درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Intercultural communication takes place when individuals influenced by different cultural communities negotiate shared meanings in interaction. As every country has its own cultural value system; consequently, nonverbal communication is different from country to country. Therefore, having knowledge about the similarities and differences of nonverbal communication in different cultures increases the possibility of being understood and reduces the risk of being misunderstood and misinterpreted by people from different cultural backgrounds. The current paper aims to investigate and compare the interpretations of nonverbal messages between the findings of Pease and Pease (2004), two prominent figures in the field of nonverbal communication in Western societies and the Iranian students of English and non-English major as an example of an Eastern society. In this study, 32 body gestures were selected from among 170 pictures used by Pease and Pease (2004) and the Iranian students’ interpretations of those body gestures were investigated. The results showed that the interpretations were significantly different across Western and Iranian students; however, there was no significant difference between English and non-English major students’ interpretations.

The present study aims at discussing whether metaphors in the Qur’an, revealed more than 1400 years ago, are dead, moribund or live and how these three types of metaphors have been translated in three English and three Persian translations of the Qur’an. The results reveal that among 70 metaphors examined, while only about 32.85% are live metaphors, about 67.14% are moribund, but none of the cases are completely dead. Furthermore, based on Newmark’s (1988a) classification of procedures for translation of metaphors, there is no image in 15.21% of the procedures used in the English and Persian translations of live metaphors while there are images in 84.78% of them. On the other hand, 43.26% of the procedures used in translations of moribund metaphors transfer the images whereas 56.73% of them omit the images, although these metaphors are not dead. Yet the point is that when the majority of Qur’anic metaphors, that are moribund, had been considered by translators as dead metaphors and their images had been omitted, the translations fail to represent one of the important aspects of the original text’s literary style that is its metaphorical and literary language.

Teacher questions are claimed to be constitutive of classroom interaction because of their crucial role both in the construction of knowledge and the organization of classroom proceedings (Dalton Puffer, 2007). Most of previous research on teachers’ questions mainly focused on identifying and discovering different question types believed to be helpful in creating the opportunities for learners’ interactions. Drawing on conversation analysis through adopting socio-cultural perspective, this study, however, aims to examine how EFL teachers manage understanding-check questions in their talk-in-interaction. For this purpose, six EFL teachers’ discursive classroom practices were observed, video-recorded, and transcribed line-by-line in its entirety. Through the microanalysis of the transcribed data, our findings suggest that EFL teachers vary in their management of understanding-check questions and the teachers’ understanding-check questions tend to serve different functions in the different micro-contexts identified. Three major sequential environments emerged to feature understanding-check questions in this study: Activity-boundary environment, post-instruction environment and within-activity environment. The findings of the study indicate that understanding-check questions at activity boundary environment are designed to accomplish dual functions, however those launched in post-instruction and within-activity environments maintain a singular focus on ensuring absolute understanding of the just-given explanation or instruction.

Alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. These approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996). The present study tries to explore the effect of two alternative assessment approaches (self-assessment and conference) on students’ production of four speech acts (apology, complaint, request, and refusal) plus politeness markers. A sample of 64 EFL students participated in this study. Metapragmatic explanations were given to three groups of university students studying English as a foreign language. The two treatment groups received instruction through self-assessment and conference and a comparison group was exposed to the conventional one-shot testing. The results of the One-Way ANOVA conducted after the treatment revealed an outperformance of alternative assessment approaches to the conventional one in the production of the four speech acts and politeness markers in WDCTs. A qualitative analysis of students’ self-ratings in the self-assessment group revealed that they focused more on linguistic criteria during the initial sessions and on pragmatic ones by the end of the treatment. It can be concluded that alternative assessment approaches are beneficial to students’ production of speech acts and politeness markers. In the end, the applicability and the positive effect of alternative approaches in pragmatic assessment are emphasized.

This article was written based on the key concept of polysystem theory which, in translating any literary text, emphasizes the transference of the social systems in which a text is embedded. As stated by Tynjanov (1978a), polysystem theory saw translated literature as a system operating in the larger social systems of the target text. Thus, the task of understanding as well as transferring such systems in their translations, which can certainly affect the readers’ adequate understanding of texts, is a challenging job for most of the literary translators. After identifying three main social systems in The Great Gatsby as the corpus which was ranked second in the lists of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, the source and the target texts were studied attentively, to study the way the respective systems were translated by the Iranian literary translators. Therefore, the prominent element of Nord’s textual analysis (1991), macrostructure, was focused throughout data collection procedure. Then, it was demonstrated that especially through an appropriate transference of the major conflict between the two predominant classes in the novel, the translator has managed to suitably convey most of the text’s social systems in his translation. Finally, it could be deduced that most of the literary translators in Iran, somehow transferred the concerned systems into some significantly adequate equivalents in their works.

This study tries to critically unravel the way Islam is represented in western discourse through establishing the relationship between language and ideology, the forms it takes and its potential effect. To that end, headlines from widely circulated print media of the west including the Independent, the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and The Times from January 1, 2008 to December 30, 2012 were selected and Islam and Muslim reproductions were studied therein. This study was carried out using a synthesis of Edward Said's notion of "Orientalism" and Van Dijk's notion of "ideological square", characterized by "positive self-presentation" and a simultaneous "negative other presentation". The analysis demonstrated that Islam is repetitively stereotyped and Muslims are negatively represented, both through various types of linguistic choices selected and via special construction of the headlines.  The educational implications of critical discourse analysis in general and the present study in particular are discussed in relation to teaching, learning and translating the English language.

توسعه توانشهای زیر مجموعه زبان دوم تحت تاثیر عوامل مختلفی چون عوامل شناختی، فردی، و اجتماعی است ( الیس، 1994) که در این میان طیف وسیعی از عوامل فردی در مطالعات آموزش زبان مورد تحقیق و بررسی قرار گرفته اند لیکن تاکنون در این مطالعات هوش هیجانی به عنوان یک عامل فردی مورد توجه جدی قرار نگرفته است (پیشقدم، 2009). از سوی دیگر برخی از کنشهای زبانی که از جمله عناصر اصلی توانش کاربردشناسی زبان بینابین به شمار می رود دارای ویژگی «تهدید وجهه» می باشد. این نکته تاثیر و یا ارتباط هوش هیجانی - که ارتباط مستقیم با توانایی و مهارت افراد در مدیریت و کنترل احساسات دارد – را با توانش کاربرد شناسی زبان بینابین بسیار محتمل می سازد. در مطالعه حاضر محقق به بررسی این ارتباط محتمل می پردازد و با این هدف پرسشنامه «بار-آن» به عنوان معیار هوش هیجانی ، آزمون تافل به عنوان معیار سطح مهارت و توانایی زبانی و دو آزمون کاربرد شناسی زبان بینابین بر روی 52 زبان آموز ایرانی اجرا شده است. نتایج حاصل از تجزیه و تحلیل داده ها نشانگرعدم وجود ارتباط موثر و معنا دار میان هوش هیجانی و توانش کاربرد شناسی و سطح مهارت زبانی زبان آموزان می باشد در حالی که میان توانش کاربرد شناسی زبان بینابین و سطح مهارت زبانی ارتباطی معنا دار و موثر وجود دارد. افزون بر این نتایج به دست آمده بیانگر آن است که هوش هیجانی نمی تواند به عنوان معیار مناسبی برای پیش بینی میزان توسعه توانش کاربردشناسی زبان بینابین و یا سطح مهارت زبانی مورد استفاده قرار گیرد و در نتیجه با استناد به نتایج تحقیق حاضر می توان گفت که در فرآیند یادگیری زبان دوم به طور عام و توسعه توانش کاربرد شناسی زبان بینابین به طور خاص نمی توان هوش هیجانی را به عنوان یک عامل فردی تاثیر گذار و مهم به شمار آورد.