درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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.

This study aimed at examining the main and interaction effects of increased intentional reasoning demands, planning time, and also language learning aptitude on syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) of 226 EFL learners’ performance on letter writing tasks. The participants were first randomly assigned to three experimental groups to be given a task with differing degrees of reasoning demand (low, medium, and high) to each group. Then, within each reasoning group, we reassigned an equal number of high- and low- aptitude learners to Planning and No-planning groups by random stratified sampling. The results revealed that (a) increasing task complexity with regard to the amount of intentional reasoning demands resulted in greater lexical and syntactic complexity and less fluency while no significant effect was observed on accuracy; (b) increasing task complexity through planning time led to significantly lower syntactic complexity and fluency; (c) reasoning demands and planning time had a significant interaction effect on accuracy; and (d) the interaction effect of language aptitude was significant with neither planning nor reasoning factor, but a three-way interaction effect was found on accuracy. The findings are discussed in relation to cognitive task complexity (CTC) models which were the main impetus for this study.

The aim of intercultural translation is to communicate. Communication is acted via verbal as well as visual means. The interaction of verbal and visual means of communication makes a set of complex situations which demand special attention in translation. One context in which the interaction of visual and verbal elements gets vital importance is children’s picture books. Color is an integral part of children's books and a visual mode of communication. For the translator, to interpret symbolic colors, cultural knowledge of the source and the target cultures is required. To see how the cultural meaning of colors can be transferred and how the interrelationship of words and colors can be achieved, Nida and De Waard’s (1986) Adaptation Theory was utilized in this study. The theory was applied to eight children’s colored picture books aimed for school-aged children. Six of the books were originally written in English and translated into Persian and two of them were the other way round. The analysis of the data showed that the required features of the above-stated theory was rarely followed by translators and illustrators, and, except in one case, color symbolism was not considered by them. Findings of the study indicate that since visuals are inseparable elements of translating children's picture books, translators/illustrators should be dressed with enough information of visual-cultural aspects of translation in general, and of color symbolism in particular.

Considering the paucity of self-studies exploring English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' journeys into becoming a creative teacher, in this qualitative action research, a mainstream Iranian teacher-researcher narrates the changes and challenges she observed while planning her creative classroom practices, implementing, and reflecting on them. While she experienced changes like going beyond the textbook, becoming a caring observer, and becoming a moment catcher, she faced constraining challenges like overcoming inner fears, showing (non)-compliance with institutional rules, and coping with situations when things did not turn out as expected. Such an insider view of teacher creativity reiterates that creativity needs to be considered not just as a set of techniques and procedures to be mastered but as an ongoing passion for renovation which should be cultivated over time despite existing constraints.

Listening plays a significant role in daily communication and educational processes. In spite of its importance, listening has long been the neglected skill in second and foreign language acquisition, research, teaching, and assessment. However, on account of the entire challenges EFL learners encounter in classrooms due to the listening complexity, some pre-listening activities as supports in the procedure of teaching listening are proposed by experts in the field. This research investigated 80 male and female learners in 2 groups of 40, who were selected randomly, to determine whether pre-listening activities have a significant effect on listening comprehension of English texts. It also investigated whether there was a significant difference between male and female learners on pre-listening activities in terms of their effects on the comprehension of English texts. To do this, subjects first took a TOFEL test, which served as a pre-test, to make it possible to have homogeneous learners in a control group and an experimental group. In the experimental group, some pre-listening tasks, through which the learners received general prior information about the content of the listening texts, were performed. Then, they listened to and answered some multiple-choice comprehension questions which asked for the specific information in the listening texts. However, the control group’s listening comprehension tasks were destitute of pre-listening activities. The results of the analysis of the data obtained at the end of the experiment revealed that the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group. It also showed that females outperformed the male group. In other words, the treatments appeared to have a significant effect on the performance of the experimental group (and especially female learners therein) in listening comprehension.

Over the past twenty-five years, researchers have expressed considerable interest in titles of academic publications. Unfortunately, conference paper titles (CPTs) have only recently begun to receive attention. The aim of this study, therefore, is to investigate the text length, syntactic structure, and lexicon of CPTs in Applied Linguistics. A data set of 698 titles was selected from the 2008 International Conference on Applied Linguistics held in Germany. The results from the analysis indicated that, first; the average text length of CPTs in Applied Linguistics is 10.4 words. Second, CPTs tended to be nominal, consistent with the finding in several titleology studies. Last, the lexical items of CPTs comprised a rich array of four main categories of lexicon (domain-specific words, research-related words, verbal expressions, and country/local references). These findings have implications for the scholarship on CPTs, academic writing pedagogy, and future research on academic titles.

The present study intended to address the impact of the socio-economic status (SES) on the Iranian EFL learners’ language achievement and identity processing styles. To attain this goal, 148 students studying General English were designated on the base of purposive sampling from Yasuj University of Medical Sciences (YUMS). At the first step, questions related to social, cultural, and financial background was asked of 20 participants (sample) by an interview. Then, a the researcher constructed a questionnaire from the information attained from the interview, regarding the factors related to the social, cultural, and financial factors (variables) and was distributed among the population (148 students) of the study. The participants’ English University Entrance Exam Score (Achievement test) scores were obtained from the Education Office of Yasuj University of Medical Sciences. Afterward, Berzonsky’s forty item revised version of the identity style inventory (ISI3) (Berzonsky, 1992) assessed the identity style of each participant. Examination of the results indicated that the structural relationship between the variables of identity processing style and language skills was 0.84 and its standard value was equal to 0.345. This value indicated a positive and average relationship between the two structures. That is, with the change of identity processing style, the language skills of the participants have changed.

Chomsky cannot help wondering at the fact that we, despite so vast evidence, have little knowledge about the obvious evidence. A good example, I think, is the child’s way of first language acquisition. A great many researchers have studied various aspects of child language acquisition at different stages of the child’ life and have brought to light many details of language development. However, it remains uncertain how the child can cope with this heavy task of language acquisition within the first two years of his life. Since its birth, the child begins acquiring the intonation, the sound, the phoneme, the word, the meaning, and the structure of the language, to which he is exposed so fast that it is beyond our imagination. Mind that the same child is unable to do the simplest addition or subtraction of numbers within the early years of life. Thus, the intriguing question for Chomsky is: How is it that the child can acquire the complex system of a language such as English, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese … very fast despite so little and often deficient linguistic input?

The upheaval time of COVID-19 highlighted the importance of an effective way of teaching English to the front-line healthcare workers such as medical doctors and researchers with different digital-divide status, particularly in non-English-speaking countries because they were first-hand users of critical pandemic-related information in mostly-English articles published online by scientific journals. This study attempted to investigate the pedagogical effects of utilizing the two main User-Generated Content (UGC) platforms in E-learning, namely LMS vs. LXP, on the results of the Electronic Ministry of Health Language Examinations (E-MHLE) among Iranian English for Medical Purposes (EMP) learners across their digital-divide status (digital natives vs. digital immigrants) during the COVID-19 pandemic. A series of focus-group E-interviews were conducted to determine the reasons behind the lowest scores among the participants and to find out possible suggestions for success in high-stake E-tests. To this end, 272 EMP learners who were users of LMS and LXP were conveniently selected from a university of medical science to participate in this sequential explanatory mixed-method research. The results of descriptive and inferential statistics showed that the LXP group outperformed the LMS one in the results of E-MHLE. Moreover, the digital natives obtained higher scores than the digital immigrants in both groups but the difference was not significant in the LXP. The findings of the E-interviews were thematically analyzed and discussed. The findings of this study might offer practical and realistic benefits to the whole EMP community, particularly policymakers for the post-COVID-19 era. 

Despite a great number of studies exploring Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis in the cognitive perspective of language learning, the investigations focused on noticing in the ecological perspective are rather rare in number. The present study was an attempt to examine how noticing second language recast could affect the learners’ achievements of grammatical structures through these two perspectives (i.e., cognitive and ecological). To do so, one hundred and twenty first-year college students at Islamic Azad University and Applied Science University in Tehran took part in this study. The students were divided into two cognitive and ecological groups and received two different treatments. During the treatment, the learners in all groups received recast and their noticing was assessed through learners’ raising hands and underlining. In the end, a posttest was conducted to measure the effectiveness of the treatment. Data analysis revealed that the ecological perspective of language learning was more conducive to noticing and subsequent language learning. The study also made contributions by actualizing the ecological project-based meaningful activities, shedding light on the importance of affordance and interaction in the context of language learning.