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The present study explores communication strategies used by Iranian advanced EFL learners to overcome communication problems. This study aims to explore EFL learners' awareness of communication strategies. To this end, 17 advanced EFL learners who were willing to participate in the study were selected through snowball sampling. Their awareness of communication strategies was then explored through open-ended interviews and analyzed in line with the coding schemes of grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1991). Iterative data collection and analysis yielded four main categories including explicit, reciprocal, implicit, and reduction strategies. Each of these strategies covers some subcategories. To visualize the findings and explore the degree to which the abstracted strategies reflect the participants' perspective, the transcribed data, along with the emerged strategies were fed to MAXQDA. This study can contribute to effective oral communication by elaborating on the notion of communication strategies and reaching communicative goals. The findings have implications for language learners, language teachers, and materials developers.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of small-group student-led discussion as a pre-writing task on the writing performance of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, a quasi-experimental study design was employed in which 80 Iranian intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups, with the former being required to engage in small-group student-led discussions prior to writing paragraphs on a predetermined topic. Their paragraphs were subject to analysis focussed on the components of vocabulary, grammar, content, writing mechanics, and organization. Results indicated that, following the treatment, learners' writing performance improved significantly according to raters' holistic evaluation, as well as specifically in relation to the elements of content and vocabulary. Our study indicates that the socially negotiated nature of learners' interactions can help them engage with and develop a more wide-ranging and in-depth understanding of written content.

In line with the concept of mobile learning in English Language Teaching (ELT), the aim of this research is to explore how Iranian ELT practitioners take advantage of social media to propose supportive and impactful language learning programs by adhering to persuasive linguistic devices. The research design is nonexperimental and explorative. ELT-related commercial videos and pictures were identified on social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. We delved into the syntactic and pragmatic features of the data on ELT-related ads to identify the persuasive techniques and strategies these ads resort to for attracting language learners to online classes and services. To analyze the data, the widely-used and acknowledged Cialdini's (The psychology of persuasion, Quill William Morrow, 1984) principles of persuasion are employed. The results manifested that 'reciprocity' and 'scarcity' were the most used persuasive strategies, while 'commitment and consistency' and 'consensus' were the least favorable persuasion principles in these ads. The analysis of the Iranian ELT-related ads indicated that the language used within this context is purposeful and strategic. A contextual investigation of the ELT-related ads on social media can meaningfully contribute to social practices underlying English language pedagogy and digital literacy.

Research on the discursive features of graffiti in institutional settings is in its infancy and few studies have investigated the phenomenon and its implications in educational contexts. In this paper, we report on a study in which we employed systemic functional linguistics (Halliday in Learning how to mean, Edward Arnold, 1975). to probe communicative functions and gender differences in Iranian university student graffiti that appeared in all-male and all-female locations. The data comprised authentic instances of graffiti generated by students, analysis of which suggests that male and female university students each have their own distinctive motives for using graffiti, as realised in significant differences observed in the context-specific functions they perform. Graffiti pieces represented a distinctive and meaningful way of communicating, and its most salient features were creativity, simplicity and variation. Indications are that university students' graffiti reflects psychological and social challenges, and the thoughts, attitudes and feelings expressed through it serve students' personal and interactional purposes.

This study explores discourse markers (DMs) as they occur with compliment responses (CRs) in classroom interactions among Iranian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Using the tenets of conversation analysis, this paper draws on data from teacher-student interactions in several private language institutes in Iran. After audiorecording and transcription of the compliment-response exchanges, 148 DMs were identified within the responses. These sequences were analyzed to find out how DMs are combined with four distinct CR types; accept, mitigate, reject, and request interpretation. DMs were also identified and categorizedbased on their frequency of occurance and semantic features to allow comparison with previous findings. The results of this study revealed that Iranian EFL learners resorted to a limited number of DMs in responses to teacher-generated compliments, with "linking" DMs being the most favorable type. Moreover, some DMs were accompanied by a specific CR type which helped the formation of an intended illocutionary force by the complimentee. It was also observed that a DM or a combination of these markers can stand alone as a legitimate and functional response to compliments, which further reveals that DMs can contribute to both semantic and pragmatic meaning. These findings clearly suggest that explicit teaching of DMs in English language classes should be taken into consideration, as these linguistic elements can provide learners with important tools to convey their intended meaning more smoothly and effectively.

This study investigates persuasive strategies used in the writings of Iranian university students in the field of teaching English as foreign language (TEFL). The study utilized the 7 principles of persuasive strategies presented by Cialdini (The psychology of persuasion, Quill William Morrow, New York 1984; Pre-suasion: A revolutionary way to influence and persuade, Simon & Schuster, New York 2016), which include 'reciprocity', 'commitment and consistency', 'social proof', 'liking', 'authority', 'scarcity', and 'unity'. The results indicate that strategies such as 'liking', 'unity', and 'authority' were used more frequently than other persuasive strategies. On the other hand, 'scarcity' was the least used strategy by the participants. Significant gender differences were also observed in the data. These findings have important pedagogical implications and suggest the need to incorporate persuasive strategies into instructional materials and teaching practices to enhance the persuasive writing skills of university students. Furthermore, gender differences highlight the importance of considering individual differences when teaching persuasive writing. Finally, the study discusses the pedagogical implications of these findings in the context of learning and teaching., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)