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Research findings reported to date indicate that carefully planning speech while performing a task increases second language (L2) learners’ attention to formal aspects of their discourse. The evidence, however, is mostly based on performance analysis with respect to the linguistic measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To enhance the psycholinguistic validity of current findings, the present research adopted a process-product approach to analyze L2 learners’ performance and attention shift as indicated by the occurrence of pauses in their speech. The study involved thirty Iranian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) who were divided into two groups of fifteen. Whereas participants in the first group were given unlimited time to carefully plan while performing a narrative task, their counterparts in the other group completed the same task under time constraint. Following participants’ performance, both performance analysis and retrospective interviews were conducted to collect their protocol data. The results revealed that carefully planned speech is characterized by increased complexity and accuracy and reduced fluency stemming from attention being primarily focused on syntactic encoding, lexical choice, and phonology instead of conceptualizing the message. The outcomes are discussed in light of their theoretical and pedagogical implications.

Allusions in literary texts are among the elements which can cause intercultural misunderstanding. In this study, the translation of the  allusions of two narrative poems selected from Nizami’s The seven Images (Haft Gonbad) were studied. To this end, the frequent types of implicit allusions were extracted from the poems: The Black Dome and The White Dome . Next, the original text was compared with its English translations to identify whether these allusive meanings were found and transferred in their translations. To achieve this goal, Leppihalm’s (1997) model of translation strategies for key-phrase (KP) allusions was employed. The findings indicated that the most frequent strategy selected by the translators is literal translation. Rendering the poems into English literally, the translators ignored the implicit meanings underlying the allusions. The findings can have implications for translating literary texts.

Translation service has been essential before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. It is one of the considered frontline services, especially in a multilingual nation like Saudi Arabia. However, just like any other industry, translation had to undergo necessary changes that could have been realized even without the repercussion of a pandemic. This study looked into the change-related issues that struck the translation industry/business, including the adoption of translation tech tools and the reformation of translation course programs and curricula. With the participation of 103 study respondents and the sheer use of descriptive statistical analysis, it was found that the dominantly rookie workforce of the Saudi translation industry is now shifting towards engaging in remote services, adopting new technological tools, and continually engaging in professional development courses and trainings. In the survey, it was further revealed that the translators have a thirst for knowledge in managing business and the skill in using computer-aided translation (CAT) and other media tools. It was deduced that in order for translation to be more productive, lucrative, and most of all, reliable, translators have to learn to adapt to these changes. Moreover, this study offers timely challenges in the breeding of a more resilient translator workforce in the future. When clearly viewed from a more general perspective, this pandemic has brought to light one positive realization despite the devastation it has caused to the population - one should not be content with something just because it works; sometimes, he has to learn new tricks to produce better outcomes.

Given the significance and problematic nature of speaking in EFL instruction as well as lack of orthodoxy of views on acceptance or rejection of language learning transferability, this study proposed an inventive model to teaching thinking via questioning as a way to trigger speaking. It compromises six components, and organizes a rich interactive teaching/learning environment to gauge its usefulness in the development of EFL learners' oral skill as well as its inter-domain transferability effects. To this end, we compared the performance of 60 participants on pre-post-treatment oral narrative tasks over thirteen treatment sessions with a time allocation of 45 minutes for each session: One group with isolated questioning instruction and the other with integrated one. The results of independent samples t-test indicated that instructional treatment assisted the experimental group participants to outperform the control group learners solely in terms of measures of lexical and grammatical complexity. It is also suggested that the merits of questioning intervention transfer to learners' performance on a delayed task in a new social domain. As proposed, implementing the integrated approach of HOQs assisted EFL learners to successfully accomplish demanding oral tasks initially in academic setting and in later delayed novel transcontextual settings.

Sandwich and cake formats of interventionist Dynamic Assessment suffer from two problems: both are time-demanding, and the intervention presented to the learners varies from one learner to another.  To suggest a solution to the above problems in teaching and assessing reading strategies, the present researchers have introduced ‘sauce’-format mediation through which intervention is provided for the learners within ‘mediation boxes’ along the test. Thirty Iranian intermediate EFL learners participated in the study. They were first given a non-mediated reading pretest, and then they took the same test along with a ‘mediation box’ following each question to observe the probable effect of ‘sauce’-format mediation.  To measure the transcendence of the given mediation, the participants answered a non-mediated delayed posttest at the end.  Comparing the means of the mediated posttest and non-mediated pretest on the one hand and those of the non-mediated delayed posttest and the pretest on the other revealed that the learners benefitted significantly well from the ‘sauce’-format mediation and could transfer their learning to a novel context. Findings of this study are consistent with the previous research on DA that intervention supports learner development.

Washback or backwash, used similarly, has been defined as the impact of testing on curriculum design, teaching practice, and learning behaviors. Iranian PhD candidates’ performance on this exam is required to pursue PhD study; therefore, degrees of washback both at the micro and macro levels are at stake. Despite the importance of this exam for the candidates, it seems that studies on washback and specifically washback effect of EPT on Iranian PhD candidates’ learning materials has not been given adequate attention in Iran. Given this, the present study attempts to examine the washback effect of EPT on Iranian PhD candidates’ learning materials. Based on sequential design, two phases of data collection were conducted with a two-week interval. In the first phase, attitude questionnaire was administered to 200 Iranian PhD candidates at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan (Khorasgan) branch. In the second phase of the study, 20 Iranian PhD candidates were interviewed. Finally, the collected data from both the questionnaires and the interviews were analyzed via quantitative and descriptive analysis, respectively. The results of the study revealed both positive and negative washback impacts on learning materials. The findings of the study have practical implications for language teachers in general, and EFL language teachers, syllabus designers, and material developers in particular.

There is scarce systematic research on the role of genres and their associated discourse features in Information Structure and its syntactic representations in Persian. The current descriptive, corpus-based study, therefore, aimed to investigate three different genres of Persian spoken language; that is, political, scientific and daily conversation, in terms of their Information Structure as realized through four syntactic devices of clefting, pseudo-clefting, passive and preposing. To this purpose, 1000 different utterances related to each of the mentioned genres, were extracted from the multi-media archive of IRNA (Iranian News Agency) website and daily conversations of the researchers’ family members and friends, based on Lambrecht’s theoretical framework in modeling the Information Structure. The collected data were then transcribed, the syntactic devices were identified, and descriptive statistics were used to see how the above syntactic devices are represented in each genre type. The results revealed that the devices are represented differently in the three genres of political, scientific, and daily conversations. This finding may be of interest to linguists and language theoreticians.

The present descriptive study aimed at investigating the human and machine Persian translations of The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini, and comparing the applied translation strategies in the translated texts for culture-specific items (CSI). To this end, based on Newmark’s (1988) category, the applied strategies were identified in the two translations and compared. The obtained results showed that Naturalization and Transposition strategies were the most frequently-used strategies by both human translators and machine translation. The results also showed that machine translation could not present a comprehensible translation due to overuse of these strategies (75%). It was further revealed that the spirit of the original text was not lost in the translated versions due to the closeness of Iranian and Afghan cultures. In fact, the translated versions kept the real beauty and creativity of the original work. However, the remorseful theme of the source text was kept intact to a great extent in the human translation of the novel, while machine translation lost it. Thus, the general impression is that culture-specific terms make it difficult for the machine translation to achieve complete word-for-word and semantic equivalence, and that the human translator must have a broad knowledge of the literature and traditions of both the source and target languages.

World literature is replete with many texts that depict the imperialists using hypocritical language as an oppressive device for intimidating their subjects. The oppressors pretended to be the civilizers by inculcating the idea of “Benevolent Colonization” into the minds of the oppressed. In this paper, the researchers investigate how situational and linguistic contexts affect the meanings of utterances in George Orwell’s selected novels. It is aimed to remove the gaps in the multicultural world by scrutinizing the power of language pragmatically. The methodology is qualitative based on Grice’s theory of implicature. The novels under investigation both violate and adhere to the four maxims of Grice’s theory of Conversational Implicature. The findings of the paper indicate that language can be used as a suppressive weapon for supporting imperialist objectives or hamper satisfactory human relations, and that positive gifts of imperialism come with the caveat that they are being achieved at the cost of exploiting the oppressed.

The present study aims at scrutinizing the inference complexity level (henceforth ICL) of test items of the Iranian State University TEFL Ph.D. entrance exam (ISUTPEE) from 2010 to 2017 through the lens of Kintsch's construction-integration theory (C-I) (Kintsch, 1988, 1998). Though there is ample research on inferencing in the field of reading comprehension, the existing literature reveals a serious gap in relation to inferencing complexity of test items in high-stakes exams that exert profound effects on the academic achievements of the individuals. Inferencing is examined in this study to explore the ICL of the test items of the Special Knowledge Test (SKT) according to three levels of memory representations of Kintsch's model: the surface model, the textbase, and the situation model. To this end, the test items for eight consecutive years of the ISUTPEE were examined in relation to the three distinct kinds of mental representations. To ensure the reliability of coding by the researchers, two other specialist coders assessed the ICL of 33% of the items. The intraclass correlation among the three sets of codes was 0.91. The results of the study showed that a large number of questions, accounting for more than 80% of the items, merely activate the surface and the textbase model of information representations in memory. Furthermore, the ICL for each of the four parts of SKT was examined. This analytical study carries a stark warning regarding a deficiency of systematic attention to ICL in the development of test items.