درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The study analyzed a corpus of 40 emails of requests composed by Vietnamese students to their university lecturers. The study purpose was to identify politeness strategies composed by Vietnamese students using Brown and Levinson’s model and Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s framework as guidelines. To obtain the results, a discourse analysis was implemented. The AnConc software was used as a research tool for the study. 40 emails from 80 students were collected and divided into three types of requestive emails: assistance, confirmation and consideration, and recommendation for data analysis. Syntactical and lexical modifiers were examined and politeness markers were identified manually by the assistance of the AnConc software. The results indicated that Vietnamese students often used status-stating, deferent and solidary politeness strategies to approach their professors for personal requests. While using these three strategies, the target students had to use syntactical and lexical devices such as modals, interrogatives, please, and hedges as speech acts or supportive moves to gain their requestive purposes. The study also identified a common pattern that Vietnamese students liked to use the email corpus in the direction of salutation, self-introduction, requests, reasons for request, and thank compliments. The study has pedagogical implications for language teachers and learners; e.g. email writing should be taught to students, especially ESP students as these students do not know the format and the appropriate language they should use in email composition. Language students should also pay attention to the correct formal form and cultural differences when composing requestive emails delivered to their professors.

This study investigated the effects of eliciting tasks on listening comprehension among Iranian pre-intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. To do the current study, 30 participants out of 40 were selected through administering an Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT). After that, the participants were divided into two equal groups; one experimental and one control group. Then, a listening comprehension pre-test was administered to assess the participants’ listening comprehension at the beginning of the course. The experimental group received the treatment through eliciting tasks. Then, the control group received common instruction and was engaged in the ordinary program of the classroom. After twelve sessions of instruction, a post-test of listening comprehension was administered to gather the sufficient data. Data were analyzed through independent and paired samples t-tests and the results indicated that both experimental and control groups had better performance on their post-test compared to their pre-test. More importantly, the results showed that there was a significant difference between the post-tests of both groups. In fact, the experimental group outperformed the control group on the post-test thanks to eliciting tasks activities. The study has implications for language teachers and learners; e.g., Eliciting tasks help to develop a learner-centered classroom and a simulating environment while making learning memorable by linking new and old information.

This study explored the autonomy of advanced English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in reading comprehension through scaffolding and jigsaw in computer-assisted and conventional contexts. After being homogenized through the reading section of DIALANG proficiency test, a total of 80 female advanced EFL learners with the age range of 21 to 45 were selected as the participants of the study. They were randomly assigned to four groups: experimental group A (scaffolding in a conventional context), experimental group B (scaffolding in a computer-assisted context), experimental group C (jigsaw in a conventional context), and experimental group D (jigsaw in a computer-assisted context). Next, the autonomy in RC questionnaire, which was designed and piloted by Ebadi and Shirzad (in press), was administered as the pretest. Then, the learners in each group took part in three months (16 sessions) autonomy in reading comprehension training courses. After the treatment, the same autonomy in RC questionnaire was administered as the posttest. One-way ANCOVA was used to analyze the quantitative data. The results revealed that although both jigsaw and scaffolding approaches were successful in both conventional and computer assisted contexts from pre-test to post-test, the scaffolding method proved more effective. Moreover, both the scaffolding and jigsaw approaches were more effective in computer-assisted environment compared to conventional contexts, with the scaffolding CA approach outperforming the jigsaw CA technique. The findings’ implications for learners, teachers, and syllabus designers are discussed in both contexts.

This study reports psychometric properties and derivation of norms for a Persian version of the Multiple Intelligence Developmental Assessment Scales (MIDAS) for Adults. After examining and confirming equivalency between English and Persian versions, translated and validated by Saeidi, Ostovar, Shearer, and Asghari Jafarabadi (2015), the scale was administered to a sample (N = 2146), including students, undergraduates, graduates, and adults from different provinces in Iran. The participants were at least 19 years old and above (M = 29.40, SD = 2.26). Out of 2146 samples, 1103 females and 1043 were males. To examine the validity and reliability properties of the scale, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, Cronbach Alpha (α) reliability correlation coefficients, and corrected item-total correlations were employed. Exploratory factor analysis using varimax rotation identified eight principal components, which accounted for 67.21% of the variance for 115 items. The internal consistency coefficient (α = .92; ranging from 0.89 to 0.93) was also very high. The confirmatory analysis generally replicated the original conceptualization of the MIDAS. According to the results, the Persian-MIDAS-adults questionnaire has good psychometric properties in the research community and can be safely used as a valid tool to assess MI in Iran.

This study investigated the relationship between five teaching styles and emotional intelligence among 102 Iranian English instructors from different universities in Tehran, Iran. To this end, the data were obtained through two phases of quantitative and qualitative data collection. To achieve quantitative data, the participants were asked to fill in two questionnaires, including the Teaching Styles Inventory (version 3.0) and the Emotional Intelligence Scale. The second phase of data collection was performed through collecting qualitative data by conducting a semi-structured interview on 10 English instructors. To analyze quantitative data, multiple regression analyses were run. Likewise, the qualitative data was analyzed through data reduction process in order to realize the instructors’ attitudes toward the different aspects of teaching styles and to find out to what extent their attitudes were similar to one another. The results demonstrated that among various teaching styles, including expert, formal authority, personal model, facilitator, and delegator, merely the delegator style had statistically significant association with emotional intelligence. Furthermore, the relationship between personal model style and emotional intelligence was considerable, though not statistically significant. The findings and their implications are fully discussed.

To better illuminate the link between scaffolding and visual aids, this quasi-experimental study attempted to scaffold an intact group of 14 intermediate-level Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners through providing graphs with the aim of enhancing their writing ability. Ensuring lack of familiarity with eight unknown words, they were scaffolded through visual images. The scaffolding process included three respective phases of contingency, fading, and transferring. As post-tests for checking the learners’ understanding of and opinion about the graph scaffolding process, a researcher-made questionnaire and a semi-structured interview followed the treatment phase. The results of the questionnaire showed that visual scaffolding aided the learners to better grasp the meaning of the target vocabularies and even some grammatical points in the materials. Moreover, the visual scaffolding helped them to produce the material in different modalities. The results also indicated all the three characteristics of scaffolding were met by the visual scaffolding. Finally, the interview results revealed the learners had favorable attitude toward visual scaffolding and considered the third phase of the scaffolding as the most challenging one. It can be concluded that the findings gave credence to the effectiveness of visual scaffolding in improving EFL students’ writing ability.

The main concern of this study was to identify Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ problems in cohesion and coherence of writing performance as well as the extent to which they utilized cohesion and coherence in their writing. It is important for EFL and ESL learners the ability to compose a piece of descriptive text. Despite its significance, there is a gap in the literature about how Iranian EFL learners write essays in this genre that this study intends to fill. The research design involved the utilization of mixed research method in addressing the research questions. The study addressed a corpus of 40 intermediate language learners’ descriptive essays, 10 experienced teachers that they were themselves at intermediate level as the questionnaire respondents and four interviewees’ answers from those volunteer experienced teachers. The results of the study revealed lack of cohesion and coherence in the participants’ essays and their writing performance in terms of these two variables was not acceptable. Therefore, the obtained findings, by implication, indicated that they had neither some aspects of cohesive and coherent writing, nor had enough support, practice and feedback on their written text in terms of cohesion and coherence. Some pedagogical implications of this study would be applicable to the language learners’ writing in terms of these two aforementioned variables as well as the results were expected to aid in setting the writing sections of classes for improvement of language learners’ written texts particularly in terms of cohesion and coherence.

Today technology is an integral part of professional translation; and it is generally assumed that translators’ attitudes toward translation technology tools influence their interaction with technology (Bundgaard, 2017). Therefore, the present two-phase study seeks to shed some light on what translation technology tools are and how professional translators feel toward them. The research method used is exploratory in nature, as it tends to discuss issues on which little research has been done and relies on secondary research for its data. The data required for answering the first question have been mined utilizing document analysis from language service providers’ (LSPs) websites, while the data for working out the answer to the second question have been obtained from ProZ.com Quick Polls. Based on our findings, translation technology tools fall into eight broad categories, of which the most commonly used are translation memory (TM) or computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools. In addition, it was found that most translators either do not have a love-hate relationship with technology or love it. This research is envisaged to form the basis of more detailed and conclusive studies.