درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study investigates the implantation of political science terminology approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL) in the Hamshahri corpus made up of news text from Hamshahri newspaper and their acceptability among MA students of English translation studies (ETS), English literature (EL), and Political science (PS). To conduct this research the frequencies of the political terms approved by the APLL with their competing terms were compiled from the corpus. For analyzing another group of terms without competing terms, 90 MA students were purposively selected from the abovementioned majors. Accordingly, a 60-item 5-point Likert Scale questionnaire (including 60 political terms) along with an open-ended question were administered. The implantation coefficients (IC) of the first group of the terms with competing terms indicate that the factors such as conciseness and derivative capabilities result in higher IC. The descriptive results indicated that around two third of the ETS and EL students agree with the APLL-approved political science terms, while less than half of the PS students accept these neologisms. Moreover, the Chi-Square test (value of 92.000, p= 0.000 < 0.05) revealed that there is a correlation between the level of agreement and the major. In addition, Cramer’s V test result with the value of 0.092 indicated a weak correlation between the academic major and the attitude. Finally, analysis of the open-ended question showed that conciseness, transparency, morphological well-formedness, and familiarity with neologisms were the main reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with them.

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.

The present study examined whether the advantage of females on L2 vocabulary recall and acquisition is partly as a result of estrogen secretion or not. In this regard, through volunteer and convenience sampling 15 intermediate EFL female participants aged between 23-31 were selected from the subject pool of 55 participants. The participants were studying at Iranian Language Center located in Bandar-e Anzali, Iran. To ensure the homogeneity among the participants, Babel English Placement test was used. In the course of study, the participants were taught two series of 42 lexical items in each phase of menstrual cycles (i.e., follicular and luteal). The treatment period was held six sessions at each phase. Each session took 30 minutes. To compare the performance of the participants, immediately after the sixth session, a piloted teacher-made vocabulary recall test was administered at each phase. Finally, the mean scores of participants' performance in the two phases were contrasted through a paired samples t test. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the participants' recall scores in the follicular and luteal phases. Moreover, to investigate the impact of estrogen secretion on participants' L2 vocabulary acquisition, two months after the treatment, the participants took a piloted teacher-made vocabulary acquisition test at each phase of menstrual cycle. The results of paired samples t test indicated a significant difference between the participants' vocabulary acquisition scores in the two phases.

Research articles have received a wide interest in discourse studies particularly in genre analysis over the last few decades. A vast number of studies have been centered on identifying the organizational patterns of research articles in various fields. While Introduction section has enjoyed a lot of attention, very few studies have focused on rhetorical structure of qualitative and quantitative research articles. This genre-based investigation reports on a study of the Introduction sections of 15 qualitative and 15 quantitative research articles in Applied Linguistics from five high impact journals published from 2008-2012. Based on Swales’ (2004) move structure model, this study focuses on Move 3 (introducing the present work) and examines how qualitative and quantitative research article writers introduce their work in Introduction section. The analysis revealed that there were similarities in the overall presence and use of steps in both groups, some differences in the overall presence and frequency of directive determinants were obvious which could be attributed to the different nature of these research designs.

Oral Communication Strategies are conscious techniques that L2 interlocutors employ to overcome the communication breakdowns in the target language. Hence, they can help to promote the effectiveness of communication ability. However, it must be noted that many variables can influence the use of these strategies. The present study, therefore, aimed to investigate the role of language proficiency and cultural background variables on the use of oral communication strategies. After piloting the Oral Communication Strategy Inventory and Cultural Milieu and examining the reliability analysis as well as the construct validity, the questionnaires were administered to 320 participants majoring in the English language at B.A and M.A levels. Then, SPSS 18.0 computer program was used to analyze the collected data. Next, an interview was held to gain more information on the use of strategies by the Iranian EFL learners. The results of this inquiry revealed that there is no significant difference between learners at different language proficiency levels in terms of oral communication strategies use, while there is a significant difference between different cultural backgrounds in the use of OCSs. The findings of this research can be useful for developing the use of oral communication strategies among EFL learners, particularly with Persian and Turkish cultural backgrounds.

Motivation for learning a new language is both self and time-oriented. The language learner’s motivation experiences gradual fluctuation over time and the view of oneself is different on each timescale of the study. Interaction among different timescales throughout the Second Language Development (SLD) is a novel area of investigation (de Bot, 2015). In order to probe this interactive nature, the present study tried to examine the motivational dynamics of a group of language learners in longer timescales composed of a number of tasks performed on shorter timescales. To this end, a group of university students were surveyed at the onset, while performing tasks and at the end of the course to better picture the interplay of different motivational themes over time. The results revealed different manifestations of components of L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) over different timescales of the study. Apart from this evolutionary manifestation of L2MSS components, ANNOVA results revealed significant difference between scores of each individual component among all three timescales. In sum, results of the study confirmed temporal and visionary variation in participants’ motivation. Finally, some implications were driven from the findings of the study.

The present study aimed toassess the target and present reading comprehension needs and abilities of Iranian medical students with different levels of Englishlanguage proficiency. A total of 283 medical students and 23 ESP instructors were chosen through cluster sampling. The data collection instruments included the Persian version of Atai and Nazari’s (2011) needs analysis questionnaire and a 40-item language proficiency test. The obtained results indicatedthat ‘general vocabulary’and ‘medical terminology’were considered ‘important’ in facilitating the comprehension of medical texts. In addition, the findings revealed that medical students need to improve all reading sub-skills. Furthermore, the respondents’ perceptions were significantly different with regard to students’ target needs and present abilities in reading comprehension. Finally, there was no statistically significant difference in students’ target and present needs and abilities across different levels of language proficiency. The findings have potentialimplications for the improvement of medical EAP courses.