This study aimed to gauge the efficacy of three modes of instruction of English idioms, ie, Short Message Service (SMS)-based learning, contextual learning and self-study learning. More precisely, this study capitalized on the push aspect of SMS affordance to deliver bite-sized English idiom lessons on spaced intervals to the learners irrespective of the traditionally inherent problems in most teaching classrooms of English as a Foreign Language learning contexts and thus promote regular study. Students' perceptions and attitudes toward mobile learning and the application of SMS in teaching and learning English (idioms) were also sought by conducting a poststudy survey. Overall, the results revealed that students receiving short mini-lessons on their mobile phones via SMS were more enthusiastic and learned more than their counterparts on paper or contextual groups.

The aim of this study was to investigate discourse markers in descriptive compositions of 90 Iranian students who were selected from two universities. Without any instruction, they were given a topic to write a descriptive composition per week for 8 weeks. 598 compositions were collected, and they were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively by three raters following Fraser's (1999) taxonomy of Discourse Markers. Findings showed that students employed discourse markers with different degrees of occurrence. Elaborative markers were the most frequently used, followed by inferential, contrastive, causative, and topic relating markers. There was a direct and positive relationship between the quality of the compositions and the number of well-functioned discourse markers. Results also revealed statistically significant differences between the use of discourse markers and composition quality in the groups. Graduate students used more discourse markers, and this led to more cohesive texts.

This study was a cross-sectional investigation into the request strategies used by Iranian learners of English as a Foreign Language and Australian native speakers of English. The sample involved 96 BA and MA Persian students and 10 native speakers of English. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was used to generate data related to the request strategies used by each group. Selection of request situations in DCT was based on two social factors of relative power and social distance. Although results revealed pragmatic development, particularly in the movement from direct to conventionally indirect strategies on the part of EFL learners, learners with higher proficiency displayed overuse of indirect type of requesting; whereas the native group was characterized by the more balanced use of this strategy. The lower proficiency learners, on the other hand, overused the most direct strategy type. In terms of the influence of the social variables, the findings of this research revealed that as far as social power is concerned EFL learners display closer performance to native speakers. But considering social distance, it seems that Iranian EFL learners have not acquired sufficient sociopragmatic knowledge to display proper social behavior.

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Writing a master's thesis, oftentimes the first shot by a novice researcher at writing for academic purposes, requires providing a framework and support by learning how to cite the works of others. Compared to the host of studies on research article introductions as the product of expert writing, little work has been done on citations in master's thesis introductions (MAIs), and so the paucity of research in this area calls for further investigation into citations in MAIs. To this aim, we compared the use of citation forms in 65 Iranian MAIs in the field of Applied Linguistics. Citation forms were divided into integral which play an overt grammatical role within a sentence and non-integral which play a covert grammatical role in text. Each category was further divided into sub-categories. Analyses of the citation practices indicated that integral citations constituted a greater proportion of citations in the MAIs. The study also examined stance manifested in verb controlling citations and underlined the importance of evidential marking in academic writing and discussed pedagogical implications of the research.