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Using of language skills has long been among the most conspicuous weak points of learners of Arabic language as a foreign language. By interviewing some professors and experts of Arabic language teaching, a number of topics were recognized as worthy to be investigated further as sources of weakness. These topics include “sources of boredom and tiredness of students in learning Arabic language”, “the appropriateness of existing instructional materials”, the appropriateness of the teaching methods”, “the sources of students motivation”, “ the effect of teaching methods on motivating students” in general and “ the appropriateness of methods for teaching listening” in particular. A researcher made questionnaire was used to elicit the viewpoints of students and professors regarding each of the above-mentioned topics. The results indicated that learners of Arabic language are not de-motivated but bored and tired due to the overall teaching context, in which they are learning this foreign language. Among the major sources of this boredom are “inappropriate teaching methods”, inappropriate instructional materials” and “inappropriate techniques in teaching listening comprehension”.

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The present article takes a critical and analytic look at various dimensions of studying vocabulary in academic texts, hence providing a quite clear prospect of the requirements, methods and challenges of this line of inquiry. The basic focus of the article is however to draw attention to the paucity of corpus-informed research on Persian academic texts as well as the linguistic productions of Persian speakers in other languages. In the first section, a holistic picture as to the significance of learning academic vocabulary is drawn. Then, some academic word and phrase lists and some academic corpora are briefly introduced. In the next section, different aspects which should be taken into consideration (e.g. collocation, lexical bundles, intra and inter-text lexical variation) in such type of research are elaborated and some of precautions to be taken by researchers are discussed. In the final section, some of the challenges and limitations of this type of research are mentioned and a scheme of the ecology of “studying academic vocabulary” is given. The scheme is supposed to act as a synoptic road map for interested researchers who are at the beginning of their academic endeavor.


 

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1. Introduction

 
The usefulness of error correction in improving students’ grammatical accuracy has been the focus of attention in the past decades, and hot debates have raged on over this issue. There is yet no clear answer, to date, as to the efficacy of feedback and its various types. The aim of this study is, thus, to shed more light on the relative effectiveness of feedback per se and also the efficiency of some types of grammatical feedback, delivered electronically through MS Word software, over the others in improving students’ written accuracy.
 
 

2. Research questions

 

1. Is there any effect, whatsoever, for different types of feedback (i.e. direct, indication only & indication plus location) when delivered electronically in improving students’ level of grammatical accuracy?
2. Is there any priority for each of the above feedback types over the others?

 
 

3. Method

 
Participants
 
The participants of this study included 85 Iranian English majors. Of the total participants, 53 were female and 32 were male. The number of females and males were 15 and 11, 13 and 6, 12 and 8 and, 13 and 7 for control group, direct feedback group, indication group and indication and location group respectively.
Design and procedure
This study employed a pretest-treatment-posttest format. Of the four groups involved in the study, three were treatment groups and one was the control group. In the first treatment group, direct feedback group, the correct form of the students’ grammatical errors was provided. The two other treatment groups were, however, both provided with indirect feedback. In one of them, the indication-only group, the students were provided with an indication in the margin of the line in which the error was committed to show that an error or errors have occurred. The indication and location group was provided with feedback as to the exact word or phrase in the text that included a grammatical error.
Analysis
To answer the first research question (i.e. its three sub-questions), three paired sample T-test were used. The second research question (i.e. its three sub-questions) was answered using one-way ANOVA.

4. Results

Significant difference was found between the pretest and the posttest of the direct feedback group in the mean rate of errors (t=3.475; p‹.05). It means that the provision of direct written corrective feedback has been effective in improving students’ level of accuracy to a statistically significant level. However, the second group of the study, the indication only group, did not show any significant improvement in accuracy from the pretest to the posttest (t=1.627; p›.05). No significant improvement in grammatical accuracy was also observed for the indication and location group.
The primary result of the analysis indicated that there was a significant difference between the four groups with respect to their improvement from the pretest to the posttest (F=6.771; p‹.001). To further investigate the details of this comparison Tukey’s post hoc measure was used. Tukey’s index indicated that there were significant differences between direct feedback group on the one hand and control group (p‹.001), indication only group (p‹.05) and indication and location group (p‹.05). It was, in fact, the direct corrective feedback group whose improvement in accuracy was statistically significantly higher than the other groups. No other significant difference was found between other pairs of the groups with respect to accuracy improvement.
 

5. Conclusion

An explanation for the findings of the first question can be offered with regard to Schmidt (1990) noticing hypothesis. Among the three types of feedback offered to the groups of the study, direct feedback is apparently the most noticeable. This characteristic may lend this type of feedback to longer retention and quicker internalization. Comparison of the means of improvement for the three treatment groups clearly indicates that the direct group made the most substantial improvement of all. The second substantial improvement is made by indication and location group and the lowest improvement was made by the indication only group. This ranking of improvement is in other words a ranking of noticeability of feedback, and although not consistent with many parts of the literature, is totally consistent with some others especially Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis.
 
The findings of the second research question can also be interpreted and justified in light of the noticing hypothesis. This point that the direct feedback turned out to make a significant difference and is significantly different from other types of feedback can be justified in light of the fact that the participants of this study were roughly (and not definitely) of the intermediate level of proficiency. For these students, getting involved in problem solving (as the indirect types of feedback requires) while at the same time involved in the quite demanding task of following the ideas might be rather over-demanding, hence distracting their attention. Also, there are many grammatical points which are yet totally unknown to intermediate students and therefore any involvement in problem solving will lead nowhere, no matter how much effort the student makes. This point is also well recognized by Ferris and Roberts (2001) who suggest that direct feedback is perhaps more efficient than indirect corrective feedback with writers of low levels of proficiency.
 

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The objective of the current paper was set to examine the effect of second language reading strategy instruction on young Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ reading comprehension and reading anxiety. Although a growing body of empirical studies have employed CALLA as a framework for L2 reading strategy instruction, there is a scarcity of empirical studies exploring the effectiveness of this model for reading strategy instruction among young learners in EFL contexts (Manoli, Papadopoulou, & Metallidou, 2016). The importance of conducting strategy-instruction studies involving younger L2 learners has been called for by numerous researchers (e.g., Chamot, 2005; Macaro & Erler, 2008; Manoli, Papadopoulou, & Metallidou, 2016) since the vast majority of studies have recruited older students. Moreover, as discussed above the construct of FL reading anxiety has remained under-researched in L2 empirical studies. For these reasons, the current study was set to explore the impact of L2 reading strategy instruction, set within CALLA model, on young Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension and reading anxiety.
To accomplish this objective, a sample of 48 young Iranian EFL learners were selected and randomly assigned to an experimental group (N = 25) and a control group (N = 23). To guarantee the homogeneity of the experimental and the control groups in terms of general English proficiency level “Oxford Placement Test” (OPT) (Allan, 2004) was given to the students of both groups. The results obtained from OPT indicated that the learner were of lower intermediate level of language proficiency (B1). The two classes were taught by the same teacher who employed the same course book and materials. The experimental intervention (i.e., reading strategy instruction) lasted for a period of 12 weeks.
Employing a quasi-experimental design, the study employed an experimental group that received a second language reading strategy instruction for a period of one semester and a control group that were taught with regular method with no strategy instruction but they were measured in terms of reading comprehension and reading anxiety before and after the strategy instruction. The strategy instruction intervention for the present study was based on Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) (Chamot & O`Malley, 1994) framework developed by Chamot et al. (1999) which constitutes five key stages including preparation, presentation, practice, evalua­tion, and expansion. In this framework, the instruction gradually moves from a highly explicit instruction to a more implicit teaching of using strategies to learning tasks so that the language learners can begin to accept more responsibility in selecting and implementing appropriate learning strategies. This cycle reiterates when new strategies are added to students’ strategic repertoires. In the meantime, the control group students were taught traditionally without receiving any explicit instruction of L2 reading strategies. More specifically, the procedure adopted for the control group was to make the students read a text aloud and translate it. During the sessions, the teacher taught the new vocabularies and provided the students with oral comprehension questions following passage reading.
The reading component of Cambridge Preliminary English Test (CPET) and Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) were administered to assess the reading comprehension performance and reading anxiety of the participants as pre-test and post-test of the study.
The findings of the study revealed that the learners in the experimental group outperformed those of control group with regard to reading comprehension after receiving the strategy instruction intervention. The results of this research indicated that the students of the experimental group significantly outperformed those of control group with regard to reading comprehension ability, suggesting that the reading strategy instruction was influential in fostering L2 reading comprehension of the young Iranian EFL learners. The results of this research are in agreement with those of previous empirical studies (Aghaie & Zhang, 2012; Akkakoson, 2013; Dabarera, Renandya, & Zhang, 2014; Zhang, 2008, among others) and are at variance with the findings of Shang (2010). More particularly, concerning the young EFL learners as the participants of this study, it was revealed that the findings of the present study corroborated and extended the findings of Manoli, Papadopoulou, and Metallidou (2016) that supported the effectiveness of strategy use and instruction in improving reading comprehension among young, school-aged students.
Moreover, it was revealed that the reading strategy instruction reduced the reading anxiety of the participants. Pedagogical implications on reading strategy instruction were finally discussed. This finding is in line with the findings of a number of previous empirical studies which suggested that the use of comprehension strategies can decrease reading anxiety of the students (Gahungu, 2007; Lien, 2016; Naseri & Zaferanieh, 2012). This is also consistent with the claim that there are interactions between general foreign language anxiety and strategy use (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1994; Rahimi & Zhang, 2014). It might be argued that the improvement reading performance by strategy instruction has helped the participants to reduce their reading anxiety.
As far as practical implications of the study are concerned, it is suggested that EFL practitioners need to integrate reading strategy instruction into their regular L2 classrooms in order to improve reading performance of their students. Nevertheless, the teachers themselves should be trained on how to teach strategies effectively. If teachers are now equipped with the knowledge and awareness of reading strategies, they will not be able to implement strategy-based instruction (Zhang & Wu, 2009).

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Scholarly publication has turned into a growing concern affecting the lives of academics across the world. The increasing demand by higher education institutions for publications in high-profile venues has created various policy issues, including the ones about the language of publication, and more specifically, about writing and publishing in English by speakers of other languages. In this study, we investigate policies of publishing in English in Iranian higher education based on qualitative content analysis of 30 national policy documents and 170 university bylaws released by 46 Iranian universities over the past twenty-three years. The emerging policy lines reveal that the research evaluation system and the structure of incentives as well as institutional pressure mechanisms all tend to act in favor of publishing in English in a context where it is the academic language of only a small minority. The implications of such policy directions for higher education in Iran are discussed along with possible messages for other contexts around the world.