درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This paper investigates a special type of recurrent expressions, lexical bundles, defined as a sequence of three or more words that co-occur frequently in a particular register (Biber et al., 1999). Considering the importance of this group of multi-word sequences in academic prose, this study explores the forms and syntactic structures of three- and four-word bundles in English abstracts written by Iranian scholars in three disciplines; business studies, history, and linguistics. Applying a frequency-based approach suggested by Biber et al. (1999), the data were drawn from a corpus consisting of 660 English abstracts of research articles published by various leading academic journals. As regards syntactic structure, the structural characteristics of the lexical bundles were first explored through careful analysis and then classified using a modified version of Biber et al.’s (1999) structural framework. The study also compares the forms, frequencies, and structures of the lexical bundles in the corpus to those found in Hyland’s (2004) research article corpus. This comparison shows that not only are there relatively large differences between the two corpora in the forms and frequencies of bundles employed, but also there are some discrepancies in terms of distribution of the different structural types and tokens.

The combination of implicit meaning-focused input and explicit instruction has been suggested by recent research as very effective for learning L2 vocabulary; however, the time sequence for such juxtaposition has not been adequately examined through empirical studies. Therefore, this study sought to find the optimal time for combining explicit and implicit L2 vocabulary instruction using an explanatory mixed-method design. A convenience sample of 62 upper-intermediate EFL learners from three intact classes participated in this study. The Test of Academic Word List (Version A) that assesses Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) was administered as a pertest. The reading book, Focus on Vocabulary 2, that has been developed based on the AWL was used for giving meaning-forced input. The target words were explicitly pre-taught in Class A (n=22), taught concurrent with encountering them in the reading text in Class B (n=20), and post-taught in Class C (n=22). Version B of the AWL Test was used as the posttest and after a 14-day retention interval (RI) as the delayed posttest. Then, 25% of the learners were orally interviewed about their attitudes toward the treatment they received. Quantitative data analysis using one-way ANCOVA revealed that explicit teaching during the reading was the optimal time and could help learners significantly do better on the immediate and delayed post-tests followed by pre-teaching. Qualitative analysis also verified the obtained quantitative results. The findings of this study imply that explicit vocabulary teaching during the reading should be practiced by EFL teachers/learners for fostering vocabulary development.

This study reports on research article (RA) authors’ definitional understanding and sociocultural perceptions of intertextuality and plagiarism in academic writing. To meet this end, a questionnaire, consisting of three sections, was constructed and emailed to Iranian RA authors who have published in leading international and local applied linguistics journals. The findings of the first two sections suggest that authors recognized the crucial role intertextuality plays in RAs; however, they had a flimsy understanding of the concept and its cultural bearings. On the other hand, unacceptable, as most of these respondents may find it, plagiarism was seen as an unavoidable part of academic research at least in initial steps of academic writing. This was shown to be mainly the function of the authors’ sociocultural perceptions of plagiarism. The third section of the questionnaire addressed the authors’ departure from plagiarism and gradual proximization to intertextuality. The findings imply that plagiarism, intertextuality and their concomitant sociocultural perceptions ought to be discussed, re-examined, and put to trial in local contexts

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.

Although most researchers have recently considered the role of test-taking strategies as one of the most vital factors in test taking process, it has been ignored by most EFL teachers in educational and academic settings including Iran. Because of the importance of test-taking strategies in EFL learners’ performance in tests, this research was set out to examine what strategies Iranian EFL test takers employed in reading comprehension tests. Furthermore, the present paper aimed at finding any possible relationship between test-taking strategies and test takers’ performance on reading comprehension tests. Discovering the best predictors of EFL reading test performance among several categories of test-taking strategies was also investigated. To this end, 135 EFL students were chosen based on their availability. All of the students were female, majoring in different fields of study. Three kinds of materials including multiple-choice reading comprehension tests, a questionnaire, and interviews were utilized to investigate the research questions. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, Pearson Product Correlation, and stepwise regression. The results showed a significant, positive, but low correlation between the students’ total reading score and planning and also monitoring strategies. Furthermore, planning strategy proved to be a predictor of English reading comprehension test.

Despite the abundance of research on ELT teachers, little is known about teacher language awareness (TLA) with focus on its impact on pedagogical practice in the EFL context. To fill this gap, an in-depth study was conducted to examine the procedural dimension of TLA among eight EFL teachers with different teaching experiences (novice versus experienced) related to teaching grammar at Iranian language institutes. Data were collected through non-participant classroom observations and stimulated recall interviews (of at least 7 lessons per teacher) from eight EFL teachers at three private language institutes in Iran. The findings revealed the experienced teachers’ application of TLA in their pedagogical practices in comparison to their novice counterparts. Most importantly, the application of TLA in classrooms was affected by factors, such as context, time constraints, learners’ emotions, and previous experiences as learners and teachers. This study may expand the current understanding of TLA and its impact on grammar teaching and have implications for language teacher education and development.

With the advent of globalization, especially in its third phase (see Robertson, 2003), global relations of domination have undermined abuse of power at national and local levels (Fairclough, 2001). Global ELT textbooks, as corollaries of the globalization process, are not immune to the embedment of discriminatory discourses, as various studies have shown (see for example, Gray, 2010, 2012; Babaii and Sheikhi, 2017). On the other hand, a social actor analysis of verbal and visual discourse will contribute significantly to the disclosure of discriminatory discourses (see van Leeuwen, 2008; Hart, 2014). The current study, therefore, reduces the gap in research on ideology of ELT materials by probing into the nursery rhymes in children and young-adult ELT textbooks. Visual representation of social actors in the images accompanying nursery rhymes in Magic Time, English Time, Let's Go and Family and Friends were, thus, examined, using van Leeuwen's (2008) framework. Regarding results, the most frequent exclusionary discourses in the corpus included religion, nationality, race, and gender respectively. Significantly, it was found that monochromatic depiction of social actors constituted a strategy for the discursive construction of otherness in Family and Friends. Additionally, a process, called whitenization of blacks in the terminology of the current study, was found to be at work in which blacks were depicted as having the facial features of whites.

Translation seems a spoon feeding activity if it is taken mere transference of meaning from one language to another i.e. source language to target language. A good translation is usually considered, a translation in which merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another as to be distinctly apprehended by the native speaker of the country to which that language belongs as it is by those who speak the language of the original work. This vendetta leads to the presupposition that there may be other types of translations i.e. a bad translation, an average translation, or the best translation. There is another controversy of free (sense) and literal translation (sense & style). Sometimes it is taken as word for word translation and sometimes as sense for sense translation. But the problem arises when the cultural, poetical, linguistic, stylistic, and technological issues are involved in translation. To find out its inherent impossibility, the participants were given one quotation to translate it from Urdu to English. It is concluded that although the quotation which was given for translation was quite simple and did not have cultural and equivalence problems to a great degree, yet the varied responses with respect to structure, understanding, punctuation, and expression show that it was not an easy task

<span>The present study aimed to explore how nominalization is manifested in a sample of Physics and Applied Linguistics research articles (RAs), representing hard and soft sciences respectively. To this end, 60 RAs from discipline-related professional journals were randomly selected and analyzed in light of Halliday and Matthiessen’s (1999) taxonomy of nominalization. Comparing the normalized frequencies indicated that articles in Applied Linguistics differ significantly from their counterparts in Physics as they include more nominalized expressions. Moreover, the analysis brought out the findings that deployment of nominalization Type Two is significantly different from the other three types of nominalization in each discipline. Subsequently, the obtained expressions were put into their context of use in order to extract the most prevalent patterns of nominalization in the RAs. The investigation into the embedded patterns introduced 15 common patterns for Physics and Applied Linguistics RAs. Chi-square analyses suggested statistically significant differences in using only four patterns. Finally, implications accrue to the findings in reference to academic writing teachers and course designers.</span>

The aim of this study is to identify the influence of morphological analysis strategy employed by Palestinian 10th grade-female students in guessing and manipulating complex words in addition to using these words in meaningful sentences. This study involved 75 female students from Idna Secondary School for Girls at Hebron governorate. The sample of the study was assigned to control group (37 students) and experimental group (38 students) from two different sections. To achieve the aims of the study, morphological structure test based on students’ textbook has been given to both groups in form of pretest/posttest. Meanwhile, the experimental group has received treatments on morphological analysis strategy prior to the post-test, whereas the control group hasn’t received any treatment except for the traditional way of teaching for the same two units. Results showed that the experimental group has outperformed the control group as they scored higher grades. They also scored better results in identifying the syntactic category of English words depending used in context.

The article deals with Belarusian and English deictic markers and their role in verbal communication of native speakers in line with the pragmatic approach to language as a theory of speech influence for achieving communicators’ goals. Being a universal lingua-pragmatic category, deixis not only forms the propositional frame of an utterance with the indication to the place, time and communicators, but also marks their goals in communication as a strategic process aimed at achieving participants’ aims (macro-intentions) through the strategies of confrontation, negative politeness, and cooperation. The strategy is implemented through one or a number of tactics, which possess a dynamic character and make the strategy flexible. Speech tactics are predetermined by local aims (micro-intentions), and represent one of the tasks carried out consistently within a certain strategic line.

For the first time, this study combined models and principles of authentic assessment from two parallel fields of applied linguistics as well as general education to investigate the authenticity of the TOEFL iBT speaking module. The study consisted of two major parts, namely task analysis and task survey. Utilizing Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) definition of authenticity, the task analysis examined the degree of the correspondence between the characteristics of the speaking module tasks in the TOEFL iBT test and those of target language use (TLU) tasks. In the task survey, a Likert Scale questionnaire of authenticity was developed by the researcher based on Herrington and Herrington’s (1998; 2006) four criteria of authentic assessment. The questionnaire was sent through email to 120 subjects who had already taken the test in order to elicit their attitudes towards the degree of the authenticity of the speaking section tasks. The results of the task analysis revealed a limited correspondence between the characteristics of the test tasks and those of the TLU tasks. However, the results of the task survey indicated that except for one factor (indicators), most of the test takers had a positive view toward the authenticity of the speaking module tasks in terms of the three other factors (context, student factor, task factor).

This study attempted to investigate the relationship among learning strategy, autonomy and language proficiency of Chinese university EFL students. To achieve this objective, purposive sampling and cluster sampling methods were used to select 422 non-English major students as participants in three universities, Henan province, China. Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) and Xu’s (2004) Learner Autonomy Questionnaire (LAQ) were adopted to investigate the participants’ strategy use and learner autonomy, respectively. The participants’ language proficiency was measured by their CET-4 scores. Results of the Pearson correlation analysis indicated that there existed interrelationships among the three variables: learning strategy and learner autonomy were significantly and positively correlated with each other, and both of them had significant positive relationships with language proficiency. Multiple Regressions Analysis results suggested that learner autonomy could best predict the variance in language proficiency. Pedagogical suggestions are offered to English language teachers in assisting their students with regards to the improvement of language proficiency.

The present study aimed at investigating the effect of critical thinking (CT) versus brainstorming (BS) as pre-writing stage activities on English as a foreign language (EFL) pre-intermediate learners’ expository writing. To achieve this aim, 100 pre-intermediate level participants studying at Naft Language Center in Ahvaz were selected based on convenience sampling method. They took part in Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) and 60 of them were assigned into three equal homogeneous groups; two experimental groups of CT and BS compared to one control group (CO). They received three different kinds of treatments lasting 13 sessions of 90 minutes. The CT group received exercises on major CT skills (e.g., inferencing, recognition, deduction) and BS group go through think, pair and share steps to outline the writing tasks. Prior to the main study, students wrote a 150-word expository writing about one of the topics chosen from their textbooks as a pre-test. Finally, all groups were asked to write another 150-word expository writing as a post-test after the implementation of the proposed treatment. The results indicated that both CT and BS as pre-writing stage activities led to the enhancement of the participants’ expository writing performance.