Reading comprehension occupies a very vital position as one of the skills in learning English as a foreign language. The ability to comprehend any reading text requires interpreting text through making accurate connection between the linguistic representations or meaning of words and sentences and their pragmatic outcomes. Thus, one of the challenging burdens of EFL learners is to capture the intended meaning of any reading text. This paper aims at introducing the significance of pragmatic meaning in reading L2 texts as an alternative to foster EFL learners' text-understanding ability. In this regard, the researchers employed 4o students in the field of ELT to read two kinds of texts; namely semantically-oriented and pragmatically-oriented texts and answer the related questions. Findings of the study indicated that the majority of students were capable of answering the questions in simplified texts due to their familiarity with the passage when processing the reading material and the ease of the passage. However, only a small number of students was successful in answering the questions of original passages. Based on the results of the study, some guidelines are suggested to make students familiar with pragmatic meaning. In addition, this research enables the students (particularly less-gifted ones) to attend to pragmatic meaning in text-understanding, which in fact helps them to overcome the problem of text-understanding to a considerable extent.
This study investigated the effect of different modes of English captioning on EFL learners' general listening comprehension. To this end, forty five intermediate-level learners were selected based on their scores on a standardized English proficiency test (PET) to carry out the study. Then, the selected participants were randomly assigned into two experimental groups (full-captions and keyword-captions) and one control group (no-captions). Research instrumentation included a pre-test and a post-test following an experimental design. Participants took a pre-test and a post-test containing 50 multiple-choice questions (25question for pre-test and 25 question for post-test) selected from a standard listening test PET, and also 15 treatment sessions. The findings showed significant differences among fullcaptions, keyword-captions, and no-captions in terms of their effect on learners' general listening comprehension. This study provided some pedagogical implications for teaching listening through using different modes of captions.
Writing is a means of articulating ideas, arousing feelings, persuading and convincing other people, but the procedure of writing has become arduous and labyrinthine for Iranian EFL learners. The educational system in Iran is structure-based and it ignores the communicative role of writing, so students' performance in writing wouldn't be desirable. To tackle the mentioned problem, the present paper develops a scaffolding environment to maximize students writing dexterities through the application of various scaffolding means coined by Tharp and Gallimore (1988) during the stages of Seow's process model. The purpose was to determine the procedure of teacher guidance in a process-oriented situation and trace the scaffolding means which had a pre-eminent role in enhancing students' writing proficiency by observing the class and conducting an interview. To this end, 15 female students within the age range of 15-18 studying in Be'sat Language Institute in Salmas, Iran participated in this study. The results elucidated that students could benefit from the established situation in different ways during the accomplishment of their writing tasks. At the end, the study provided some pedagogical implications for teachers in terms of teaching writing.
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