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This study explored the effect of portfolio and self assessment on writing tasks on the one hand and self regulation ability on the other by assigning sixty freshman undergraduate university students majoring in teaching English as a foreign language to a control and experimental group. They had enrolled in the Writing Essay course at Tabaran University in Iran in 2010. While both groups wrote several essays during the course and took a self regulation questionnaire and the same writing task at the beginning and end of the course as pre-and-post tests, only the participants in the experimental group were required to write portfolios regularly and perform self assessment tasks. The multivariate analysis of results showed that the two groups had no significant difference in their writing and self-regulation abilities when the course started. The experimental group, however, did not only score significantly higher than the control group on the writing task (F = 14.390, df = 1, p <.000) but also gained higher self regulation ability as a result of writing portfolios and self assessment (F = 58.235, df = 1, p <.000). The implications of the study are discussed within a foreign language teaching context

This study translated the 21-item Religious Orientation Scale (ROS) into Persian and explored its factorial validity in Iran by administering it to 329 undergraduate university students and employing three methods of factor extraction, i.e., Maximum Likelihood (ML), Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Among the three methods, ML seems to be favored in the literature recently because it forms the basis of the structural equation modeling (SEM) upon which studies such as Brewczynski and MacDonald's (2006) are developed. The ML, PAF and PCA all extracted four latent variables (LVs) when they were applied to the participants' responses and the LVs were rotated via Varimax with Kaiser Normalization. When the highest loading of a cross loading item was kept and its loadings on other LVs were removed, it was found that the three methods had the same items loading on factors three and four. The one-way ANOVA analysis of the mean of loadings and post hoc tests, however, showed that the PCA differed significantly from the ML and PAF. It was also found that the first factor extracted by the PAF is the same as the second factor of the ML and vice versa. Based on the items loading on the first two factors it is suggested that the PAF be adopted as the best method of factor extraction in both exploratory and confirmatory studies.

The present study investigated the influence of concept mapping as a post-reading strategy on EFL learners' critical thinking ability. The study utilized a pretest -posttest control and experimental group design. To do so, thirty six EFL learners at upper intermediate and advanced levels were randomly assigned to experimental (n=18) and control (n=18) groups. The results of pretest indicated that the participants of the two groups were homogenous with regard to their proficiency level and critical thinking ability. The experimental group was instructed to construct concept maps after reading each text and formulated the required post-reading activities on the basis of the constructed maps. Critical thinking skill was assessed via the "Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal" (CTA). The results of posttest indicated that concept mapping has a positive and significant influence on learners' critical thinking ability. The discussion and conclusions of the research are further presented with reference to the finding.

The present study explores the relationship between field-dependence/independence cognitive style and listening comprehension ability. Participants were 200 (152 female and 48 male) English students enrolled in universities and language institutes in Mashhad, Iran, who responded to the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) and the IELTS listening comprehension. They were divided into field-dependent and field-independent groups according to the scores gained in the GEFT. The result of the study suggests that test-takers" cognitive styles influences on their listening and task performance. Field-independent participants outperformed field-dependent participants in IELTS listening comprehension and all of the listening tasks. The finding also indicates that field-independency correlates more positively with test-takers successes in IELTS listening comprehension compared to field-dependent ones. More specifically, field-independency correlates more significantly with fill-in-the-gap questions, i.e., form-completion, note-completion and sentence-completion tasks compared to field-dependent test-takers. Field-dependency cognitive style, however, correlates more significantly with multiple choice and matching questions compared to field-independency cognitive style.