حمید علامی

Despite its role in achieving the frontiers of knowledge and interacting with the international community, English does not have its proper place in the Iranian General Education system, resulting in poor English education in school, hence, students’ poor command of English. This study explores the feasibility of outsourcing English teaching and entrusting this enterprise to the private sector. To this end, a questionnaire was developed from expert interviews to canvass 376 English teachers, students, and parents, as primary stakeholders, across the country. An exploration of respondents’ attitudes toward outsourcing English teaching indicated the agreement of the majority of the respondents with this idea of English education privatization. Moreover, political and ideological perspectives imply that a shift from school to institute is needed if we expect effective communication-based language teaching and learning. This may necessitate a radical reform in the language policy of the country and may even lead to the decentralization of English education due to regional and cultural needs. The study has implications regarding possible fundamental changes in language planning in the formal education system of the country.    

The area of Individual Differences (IDs) and their interactions with instructional conditions have recently been a point of interest in second language acquisition. However, the effect of such interaction on aural implicit grammar knowledge has not been researched exhaustively. This study thus examined the interactive effects of aptitude and treatment conditions on implicit grammar knowledge as elicited aurally. Grammar knowledge was operationalized as the ability to comprehend past/present simple passive verbs. To this end, 120 EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups: three teacher-generated experimental (Isolated Form-Focused Instruction, henceforth FFI, Integrated FFI, and Incidental) conditions, each lasting for six treatment sessions, and a control group receiving the same content with no instruction. Initially, learners took a pre-test and cognitive tests (LLAMA-D, LLAMA-F, and LSPAN). They then received the treatments, and three days after the treatments, they took an Aural Timed Grammaticality Judgment Test as a measure of implicit grammar knowledge. Results of a general linear model revealed a significant effect for treatment. Additionally, LSPAN was found to mediate the effectiveness of instruction, with the highest effect on implicit grammar knowledge under the Isolated FFI condition. Post-hoc analyses also demonstrated that instruction made a significant difference compared with no instruction, though, in comparison with other conditions, Integrated FFI proved to be more effective. Results provide EFL teachers and curriculum developers with awareness concerning the interaction between instruction and cognitive differences. For improving the effectiveness of instruction and acquiring implicit knowledge, cognitive tasks, especially those boosting working memory, are suggested.

Prosody is a fundamental aspect of speech communication through which (un)truthfulness and (in)sincerity of speech can be identified. The focus of the study is on the prosodic features of (in)sincere compliments among EFL learners. Twenty male and female EFL learners were selected through Oxford Quick Placement Test. The participants did role-plays based on situations on compliment topics and their voices were recorded in a recording studio. The produced compliments were transferred to Praat software for acoustic analysis. Also, two native speakers (one male and one female) were requested to read the produced compliments both in a sincere and insincere manner. Their voices were transferred to Praat software for acoustic analysis to establish the baseline of the study. The prosodic features of the participants’ voices were compared with those of native speakers to determine the (in)sincerity of the compliments on a 5-point scale. Results showed that sincere compliments are produced with a higher pitch. Concerning the gender of the participants, males were sincerer than females. Regarding the proficiency level of the participants, there was no significant prosodic feature in determining the sincerity of their compliments. Both intermediate and advanced groups were similar to native speakers in giving sincere compliments. The results of the study open up new horizons for the importance of vocal cues in evaluating sincerity in speech acts.

Standard political discourse is replete with ambiguity and vagueness. Politicians frequently use vague language to hide their inadequate knowledge, show their low interest in the issue, and/or evoke emotion. This study reports on a qualitative content analysis of vagueness in two Iranian presidents' political interviews within a pragmalinguistic and sociopolitical paradigm. The data consisted of nine question-answer exchanges extracted from seven internationally live broadcast interviews. A total of 57 instances of vague language use were analyzed in terms of 21 pragmalinguistic vagueness strategies. Implications are that vagueness in political discourse is motivated by a multiplicity of factors such as face management, sociopolitical and situational adaptation, conflict avoidance, and personal characteristics of the interviewers and the respondents. Vagueness was also found to be a sign of diplomatic prudence or wisdom.

People are constrained by their culture and social life when telling stories. A second language learner then cannot be expected to tell stories in the target language without cross-cultural effects that influence the way of narration. The present study examined the role of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) in the organization of narratives by focusing on Persian speakers’ and EFL learners’ lived narratives. For this purpose, 125 oral stories were voice recorded. Seventy-five EFL learners’ narratives and 50 Persian narratives as told by Iranian native speakers were collected via classroom discussions and interviews. To examine the substantive effect of L2 knowledge, the EFL learners were selected from pre-intermediate and upper-intermediate proficiency levels. The Labovian analytical narrative model was employed for the analysis. The findings indicated that EFL learners’ narratives were mostly affected by L1 rather than L2. Furthermore, English linguistic knowledge, rather than the English narrative structure itself, affected the organization of EFL narratives

Working memory is believed to interact with a second language (L2) learning at the cognitive level. The present study sought to explore the impact of L2 readers’ prior knowledge on the contribution of working memory to reading comprehension. Eighty Iranian English learners were divided into two groups of high and low by their scores on L2 knowledge and the topic knowledge tests. Their working memory spans, and reading comprehension abilities were measured via a working memory test and a reading comprehension test respectively. The results indicated that working memory significantly predicted L2 reading comprehension only when the readers had sufficient topic knowledge. The results also show that the learners’ comprehension was mostly determined by their L2 linguistic knowledge, even when they had considerable working memory capacity. The findings imply that readers’ prior knowledge could moderate the contribution of working memory in L2 reading comprehension. A certain level of knowledge in the target language and on the topic is required for L2 readers to help working memory work more efficiently.

Most popular models of narratives and narrative analyses have been drawn on native stories, yet EFL learners’ narratives have not received due narrative analysis. The present study then aims at scrutinizing the structure of personal English stories as told by EFL learners. To this aim, three hundred narratives were collected through classroom discussions and interviews. Qualitative analysis methods were utilized to find how narratives were recounted. The results of data analyses indicated that EFL learners’ narratives consisted of 4 parts with the abstract and coda sections absent from them. Besides, there were other differences between the collected narratives and those told by English native speakers.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the probable differences between narratives as rehearsed by EFL language learners of two different English proficiencies. It aimed to find out how narrative elements ( abstract , orientation , main action , results , and coda ) are recounted differently by EFL language learners of different English proficiencies. To this end, 250 personal oral narratives were recorded through classroom discussions and interviews. Two hundred participants were asked to narrate a personal story in the classroom, and the other 50 were interviewed. The analysis focused on narratives structure to discover how knowledge of target language might affect the way language learners construct English narratives. The collected data were interpreted according to Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) and Labov’s (1972) analytical models. The results revealed that upper-intermediate language learners reported more organized, chronological, logical, and to the point stories than pre-intermediate ones. The difference was in orientation , main action , and result parts. Neither group of language learners expressed the abstract and coda sections.

As the overriding components of discourse, metadiscourse markers (MDMs) have been studied extensively through varying disciplines and paradigms and in different languages/cultures. However, when it comes to subdisciplinary realization of these features, particularly in medicine, we have to seemingly pave a long way. Identifying this gap, the present corpus-based study which is inspired by the metadiscourse taxonomy of Hyland (2005), focuses on exploration of 180 Medical Physics and Nursing research articles (RAs) as two rather distinct but comparable subfields of medicine across the quantitative and qualitative paradigms in English. It is expected that the findings will help in heading off the problems of the academic researchers and graduate students in writing RAs.

The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study aimed primarily to reinvestigate the closing structures of telephone conversation (hereafter abbreviated as TC) in Persian and to discover the common politeness strategies used by native Persian speakers to end their TCs considering the contextual variables of social distance and status. Moreover, this study tried to explore the effect of time availability/limitation along with those contextual variables on TC closing part. To this end, 30 Persian native speakers were selected randomly. A DCT (Discourse Completion Test) of 12 scenarios was developed by considering three criteria: status, time limitation and distance. Analyzing DCTs, many different TC closing patterns were found. The obtained findings depicted that the aforementioned variables had significant effects on the TC closing patterns and strategies taken by the participants. The findings of the present study may be beneficial for extending pragmatic knowledge through emphasizing the significance of pragmatic competence in language proficiency. Also, since the results showed some limitations in the previous politeness models, the findings of this study can guide researchers to follow more complete and perfect politeness models.

For many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, working contingently with language learners' problematic learner contributions in classroom interaction remains a challenge. Drawing on conversation analysis methodology and using sociocultural and situated learning theories, this longitudinal case study traces the progressional changes in one Iranian English language teacher's repairing practices (his orientation to repairable, repair completion type and trajectory) along with the changing impacts of different organizational patterns of repair and interactional awareness on learning opportunities. The data material consists of video recordings of EFL oral classroom interactions (11 lessons) and reflective conversations (seven sessions) between the researcher and the participant teacher at one private language institute in Iran over a period of six months, in two phases. Qualitative results from the first (descriptive) phase indicated that the teacher's provision of repair in meaning-oriented contexts was generally convergent while in form-oriented ones divergent. The qualitative changes revealed the teacher's increasing attention to lexical errors and use of self-repair types, particularly in form-oriented contexts and the teacher's progress in interactional awareness including identification of contexts and repair organization, use of metalanguage and critical self-evaluation This study makes a contribution to conversation analytic research and our understanding of English teacher professional development.

Due to the lack of paralinguistic information, politeness gains a considerable significance in telephone conversations (TCs). The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study intended to primarily investigate the fundamental closing structures of TCs in Persian and English. Furthermore, it examined the effect of two contextual variables and time availability on the closing pattern sand length of TCs. To this aim, 30 English natives, 30 Persian natives, and 30 Persian EFL learners were selected. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) of 12 scenarios was developed considering contextual variables and time limitation. The obtained results demonstrated that the CPT (closing implicative environment + preclosing + terminal components) closing pattern may not be applicable in every context. Furthermore, telephone conversers change the pattern and length of TC closing part to maintain their rapport based on the aforementioned variables. The findings of the present study can guide the researcher to follow more complete and perfect politeness models.

Despite the abundance of research on teachers’ repair practices in language classroom interaction, there are not enough conversation analytic studies on repair organization with the focus on the details of interaction in the context of EFL. Drawing on sociocultural and situated learning theories, this study explores the contingent nature of English language teachers’ organizational patterns of repair practices (repair focus, repair completion, repair trajectory and convergence) by adopting the context-dependency of repair as a point of departure. More specifically, we analyzed two classroom interactional contexts: form-oriented and meaning-oriented contexts as well as their realization in student participation. Data were collected through video- and audio-tape recordings of 14 lessons from eight EFL teachers at four private language institutes in Iran and they were analyzed based on the framework of conversation analysis methodology. The analysis of lesson transcripts indicated that the teachers varied in their repair practices; however, an organizational repair pattern emerged from the data. The analysis of qualitative data revealed that the teachers largely repaired divergently in form-oriented contexts but convergently in meaning-oriented contexts, and deployed other-repair more than self-repair. The pedagogical implications of the study are for language teachers’ awareness of the role of repair organization in facilitating learning opportunities and for teachers’ professional development.

دعوتنامه ی ازدواج به عنوان گونه ای اجتماعی و فرهنگی ویژه، فرصتی شایان توجه را برای مقایسه ی ارزش های فرهنگی اجتماعی منعکس شده در محتوای نوشتاری و ترکیب قسمت های مختلف این گونه در جوامع مختلف زبانی فراهم می نماید. با استفاده ازآموزش گونه ای می توان دانش آموزان را با این گونه و اجزای مختلف تشکیل دهنده ی آن آشنا نمود. آموزش گونه ای این فرصت را به دانش آموزان می دهد که گونه های شناخته شده و بارز در زبان اول و دومشان را مطالعه نموده و اجزای تشکیل دهنده مشترک و همچنین اختصاصی گونه ها را با نگاهی میان فرهنگی و میان زبانی بررسی کنند. تحقیق حاضر بر آن بوده است که دعوتنامه ی ازدواج را به وسیله ی دو روش مکمل و هم پوشاننده ی تحلیل گونه ای و تحلیل انتقادی گفتمان بررسی نماید. تعداد 100 کارت( از هر جامعه 50 کارت) جمع آوری و مورد تجزیه و تحلیل مفایسه ای قرار گرفتند. نتایج تحلیل گونه ای نشان داد که کارت دعوت عروسی در هر دو جامعه زبانی شامل بخش های مشابه و مختلفی در ساختار گونه ای است. نتایج تحلیل انتقادی گفتمان نشان داد که سطح سنتی بودن، مذهبی بودن،، مرد سالاری و سطح تحصیلات از تاثیر گذارترین عوامل بر گونه دعوت نامه ازدواج در هردو جامعه هستند اما شدت تاثیر این عوامل در این دو جامعه زبانی یکسان نیست. نتایج این تحقیق عوامل فرهنگی و اجتماعی حاکم بر دو جامعه ی زبانی ایرانی آمریکایی را مشخص میکند

This paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the Persian native speakers. 200 Persian respondents took a 24-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenting exchanges they either observed or participated in. The results suggested a significant effect for the treated intervening social variables of age, gender, educational background, social distance, and relative power as well as compliment topics in determining the type of compliment response. The responses were further suggestive of the contextual effects of the three systems of hierarchical, solidarity and deferential as well as a newly coined system as kinship system.