The types of assessment tasks affect the learners’ psychological well-being and the process of learning. For years, educationalists were in search of finding and implementing accurate and convenient approaches to assess learners efficiently. Despite the significant role of performance-based assessment (PBA) in affecting second/foreign language (L2) learning processes, few empirical studies have tried to explore how PBA affects reading comprehension achievement (RCA), academic motivation (AM), foreign language anxiety (FLA), and students’ self-efficacy (SS-E). To fill this lacuna of research, the current study intended to gauge the impact of PBA on the improvement of RCA, AM, FLA, and SS-E in English as a foreign language (EFL) context. In so doing, a sample of 88 intermediate EFL learners were randomly divided into experimental group (EG) and CG (control group). During this research (16 sessions), the learners in the CG (N = 43) received the tradition assessment. In contrast, the learners in the EG (N = 45) were exposed to some modification based on the underpinning theories of PBA. Data inspection applying the one-way multivariate analysis of variance (i.e., the one-way MANOVA) indicated that the learners in the EG outperformed their counterparts in the CG. The results highlighted the significant contributions of PBA in fostering RCA, AM, FLA, and S-E beliefs. The implications of this study may redound to the benefits of language learners, teachers, curriculum designers, and policy makers in providing opportunities for further practice of PBA.

In spite of their pivotal role in language learning, psychological variables involved in language learning have received less attention in empirical research. Therefore, this paper tried to inspect the effects of interventionist DA, interactionist DA, and non-DA on EFL students’ SAF, FLCA, and FLLM. To achieve this goal, 78 respondents were chosen and randomly separated into three groups: EG1 (interactionist DA), EG2 (interventionist DA), and CG (non-DA). Before starting the treatment, the participants’ SAF, FLCA, and FLCM were checked through three related pretests. As the treatment, the non-DA students were given specific topics, and they were asked to discuss them without any DA-oriented interventions. The EG1 was evaluated and provided with the needed help by interaction-oriented DA techniques, whereas the EG2 was trained by DA-oriented instruction following Lantolf and Poehner’s (Language Teaching Research 15: 11–33, 2011) scales to measure and aid the students’ speaking ability in their discussions. At the end of the study, the post-tests of SAF, FLCA, and FLLM were administered to check the impacts of the treatment. Analyzing the data through one-way ANOVA tests, it was revealed the two models of DA (i.e., interactionist and interventionist) had a significant positive effect on EFL learners’ SAF. Moreover, it was revealed that both DA models not only increased the EFL learners’ motivation but also lowered their FLCA. This research has multiple implications for both EFL learners and teachers.

This paper offers a psycho-pragmatic analysis of impoliteness in Shakespeare’s King Lear at the intradiegetic level of communication. The paper’s main objective is to explore the extent to which impoliteness assessment is influenced by both the psychological traits of interlocutors motivated by their reality paradigms and the fictional participation of discourse participants, which targets a deeper understanding of the association between impoliteness, psychological dimensions of personality, and fictional participation in drama dialogue. The study is based on an eclectic framework by drawing inspiration from contributions in the field of impoliteness and relational work studies, with a special emphasis on Locher and Jucker’s (2021) list of the factors influencing relational work, together with reference to studies on the relationship between psychological dimensions of personality and language use, with a focus on Archer’s (2002) concept of reality paradigms. The paper has two main findings: first, psychological traits of interlocutors contribute significantly to the production, reception, and assessment of impoliteness and serve as antecedents of their verbal aggression; and, second, psychological impoliteness operates within a specific community of practice and has its own context-specific expectation frames.

This paper investigates the linguistic representation of power in Edward Bond’s Lear (1978). More specifically, the paper tries to explore the extent to which power is linguistically represented manipulatively and/or persuasively by means of specific lexical and pragmatic devices in the discourse of the selected play. The main objective of the paper is to explore how power relations, irrespective of their type, influence the cognitive world of the discourse participants, which in turn attempts a change in their conversational behavior to the extent that allows the acceptance of a specific argument in a particular way. The paper adopts a lexico-pragmatic perspective to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), instanced by Fairclough’s (1989) lexical model for the analysis of discourse, and the concepts of politeness and face (Thomas, 1995; Yule, 1996a). The main research question of the paper is: to what extent do different power relations, encoded lexically and/or pragmatically, affect the conversational behavior of the play’s characters, persuasively and/or manipulatively? Some lexical and pragmatic strategies have been highlighted and then linguistically analyzed to expose their effectiveness in deciphering persuasive and manipulative power relations in the selected play. Among these strategies are: euphemism, myth-making, positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, and politeness strategies. The paper concludes that power has linguistically been encoded in the discourse of the selected play, both persuasively and manipulatively, to affect a cognitive shift in behavior reflected in the conversational interaction among characters.