The importance assigned to the role of English language learning (ELL) software and websites has been even more highlighted in online classrooms during the COVID-19 pandemic where teachers and students did not have a face to face interaction. One of the language Skills which seems to be negatively affected by the lack of face-to-face interaction between teachers and learners is Writing. Among various technology-assisted tools, websites can be effectively used as a source for improving L2 Writing Skills. However, not all websites encompass suitable content for developing learners’ ESL/EFL Writing Skills. Therefore, it seems to be a logical concern to guide the students in both selecting and implementing the most relevant and, at the same time, efficient websites for teaching Writing Skills. Evaluating such websites is one way to respond to this concern. For this purpose, this study aims at evaluating two of the widely used websites specially designed to develop and improve learners’ L2 Writing Skills: The Purdue Online Writing Lab and Pro Writing Aid. Besides, the two websites would be compared with each other in order to introduce the strengths and weaknesses of each website. The results of such an evaluation would be helpful for both teachers and learners in selecting the most efficient website for improving their Writing Skills based on their purposes and practical needs.

There are two main approaches to teaching Writing Skill to children: the soundbased approach and word-based approach. In alphabetic or phonics approach which is one of the oldest and known methods, Writing / reading teaching begins with the teaching of individual sounds to children. In contrast, in the word-based approach, the teaching of the Writing system begins by reading and Writing the words. While introducing these two common approaches to Writing spelling Skills, this paper attempts to compare the advantages and disadvantages of each one by providing evidence from Persian and English languages. Proponents of the traditional, alphanumeric style believe that this method brings phonological awareness to learners, which helps them to read the meaningless and new words. The advocates of the rival method, the word-based method, believe that in the teaching of reading, the focus should be on the whole word, because the whole word is a semantic unit and the purpose of reading is also the discovery of meaning. They claim that children in this way can discover the phonological values of letters later in a process of self-discovery. Evidence of English and Persian indicates that Skilled readers use a word-based approach.

One of the promises of web-based education is to help students take control of their learning pace as the basic requirement of language learning is being life-long. The purpose of the present study was to find out which of the e-tools -- weblogs, wikis, or podcasts -- can better help EFL learners excel in their Writing Skill. To this end, 156 Iranian sophomore students majoring in English and studying at Islamic Azad University, Abadeh and Shiraz Branches and the Zand Institute of Higher Education were selected based on random sampling as participants. As the design of the study was a pre-experimental one, there were three experimental groups involved but no control group. Before the instruction, the participants were given an essay Writing test, whose results were used to divide them into three groups. Two of the groups received in-class instruction and were assigned out-of-class activities through weblogs and wikis. The third group received the instruction through podcasts. The treatment lasted for two and a half months and at the end, another essay Writing test was given to all groups. A two-way ANOVA for the comparison of the participants' gain scores indicated that using the tools available on the Internet could lead to improvement in the EFL students Writing abilities, and gender was not a determining factor. The study reveals the fact that web tools, in general, and blogs, wikis, and podcasts, in particular, can foster EFL students’ Writing Skills and teachers can use them as supplements in their language instruction.

The experiment undertaken in this study focused on testing the hypothesis that the context or activity through which language learning takes place and specific FL forms that learners are expected to learn may be possible causes of variation in the learner's performance. This study, thus, investigated the possible causes of variation in intermodal transfer, a process which is believed to be partly responsible for foreign language learning (FLL). An almost linguistically homogenous sample of sixty subjects was randomly selected out of 1500 newly accepted university students in Islamic Azad University- Shahrekord Branch. The subjects were chosen from a variety of majors such as Persian Literature, Sociology, History, Public Administration, Educational Administration, Preschool Education, Nursing, Civil Engineering, Geography, and General sciences. They were assigned to two groups, each receiving exposure to the English language forms in focus through a different context: Group A through conversational activities and group B through Writing activities. The language elements studied were eight English forms non-existent in the learners' L1 (Persian). The results supported the hypothesis that knowledge of FL forms not present in L1 learned through Writing contexts/activities is more readily transferable to other contexts than the same knowledge learned through conversational contexts/activities.The possible causes of such variation in the learners' performances were discussed along with implications of the findings for FLL studies and EFL pedagogical purposes.

Writing Skill has always been the Achille Heel of the students when learning a foreign language. It takes so much time and energy of the learners as well as teachers to unearth the challenges of the learners and propose applicable solutions for them. This study aims to explore the EFL learners’ Writing difficulties, strategies, and attitudes and examine the areas of Writing difficulty in their Writing performance. To this end, a close-ended questionnaire and an interview were administered to 31 pre- to upper-intermediate EFL learners from two intact classes who were interested in improving their general Writing abilities. A Writing task was also given to identify the areas of difficulty in practice. The results of frequency analysis revealed that the students’ major areas of difficulty were cohesion and coherence and topic development. Furthermore, the students’ frequent strategies and behaviors are brainstorming, editing and revising, and, in terms of attitude, they unanimously consider Writing a rather difficult Skill. The implications and down-to-earth recommendations for the learners and teachers are enumerated at the end.

The present study was conducted to compare the Iranian EFL learners' Writing performances when receiving two different feedback styles: Audio taped feedback (ATF) and minimal marking (MM). Eighty four male participants of this study were chosen from among 136 early intermediate EFL learners who were selected through the cluster sampling of students at Kish Language institute. The classes under study were randomly divided into two groups: the ATF Group and the MM Group, each with 42 eligible participants, who were again checked to be homogeneous through a homogeneity test. During the course of this study, i.e., 36 sessions, the participants were assigned to write expository paragraphs of about 150 words on eight Writing topics. One of the groups received ATF on their scripts, and the other group received MM Two tests were used to compare the Writing performances of the groups: a pre-test prior to the treatment and a post-test after the treatment, both in the form of in-class expository paragraphs of about 150 words under a time limit of 40 minutes. Data analyses and statistical calculations indicated that (a) the ATF Group performed better on the post-test, (b) the MM Group's performance on the post-test did not show any improvement over the pre-test, and, lastly, (c) the ATF Group performed better than the MM Group on the post-test.