The aim of this study was to examine Iranian EFL university students' level of anxiety and their perceptions towards in-class activities during speaking courses and possible causes of apprehension. Moreover, this study investigated whether or not EFL university students' gender differences affect their perceptions of foreign language speaking anxiety. To this end, data were collected from 175 Iranian EFL learners; 125 females and 50 males through Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) adopted from Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope (1986) followed by a structured interview. The findings showed that the level of females' anxiety was significantly higher than that of males in impromptu speaking activities. Moreover, instructors could have an essential role in reducing the speaking anxiety. Results of the interviews confirmed the findings obtained through the questionnaire.

Genre studies allow researchers to observe the repeated communicative functions and their linguistic components in different genres (Brett, 1994). Writing the introduction section is a tough and burdensome task for both native and non-native speakers (Swales & Feak, 1994). Hence, the present study aimed to investigate the generic organization of English research article introductions written by native English and Iranian non-native speakers of English. A total of 160 published articles were selected from established journals in Applied Linguistics. Following Swales' (2004) Create A Research Space (CARS) model, the researchers analyzed the articles for their specific generic patterns. Findings displayed that native English writers used significantly more strategies than Iranian non-native speakers of English, yielding richer texts. The findings of the present study contribute to the current knowledge of cross-cultural studies in academic writing to non-native English speakers in general and to non-native English novice writers in particular. Built on Swales' (2004) CARS model, the study describes how introduction sections are developed in English by native and non-native speakers, offering insights into ESP/EAP writing pedagogy.

The present study positions a research to analyze the university students' graffiti on classroom walls to make a thematic analysis of the graffiti used in the Iranian higher education context. It is an attempt to investigate how university students voice their opinions and express themselves using graffiti on the university classroom walls. The study is based on the documentation and classification of more than 200 pieces of graffiti on university classroom walls in Isfahan, Iran. The analysis suggests different themes such as love and hatred, politics, religion, poem, class notes, signature, presence, date, complaint/despair, self-expression, drawings, etc. It is believed that this study is not only a sociological analysis of graffiti in the university context, but it may also be interesting to a wider audience like educators, administrators, teachers and parents.

One of the challenges brought about by intercultural communication is the cross-cultural understanding of whatis meant by what is said in another culture. Performing a given communicative act in a different cultural background than the speakers' own requires taking into consideration several issues in order not to be perceived as impolite, rude, or even offensive in the host community.The present study aims to investigate the pragmatic behavior of refusal to invitation by Chinese international university students and Malaysian university students in Malaysia. The second aim is to seek the respondents' perception in the process of refusing an invitation regarding their cognition, language of thought, and perception of insistence after refusing an invitation. The subjects were selected from forty Chinese international students and forty Malaysian students at University Sains Malaysia, Malaysia. Data were collected through a written discourse completion task and an immediate structured post-interview.An analysis of the data demonstrated that both Chinese and Malaysian respondents used similar type of strategies when refusing an invitation; however, they were different in terms of the number of strategies (i.e. frequency) used in each situation. It is hoped that the present research will not only make contributions to the studies of refusal behavior in the intercultural communication in general but to the pragmatic behavior of refusal to invitation between Chinese international students and Malaysian students in particular. Keywords:Intercultural communication, Speech act of refusal to invitation, Chinese international students, Malay university students, Malaysia, Strategies IntroductionIntercultural communication is not a new concept. There would be no need to study intercultural communication in the case in which people never come into contact with each other, and therefore, there would be no need to communicate with people who speak a different language and organize their lives according to completely different norms and values (Pinto, 2000). However, what is new about intercultural communication is the systematic study of exactly what happens when cross-cultural contacts and interactions take place-when message producer and message receiver are from different cultures (Gao, 2006).One of the challenges brought about by intercultural communication is the understanding of speech acts cross-culturally. Speech acts or the communicative acts (e.g. thanking, apology, request) vary cross-culturally and the appropriate use of a given speech acts is subject to variation as the cultures differ. For example, in complimenting someone on her new dress, a positive acceptance of the compliment by appreciation (e.g. thank you) is common in some cultures (e.g. the United States), while rejecting the compliment (e.g. no, it is not new) www.ccsenet.org/ijel

Politeness conventions vary across cultures and so is impoliteness and rudeness. In some cases, what is considered rude in one culture or a society is not necessarily rude or impolite in another. This cannot be explained unless more studies on the use of language functions in a specific culture are conducted. The aim of this paper is to investigate Malaysians university students' realization of responding to rudeness. For this purpose, 51 Malaysian university students at Universiti Sains Malaysia took part in this research. The respondents completed a Discourse Completion Task consisting of six situations in which they had to respond to an offensive or a rude language directed toward them. The findings were then analyzed using Beebe and Waring's (2005) a coding scheme of responding rudeness to examine the type and use of strategies in responding to rudeness. Moreover, a post-structured interview was conducted to explore the respondents' perception of politeness, cognition and language of thought (i.e. the language they think in their mind to produce response in the moment) in responding to rudeness. The results showed that participants employ different strategies with variations in contextual variables (i.e. social distance and social status) in their responses. The comparison of participants' production and perception in responding to rudeness provided significant results. It is hoped that the analysis of Malaysian university students' responding to rudeness could add to the body of knowledge in pragmatics and speech act studies in general and to our understanding of Malays university students' realization in responding to rudeness in particular.

This paper aims to explore the role interpersonal metadiscourse markers play in theconstruction and achievement of persuasion in local British and Iranian newspapers.To this end, a corpus of 120 persuasive opinion articles published in two local Iraniannewspapers, namely Isfahan Ziba and Isfahan (Emrooz) Today, and two local Britishnewspapers, namely Liverpool Echo and Chronicle Live, from July 2015 to June 2016,were randomly selected and analyzed based on Dafouz-Milne’s (2008) taxonomy ofinterpersonal metadiscourse markers. The overal findings disclose that interpersonalmetadiscourse is present in the two corpora; however, there are variations in thedistribution and frequency of interpersonal markers.

Learning a language means learning the culture. What we act and speak reflect the culture of our language. Requests have attracted the attention of many researchers which they have often been investigated adjacent to the politeness (

As an instance of foreign language comprehension, L2 humor perception is proved to be challenging for the foreign language learners. However, the body of literature is heavier on the side of humor production than humor perception. The current study explores the extent to which Iranian English as foreign language (EFL) learners perceive different types of English humor in comparison with the English native speakers. The participants were 153 Iranian EFL learners at intermediate level of language proficiency who were randomly selected from English language learners from several English language institutes in Shiraz, Iran, and 30 American English native speakers who voluntarily participated in this study. A questionnaire consisting of six contextualized jokes of three major types of universal, cultural and linguistic (with morphological, phonological, lexical and syntactic subcategories)was developed based on Schmitz's classification of verbal humor to obtain the quantitative data. Moreover, a semi-structured interview was conducted to elicit the perception of those participants who did not find the jokes humorous. The results showed that the majority of Iranian EFL participants did not realize the humor in the jokes. Also, the findings revealed that generally speaking, Iranian EFL learners' perception of humor is significantly lower in all types of jokes examined. The best perceived type of humor was found to be the linguistic humor of morphological type for the Iranian EFL learners and the lexical type for English native speakers. It was also discovered that the phonological humor was the least perceived type of humor for both Iranian EFL learners and English native speakers.