Many books have been written to illustrate the position of the new technologies in teaching and learning a foreign or second language (L2); nonetheless, most of these books have not been successful. The Handbook of Technology and second language Teaching and Learning edited by Caral A. Chapell and Shanon Sauro and published by Wiley Blackwell in 2017, provides a comprehensive overview of the various facets of the use of technology in teaching and learning an L2. This book has not been translated into Persian and no critical review has been published for it; accordingly, this study sought to both introduce and critically review this book. The current critical review revealed some advantages including comprehensiveness of the whole book, the expertise of the writers, up-to-dateness, content and format integrity, and the use of valid sources. The main criticisms are the exclusion of some of the very recent technologies, perhaps due to the ever-changing and exponentially volatile nature of the technological improvements and expansions, the introduction of too many technologies at the theoretical level without providing information about their practical use. Generally, the book is an invaluable and academically written source for L2 practitioners, postgraduate students, and researchers.

Interfacing the domains of second language (L2) writing and assessment, Assessing Change in English second language writing Performance authored by Khaled Barkaoui and Ali Hadidi purports to advance our understanding of the nature and outcome of instruction on L2 learners’ writing development over an extended period of time. In this succinct volume, the authors present a writing assessment model and then describe a study that set out to validate the proposed model. As L2 writing teachers and researchers, we are constantly faced with the choice of how best to assess learners’ writing development.  As such we were keen to review a book which provides a model that identifies and evaluates a number of different measures of writing dimensions.

Employing an explanatory sequential design, the present study investigated the effect of English as a Foreign language (EFL) blog-mediated writing instruction on the students’ learner autonomy. A number of 46 learners who were the students of two intact classes were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups. Over a 16-week semester, the control group students (n=21) were taught based on regular in-class writing instruction and the students in the experimental group (n=25) made use of blogs in addition to the traditional in-class writing instruction. The data were collected through administering a learner autonomy instrument, consisting of metacognitive, cognitive, social, and affective components, and conducting semi-structured interviews. The results of both quantitative and qualitative data revealed that the blog-mediated writing instruction contributed to enhancing learner autonomy of the participants. More specifically, the students who experienced blog-mediated writing activities showed improvement in metacognitive and cognitive components of learner autonomy. The findings offer significant implications for EFL teachers.