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Among the L2 skills, writing is considered one of the most emotion-wrought aspects of language learning due to the high level of students’ engagement and investment in the composing process. Nevertheless, many L2 teachers have neglected the psychological aspects of writing which can be traced to the profession’s history of emphasizing cognition over emotion. Positive Psychology principles highlight the fact that the students’ success in accomplishing educational tasks such as writing depends not only on their knowledge, effort and perseverance but also their psycho-emotional status. Accordingly, the present study, adopting a correlational design, investigated the associations between 40 Iranian EFL learners' writing performance and their perceptions of a set of positive psychology constructs. The required data were collected based on the students' performance on two essay writing tasks and their responses to the items of L2-specific academic buoyancy, L2 writing mindset and willingness to write questionnaires. The correlation coefficients indicated no statistically significant relationship between the students' writing performance and the positive psychology constructs investigated; nevertheless, there was a significant positive relationship between academic buoyancy and willingness to write variables. In addition, the multiple regression analysis showed that among the subscales of the positive psychology measures, the positive acceptance of academic life and regularity adaptation could best predict the writing performance of the students. The MANOVA results also indicated no statistically significant differences among more-skilled, moderately-skilled and less-skilled student writers in terms of academic buoyancy, mindset and willingness to write.
 

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Shadow education, defined as private supplementary tutoring provided beyond the mainstream educational systems and formal learning spaces, has become a widespread phenomenon throughout the world. The present study adopted a hermeneutic phenomenological research approach to investigate the status and effects of shadow education practice in general education and teaching the English language in Iran. Through the purposive sampling technique, 10 ELT teachers and 10 EFL college students who had the experience of being engaged in such teaching practices and learning experiences were selected and interviewed. After conducting a thematic analysis of the transcribed data, the researcher obtained the following themes with regard to the nature and influence of shadow education in teaching English in Iran: (1) shadow education compensating for inefficiency in teaching, (2) shadow education providing more student-centered and humanistic teaching methods, (3) shadow education facilitating access to higher education, (4), shadow education creating business opportunities and (5) shadow education perpetuating social inequalities in the society. Finally, it was suggested that due to its tremendous growth and ubiquitous presence along with the mainstream curriculum in educational ecology, shadow education must receive appropriate attention from educational authorities, teachers and researchers in the country.