Volume 7. Issue 3 August 2011.

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Foreword:

Welcome to the third edition of the year 2011. The Iranian EFL Journal is a bi-monthly journal from 2011, and this has created a golden opportunity for our readers to access to more articles. The journal has had strong growth over the last few years with a monthly readership now exceeding 2500 readers. For a journal examining the topic of EFL/ESL, Literature and Translation studies, the growth and readership has been pleasing. Statistically, readers are coming from almost 80 countries. In the third issue of volume 7 we present 15 articles for your reading.  

In the first article, the authors Mahmood Salimi, Mansoor Tavakoli and Saeed Ketabi present testing EFL learners’ knowledge of English collocations: an exploratory factor analysis approach. In the second article, Azar  Hosseini Fatemi,  Reza  Pishghadam and Zahra Heidarian have studied gender delineation in high school and pre-university ELT textbooks: a criterion-oriented approach to text analysis. In the next article, recounting and fine-tuning academic word list for four academic fields is done by Iman Alizadeh and Hadi Farjami. The fourth article is an article in the area of literature. In this article, the plays of Eugene O’Neill are studied and different aspects of his plays are discovered. In the next article, Mohammad Salehi has studied the acquisition of preposition pied piping and preposition stranding by Iranian learners of English.

In the sixth article, Afsaneh Baharloo has explored the anxiety about L2 reading tasks. In the seventh article, the effect of explicit training of metacognitive vocabulary learning strategies on recall and retention of idioms by advanced EFL students is presented by Mehdi Mardani and Ahmad Moinzadeh. In the eighth article, a semantic analysis of interchangeability and synonymy of the discourse markers But and However is scrutinized by Hassan Fartousi. In the ninth article of the issue, Abbas Pourhosein Gilakjani and Seyedeh Masoumeh Ahmadi have presented the impact of authentic listening materials on Iranian EFL learners’ english listening comprehension. In the tenth article of the issue, form and content in the argumentative writing of extroverted and introverted Iranian EFL learners is studied by Fateme Layeghi.

In the next article, Mohamad Reza khodabakhsh has explored the effect of modified speech on listening to authentic speech. Moreover, Peyman Rajabi, Gholam Reza Kiany and Parviz Maftoon have introduced the impact of ESP in-service teacher training programs on Iranian ESP teachers’ beliefs, classroom practices and students’ achievements. In the next article, acquisition of English syllable structure as a foreign language by Iranian Farsi and Arabic speakers is done by Ali Akbar Jabbari and Amrollah Fazlinezhad. In the fourteenth article of the issue, the relation between paragraph organization and the topic progression used in English paragraphs selected from native books on teaching writing is presented by Zargham Ghabanchi and Sahar Zahed Alavi. And in the last article of the issue an investigation of e-mail writing style in Persian learners of English: the effects of social distance and closeness on the formality of the written e-mails is done by Shahla Janghorban and Saeed Ketabi.

 We hope you enjoy this edition and look forward to your readership.