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The use of task-based collaborative output activities in enhancing EFL students’ writing proficiency has been underrated in the Iranian context. To foster students’ writing ability, the present study, employing a mixed-methods design, aimed to evaluate the effect of innovative tools, dictogloss and debating, on the writing development of English-major university students in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). The study involved two experimental extracurricular classes and consisted of 11 sessions during the regular academic term. Having analyzed the writing tasks produced by the students’ performance on pre-test and post-test, the researcher found that the students of both groups significantly enhanced their writing performance, representing an increase in a number of indices of CAF measures following the intervention. More specifically, the results of a paired-samples t-test confirmed that the students in the dictogloss group showed significant improvement in six indices of CAF measure, and the students in the debate group displayed significant improvement in seven indices of CAF measures. Moreover, the results of ANCOVA confirmed that the debate group improved more than the dictogloss group in terms of CAF measures. The results of the interviews with the students regarding the role of task-based collaborative output activities in their written performance yielded several commonalities, which were coded into 11 codes for dictogloss and 16 codes for debating, taking inter-coder reliability and agreement into account. In the end, the study offers some practical implications for L2 learners and teachers.

The widespread phenomenon of ‘retranslation’ that has become prevalent in the world refers to subsequent translations of a text or part of a text, carried out after the initial translation that introduced this text to the ‘same’ target language. Translation Studies scholars have strived to formulate hypotheses for re-translation. In 1990, Berman put forward the Retranslation Hypothesis in which he hypothesized that the earlier re-translations of a work depart from the source language and are more in line with the target language and culture over time. This hypothesis, in some cases, has been confirmed or partially confirmed, and in some others, disapproved. Thus, to confirm or reject the Retranslation Hypothesis more significantly, and push it forward to theorization, it must be (re)examined in different languages. Therefore, this study aimed to revisit the hypothesis by examining the Persian re-translations of the novel The Little Prince. The results of the study were largely in line with the hypothesis and proved that earlier translations follow more closely the norms of target language and culture, and later ones are closer to the source text and culture. The study ultimately serves as another piece of the puzzle for the Retranslation Hypothesis to approach a theory.

In his political novel, Autumn , Ali Smith has implicitly integrated family life with political matrices of British-European relations. In this study, Autumn was investigated in light of Kenneth Burke's notions of identification, substance, symbolism, and imagination known as rhetoric of motives. Identification refers to identifying with characters having some components or substances in common. Rhetoric of motives refers to the application of terms with persuasive function that move people into action. The themes of Ali Smith's Autumn are in congruity with Kenneth Burke’s theoretical ideas represented as theme of love to explain illogical coupling of a young woman and an old man that recalls England and Europe/EU interconnection and mismatching relations. This study explored how the rhetoric and dialect of Smith that have symbolic meanings and functions is motivating through identification with characters. Burke believes that through rhetoric of motives and grammar of motives it is possible to create protagonists that people can easily identify with to persuade them into action based on their intended political views. Through rhetoric of motives by the seasonal novel via identification, symbolism, and imagination, Smith indirectly portrays the political event of Brexit (British Exit) and its consequences in British society.

The well-established affiliation of metadiscourse research tradition to the philosophy of ESP raises some inevitable expectations on how much and how well the concept has been geared to meet the practical necessities of academic writing pedagogy. In light of such an expectation, a corpus of 35 academic writing coursebooks published during the last three decades was evaluated in terms of the possible realizations of key resources of interaction in pedagogical tasks. Due to its theoretical rigor and analytically operationalized nature, Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2005a) was taken as the guiding framework for the current evaluation. The quantitative findings emerging from the analysis of the corpus did not sound sufficiently promising, suggesting that those theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e., the 55 categories emerging from the evaluation of the corpus) suggest that the rigorous tradition of research in metadiscourse has contributed to the effective operationalization of the concept for pedagogical objectives. It has been argued that through the effective introduction of the concept of metadiscourse into pedagogical designs and its appropriate operationalization, novice participants of academic/scientific discourse communities would be enabled to redefine the nature of academic communication and get rid of a large number of misconceptions which have become fossilized through long years of the dominance of positivistic thinking.

This study was an attempt to examine the effect of using comic strips on improving grammar recognition and performance among Iranian young EFL learners. To this end, one experimental and one control groups were formed, each having 45 preintermediate participants chosen via convenience sampling. The researcher-made pretests of grammar and speaking assured the researchers that the participants did not know the grammatical points targeted in this study. In continuation, the experimental group received grammar instruction with the aid of comic strips, and the control group was taught the same grammar points through conventional methods of grammar teaching. After 16 sessions, both groups sat for a researcher-made grammar posttest and speaking test. Also, an interview was conducted to evaluate the extent to which the treatment for the experimental group and conventional instruction for the control group were effective. Data collected from the groups were, then, submitted for data analysis including ANOVA and t test. Results indicated that the implementation of comic strips could have a positive effect on grammatical competence and performance.

Cette contribution porte sur l’enseignement/apprentissage du français langue étrangère (FLE) défini en termes de « compétences » et s’inscrivant dans une logique actionnelle. L’absence d’une méthodologie d’enseignement particulière dans le Cadre Européen Commun de Référence pour les Langues (CECRL) nous laisse mettre en avant que la compétence à communiquer langagièrement est inhérente à la maîtrise de genres de discours. Nous allons d’abord démontrer comment les genres de discours peuvent servir d’orientation pratique pour la mise en œuvre de la perspective actionnelle en classe de FLE pour ensuite aborder la manière de transposer les genres de discours en classe de langue. Enfin, nous allons proposer une séquence didactique portant sur le genre du reportage.

Recently translation researchers have endeavored to adopt new directions in the current translation quality assessment (TQA) approaches. To this end, they made them more congruent with the desired requirements of a translator’s competence, especially considering the latest paradigm shifts, including ideological skewing and localization (Tiselius & Hild, 2017). Thus, such frameworks as Angelelli’s (2009) definition of translation competence (TC), as the study’s theoretical framework, need to be improved. An attempt was made in this study to design a rubric based on the proposed TQA model representing the TC construct with its comprehensive sub-components and finally, to test its applicability to the Persian translation of The Catcher in the Rye . The assessment procedure through which the obtained results were textually analyzed based on the proposed rubric specifically for each sub-component, revealed the inadequacy of the translation quality on the whole and the underlying implications of the rubric’s applicability to other translation products.                                                                                                                                                                   

The present study aimed to analyze the postmodern features of Slaughterhouse-Five , authored by Kurt Vonnegut, and its two Persian translations by Bahrami and Abbasi. To this end, Lewis’s classification of postmodern features (2011) and Parham’s model (2015) were employed. The features investigated in this study were temporal disorder, fragmentation, vicious circles, paranoia, reader involvement, polyvocality, pastiche, and intertextuality. The results indicated that most postmodern features were preserved in both translations. However, the absence of several fragmentations and intertextuality features in Persian translations can imply the translators' unawareness of the significance of translating these features. To translate these features into the target text, translators should be aware of their impacts on the text, content, and audience. To translate postmodern features more precisely, it is suggested that postmodern features be taken into consideration by literary translators and translator trainers. The findings of this research can have implications for literary translators, and literary translation classrooms.