Abstract-Little research has been conducted in the field of alternative assessment including portfolio and peer assessment in Iran. Moreover, In spite of the assumed advantages of portfolio and peer assessment, the practicality of these techniques needs to be investigated. To this aim, a total of 207 writing papers from 69 participants were collected to investigate the effects of peer and portfolio assessment on the writing components in two experimental groups. The data were collected from students of a general English semester course held at Sharif University of Technology. There were two experimental groups of 37 and 32 students experiencing portfolio and peer assessment respectively. As the treatment, students were supposed to write compositions, and for each composition, they were supposed to invest at least twenty minutes on a topic of interest e.g. sport, science, social issues, etc. And they were then rated by their teacher in group A and their peers in group B based on ten pre-established assessment criteria in each session during the term. After administering the writing post-test, independent t-tests were run to find the differences between the two groups. As the result, it was indicated that portfolio and peer assessment had the same effect on four of the five components of writing namely as content, organization, language use and vocabulary. But only there was a significant difference between portfolio and peer assessment groups on the last component of the study: mechanics in writing. The findings of this study have implications for language teachers, material designers, and educational policy makers.

The current study is an attempt to investigate the explicit or the implicit instruction of metadiscourse markers and the writing skill improvement. The participants of the study (N = 90) were female Iranian students at Kish Institute of Science and Technology. Two experimental groups were defined in this study: experimental group "A" which received the explicit instruction of metadiscourse markers and experimental group "B" which were taught implicitly based on Hyland's (2005) classification of metadiscourse markers. Two instruments were employed in the study: a pretest and a posttest. To elicit the pertinent data, the participants were given a pretest of writing ability to investigate if the learners had knowledge regarding the correct application of metadiscourse markers in their writing. After 8-session treatment, a posttest was administered to compare the participants' performance in use of matediscourse markers. The findings of the present study indicated that there was a significant difference in the participants' pretest and posttest writing scores with regard to the application of metadiscourse markers. The findings revealed that metadiscourse instruction had a positive effect on the learners' writing. In addition, the results showed that both the explicit and the implicit instruction of metadiscourse markers significantly improved participants' writing ability.

Lack of coherence in argumentative essays written by teenage English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners has been associated with and attributed to lack of critical thinking abilities. This aforementioned problem, in particular, has impeded students' ability to obtain high scores on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam. In order to investigate potential interventions that will facilitate students' writing abilities in general and, more specifically, coherence, this study focuses on teaching two fundamental critical thinking tasks: Identify-Cause-and-Effect-Relationships and Divergent-Thinking. We conducted a quantitative experimental research with two classes at Mofid high school. Performing quantitative data analysis, we found that there is a significant difference in each class --class A and class B--before and after the treatment. Both classes improved; however, the difference between improvement levels for each task was negligible. The present study's implication is that the given tasks of critical thinking can make a valuable contribution to learners to become competent writers with regard to coherency.

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Abstract-The purpose of the study has been to determine the existence of any significant relationship between willingness to communicate as a determining factor in language learning and critical thinking and its psychological constructs. The five psychological levels of critical thinking are inference ability, recognizing assumption ability, deduction ability, interpretation ability and argument evaluation ability. There were two instruments implemented so as to obtain as valid data as possible. First, Willingness to Communicate Questionnaire (WTCQ) was adapted from MacIntyre, Baker, Clément and Conrod (2001) to measure students' willingness to communicate. The second instrument was Critical Thinking Questionnaire (CTQ) which was adapted from Watson & Glaser (1994), and it was intended to gauge critical thinking and the related psychological constructs. The sample of the study included 360 BA English students who were selected based on the multistage random sampling from the English students at Islamic Azad University branches of Tehran province. The research has been conducted based on a descriptive correlational study which resulted in the existence of significant positive correlation between all psychological levels of critical thinking and willingness to communicate. Moreover, critical thinking as a major variable was also found significantly correlated with willingness to communicate.