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In any language teaching–learning context, teaching materials occupy a focal place in that they provide much of the input that learners are exposed to. Furthermore, teaching materials in general, a...

Learner attitudes towards learning and the perceptions and beliefs behind them may have a profound influence on learning behavior and on learning outcomes (Cotterall, 1995; Reid,1982) and teachers’ awareness of such needs and preferences will result in more realistic and useful teaching strategies which in turn will have a facilitative effect on the learning process (Horwitz, 1988). Thus, it seems the learners should be given opportunities to express their own language learning preferences especially in reference to definition of objectives in general and awareness of strategies in learning (Bada & Okan,2000). Taking into account the great role identifying learner preferences plays in learning in general and learning a language in particular, 174 EFL students at English Language Department of Islamic Azad university of Hamedan were asked to take part in a survey, expressing their language learning preferences by answering a 13-item questionnaire adapted from Brindley(1984) and containing questions on Learning, Error Correction, and Assessment and/or Evaluation. As a further measure 24 EFL teachers working with the same students were also asked to express their views on the extent to which they were aware of their students’ needs and preferences. The analysis of the data collected pointed to a need for closer cooperation between the teachers and students in arranging and implementing learning activities.

Problem statement: Quick access to the knowledge of modern sciences which are being developed every day is one of the necessities of Medical Education. In this regard, the use of computers as a valuable tool plays an important role in teaching medical students. This can increase the learners’ use of their different senses in education which may enhance their knowledge and lifelong learning Purpose of study: The purpose of the present study is to measure the nursing students’ attitudes and knowledge about the computers and the Internet. Methods: In this descriptive and cross-sectional study a questionnaire was administered to a group of 300 nursing students randomly selected from different levels. Finding and results: The results of data analysis through showed that; 86.8percent of students had access to the computers and 63.5 percent to the Internet. The rates of access include the home access and the University. 73.2 percent of students were not adequately informed of the procedures of professional searching and 59.8 did not have enough information about specialized sites in their field. Conclusion and discussion: Levels of student's achievement and attitudes toward computers and the internet is good but providing different forms of professional training to use this tool seem necessary.

As some studies on brain lateralization (e.g. Knecht et al., 2000) have lent support to the hypothesis that left handed people may reflect a right-brain dominance, and as differences in dominance could have implications about cognitive functioning, the present study aims at investigating whether this difference is reflected in the learning-style and, therefore, learning-strategy differences between left-handed and right-handed EFL students. To do this, three questionnaires, Torrance's (1987) Right/Left Brain Dominance Test; Oxford's(1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning, and VAK Learning Styles Indicator, were adopted and administered among a sample of 100 EFL students (50 left-handers and 50 right-handers). The data collected were then analyzed by SPSS Package to find the patterns of difference and the significance of the differences between left and right-handers on the areas of concern by the computation of cross-tab frequencies with Chi-Square and Independent Samples T-test respectively. Although the results of the data analysis showed no significant difference in brain dominance between right-handersand left-handers, the differences between the groups on certain aspects of learning styles as well as learning strategies were found to be statistically significant suggesting a rather different cognitive processing in left-handed learners than right-handed counterparts and bringing to light the need for the educators, teachers, and syllabus designers to give the issue due attention.

The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect(s) of providing feedback on EFL students’ writing performance at Islamic Azad University of Hamedan. To do this, 60 EFL students enrolled in Advanced Writing classes, in which the focus is on developing students’ composition skills, were randomly assigned to three groups: a control group, a direct-correction experimental group and an uncoded-feedback experimental group. The study lasted 7 weeks in the course of which the participants had to write paragraphs on the topics assigned on a weekly basis. The papers were all read by the researcher teacher and returned back to the students providing direct corrections on the errors made on participles and resumptives(two problematic areas to Iranian learners of English) to those in the first experimental group, uncoded feedback on such errors to those participants in the second experimental group, and no feedback to those in the control group.The results of a one-way ANOVA indicated that teacher feedback was a significant factor influencing students’ writing performance in the two experimental groups. The results also pointed to a significant difference in the performance of the students in uncoded-feedback group over those in the direct-correction feedback group and no-feedback control group. The results of the study support the claim that error feedback in general helps in EFL learners’ better writing performance and that uncoded feedback, compared with direct corrections, is providing a more effective strategy to react to students’ writings.

The present study is an attempt to find out whether teaching “cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies” affects EFL students’ reading comprehension across proficiency levels.To that end, one hundred and eighty B.A. students majoring in English from Azad University were randomly selected and were divided into three proficiency groups on the basis of their scores on the quick Test of Michigan. Subsequently, the subjects at each proficiency level were divided into two equal sub-groups, and were randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups. The subjects in each experimental group were taught the desired cognitive and metacognitive strategies, whereas those in the control groups received some sort of instruction on vocabulary and structure. At the end, all the subjects were given reading comprehension tests geared at their proficiency levels.The data thus collected were then analyzed by SPSS statistical package to find out the difference between the means of the groups through the estimation of independent samples t-tests. The results revealed that “teaching cognitive and metacognitive strategies” had no significanteffects on the reading comprehension of elementary students, neither did it have any effect on the reading comprehension of advanced students. However, teaching such strategies had significant effects on the reading comprehension of intermediate students.

One of the issues in communicative language teaching (CLT) domain is pragmatic knowledge. One of the issues that has gained significance in pragmatic studies is the relationship among pragmatic knowledge, gender, and language proficiency. A few studies have investigated the effect of gender on pragmatics knowledge and the relationship between language proficiency and pragmatic knowledge; on the other hand, few of these studies have been corpus based. In this study, the relationship among the Iranian EFL students’ gender, language proficiency, and comprehension of speech acts (apologizing and requesting) were examined. Then the findings were compared with the international corpus collections of the speech acts. To that end, 30 male and 30 female EFL students from Islamic Azad university of Hamadan were selected through quota sampling. Two kinds of tests, IELTS test and Discourse Completion Task (DCT) test, were administered to measure the students’ language proficiency and speech acts knowledge. The results of data analysis showed that in pragmatics test, the female students outperformed the male students and in language proficiency test male students outperformed female ones. Therefore, the results of this study implied that gender affects the students’ pragmatic knowledge and there is no relationship between pragmatic knowledge and language proficiency knowledge.

The current study aimed to explore the effects of peer interaction on self-efficacy in vocabulary learning. The participants of the study included 64 EFL students in two intact classes at Takhti high school and Pardis language institute in Hamedan, Iran who were conveniently sampled to take part in the study. They aged 15-17 and were randomly positioned into one experimental and one control group. The participants were assigned as the experimental group and as control group 32 each. the experimental group received the intervention including peer interaction for example Word Expert Cards (Richek & McTague, 2008) while those in the control group had time to learn vocabularies and deepen their learningindividuallyand researcher monitored and told them to memorize or paraphrase the vocabularies themselves individually All the participants completed a self-efficacy questionnaire on vocabulary learning. The participants completed a questionnaire on self-efficacy learning twice, once before the treatment as the pretest and a second time after the treatment as the posttest. The data thus obtained were then analyzed through measuring the Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) to examine the trajectories of change in the participants’ self-efficacy over the treatment. The results indicated a significant increase in the self-efficacy indexes of the experimental group compared with the control group. The findings from the current study provide empirical evidence suggesting that through peer interaction it could be possible to enhance self-efficacy, which in turn may contribute to the development of language skills.

This study has attempted to investigate the administered written tests in the language department of Islamic Azad University of Hamedan, Iran from validity, practicality and reliability points of view. To this end two steps were taken. First, examining 112 tests, we knew that the face validity of 50 tests had been threatened, 9 tests lacked content validity, and 2 tests were impractical. Second, randomly the sores of 103 tests (8 multiple-choice and 95essay-type), related to different academic courses, were fed into SPSS software to estimate their reliability statistically using Cronbach’s alpha. The results showed that 7 multiple-choice tests had adequate reliability, 39 out of 95 essay-type tests had acceptable reliability, and totally there was a rather acceptable correlation coefficient among the scores of 95 essay-type tests. Finally, some suggestions were offered to improve the future tests.

This study attempted to investigate the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ critical thinking skills, their Emotional Quotient (EQ) and their students’ engagement in the task. To that end, 20 EFL high school teachers completed “Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal” (Form A) and the “Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory”. Furthermore, 600 male and female learners, the students of the teacher participants at the time, participated in the study by answering the Persian version of “Tinio High School Survey on Student Engagement”. The findings of the study indicated that there was a significant relationship between teachers’ critical thinking skills and their students’ engagement in the task. However, the results did not show any meaningful relationship between teachers’ EQ and their students’ engagement in the task and also between teachers’ critical thinking skills and their EQ, although the results pointed to a high degree of correlation between ‘intrapersonal aspects of teachers’ EQ’ and ‘students’ behavioral engagement’.

The article reviews the book "Individual Learner Differences in SLA," edited by Janusz Arabski and Adam Wojtaszek.

The present study is a report on a survey carried out to analyze the productivity indexes at Islamic Azad University, Hamedan Branch, Iran. The study includes analyzing the statistics for 50 indexes found crucial to the proper functioning of a higher education institute. The analysis of the data thus obtained over a five-year period showed that, despite having taken dramatic steps to improve the quality of educatin, Hamedan Branch still needs to improve its facilities and mange its human and capital resources better if it is going to maintain its competitiveness.

The present article reflects the results of a needs analysis survey carried out on a group of 52 students in a general English course at Islamic Azad University of Hamedan, Iran, in which a 32-item questionnaire adapted from Kavaliauskiene and Užpaliene (2003) , Iwai et. al (1999) and Seedhouse (1994) is used to investigate the students’ conceptions of good learning of English expressed in terms of their own wants and lacks. The results of the data analysis point to a need to improve the course syllabus in different ways.

This paper discusses how markedness issues have affected syllabus design in a second language acquisition context. To do this, first definitions of the term markedness are presented and different criteria for distinguishing marked from unmarked are reviewed. Then markedness issues in syllabus design are discussed.