The polite listener In England stares at the speaker attentively and blinks his eyes occasionally as a sign of interest. That eye-blink says nothing to Americans, who expect the listener to nod or to murmur something such as "mm - hmm”. And in some parts of  Far East, it is impolite to look at the other person at all during conversation.It is often argued that, in teaching foreign LANGUAGEs, culture and LANGUAGE are interwoven in a way that it is not possible to present LANGUAGE without its culture. However, until a new method of teaching LANGUAGE, called communicative approach, which is sociolinguistically oriented, had not come into existence, this belief was not used to be observed in textbooks and LANGUAGE classes. This method intends to create situations in the classroom in which foreign LANGUAGE can be used as naturally and authentically as the native speakers of target LANGUAGE use it for communicative purposes.The problem of teaching culture, nevertheless, does not end here. Nowadays, foreign LANGUAGEs are taught with different and varied objectives. Is it necessary for all foreign LANGUAGE learners to get familiar with the culture of foreign LANGUAGE they are supposed to learn? As Schumann (1984) claims, is it true that second LANGUAGE learning is impossible, unless one gives up his/her own native culture and adopts the culture of foreign LANGUAGE community? What are some relevant issues regarding teaching English in Iran? These are actually some basic questions raised in this article. Whereas definite answers are not necessarily provided in this paper, some areas of research related to culture, and teaching foreign LANGUAGE are put forward.

This study investigated the effect of LANGUAGE COMPLEXITY and group size on knowledge construction in two online debates. Knowledge construction was assessed using Gunawardena et al.’s Interaction Analysis Model (1997). LANGUAGE COMPLEXITY was determined by dividing the number of unique words by total words. It refers to the lexical variation. The results showed that knowledge construction and group size are significantly and negatively correlated. Also, the study revealed that knowledge construction and LANGUAGE COMPLEXITY are significantly and positively correlated. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that LANGUAGE COMPLEXITY is a significant predictor of knowledge construction in online debates. Some actions should be undertaken to increase LANGUAGE COMPLEXITY in order to foster knowledge construction in online debates.

The present meta-analysis was conducted to provide a quantitative measure of the overall effects of task COMPLEXITY on Chinese EFL learners’ LANGUAGE production. Based on the strict inclusion criteria, 12 primary studies were synthesized according to key features. Eleven of them were meta-analyzed to investigate effects of raising the resource-directing task COMPLEXITY. Results revealed that (a) there was an assortment of treatments and measures, (b) there was a small to medium positive effect for syntactic COMPLEXITY (d=0.64) and small effect for lexical COMPLEXITY (d=0.20), which lends support to the Cognition Hypothesis; there was a small negative effect for accuracy (-0.18) and a close to negative effect (0.01) for fluency in writing, which partly confirms Skehan’s Trade-off effects, and (c) task modality (oral or written) did not make a significant difference on the overall effects on COMPLEXITY and accuracy, while make a significant difference on fluency.

This quasi-experimental research investigated the relative effectiveness of teacher scaffolding compared to peer scaffolding strategies on the writing performance of Iranian EFL learners—specifically focusing on accuracy, fluency, and COMPLEXITY—within a mobile-assisted instructional framework guided by Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. The study involved 80 university students with intermediate English proficiency, comprising both male and female participants, who were pursuing degrees in English LANGUAGE Translation at Islamic Azad University in Ayatollah Amoli, Iran. The participants were separated into two experimental groups, along with one control group. After an initial essay-writing pretest and a sequence of ten instructional sessions, a posttest was administered. The essays were evaluated by two independent raters utilizing Larsen-Freeman’s assessment profile. Statistical analyses, which included paired samples t-tests and one-way ANOVA, revealed that both scaffolding strategies significantly enhanced learners’ writing accuracy, fluency, and COMPLEXITY. Importantly, the group that received teacher scaffolding demonstrated greater improvement in composing five-paragraph essays compared to their peers. These results offer valuable insights for educators, students, and researchers in Iran, highlighting the crucial role of scaffolding strategies—especially teacher scaffolding—in improving EFL learners’ essay writing skills.

Easy access to social media enables users to express their opinions and ideology about various topics like news, videos, and personalities freely, without any fear, and often in an offensive manner. It is a vital task to detect comments with offensive LANGUAGE on social media platforms and relies on a complete and comprehensive tagged dataset. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce and make publicly available PerBOLD, a new Persian comment dataset collected from Instagram as a popular platform among Iranian. We follow a two-level manual annotation process in order to determine whether a comment has offensive LANGUAGE or not and fine-grained tags of different types of offensive LANGUAGE. Furthermore, we present some interesting aspects of data and analysis them.

Explaining the meaning of “Clear Arabic LANGUAGE” (Arabic: لسان عربیّ مبین) in the Holy Quran according to the opinions of the commentators (the scholars who interpret the Holy Book of Quran) and the semantic functions of the words is the main issue of this research. Differences of opinion of commentators (Arabic: مفسّر; plural: Arabic: مفسّرون, Romanized: mufassirūn) and citing their views for different reasons necessitated this research. The present article has been studied and evaluated the opinions of the commentators in interpreting the verse and considers their views about “Clear Arabic LANGUAGE” (Arabic: لسان عربیّ مبین) in four parts. These include: Taḥaddī (Arabic: تحدّی, The Quranic Challenge), the LANGUAGE of the audience and the place of revelation, the honor and capacities of the Arabic LANGUAGE, the eloquence and explicitness of the specific LANGUAGE of the Qur'an. The results of the research show that the “Clear Arabic LANGUAGE” beyond the opinions of the commentators is a common understanding that has revealed the superhuman LANGUAGE of revelation through human conversational style and considered the universal characteristics, transhumanism, transhistorical of the Holy Book of Quran while considering the conditions and understanding of the audience. Paying attention to the Quranic meaning of related words and narrations as well as Saussure’s linguistic point of view can confirm the recent meaning.

The current inquiry aimed at examining the effect of first LANGUAGE by Iranian learners as Foreign LANGUAGE (EFL) in task preparation on their speaking accuracy, fluency and COMPLEXITY. For this purpose, 40 Iranian EFL learners with intermediate level were selected based on a placement test, and divided into two equal groups. Then, the speaking fluency, accuracy, and COMPLEXITY test was administered as the pretest. The treatment lasted for five sessions of 60 minutes. In these sessions, the learners did oral opinion tasks. In the first group, participants were supposed to spend 10 minutes to cooperate with a partner to read a proposed problem, discuss their solutions, and jot down by in a planning sheet. Within 10 minutes, they prepared for the task using only their L1 (Persian) for improving both speaking and writing skills. Following that, the participants were separated in various rooms, and were given two minutes to plan the task in English prior to doing the task. In contrast, the second group completed the planning sheet and prepared the task in English as their second/foreign LANGUAGE. The instruction lasted five sessions. At the final session, the speaking fluency, accuracy, and COMPLEXITY posttest was conducted. The effects of the task planning conditions were analyzed and compared during and after the task performance. The data were analyzed via ANCOVA. The findings indicated that using L1 by Iranian EFL learners in task preparation significantly affected speaking accuracy, fluency and COMPLEXITY. Finally, the pedagogical and theoretical implications of the study are provided.

Robinson‟ s Cognition Hypothesis and Skehan‟ s Limited Attentional Capacity Model provide the major impetus for this study. The present article reports the findings of a between-subject factorial experimental research study which explored 1) the effects of increased cognitive task COMPLEXITY, manipulated through the intentional reasoning demands and number of elements on the lexical and syntactic COMPLEXITY, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of EFL writers‟ productions; and 2) the joint effects of cognitive task COMPLEXITY factor and learners‟ LANGUAGE learning aptitude (Low vs. High) on the written output. Firstly, we gave Carroll and Sapon‟ s Modern LANGUAGE Aptitude Test (MLAT) to 226 participants and then did a random stratification of the low-and high-aptitude learners into three groups. The participants received letter writing tasks with different cognitive COMPLEXITY levels (low, medium, and high). The findings indicated that increasing cognitive task COMPLEXITY resulted in significantly higher lexical and syntactic COMPLEXITY and lower fluency, whereas no significant effect was found on writing accuracy. Moreover, the statistical results revealed no significant interaction effect between task COMPLEXITY factors and learners‟ LANGUAGE aptitude. With regard to the first objective of the study, the findings supported the predictions of Cognition Hypothesis while it is not the case in relation to the second objective of the study.