The goal of language programs is to utilize language for effective communication. Due to the needs, interests, and motivations of language learners, they may show individual differences in their lan- guage learning. Materials used in language programs can be instructional, experiential, elucidative, or exploratory in that they can inform learners about the language, provide experience of the lan- guage in use, and help learners to make discoveries about the language for themselves. Therefore, material development has been institutionalized in the last decades. Material development is both a field of study and a practical undertaking. At the theoretical level, the principles of the design, implementation, and evaluation of ELT materials will be emphasized. At the practical level, the production, evaluation, and adaptation of ELT materials, by teachers or mate- rial writers would be taken in to account. The present study investigated the goals of language teaching programs in some countries, and discussed the contextual factors affecting the processes of ELT material development explicitly. The discussion of the three phases of ELT material development; namely, the organization and analysis, evaluation, and adaptation of materials has been thoroughly elaborated throughout the present study. The ELT profession nowadays has a range of different types of syllabus available from which a choice should be made for a specific situation. Having analyzed the material available, the ELT ma- terial developers should evaluate them both externally and internally to select the most appropriate materials. Finally, materials should be adapted to different learners in different settings following some adaptation principles. To this end, a framework for adaptation has been introduced at the end. تفاصيل المقالة

The phenomenon of how tests influence teaching and learning is commonly described as “wash back” in language instruction. Literature indicates that wash back effect is a complex concept that becomes even more complicated under different interpretations of the wash back phenomenon in teaching and learning. In the present study, some definitions of wash back and its two major types were introduced, and also the relationship between wash back effect of high school examinations and the learners’ language learning beliefs was investigated. To carry out this survey study, 120 female students were randomly selected from different high schools in Kermanshah. They were students of different grades in high school, 30% in the first, 35% in the second and 35% in the third grade. The participants were given two questionnaires to assess the wash back effect of high school examinations and their language learning beliefs. The wash back questionnaire selected from Nikoopour (2005) consisted of 42 items with a reliability of 0.82, which was designed based on a Likert scale. The second instrument was the so-called BALLI questionnaire selected from Horwitz (1987), including 34-items, and designed to assess the learners’ language learning beliefs (hereafter LLLB). The present study focused on the relationship between the wash back effect of high school English examinations and the students’ language learning beliefs. The results indicated that the students agreed on the wash back effect of English high school examinations. Also, they agreed with the correspondence between different factors of learners’ language learning beliefs and foreign language learning. تفاصيل المقالة

As a subset of descriptive studies, the current research focused on learners’ perception of the common teaching methods in translation courses. Accordingly, a multi-item Likert-scale questionnaire with 29 items was developed based on the proposed strategies applied in the three traditional, complex and modern methods of teaching for collecting the research data. Cronbach’s alpha was administered for estimating the reliability of the items. Besides, experts’ judgment and factor analysis were used for the coverage and relevance of content and construct validity. After administering the questionnaire among 100 homogenized participants, the answers were processed into numbers and applied in the final data analysis and reported. In conclusion, although all the methods were common in the educational context, the modern methods resolved the challenges which existed in previous methods and put emphasis on the necessity to provide a combined approach towards the existing principles of teaching translation. The results of the study would be helpful for students and instructors in teaching and translation studies via providing an interdisciplinary perspective in teaching translation and languages based on students’ attitudes towards the teaching methods in translation courses. تفاصيل المقالة