درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

مقاله حاضر به طور کلی به برررسی نحوه ابراز زبان شناختی اساتید و دانشجویان ایرانی مقاطع کارشناسی و کارشناسی ارشد رشته زبان انگلیسی و به طور اخص به نحوه ایجاد و تداوم جایگاه و قدرت اجتماعی دربین آنان باتوجه به عوامل اجتماعی و فرهنگی می پردازد. برای انجام این مطالعه 84 متن رایانامه که اساتید و دانشجویان در سال تحصیلی 92-93 تبادل کرده اند از طریق گرامر نقش گرایانه هلیدی و اجزای تحلیل انتقادی گفتمان مورد تجزیه و تحلیل قرار گرفته است. نتایج نشان می دهد اگرچه دو گروه مذکور از رایانامه به طرق متفاوتی برای ایجاد و تداوم ارتباطات اجتماعی خود بهره می برند اما هر دو برای انتقال معانی مورد نظر خود عمدتا متکی به فرآیندهای مادی و ذهنی هستند. آنان همچنین گفتمان و اعمال از قبل تعریف شده توسط عوامل اجتماعی – فرهنگی و مذهبی که در کلاسهای سنتی به کار می برند را به محیط اینترنت نیز انتقال می دهند(برنستین, 1971) و از این طریق جایگاه و قدرت اجتماعی خود را شکل می دهند. یافته های این مقاله می تواند به روشن شدن نقش عوامل اجتماعی – فرهنگی و دیگر عوامل موثر در فرآیند ارتباط رایانه ای منجر شود. دیدگاه انتقادی این مطالعه میتواند تاثیر عمیقی بر روی دانشجویان و اساتید آنها در رابطه با تعامل در محیط اینترنت داشته باشد و به اساتید راههای مشخصی برای شناخت و ارزش نهادن به زبان استفاده شده توسط دانشجویان ارائه دهد.

Due to the potent role of critical thinking in learners’ academic success and its connection with factors conducive to learning such as argumentation ability, the present study seeks to primarily probe the correlation between Iranian EFL learners’ critical thinking ability and their argumentative writing achievement, and investigate the predictability of the students’ argumentative writing achievement based on their scores on critical thinking scale. Furthermore, the effect of gender on Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement was investigated. In so doing, 'Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal' (2002) as well as an argumentative writing assignment was employed, and the participants of the study included 178 EFL learners in three universities in Mashhad, Iran. Structure Equation Modeling (SEM) was utilized to analyze the data. The results substantiated the positive correlation between critical thinking ability and argumentative writing revealing that these two variables significantly and positively related to each other; among the predictors (subscales of the critical thinking) of argumentative writing, inference, assumptions, arguments were the stronger predictors. Finally, gender was not found to significantly affect Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative writing achievement. The conclusions and implications of this study are pointed out with reference to foreign language teaching context.

Although images are abundant and play significant aesthetic and pedagogical roles in today’s EFL course books, they are still one of the less explored areas of research. The present study is an attempt to examine the role and function of images in Iranian high school EFL course books; it also aims to cast a critical eye over their suitability and efficiency. To this end, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) model of visual grammar was adopted. The findings revealed that although the informative and/or illustrative functions of the images make them important resources in Iranian high school EFL course books, their full potential for language learning does not seem to be adequately exploited. This relates to flaws at the representational mode of meaning making, such as outdated portrayal of objects, gender stereotyping, and overdramatizing national identity as well as shortcomings at the interactive mode, such as poor modality due to grayscale printing and plain graphics with no contextualization or pictorial detail. These flaws make the images seem out of today’s world and hardly credible for high school students who are already adept at new technology. Since these shortcomings may sacrifice pedagogical objectives, the study calls for changes in both technical quality and underlying messages of images in the course books.

The present study sought to investigate the effect of explicit instruction of lexical bundles (LBs) on the development of Iranian English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students’ writing quality and also their receptive and productive knowledge of Lexical Bundles (LB). Assigned to two experimental and control groups, the eighty participants took pre- and post-tests of writing tasks and the receptive knowledge test. Afterwards, the obtained scores were subjected to a series of Analyses of Covariance (ANCOVAs) and paired samples t-tests. Results of the within-group and between-group analyses indicated that explicit instruction of LBs enhanced the participants’ productive and receptive knowledge of LBs and also improved the overall quality of their written productions. Possible explanations are provided and the implications of the findings for the applicability of LBs instruction are discussed.

An overview of pedagogical interventions in the field of interlanguage pragmatics reveals the under-exploration of the processes in which changes in learners' second language (L2) pragmatic competence are established and that most of these investigations have focused on the product or final outcome of the learners' pragmatic development (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Kasper, 1996; Vyatkina & Belz, 2006). This study aimed to provide a qualitative analysis of the microgenetic development of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' pragmatic knowledge of request speech act. A total of 140 male and female participants received instruction on request strategy types and internal and external modification devices for seven sessions (weeks) through consciousness-raising (C-R) tasks. The data were collected after instructional sessions during the first, third, fifth, and seventh weeks through discourse completion tests (DCTs). The results indicated that, in the course of time, the participants stopped using direct request strategies and employed conventionally indirect strategies more frequently in situations involving high-status interlocutors and high-imposition requests. Moreover, as time progressed, the learners became more preoccupied with pragmatic appropriateness rather than grammatical correctness. The results of the study suggest that C-R instructional tasks offer an effective means of teaching pragmatics. Considering request speech act, learners should become conscious of the significance of concepts such as status and imposition as well as internal and external modification devices in request formulation.