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.

In an attempt to add to the current body of research on written corrective feedback (CF), the current study reports on a nine-week intervention, which initially focused on the effect of direct written CF on learners’ use of English articles in their writing and then examined the effect of adding metalinguistic explanation to this CF type; and finally, the effect of learners’ Language Analytic Ability as an individual difference factor is investigated on language development through CF. To do so, this study used a pretest-treatment-posttest- delayed posttest research design and involved 57 intermediate female Iranian EFL learners aged 15-18 in three intact language classes, randomly assigned to the following groups: direct-only CF, direct CF with metalinguistic explanation, and control group. Initially, the findings demonstrated positive effects for direct written CF provided to learners’ writing, though the short-term benefit was more evident and statistically significant. The results also revealed a positive gain pattern through time for learners that received metalinguistic explanation, which supports the provision of such information along with written CF in language classrooms. Finally, learners’ language analytic ability was seen to be predictive of short-term and long-term learner gains when received metalinguistic explanation. The findings suggest that metalinguistic explanation provided as part of the feedback to language learners’ writing is conducive to a higher level of cognitive engagement and leads to better learning outcomes.

In an attempt to add to the current body of research on written corrective feedback (CF), the current study reports on a nine-week intervention, which initially focused on the effect of direct written CF on learners’ use of English articles in their writing and then examined the effect of adding metalinguistic explanation to this CF type; and finally, the effect of learners’ Language Analytic Ability as an individual difference factor is investigated on language development through CF. To do so, this study used a pretest-treatment-posttestdelayed posttest research design and involved 57 intermediate female Iranian EFL learners aged 15-18 in three intact language classes, randomly assigned to the following groups: direct-only CF, direct CF with metalinguistic explanation, and control group. Initially, the findings demonstrated positive effects for direct written CF provided to learners’ writing, though the short-term benefit was more evident and statistically significant. The results also revealed a positive gain pattern through time for learners that received metalinguistic explanation, which supports the provision of such information along with written CF in language classrooms. Finally, learners’ language analytic ability was seen to be predictive of short-term and long-term learner gains when received metalinguistic explanation. The findings suggest that metalinguistic explanation provided as part of the feedback to language learners’ writing is conducive to a higher level of cognitive engagement and leads to better learning outcomes.

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.

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.

Research on the effectiveness of request instruction in L2 pragmatics has been extensive, yet inconclusive. The present meta-analysis aims not only to provide a quantitative and reliable measure of the effects of instruction for the speech act of request in Iran, but also to illustrate a description of the relationship between some variables that moderate its effectiveness (age, gender, proficiency level, treatment type, research design, and data collection procedure). To do so, a total of 37 studies were retrieved and by establishing a set of different inclusion/exclusion criteria, 17 primary studies were coded and analyzed. Results revealed that (1) there is an overall large effect size on the effectiveness of the instruction of request (g = 1. 48) in an Iranian context; (2) some variables were found to be a moderator for this effectiveness like gender and treatment type; (3) considering gender, the male group produced a larger effect size (g = 3. 09) than the female one (g = 1. 10); (4) and regarding treatment types, the explicit group yielded a larger effect size (g = 1. 53) than the implicit one (g = 1. 20). A thorough interpretation of the results, as well as a discussion of practical, theoretical, and methodological implications of this study, is provided to tackle a number of conundrums surrounding the instruction of request and shed light on how to reorient future research.

In order to determine the role of the US withdrawal from Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) in 2018 in the evolution and change of the poverty framing, this study analyzes how poverty is framed in two categories of specialized (including leadership, Dolat, Mizan, Icana) and general websites (including Fars, Moj and Young Journalists Club) during 2017, 2018 and 2019. For this, it uses Framing as a theory, and the technique of Pan and Kosicki’s Frame analysis as a research method. Findings are categorized in four groups as syntactical, script, thematic, and rhetorical. The review indicates that 42,302 news and reports are distributed in these websites in the research period that 275 were identified as samples and recorded and analyzed in Maxquda software. The results show that, except for the Young Journalists Club, the way poverty is framed has changed on all cases since the imposition of sanctions, and sanctions highlighted as one of the main causes of poverty in the framing of poverty. In regard of agenda setting, the coverage of poverty news and reports is less than 10%; the poverty news coverage has been declining over the three years under study. The websites of Leadership and Moj have the largest coverage, and Young Journalists Club has the least amount (less than 1%) of coverage. Due to his type of agenda setting, the problem of poverty is marginalized in public opinion. The framing of poverty with emphasis on the US withdrawal from JCPA as the cause of poverty represent poverty as a temporary issue, silences the voice of the poor, and depicts the emergence of a new social form in Iranian society.