محمدرئوف معینی

This study aimed to investigate how English language teaching textbooks portrayed male and female social actors according to their social roles and gender identities. To examine the linguistic representation of male and female social actors and construction of gender identities in ELT textbooks, Top Notch series was selected. To do so, attempts were made to analyze the series in terms of the features introduced in two analytical models: Van Leeuwen’s (1996) framework and Halliday's transitivity model (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). All of the sentences in reading passages and conversations were counted and analyzed critically through discursive features of these two models. The findings of this study revealed significant differences in representation of male and female social actors in some discursive features. Male social actors were described as more autonomous, successful, and active compared to female social actors.

There has been increasing interest in utilizing corpora in linguistic research and pedagogy in recent years. Rhetorical organization of different sections of research articles may appear similar in various disciplines, but close examination may show subtle differences nonetheless. One of the features that has been at the center of attention especially in recent years is the idiomaticity of a discourse which can be examined from the perspective of multi-word units captured by the automatic retrieval of lexical bundles. This study takes a corpus-based approach for the identification of lexical bundles. A corpus of 801,894 words from 790 articles was collected. In order to fulfill the purposes of the present study, ABBYY FineReader 10 professional edition, Total Assistant, Antconc 3.2.3, and WordSmith Tools 5 were used to identify lexical bundles. Then these bundles were classified structurally and functionally based on the presented taxonomies in the literature. The results of the current study indicated that the writers of medical research articles mostly rely on text-oriented bundles in the discussion section of research articles to establish academic discourse.

Usually writing teachers feel commitment to provide their learners with corrective feedback (CF) to their linguistic errors. The study investigated whether two types of written corrective feedback, indirect focused corrective feedback and indirect unfocused corrective feedback, produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by high intermediate EFL learners. In this study, 54 female EFL learners formed two experimental groups and one control group. One experimental group received indirect focused written CF, and the other experimental group received indirect unfocused written CF for six weeks.  The control group, nevertheless, received no particular feedback within this period. Results of performing ANOVA with post-hoc tests revealed the accuracy development of both experimental groups.  However, unfocused group achieved the highest accuracy gain scores for simple past tense forms (copula past tense, regular past tense and irregular past tense) subject-verb agreement, articles, and prepositions. It was further found that unfocused feedback can contribute to grammatical accuracy but its long-term effectiveness is not quite as significant as its short-term effectiveness. The study also suggested that unfocused written CF reflects better teacher’s objective as it views writing correction as a whole rather than as a way of practicing grammar.