رضا بناری

The present study explored listening strategy use among a group of Iranian EFL senior high school students (N = 60). More specifically, it aimed to identify 1) the strategies used more often by participants, 2) the relationship between listening strategy use and listening comprehension problems. In this study, listening problems included input, context, listener, process, affect, and task problems while the listening strategies comprised of cognitive, meta-cognitive, and socio-affective strategies. To collect the needed data, a questionnaire was distributed among the participants. After collecting the data and analyzing them through SPSS software, the results revealed that ‘input’ and ‘affect’ were two main listening comprehension problems the learners suffered from. Results also indicated that the main listening strategy used by learners was meta-cognitive strategy. The relationship between listening problems and strategy used among the learners was statistically significant and negative. Outcomes propose that it is crucial for second language teachers to be aware of the different listening problems so as to enable listeners to utilize the appropriate strategies.

This study examined blurbs in the discipline of economics to investigate how evaluative lexico-grammatical resources are employed in the logogenetic constructions of these blurbs. The study was informed by the appraisal framework proposed by Martin and White (2005), which describes the language of our attitudes, viewpoints, and personal judgments toward people, objects, and things. All three categories of the appraisal framework, including attitude, engagement, and graduation, were thoroughly explored. Findings demonstrated that economics blurbs are densely packed with appreciation. Graduation was also found to be realized both as intensification and quantification. The study showed that blurbs can be dialogically or monologically constructed based on the presence or absence of external voices as well as engagement resources and locutions. Meanwhile, lexico-grammatical realizations were found not to be restricted to one type of grammatical structures. Various forms including adjectival qualities, nominalized qualities, and processes are employed for encoding evaluative resources. The findings of the study provide those interested in this genre insights into the practical details of blurbs’ advertising discourse and keep them informed of the curricular rules and regularities dominating promotional discourse