مطالعات کاربردی زبان - Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies

The present article reports a study carried out to investigate whether or not awareness of functional translation theories has any impact on the translation quality of translator trainees. 2oo Iranian undergraduate students took part in this study. They were divided into four groups -two- experimental and two control groups. After homogenizing the participants by a TOEFL test, a translation pre-test was administered and then functional theories of translation like Translational Action and Skopos Theory were taught to the experimental groups who were later required to use the material taught in their classroom translation practice during one academic semester. The control groups were instructed traditionally as widely practiced in Iranian undergraduate translation classes. A translation post-test was given to all the groups at the end of the semester. The statistical results demonstrated a significant difference between the pre- and post- test in the two experimental groups as compared with the control groups.

This paper is an attempt to shed light on the effects of modernization, urbanization, monolingual educational system, and mass media as well as the process of globalization on dialect leveling among Persian dialects. In so doing, the first part of the paper elaborates on the relationship between globalization and sociolinguistics, and on the concept of standardization. Also, it discusses some factors accelerating dialect leveling among Persian dialects. The second part of the paper presents some empirical evidence for the change, based on the data collected from 3 Persian dialects, namely: Birjandi, Neyshaboori, and Yazdi. Three spoken language sample corpora from two age cohort groups in each speech community were collected. Having transcribed the data, the researchers juxtaposed the phonological, morphological, and syntactic conventions of the two groups of each speech community for further in-depth analysis. Comparing the speech samples of the two age cohorts in each corpus revealed significant movements towards standard dialect. However, the quality and quantity of the observed movements did not appear to be the same across the dialects in question.

The effect of motivational self-regulatory strategies on L2 learners’ achievement has scarcely been examined within the context of our country, Iran. This study is concerned with examining the relationship between motivational self-regulatory strategies and their L2 reading and L2 writing achievement. It also explores the relationship of motivational self-regulatory strategies and use of language learning strategies among EFL learners. The results of the study indicate that 1. There is a significantly positive relationship of EFL learners’ motivational self-regulatory strategies and both their L2reading and L2 writing achievement; 2. There is a significant and positive relationship between motivational self-regulatory strategies and use of language learning strategies among EFL learners. The results of the interviews are also clearly in line with those of the questionnaires. The findings of these study postulate that EFL teachers should enrich their learners’ motivational self-regulatory to help them sustain their efforts and motivation while performing L2 reading and writing tasks.

The aim of this study is to investigate Iranian TEFL graduates’ conception of measurement error in research. Adopting a sequential explanatory multi-method strategy (Borg, 2009), the researchers analyzed causal and temporal relations in the research narratives elicited from 30 TEFL graduates. Gee’s (1986) framework for identifying narrative discourse units (lines, stanzas, and episodes) was adopted to investigate participants’ conceptions of logical orders in measure development algorithms and their knowledge of error sources. In addition, taking a narrative positivistic approach, the narratives were rated based on Optimal Matching Analysis (OMA). Finally in ‘continuous event history modeling’ phase of the study, Cox Proportional Regression Analysis showed how temporal markers in research narratives can be used to predict one’s knowledge of measure development in research design. The results suggest that researchers’ error-awareness and algorithmic knowledge correlate significantly with each other and constitute knowledge of measure development in general. The contribution of dimensionality and validity testing to this knowledge was also found to be statistically significant.

This article provides an overview of natural phonological processes in the dialect of Sistani Persian spoken in Iranian Sistan, and reviews theoretical implications of these processes. A representative selection of processes in the language is examined in reference to conditioning by surrounding segments and conditioning in reference to syllable structure. While assimilation and dissimilation are tied to segmental context, deletion, epenthesis and metathesis are considered in light of syllable structure requirements. Synchronically, natural processes include those that are of an allophonic nature as well as those which involve morphophonological alternation. The description of these phenomena is corroborated by a discussion of the application of natural processes in diachronic changes. The authors show that, in some cases, the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) is violated in Sistani Persian. This phenomenon is attributed not to language-internal factors, but rather to the generalization of marked structures as a result of interference from Standard Persian.

Among the four important factors in the educational contexts, namely, teachers, learners, textbooks and contexts, textbooks play an important role in English Language Teaching (ELT), particularly in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom where it provides the primary source of linguistic input. The wealth of published material for English language teaching (ELT) available in the market makes selecting the right coursebook a challenging task. As such, it necessitates developing a textbook evaluation scheme so that the stakeholders benefit from the proposed model as a dependable criterion with regard to selecting the most appropriate textbook among the wealth of published textbooks. Taking these points into consideration, this study aimed at investigating and evaluating the available textbook evaluation schemes and checklists and seeking the experts’ viewpoints with the objective of developing and designing a textbook evaluation scheme pertinent and beneficial to the expanding circle. As such, the existing textbooks evaluation schemes were reviewed critically and the experts’ viewpoints were sought. Accordingly, a textbook evaluation scheme consisting of 6 main factors containing 41 items has been developed and proposed

This study aims to understand certain linguistic and semantic resources for the text construction, namely the constructs of cohesion, coherence. The analysis of cohesive ties was conducted on the writing samples of 40 subjects (20 most coherent and 20 least coherent) Iranian undergraduates of English. This prompted us to identify the dominant types of cohesive devices used in most coherent writing samples. The analysis of data revealed that both the writing samples were found highly dense in the use of reference. The correlation analysis also didn’t show any overlap between the referential ties and coherence.. Hence, we can claim that referential ties don’t play any role in making a text coherent. Among the five major types of cohesive classes, substitution and ellipsis were found least frequently used in both the writing samples. Their occurrence was less than 1%. It, therefore, seems that the two types of cohesive devices aren’t widely used in written discourse. In the collective data, since, their occurrence is not even noticed in any of the writing scripts where as they could be the most dominant type of cohesion of spoken discourse.

This study compares and contrasts lexical cohesion in English and Persian abstracts of Iranian medical students’ theses to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages. For this purpose, one hundred English and Persian abstracts were selected randomly and analyzed based on Seddigh and Yarmohamadi’s (1996) lexical cohesion framework, a version of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Halliday’s (1985) taxonomies. For contrastive analysis, the SPSS package was used. The results revealed some similarities and differences in the use of lexical cohesion sub-categories in the parallel English and Persian texts. The occurrence of all sub-types is nearly the same in the two groups of texts and the two- tailed t-test employed showed that the differences are not statistically significant. Both languages exhibit a general tendency in using repetition, but synonymy and meronymy are the least used sub-categories. Regarding the density of the texts, the analysis indicates that Persian abstracts are denser than their corresponding English ones.

This paper aimed to investigate the differences between English and Persian religious elements which may be problematic in translating from English into Persian. The study aimed also to investigate the way cultural elements in general and religious ones in particular were dealt with in the selected corpora and to check whether the procedures proposed by Newmark, were sufficient and adequate for translation of these elements from English into Persian. One book The Pilgrim’s Progress by J. Bunyan and its corresponding translated Persian version were analyzed. This paper was mostly narrowed down to religious cultural elements. The findings indicated that there was no evidence to show a consistent effort on the part of translator to use any particular translation approach in the process of achieving adequate translation. The findings showed that procedures suggested by Newmark have accounted well for the transfer of cultural as well as religious elements; it was observed that Newmark’s range of procedures was comprehensive and worked well nearly for cultural elements included in the selected corpuses.