درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Despite its direct relevance to second/foreign language learning, quality of life has been a neglected area within Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research. The present study sought to investigate the relationship between quality of life factors and speaking skill as one of the most challenging parts of L2 learning. To this end, an adapted version of life quality questionnaire originally devised by the World Health Organization (WHO) was administered to 100 female intermediate Iranian EFL learners. In addition, 30 of the participants were randomly selected to take part in follow-up semi-structured interviews which asked why the respondents felt the way they reported. The analysis of data obtained from questionnaire and interviews revealed that although all the four domains of life quality namely physical, psychological, social, and environmental domains had impact on the speaking ability of the participants, a number of facets in physical and psychological domains were more influential. Furthermore, the statistical Pearson correlation analysis demonstrated a positive correlation between life quality factors dominating learner’s success in speaking tasks. The findings of this study have implications for teacher educators and educational decision makers in bringing about higher levels of speaking ability and Quality Of Life (QOL) among English language learners.

Translation studies essentially deals with a socio-communicatively driven and contextualized enterprise. Viewed hence, it seems that no discipline tends to provide the possibility of studying the interrelations between interlocutors to generate meaning within the interactive social context as precisely as sociolinguistics (Federici, 2018). A sociolinguistic approach to translation seems to be increasingly gaining ground, at the crossroads of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) and sociology within the sociological turn (Wolf, 2010). Accordingly, the present study took a sociolinguistic approach to shed some light on The Great Gatsby (1925) and its Persian translation by Emami (2000). In so doing, an extended version of Hatim and Mason’s (1997) sociolinguistic model was employed to examine the texts in question. The source text (ST) and its target text (TT) version were investigated at both textual and extra-textual levels in light of the model’s respective sub-components. The results of this comparative study, analyzed individually for each register variable, revealed that the translator dealt rather superficially with both use-related categories of register variation like tenor and user-related aspects like idiolect. By contrast, the predominant features of literary expression were mostly retained in the translation.

Poguli is spoken in the Pogal-Paristan area of district Ramban in the state of Jammu and Kashmir (India). Poguli shows interesting and significant variations from Kashmiri in phonology, morphology, and vocabulary, but linguistic research on these aspects of the dialect of Kashmiri has been inadequate and fragmentary. Limited work has been done on Poguli and is mostly based on oral form. The present paper attempts to study Poguli on morphological description basis. The study shall include description of pronouns of Poguli in question. It aims to give a complete account of different features of pronouns in Poguli.

This study tried to investigate the impact of task-based instruction (TBI) on the enhancement of Iranian EFL learners’ speaking skill. The study also tried to scrutinize the impact of TBI on learners’ emotional intelligence. To meet these ends, 60 students were randomly divided into two groups, the experimental group and the control group. At the very first session of the term, two speaking examinations were conducted for both experimental and control group. After the speaking examinations, the participants were asked to answer Bar-On’s emotional intelligence questionnaire. The experimental group was instructed through task-based approach and the control group received instruction through present-practice-produce (PPP) approach. The scores obtained by two raters from the interview post-tests were analyzed through non-parametric tests, and the data obtained from EQ questionnaires were analyzed through t-tests. Results of the statistical analysis revealed that the experimental group performed significantly better on the speaking post-test than the control group. Furthermore, the findings also indicated that the learners in the experimental group became more emotionally intelligent than those in the control group.

The current study was intended to investigate the impact of Dynamic Assessment (DA) on promoting reading comprehension ability of Iranian male and female EFL learners, focusing on Guthke's Lerntest approach. In this study, the researcher used DA which unifies instruction with assessment to provide learners with mediation to promote their hidden potential during assessment. In this action research project, Guthke's Lerntest approach was used to develop the reading comprehension skill classes that integrated mediation with assessment to support 60 Iranian EFL learners' reading skill. The Guthke's lerntest approach and the mediation design are presented in detail in this article. The participants' reading scores are presented to show the effect of Guthke's Lerntest approach on promoting Iranian EFL learners' reading performance. In addition, the participants' pre and post-test scores were compared to determine whether the participants revealed significant progress after receiving Guthke's Lerntest approach in reading comprehension setting. The findings showed that participants of experimental group significantly outperformed the one in the static way. In conclusion, the results of the study revealed that employing the Guthke's Lerntest approach can offer a new condition to enhance the EFL learners' reading comprehension ability and that doing research in this field can be beneficial for EFL learners, English instructors and other researchers in other fields. 

Teacher identity has turned out to be of great importance in teacher pedagogical practice. A number of factors are implicated in shaping and reshaping teachers' identity. Despite numerous studies on teacher identity, language teacher religious identity has remained under-researched. Therefore, the current study examined how Iranian religious English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers are identified. To do so, 30 religious teachers were selected through purposive sampling. The data were collected through employing semi-structured interviews, developed based on Simon’s (2004) six components of identity, namely personal features, physical characters, special abilities, behavioral qualities, ideological attributes, and group membership. The results demonstrated that religious teachers tend to manifest certain Islamic-based personal attributes like fairness and kindness and also adhere to some Islamic rules of physical features like head covering for females and dignified clothes for males. In addition, religious teachers' behaviors and performances were profoundly affected by their religious background, realized in their attempts to control their anger, to avoid insulting and backbiting, and to disregard or replacing the materials which seem to be against the Islamic thought. The findings can have practical implications for teachers, institute administrators, and other stakeholders whose cognizance of religious teachers' identity could help prevent possible identity tensions.

The present study investigated the use of lexical bundles (LBs) in research articles authored by English L1 and Persian L1 academic writers, with a special focus on the syntactic roles of LBs in a larger context of sentence level. Four-word bundles were retrieved and classified structurally. The use of identified LBs was compared in two writer groups. The syntactic roles and relative complexity of the bundles’ structures were analyzed in relation to Biber, Gray, and Poonpon’s (2011) hypothesized stages of writing development. The results indicated different patterns of reliance on LBs, with Persian writers making greater use of LBs at higher frequency. In addition, Persian academic writers tended to use high frequency bundles differently from native-speaker academic writers. The results of the syntactic analysis of LBs reflected more frequent use of LBs functioning as compressing lexico-grammatical structures in a native English-speaker corpus, which is indicative of a more complex academic register compared to that of a Persian L1 corpus. The pedagogical implications of the findings for the explicit instruction of syntactically complex corpus-driven LBs for discipline-specific genre writing and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Enhancing speaking ability is an important component of the acquirement of a language. The innovative aspect of this study is improving speaking ability through online strategy-based instruction by applying the Moodle course management system as an instructional platform. To this end, a group of 80 Iranian female and male students at the advanced level participated in the treatment. Participants of the study were divided into four groups of 20. The subjects in experimental groups benefited from two particular instructional focuses of this study include social and affective strategies. In order to assess the effect of the treatment pre and posttests design were utilized. Consequently, the data were analyzed through One-Way ANOVAs and t-tests. The findings revealed that strategy treatment was successful in improving the participants’ speaking ability. Therefore, the findings suggest that online strategy-based instruction can positively influence the speaking ability of Iranian advanced EFL learners. In addition, a questionnaire from Kitchakarn (2015) was employed to understand students’ perceptions and attitudes toward computer-based learning. The statistical analysis of the questionnaire revealed positive attitudes of participants toward computer-based learning.This study may have pedagogical implications for material practitioners, CALL package designers and distance learning planners to include strategy instruction in English courses.

Metaphors conceptualizing anger represent a system which is based on the cognitive cultural model of this emotion. Since this model derives from the physiological effects and the behavioral reactions associated with anger, it may be used as a criterion to compare and contrast the conceptualization of this emotion in different contexts. This article analyzes the metaphorical expressions of anger in the Qur’anic verses and the traditions of the Holy Prophet and his rightful successors to determine to what extent they follow the aforementioned model offered by Kovecses. In doing so, a corpus of 200 verses and traditions were collected from different Islamic sources and then they were grouped according to seven source domains identified by Kovecses. The findings of the study reveal that except for one source domain, i.e. burden, the other seven source domains exhibit a high frequency in the above-mentioned verses and traditions; this, in turn, is indicative of the fact that there is a systematic conceptual motivation underlying the structures of the metaphorical expressions in these verses and traditions so that it can be claimed that such expressions follow a well-established scientific pattern.