درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study aimed to study the relationship between teachers’ creativity, classroom management, age and gender. To achieve these goals, 70 Iranian EFL teachers participated in the study by filling out two questionnaires: Creativity Fostering Teacher Behavior Index developed by Soh (2000) ,and Behavior and Instructional Management Scale developed by Martin and Sass (2010). Analysis of the questionnaires revealed that there is a statistically positive significant relationship between teachers’ creativity and classroom management. In addition, the findings indicated that there is statistically significant difference across the three age groups regarding their attitudes towards creativity and classroom management. Likewise, it was revealed that there is significant difference between Iranian EFL male and female teachers concerning their attitudes towards creativity. However, the findings also indicated that there was not any statistically significant difference between Iranian EFL male and female teachers regarding their attitudes towards classroom management. The findings have implications for EFL teachers.

Translation is almost always conducted within a certain socio-cultural framework with its particular ideology. In the present study, the application of various shift types in two legal translations was examined to show how socio-cultural and ideological inclinations of the translator affect adequacy and acceptability in translation. Two legal texts in English (the Geneva Interim Agreement and NPT) and their Persian translations released by IRI’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs formed the corpus of the study. The analysis of the translations indicated the lack of ideological and cultural shifts and the presence of structural and stylistic shifts. Legal texts are highly sensitive and need the utmost precision in their translation. These requirements could make ideological and cultural shifts out of the question in legal translation. The results, therefore, suggest that in legal translation training, attention should be devoted to structural and stylistic shifts.  As for the adequacy and acceptability, it was also observed that translated texts cannot be totally adequate or totally acceptable; the poles of adequacy and acceptability are on a continuum, and translators move between these two extremes.

Assessment of writing skill is generally believed to be judged by a rater subjectively and qualitatively or by using analytic scoring rubrics which can potentially result in somehow not very reliable assessment. It seems that an evaluation of writing based on a model can result in a valid and reliable writing assessment. To achieve such an objective, this study firstly aimed to develop an assessment model based on Activity Theory (AT), i. e., Activity Theory-Based Assessment Model (ATBAM), and then to employ it in the assessment of writing performances of Iranian language learners in a private language college. And finally, to achieve the concurrent validity of ATBAM, its results were compared with those of a traditional approach. Three groups of participants took part in this study: a group of upper intermediate English learners (N=29) who submitted one writing sample per week in four successive weeks, teachers (N=6) who provided learners with feedback and assigned holistic scores and course supervisors (N=2) who reassessed the writing samples on the basis of an analytic rubric of writing assessment. The results showed that using ATBAM in writing assessment results in an exploration of not only learners’ but also teachers’ engagement in the development of learners’ writing ability. The role of teachers’ feedback and teachers’ and learners’ social interaction in the development of learners’ writing ability could potentially provide comprehensive, fair, reliable, and valid scores in this model.

The marriage between technology and teaching in educational milieus in recent years has been a major concern among educational researchers in general and applied linguists in particular as far as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are concerned. Augmented reality after virtual reality received much attention over the last decades in mobile assisted language learning context. AR mixes virtual world onto real environment, VR delve the participants in to the virtual world. To examine the effect of AR and VR on abstract writing of EFL students, 12 intermediate proficiency pairs (high and low proficiency) participated based on their scores on TOEFL and a hypothetical abstract writing task. The participants were required to write an abstract according to the sub-moves of Hyland's (2000) move analysis provided through three mobile applications including AR-, VR HeadSet virtual reality-, and paper-based scaffoldings for four weeks in a collaborative context. In evaluating the groups' abstract writing scores before and after the treatment, no significant differences were found among the three groups. However, the AR group revealed better mean average results ( M = 33) compared to the other VR ( M = 24) and paper-based groups ( M = 29). Besides, the low intermediate proficiency subjects in the AR group received higher scores ( M = 40) compared to heir higher counterpart ( M = 37). Results imply that the integration of real and unreal worlds might be a good asset in teaching the genre of abstracts to EFL learners in general and low intermediate proficiency learners in particular.

The article is dedicated to the linguistic analysis of symbol of fire in the Russian symbolist poet, K. Balmont’s lyrics. The symbolic meanings of the element fire have been studied from linguistic and linguoculturological points of view. There defined mechanisms which allow expressing both traditional symbolism of fire and the one by the author; they are collaboration of mythologems and archetypes associated with the symbol explicated in the text with a proper word, in our case with the word “fire”. The subject of this study is one of a side of traditional symbolism of the element fire conditioned by Slavic, Greek mythology, Zoroastrianism, and the Biblical motives. Archetypes are represented with binary oppositions actualizing the semantics of vertical direction, ambivalence, animism, and anthropomorphism. The author’s symbolic meanings are expressed according to his rethinking of the myths and archetypes in the nearest surrounding of the symbol in the texts.

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.