درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In this research, different English translations of Sa‘di’s Bustan were studied. An anecdote was selected randomly with its three English translations to identify whether or not the translators have managed to convey the messages of the original poem. The three selected translations were examined according to two of the criteria that Larson (1984) has proposed (accuracy and naturalness) for testing a translation. By accuracy, the researcher intended to see whether, the translators have been successful in rendering the SL text accurately and precisely without radical changes, omission and addition; and by naturalness, it was meant whether the translations sound natural or they contain strange and foreign words. The results of the study show that Edwards has been successful in understanding the main idea of the original poem and conveying it into prose. Clarke’s translation is word-for-word and being literal, the natural criterion has been breached in some instances. Wickens’s has attempted to transfer the exact meaning of the original to the target text. Among the three translations studied, that of Wickens is considered to be the most accurate one.

هدف تحقیق حاضربررسی تاثیر سه روش متفاوت نگارش دفتر تفکرات انتقادی به صورت انفرادی، مشارکتی با همگروه و به صورت مشارکتی با معلم بر روی مهارت خودسازماندهی زبان آموزان ایرانی میباشد. در ابتدا صد و پنجاه زبان آموز ایرانی سطح فوق متوسط مونث که در یک موسسه زبان مشغول فراگیری زبان انگلیسی بودند به سوالات پرسشنامه مقیاس سنجش خودسازماندهی تحصیلی پاسخ دادند. از بین این صد و پنجاه نفر، تعداد شصت زبان آموز که نمره آنها در این آزمون در محدوده یک انحراف معیار بالاتر و یا پایین تراز میانگین بود، انتخاب و به صورت تصادفی به چهار گروه تقسیم شدند. پس از استفاده از روش نگارش دفاتر تفکرات انتقادی برای یک ترم چهل و دو ساعته از شرکت کنندگان خواسته شد مجددﺍ به سوالات پرسشنامه خودسازماندهی تحصیلی پاسخ دهند. نتایج تحلیل پراکنش آزمون مرحله دوم نشان داد که نگارش افکار و وقایع انتقادی به صورت مشارکتی با همگروه یا معلم که فرصت استفاده از بازخورد همگروه و یا معلم را فراهم می آورد می تواند مهارت خودسازماندهی زبان آموزان را به صورت به صورت معنا داری افزایش دهد. زبان آموزانی که از روش نگارش تفکرات و وقایع استفاده کردند اما از بازخورد همگروهان و یا معلم بهره نبردند نیز نسبت به زبان آموزانی که این روش را به کار نبردند نمرات بهتری کسب کردند. بنابراین، نتایج این تحقیق نشانگر نقش موثر نگارش تفکرات انتقادی به صورت انفرادی در بالابردن مهارت خودسازماندهی می باشد.

In response to the increasing interest in and need for a practical brief measure in language testing, this study explored the properties of an offline short-form test (OSF) versus a conventional lengthy test. From the total of 98 vocabulary items pooled from the Iranian National University Entrance Exams, 60 items were selected for the conventional test (CT). To build the OSF, we created an item bank by examining the item response theory (IRT) parameter estimates. Data for the IRT calibration included the responses of 774,258 examinees. Upon the results of the item calibration, 43 items with the highest discrimination power and minimal guessing values from different levels of ability were selected for the item bank. Then, using the responses of 253 EFL learners, we compared the measurement properties of the OSF scores with those of the CT scores in terms of the score precision, score comparability, and consistency of classification decisions. The results revealed that although the OSF generally did not achieve the same level of measurement precision as the CT, it still achieved a desired level of precision while lessening the negative effects of a lengthy test. The results also signified an excellent degree of correspondence between OSF and CT scores and classification results. In all, findings suggest that OSF can stand as a reasonable alternative for a longer test, especially when conditions dictate that a very short test be used.

This study aimed to assess the quality of Persian translation of Orwell's (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four by Balooch (2004) based on House's (1997) model of translation quality assessment. To do so, 23 pages (about 10 percent) of the source text were randomly selected. The profile of the source text register was produced and the genre was realized. The source text profile was compared to the translation text profile. The result of this comparison was dimensional mismatches and overt errors. The dimensional mismatches were categorized based on different dimensions of register including field, tenor, and mode. The overt errors which were based on denotative mismatches and target system errors were categorized into omissions, additions, substitutions, and breaches of the target language system. Then, the frequencies of occurrences of subcategories of overt errors along with their percentages were calculated. The overt errors and dimensional errors were analyzed carefully. The dimensional mismatches as well as a large number of major overt errors such as omissions and substitutions indicated that the translation was not in accordance with the House's view stating that literary works needed to be translated overtly. In other words, mismatches on different levels of register showed that the cultural filter was applied in translation and the second-level functional equivalence required for overt translation was not reached. As a result, the Persian translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four did not fulfill the criteria to be an overt translation. Instead, this translation tended to be a covert one.

یادگیری لغات اغلب باید به صورت اتفاقی از طریق شنیدن و خواندن به وجود آید. این یکی از دلایلی است که به اهمیت وجود یک برنامه خواندن وسیع و قابل توجه در یادگیری زبان انگلیسی اشاره می کند. مطالعات وسیع این فرصت را به فراگیران زبان می دهد تا به خواندن حجم زیادی از مطالب و موادی که در سطح سواد آنهاست بپردازند. یادگیری زبان از طریق شرایطی چون تکرار، بازیابی، استفاده خلاقانه و توجه کامل به وجود می آید. این شرایط را می توان در حین خواندن به شیوه های مختلفی از طریق باریک خوانی، خواندن مجدد، خواندن و ارتباط با مهارت های دیگر، خواندن و بحث، و یادگیری از طریقه تمرینات خواندن افزایش داد. فعالیت های رایانه ای می توانند با فراهم کردن فرصتی برای یادگیری عمدی موثر واقع شوند، اما باید در نظر داشت که یادگیری عمدی نباید جایگزین خواندن وسیع شود.

Written Teacher Feedback (WTF) aims at improving the students' writing. Hence, the way in which it is provided for the learners should be taken into account as it makes an impact on the learners' comprehension of the presented comments (Ferris, 2003; Thonus, 2002). The current study was conducted to examine the possible effect of WTF directness types on Iranian EFL learners' ability to perceive the teachers' comments as praise or criticism and the required correction implied in them. To this end, three versions of the same essay, with direct, indirect and hedged comments indexed within them were distributed to 120 EFL learners. The results of ANOVA revealed that the directness type of the WTF would make no significant impact on Iranian EFL learners' ability to perceive the positive and negative comments and their required correction accurately. We might speculate from the findings that writing instructors should focus more on the quality of the WTF rather than its directness type in Iranian context. This would hopefully empower the learners to apply the teachers' comments to enhance the quality of their written products.

In this study, corpus-based techniques were utilized in order to investigate the quantitative and qualitative features of adjectives across literary and technical texts. The corpus was composed of five literary novels and five engineering academic books in English. Seventy paragraphs were randomly drawn from each corpus and the frequency distribution of adjectives with respect to their position (attributive, predicative) and syntactic functions (descriptive, verbal, numeral, etc.) were tallied and summed. The results revealed that there is a significant difference in the frequency use of adjectives across the two corpora. From a register perspective, the high frequently use of adjectives in technical texts in comparison to literary texts (67.3% and 32.7%, respectively) may be due to the fact that almost all technical texts employ “expository” linguistic features which have a generally “informational purpose”, while most novels employ “narrative’’ linguistic features which have a direct functional association with the communicative purpose of telling a story of events which have occurred in the past. From a genre perspective, academic texts in engineering tend to be highly informational, non-narrative, and characterized by an impersonal style, whereas novels generally share the same primary communicative purpose of narrating a story whose purpose is to entertain.

Postcolonial texts seek to rewrite the mythical narratives of vampires to problematize the power relations between the colonizer and the colonized. The vampire tradition is inscribed and recycled according to the collective Oriental heritage to articulate the untold stories of the muffled Eastern subject. Drawing on the mythical narratives of the ghoul (ogre) in classical Arabic culture and old Arabic folktales and of Lord Shiva in the Hindu myth, this paper compares the rewritings of the vampire topoi of otherness, unspeakableness, foreignness, and border existences in both Emile Habiby's Saraya, The Ghoul's Daughter (1991) and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine (1989). The metamorphosis of Saraya into a laughing muse and Jasmine into a potent goddess can be taken to represent the liminal state of Dracula between life and death on the one hand and the convergence of cultures on the other hand. Where these two works differ principally is in the geographic location of this site of cultural interaction. Whereas Habiby (1922 – 1996), the Palestinian writer, traces the predicament of Arabs in Israel and the Palestinian diaspora, Mukherjee (1940-), the Indian American writer, writes of the potential synthesis of Indian and American culture in the context of globalization.

Textbooks play a pivotal role in language learning classrooms. The problem is, among a wide range of textbooks available, which one is more appropriate for a specific classroom and a group of learners. In order to evaluate ELT textbooks, theorists and writers have offered different kinds of evaluative frameworks based on a number of principles and criteria. This study evaluates one example of such a series of ELT textbooks, namely, “American English File” using Littlejohn’s (1998) evaluative framework to see what explicit features of the book are, and what pedagogic values it has. Littlejohn believes that we should evaluate a textbook based on its own pedagogic values and we should see what is in it not what the teacher and evaluators think must exist in it. Consequently his framework is claimed to be devoid of any impressionistic ideas and it is in-depth and objective rather than being subjective. Nine ELT experts and ten ELT teachers helped the researcher rate the evaluative checklists. The results of the study show that although a number of shortcomings and drawbacks were found in American English File, it stood up reasonably well to a detailed and in-depth analysis and that its pedagogic values and positive attributes far out-weighed its shortcomings. The internal consistency between ratings was computed via the statistical tool of Cronbach’s alpha that indicated a desirable inter-rater reliability

The present paper aimed at highlighting the judicious incorporation of literary genres (i.e. novel, short story/fiction, drama, and poetry) as a supposedly inspiring teaching technique and an allegedly potent learning resource into ESL/EFL curricula. The rationale behind this pedagogical inclusion is to promote both teaching and learning effectiveness through capitalizing intensively on the genres so as to teach basic language skills and language areas- macro and micro levels. Much mention was made of the 'why' (i.e. justification and benefits), the 'how' (i.e. logistical considerations), the 'where' and the 'when' (i.e. spatiotemporal factors) aspects of introducing literary texts into the confines of the ESL/EFL classroom. What this vigorous discussion spawned was some detailed accounts of literary competence as an overarching term consisting of morphological, lexical, phonological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, discourse, stylistic, and sociolinguistic / sociocultural knowledge bases . Afterwards, evaluation process as the last but most important element of the teaching-learning process was explicated. In the end, seven solutions to the problems and dangers of using culture transmitters in the ESL/EFL classroom were suggested in an attempt to bring literature and ESL/EFL pedagogy into a happy contact leading to teaching and learning effectiveness maximization.

The concept of demotivation and removing possible barriers of learning has been researched and advocated throughout the ESL/EFL literature but it seems that it has not been well studied at least on Iranian seminary EFL learners. As such, this study aimed at investigating the effect of demotivation on oral performance of Iranian EFL seminary learners and finding possible demotivating factors which may affect it. The participants were 50 male intermediate EFL learners studying at Islamic Propagation Office, Isfahan, Iran, selected based on their performance on the Oxford Placement test. A pretest-posttest design oral performance exam was used. The participants were divided into two groups of motivated and demotivated group based on the motivational questionnaire (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, (1996). The collected data included: (1) the results of the motivational questionnaire, (2) the results of the oral tasks (used as pre and post tests) and (3) responses to a semi-structured interview regarding the possible demotivating factors which may influence participants' oral performance. The independent sample t-test and paired samples t-test were used to determine whether there were significant inter and intra-group differences. The results provide evidence that motivation helps enhance EFL seminary learners’ oral performance and demotivation significantly hinders improving it.