The main purpose of this paper is to study the impact of interactional feedback on inter language variation in terms of accuracy, complexity, and fluency of learners' discourse in performing planned vs. unplanned tasks. The forty upper-intermediate participants of the study who were both male and female young adult learners were randomly assigned into an experimental and a control group. Every participant of both groups was required to perform both a planned and an unplanned task. The experimental group received interactional feedback while performing each task, but the control group was not provided with any feedback. The results of statistical analysis revealed that the participants exposed to interactional feedback while performing both the planned and the unplanned tasks achieved greater accuracy and complexity, but lower fluency. While feedback hindered fluency in both planned and unplanned tasks, greatest fluency was related to the performance condition in which the participants benefited from a plaJlt1ing time period and were not interrupted with feedback moves. The findings highlight the need to consider interactional feedback as a task implementation condition in task grading and sequencing and the necessity of considering this task condition for accomplishing accuracy, complexity, and/or fluency in task response.

Knowing a word implies the KNOWLEDGE of the possible combinations - or collocations into which a given item can enter. Collocations tend to vary among languages and topic domains. While attaching due significance to the inclusion of lexical items in EFL syllabus, highlighting the importance of collocations is a necessity. The present study was undertaken with the belief that more work on collocations would enhance the practices of English learning/teaching. Specifically, this study is the result of an attempt to investigate an error pattern in the vocabulary of Iranian EFL learners i.e. the confusion of collocations. It was assumed that such an error pattern reflected a difficulty in vocabulary acquisition and that it was a feature of INTERLANGUAGE. The analysis of the data indicated that: collocation confusion is indeed a common error in Iranian EFL learners INTERLANGUAGE; there is a positive correlation between learners' overall proficiency and their KNOWLEDGE of collocations; all kinds of collocations are not equally hard for Iranian EFL learners, and adjective plus noun type of collocations will pose the largest amount of difficulty to Iranian learners.

Research into instructed pragmatics mainly comparing implicit and explicit instruction has gained salience in language teaching research in the last two decades. The present study was designed to investigate the effect of cognitive and interpersonal task-based instruction on EFL Learners’ production of two speech acts of apology and request. To this end, 125 intermediate EFL learners were conveniently sampled, and randomly assigned to four experimental groups (EG) and one control group (CG).  The four experimental groups received task-based instruction on the two speech acts of apology and request (three 30-minute sessions on each), though instruction varied in terms of general tasks types (cognitive or interpersonal) and their specific variants (cognitive: predicting (EG1; N=25) and inducing (EG2; N=25); interpersonal: co-operating (EG3; N=25) and role-play (EG4; N=25)).  The control group (N=25) did not receive any speech act-specific treatment. The participants’ speech act production was measured through a 16-item written discourse completion test (WDCT) as both the pretest and the posttest.  The findings showed the significant effect of both cognitive and interpersonal tasks, but also the greater effectiveness of the latter for speech act production. The study has implications for pragmatic task design and classroom practice. More specifically, it shows the potential of task-based instruction and interaction for EFL learners’ pragmatic development.

This paper aims at investigating the acquisition of Italian complex predicates by native speakers of Persian. Complex predication is not as pervasive a phenomenon in Italian as it is in Persian. Yet Italian native speakers use complex predicates productively; spontaneous data show that Persian learners of Italian seem to be perfectly aware of Italian complex predicates and use this familiar feature as a bridge between their native language (NL) and the target language (TL). Elicitation of complex predicates in guided context seems to indicate that the Persian group learners’ group is strikingly uniform to the Native Speakers’ group and quite homogeneous with the control group of learners with NL other than Persian. This research shows that the use of complex predicates in Italian INTERLANGUAGE (IL) cannot be considered a simple effect of transfer, but could be also analyzed as a more general IL strategy.

One way of investigating the L2 learners’ INTERLANGUAGE is uncovering the notion of “difficulty” and “error” learners have in their linguistic input by implementing the grammaticality judgment test (GJT). The test may reveal the relationship that is felt between error “recognition” and “production”. To this purpose, the subjects in this study were required to underline errors in different sentences, having been produced more often by the Persian English learners (PELs).Their response to the errors revealed some part of their INTERLANGUAGE (IL). It is hypothesized that certain types of errors are not tangible enough to recognize as they represent the items which are more “difficult” to master in the course of language learning. In other words, the study tried to shed light on the assumption that failure to recognize some errors by some learners corresponded closely with difficulty of the same items to master on production level. The statistical value, 6.58 at 2 df. at 5% level indicated that the relationship between the two variables, response and sources, was meaningful. It is furthermore discussed that resorting to the traditional inter- and intra- classification of error sources suffers from some respects and a new dimension in the area, i.e. bi-source errors, was introduced.