The present study aims at finding the differences between bilingual and monolingual learners across gender in the use of cognitive, metacognitive, and total reading strategies, as well as reading comprehension ability. To this end, 50 Persian-Turkish bilinguals and 36 Persian monolinguals participated in the study. A standard test of reading comprehension and two questionnaires were employed for data collection: a background questionnaire to determine if the subjects were bilingual or monolingual and a standardized Likert scale questionnaire to identify the reading strategies used by bilinguals and monolinguals. To analyze the data, four factorial ANOVAs were conducted with an alpha set at .05 for each effect. The results showed that bilinguals and females outperformed monolinguals and males, respectively, in reading comprehension. Moreover, bilinguals and monolinguals differed in their use of metacognitive strategies but not cognitive ones. Interestingly, there was no difference between males and females in using cognitive and metacognitive strategies, but they differed in total strategy use. The results which are discussed in the light of previous research can provide some useful insights into syllabus design and English language teaching.

The Authors Elahe Ehsanifard finished her MA at the University of Tehran. She has been published in the Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics. Her research interest areas are CALL, teacher education, second language acquisition, and curriculum design and materials development.

In its undulating trend through the history of language teaching, dictation has been used as a tool in both teaching and testing. It has been employed as a tool for either helping learners with some language skills/sub-skills or testing their language proficiency. Considering that dictation tests tap learners' overall language proficiency, it is logical to think that improving learners ability in taking dictation improves their language proficiency. In this study we have considered dictation as an end, have proposed transcribing as a technique to improve it, and have examined the effect of transcribing on dictation. Thirty one elementary female learners participated in this study. The findings of the study show that transcribing has a significant positive effect on learners' dictation. Therefore, we recommend transcribing exercise as one of the techniques to help elementary learners improve their language proficiency.

This study is motivated by the gap existing between theory and practice in teaching listening. Most of the techniques used to teach listening put more emphasis on top-down processing while listeners' problems are more of perceptive ones (bottom-up). In order to address the pervasive decoding problem in listening, this study suggests using transcribing exercise as an input enhancement device and investigates its effect on beginning learners' listening ability. To this end, 31 learners participated in the study. The control group did not have any transcribing practice while the experimental group received transcribing exercise. In the data analysis step, an independent samples t test was employed to compare the two groups. The results show that transcribing has a significant positive effect on beginning learners' listening comprehension. The findings of the study as well as advantages of transcribing exercise are discussed. Implications of the study and scope for future research are also addressed.