حسین وحید دستجردی

Density and distribution of Unfamiliar Lexical Items (ULIs) appear to influence learners’ Reading Comprehension Achievement (RCA). This study concerns the impact of these two variables on Iranian EFL learners’ RCA. For this, two groups of students timetabled for the experiments designed to assess learners’ RCA. To determine the participants’ levels of proficiency a Quick Proficiency Test was first given to the total population of 87 students and 60 selected as participants. They were then divided into four subgroups of 15, each of which took the pertaining text as the treatment. To do so, three short passages were administered, two for the density and one for distribution. Then, data were gathered from the questionnaires and answers analyzed by SPSS. The results revealed the participants in low density/distribution subgroups outperforming their counterparts in high density/distribution subgroups on tests devised to measure the learners’ inferencing of ULIs boldfaced in the texts. The selected method was a quasi-experimental, post-test only design and the procedures comprised short passages, multiple-choice tests, and statistics. To conclude, ULIs found detrimental to the learners’ successful RCA in the foregoing experimentation, where it can serve as a resource to the EFL development programs.

The importance of sport as a social, psychological, and cultural agenda in today’s world can by no means be denied. This is, as a rule, reflected in all its aspects through the language of media. The present descriptive study has thus tried to investigate how the language of sports media shape sport consumers such as coaches, players, the audience, and sporting officials at large. For this purpose, fifty soccer games were investigated during an eight-month period. The data collected from TV interviews, newspaper reports, and a sporting talk show called Navad (i.e. 90) were transcribed and analyzed with a CDA perspective in view, for the coaches, players, the audience, and officials. As a result, twelve categories were extracted based on the coaches’ reactions to their failure, from which the most salient was referees’ judgments. A close look at these categories reveal a circular relationship among sports media, coaches’ reactions to their failure or triumph, the audience interpretation of their favorite teams, and macro decisions of the officials in this field. The findings of this study can contribute to the development of a better and more appropriate environment among the four mentioned groups involved in soccer game in Iran.

The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between cohesive readability of expository texts and reading comprehension in EFL students with different proficiency levels. One hundred students formed the participant of this study. They were undergraduate students majoring in English at University of Isfahan. To collect the relevant data, participants were divided into three groups of low proficient, intermediate and high proficient based on their scores on an OPT proficiency test. A series of expository reading comprehension tests were prepared and their cohesive readability was measured through related programs. They were divided into two groups of authentic and manipulated texts, with the cohesive readability of manipulated texts reduced. The participants answered the related tests in one session. As a result of data analysis, the findings indicated that manipulation, i.e. cohesive readability reduction has a direct impact on the students' performance in reading expository texts. It was further revealed that text manipulation, i.e. reduction of cohesive readability, was more influential on the intermediate group, i.e. positive relationship between the students’ proficiency level and their reading comprehension of expository texts with different cohesive readability levels. 

Translation studies essentially deals with a socio-communicatively driven and contextualized enterprise. Viewed hence, it seems that no discipline tends to provide the possibility of studying the interrelations between interlocutors to generate meaning within the interactive social context as precisely as sociolinguistics (Federici, 2018). A sociolinguistic approach to translation seems to be increasingly gaining ground, at the crossroads of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) and sociology within the sociological turn (Wolf, 2010). Accordingly, the present study took a sociolinguistic approach to shed some light on The Great Gatsby (1925) and its Persian translation by Emami (2000). In so doing, an extended version of Hatim and Mason’s (1997) sociolinguistic model was employed to examine the texts in question. The source text (ST) and its target text (TT) version were investigated at both textual and extra-textual levels in light of the model’s respective sub-components. The results of this comparative study, analyzed individually for each register variable, revealed that the translator dealt rather superficially with both use-related categories of register variation like tenor and user-related aspects like idiolect. By contrast, the predominant features of literary expression were mostly retained in the translation.

The present study aimed firstly at investigating the impact of translators' style on figurative language translation from English into Persian. Secondly, it intended to find which strategies were most frequently adopted by Persian translators to translate figures of speech into Persian. Lastly, the study sought to check the extent of transference of figurative features of literary texts in English-Persian renderings. To achieve these purposes, the English novel, Little Women by Alcott (1880) and its three Persian translations by Raiszadeh (1997), Akhavan (1996), and Morvarid (2000) were used as the materials of the study. The original novel, along with its three selected translations, were first studied carefully by the researchers and about fifty percent of the novel was chosen to be analyzed in terms of figures of speech, which are part of stylistic features of any literary text. Then, the figures of speech in the stated sample, besides the Persian equivalents of each of them used by the three translators, were identified. Finally, a hybrid model incorporating 5 strategies retrieved from Newmrak's (1988) and Baker's (1992) models of translating figurative language was utilized to examine the identified tropes and determine the type and number of strategies employed by any individual translator. The obtained results revealed that figurative language devices were translated from the source into the target language through a variety of strategies, which can be indicative of the translator’s stylistic tendencies.

Recently translation researchers have endeavored to adopt new directions in the current translation quality assessment (TQA) approaches. To this end, they made them more congruent with the desired requirements of a translator’s competence, especially considering the latest paradigm shifts, including ideological skewing and localization (Tiselius & Hild, 2017). Thus, such frameworks as Angelelli’s (2009) definition of translation competence (TC), as the study’s theoretical framework, need to be improved. An attempt was made in this study to design a rubric based on the proposed TQA model representing the TC construct with its comprehensive sub-components and finally, to test its applicability to the Persian translation of The Catcher in the Rye . The assessment procedure through which the obtained results were textually analyzed based on the proposed rubric specifically for each sub-component, revealed the inadequacy of the translation quality on the whole and the underlying implications of the rubric’s applicability to other translation products.                                                                                                                                                                   

The purpose of this study was to examine gender and discipline-based Differential Item Functioning (DIF) and Differential Distractor Functioning (DDF) on the Islamic Azad University English Proficiency Test (IAUEPT). The study evaluated DIF and DDF across genders and disciplines using the Rasch model. To conduct DIF and DDF analysis, the examinees were divided into two groups: Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and Non-Humanities and Social Sciences (N-HSS). The results of the DIF analysis showed that four out of 100 items had DIF across gender, and two items had discipline DIF. Additionally, gender DDF analysis identified one item each for Options A, B, and C, and four items for Option D. Similarly, the discipline DDF analysis revealed one item for Option A, three items for Option B, four items for Option C, and three items for Option D. The findings of this study have significant implications for test developers. The identification of potential biases in high-stakes proficiency tests can help ensure fairness and equity for all examinees. Furthermore, identifying gender DIF can shed light on potential gender-based gaps in the curriculum, highlighting areas where male or female learners may be disadvantaged or underrepresented in terms of knowledge or skills.