ولی محمدی

Research in academic writing has revealed a strong tendency on the part of writers to interactively communicate their scientific findings with their readers. In doing so, the writers should take a position while arguing their propositions. This interaction as proposed by Hyland (2005b) takes places having two sides of stance and engagement. This study targeted the stance component of writer-reader interaction by integrating Hyland’s (2005b) and Hyland and Tse’s (2005a) frameworks to survey lexical and grammatical stance markers in the major subsections of English research articles in anthropology, education, horticulture, and zoology. The corpus included 240 English research articles published during two periods, namely, 1990 and 2010; 60 from each field, 30 articles from 1990 and 30 from 2010 yielding a total number of 1,270,021words. The findings suggested that stancetaking is a common feature of academic writing in the sampled disciplines regardless of the nature of the discipline. Also, hedges ranked first on the list of frequency count. Furthermore, there was a decreasing pattern in the use of stance markers highlighting a convergence among the scholars of the fields with respect to the totality of the facts established day by day. Then, some implications are drawn with plausible applicability in academic writing and EAP syllabus design.

Speaking is one of those stress-prone areas in learning and teaching a foreign language, and speaking anxiety is influenced by a host of factors. This study explored the predictor roles of age, self-efficacy, and teaching experience of Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers on their speaking anxiety. Furthermore, it examined the relationship between teachers’ gender and their level of self-efficacy and anxiety in speaking English. The participants of the research consisted of 109 male and female Iranian teachers teaching in different language institutes and public schools in three provinces of Iran. The Teacher Self-efficacy Scale developed by Bandura (1997) and the Public Speaking Anxiety Scale developed by Bartholomay and Houlihan (2016) were used in this research as the data collection instruments. The data were analyzed by SPSS software (Version 24) using regression and one-way ANOVA. The findings revealed that only self-efficacy was a predictor of speaking anxiety. Moreover, the participants’ level of self-efficacy and speaking anxiety did not change relying on their gender.

The United States with its presidents stepping into power from either the Democratic or Republican parties influences global affairs in one way or another. These two main political parties have long been struggling for power and the significance of tapping into the ideological inclinations of the two parties underscores scholars’ accountability toward raising the critical language awareness of the public which could be an initial step toward a change for the better. The presidential inaugural speeches, due to their programmatic and strategic nature, are of significance to researchers. This study employed van Dijk’s (2006b) socio-cognitive framework where he defined two levels of analyses for a political discourse including the micro-level and macro-level text analyses. The former included 25 discursive devices such as polarization, generalization, hyperbole, etc. The latter drew on the dichotomy of ‘positive self-representation’ and ‘negative other-representation’. In the present study, the linguistic features in 16 inaugural speeches delivered by American Democratic and Republican presidents from 1961 to 2017 were examined at both levels. The overall data analysis revealed that Democrats employed ‘norm expression’ and ‘presupposition’ significantly more than Republicans, while Republicans made more use of ‘categorization’, ‘lexicalization’, and ‘populism’. The macro-level comparison of the two parties indicated that both Democrats and Republicans resorted to using ‘positive self-representation’ significantly more than ‘negative other-representation’ while the deployment of ‘negative other-representation’ by Republicans was significantly more than that by Democrats. The findings of this study have some implications for English for political purposes, political studies, as well as attempts in discourse studies.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between teachers’ sense of burnout and students’ language achievement in their online classes. To this end, 40 male and female English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers and 100 EFL learners were randomly selected from both public schools and private language institutes. The Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and MBI-ES questionnaire were employed as the instruments of the present study. The researcher distributed MBI-ES questionnaire among the teacher participants and also used OPT test and gave it to 100 students of each class in order to measure their achievement and their language performance. The present study used Pearson correlation in order to find the correlation between the aforementioned variables. Then, after collecting the data about the two above-mentioned variables, the results revealed that there is no significant relationship between teachers’ sense of burnout and students’ language achievement during the Covid-19 pandemic.