درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study was aimed at exploring the use of pronominal reference for identity representation in terms of power and solidarity in English political discourse. The investigation was based on a corpus of four political interviews and debates amounting 26,500 words. The analysis was both qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative analysis, a discourse-analytic approach was used to find out the pronouns, their references and their identity load, and in the quantitative analysis, the distribution of different representations of identity were calculated. A nonparametric test, that is, Chi-Square was run in SPSS as the statistical operation needed for the current study. The analysis showed that most of the personal pronouns represented identity in the form of solidarity. The results also showed that political figures use <em>I</em>-pronoun and its variants to represent their identity in terms of power. The representation of identity in terms of power was also found to be correlated with the use of certain terms such as <em>veto</em> and active voice constructions. Furthermore, the results showed that when making claims, instead of giving pronominal reference to self, political figures use first-person plurals. In order to show solidarity, the speakers may also make use of discoursal proximity. Considering the important role that discourses play in constructing reality, it is important for CDA researchers to reveal sources of power, inequality and prejudice in discourses and interpret their hidden meanings. Pronominal choice and academic voice as linguistic constructions that are ideologically loaded need to be brought into the spotlight.

The present paper addresses the issues of EFL teachers’ views and implementation of problem solving in third-year classes in the Algerian Secondary Schools. The focal aim is to highlight the importance of problem solving as a means to improve the activities of teaching and learning. The survey involved a random sample of 50 teachers to whom a questionnaire was administered. Marzano’s (2001) New Taxonomy of Educational Objectives was used as the analytical framework. According to the obtained findings, teachers (96%) agreed that problem solving is a crucial component of instruction. The majority of teachers claimed that they implement problem-solving tasks in the classroom. The main benefits of implementing problem solving in the classroom that the respondents mentioned include: the development of students’ cognitive abilities, their autonomy, and the teaching practices. The findings have important implications for pedagogical strategies that might promote the teaching and assessment of problem solving in EFL contexts.

Listening taking over half of the learners’ time and effort (Nunan, 1998), forms a basis for acquiring much of a language. There are factors affecting listening comprehension and its perception, such as the speech rate, phonological properties of the text, the quality of the recording, the learners’ anxiety, and listening comprehension strategies (Goh, 2000; Hamouda, 2013). At the Iran Language Institute in Dezful, S.W. Iran, some teachers attributed some learners’ perception of partially unsuccessful comprehension of the recorded material to factors such as rate of speech, T-unit length, and pauses between T-units or inside T-units. This study aimed at the probable association between learners' and teachers' perceptions of these variables and compare them to the real qualities of the recordings they listen to. Thus, in an analytic single-shot design, a researcher-made questionnaire was developed and was answered by 504 (229 male and 275 female) participants together with their teachers in 21 classrooms across the six levels of proficiency at the Iran Language Institute. The results, not normally distributed, were juxtaposed with Kendall's tau and Spearman's rho correlation coefficients to ensure maximum agreement between the statistical analyses. The results indicated a strong or moderate correlation between the audio tracks' characteristics with neither learners' perceptions nor teachers' perceptions. Teachers' and learners' perceptions showed a moderate correlation between the perceived rate of speech and a weak correlation between their perceptions of between-T-unit pauses.

Individuals are controlled by tests in every advanced society when they want to be admitted in educational courses, to proceed from one stage to the next, or to be given a certificate (Shohamy, 2001b). Accordingly, the present study was carried out to construct and validate educational, social, and psychological consequences questionnaires of English Language Proficiency (EPT) as a high-stakes test in Iran. To achieve the goals, after initial piloting of the item pool, a total number of 252 non-English PhD students completed the final researcher-made questionnaires developed using a comprehensive review of the related literature, experts’ opinions, documents, and interviews. A number of statistical procedures were taken to validate the current questionnaires including Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). EFA was utilized to determine the underlying factors of the scale that affect the variables in a data structure without setting any predefined structure to the outcome and to verify the number of factors; subsequently, these results were confirmed in the CFA phase. Ultimately, the results were discussed and implications of the questionnaires were presented as follows.

Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, there have been three packages used in the state-controlled schools of the country, namely, Graded, Right Path to English, and Prospect/Vision series. These textbooks all include prefaces to indicate the general philosophy of language teaching and education, and how the agents (learners and teachers) have to play roles in the system. This article aims to have a postcolonial reading of the Islamic post-revolutionary English language textbooks published in Iran. To this aim, the prefaces are critically content-analyzed and explained taking into consideration the key concepts of postcolonialism. After developing the table of themes in relation to postcolonial issues, the findings indicate that the resistance prevalent in the prefaces is particularly hybrid, anxious, and unstable of the Iranian type due to the socio-politico-cultural background of the country. This resistance, thus, is a tragic attempt for developing a firm background for developing language learners'' knowledge.

The study aimed at examining the effects of scaffolding ESP readers, by using graphic markers and highlighting syntactic and emphatic prosody, on their Foreign Language Reading Anxiety (FLRA) and fluency. A mixed-methods research design was used for a deeper understanding of the obtained data. An experimental design was planned with a control and an experimental group including 38 students of two fields, museum studies, and conservation of historic buildings in Shiraz University of Arts. Participants of the experimental group were scaffolded to develop reading fluency with different graphic markers, while members of the control group had their usual ESP classes. The participants’ FLRA and reading fluency levels were assessed prior to the study and after it ended. Statistical analysis of the results proved that scaffolding the students with graphic markers had the potential to lower their FLRA. Also, the results of fluency assessment frameworks including Words Read Correctly per Minute (WCPM), Multidimensional Fluency Scale (MDFS) and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) confirmed the effectiveness of scaffolding the readers with graphic markers. For a deeper understanding, the data were explored using qualitative data classification and analysis by the NAEP framework. The qualitative analysis of the observations showed while graphic cues can scaffold the learners to notice their shortcomings toward an optimum level of fluency, they could not be the sufficient condition for achieving the goal. It was also concluded that online decoding, sight-word reading, and sensitivity to stress and intonation are pre-requisites of fluent and prosodic reading with expression.