درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to assess the retention of two word types (synonyms and homonyms) in the short term memory, and (b) to investigate the effect of these word types on word learning by asking learners to learn their Persian meanings. A total of 73 Iranian language learners studying English translation participated in the study. For the first purpose, 36 freshmen from an intact class were presented with two lists of words with their Persian meanings. One of the list included 5 pairs of synonyms and the other one included 5 pairs of homonyms. They were asked to retain as much vocabulary items as they can. Learning was measured by lexical representations of the words. The results showed that learners did better on the retention of homonyms than synonyms. For the second purpose, 37 sophomores from an intact class were provided with 40 words in pairs (20 synonyms and 20 homonyms). They were asked to write their Persian meanings in the testing session. The results indicated that students did better on learning synonyms than homonyms. The study revealed that homonyms are better retrieved in short term memory but learned more slowly regarding to the semantic representation.

This study aims at evaluating the coursebooks taught at the intermediate level of adult and young adult departments of the Iran Language Institute in terms of multiple intelligence types introduced by Gardner (1983) to see to what extent such coursebooks represent the Multiple Intelligence Theory. To fulfill the objectives, a checklist developed by Botelho (2003) and localized by the researchers on the basis of this theory was used. The coursebooks were analyzed according to this checklist and the frequencies and percentages of occurrence of each type of intelligence were calculated. The results of the study showed that verbal/linguistic, logical/mathematical and visual/spatial types of intelligence were the most dominant intelligence types in the analyzed coursebooks. Naturalistic and bodily/kinesthetic types of intelligence were the least common types represented in the coursebooks. A comparison was also made between the coursebooks taught to adults and young adults at the Iran Language Institute and the results presented a significant difference between the percentage of occurrence of logical/mathematical, bodily/kinesthetic, visual/spatial, intrapersonal and musical types of intelligence between the two sets of coursebooks. On the other hand, the difference between the percentage of occurrence of verbal/linguistic, interpersonal and naturalistic types of intelligence was not significant.