approaches cannot be reported precisely in narrative form. Our study would be conducive for all researchers, notably those working in the field of language teachers’ and learners’ psychology.  

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Shape memory alloys (SMAs) are suitable candidates in various fields of engineering. One advantage of these alloys is their capabilities in developing high strain and force. In addition to these great features, lightweight and super-elastic behavior are other traits of these materials. These specifications are of such an importance that make SMAs to be suitably used in further engineering applications. However, their intrinsic hysteresis non-linear behavior make their usage as position actuators difficult. Despite this challenge, there are various methods proposed in the literatures to model the hysteresis behavior of such materials. In this paper, a generalized Prandtl- Ishlinskii model, because of its simplicity, efficiency and inverse analytical capability, has been used for modeling the SMA behavior. In addition, the hysteresis modeling has been validated via experimental data of one of the articles. In the control section, however, two control systems consisting PID and fuzzy sliding mode controllers have been used. Fuzzy sliding mode control system is a method that can be used in systems without mathematical model and leads to increase in their robustness. It is shown in this paper that by using this method, it is possible to apply a suitable control input to the system in order to vanish the error signal. However, by using PID controllers, the error signal is not acceptable due to the constant controller coefficients. The results indicate the more efficient performance of fuzzy sliding mode controller with respect to the classical PID controller.

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The hysteresis nonlinearity of the Magnetic Shape Memory Alloy (MSMA) actuator limits its control applications. To tackle the problems, usually the hysteresis behavior of these materials is models. Prandtl-Ishlinskii (PI) model is more practical in this area, because of its simplicity and having analytical inverse. Two versions of this model, entitled: rate-independent model and rate-dependent model, have been developed. Experimental results show that with increasing input frequency, the shape of hysteresis loops is amplified. In this study, by using experimental test setup the input voltage is applied to the MSMA actuator at the frequencies 0.05- 0.4 Hz and the displacement output captured by proximity position sensor, also the MSMA is modeled by generalized rate-dependent Prandtl-Ishlinskii (GRDPI) model and modified generalized rate-dependent Prandtl-Ishlinskii (MGRDPI) model. The modified version of the model are presented by the authors to enhance the ability of the GRDPI model for describing the asymmetric and saturated hysteresis behavior in MSMAs by hyperbolic tangent function in the model output. For training of the mentioned models, the actuation frequencies 0.05 and 0.2 Hz are selected and the model parameters of each model are also obtained by using genetic algorithm (GA). For validation of the models the hysteresis loop at frequency 0.1, 0.3 and 0.4 Hz is selected. The result shows that, due to using hyperbolic tangent function in the model output, the modified version of the GRDPI model can describe the hysteresis behavior in MSMAs more accurately.