درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Despite widespread studies on language assessment literacy (LAL), there are still many unexplored areas about LAL (Gan & Lam, 2022). One of these areas is identifying various aspects of LAL regarding different language skills and scrutinizing the English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ involvement with these aspects. Accordingly, this study attempted to (a) explore Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions, preferences, and difficulties of oral/aural skills LAL and (b) develop a scale to measure these teachers’ oral/aural skills LAL. The study was carried out in two phases. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 Iranian EFL teachers to identify their perceptions, preferences, and difficulties of oral/aural skills LAL. Second, the researchers developed a questionnaire based on a review of the literature on assessing oral/aural skills and the results of interviews. The questionnaire was reviewed by experts, revised accordingly, and administered to 150 Iranian EFL teachers who were selected through convenience sampling. The reliability of the questionnaire and its construct validity were then checked. The results of both phases of the study were compatible. The outcomes showed that almost all teachers represented dissatisfaction about their oral/aural skills LAL and they were enthusiastic to participate in assessment training courses. Furthermore, it was found that due to their lack of knowledge about oral/aural skills assessment, traditional techniques of assessment were widely used by Iranian EFL teachers.

Teachers, as the center of the class, can make positive changes in their students' lives; they should be equipped with skills that will allow them to do their jobs effectively. The inclusion of productive immunity (i.e., the procedures that instructors go through to devise protective mechanisms against the effects of undesirable disruptions that might potentially endanger their desire to instruct) as one of these skills gives educators the capability to analyze and immunize their own performance. In light of this significance, it is of the utmost importance to reveal teacher productive immunity and its correlates, particularly in EFL (English as a foreign language) contexts. Regardless, there is a dearth of studies on the possible interplay among teacher immunity, professional identity, anger, grit tendencies, and psychological well-being in Iranian EFL settings. Therefore, the present study aimed to ascertain whether there was a statistically significant connection between the professional identity, anger, grit tendencies, and psychological well-being of Iranian EFL instructors and their immunity. A total number of 394 EFL teachers teaching at public schools (Khorasan Razavi and Khuzestan, Iran) took part in this analysis. The Language Teacher Immunity Instrument (LTII), The Teacher's Professional Identity Scale (TPIS), the L2-teacher Grit Scale (L2TGS), The Teacher Anger Scale (TAS), and The Psychological Well-Being at Work (PWBW) were administered electronically to respondents. The predictive power of teacher immunity was found in data analysis via Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The findings stress the need of including reflective practices, emotional control strategies, and immune system strengthening in teacher preparation programs.

Translating taboo words is one of the challenging tasks that translators face during subtitling and dubbing movies. The translation of taboo words should be handled carefully since they may violate the norms of the target society. In this regard, the translators use different strategies to find an equivalent in the target language. This study tried to identify the strategies used by Iranian translators in dubbing and subtitling the F*k words as taboos in American English-drama crime television series based on Davoodi’s (2009) model. Thus, this was a corpus-based study that has a quantitative method with a descriptive comparative approach. The corpus of this study was limited to F*k words found in the TV series called Big Little Lies season one. This TV series was selected as the corpus of this research because this series movie was incredibly more suggestive and popular in recent decades and targeted a wide range of audiences and adults. Thus, 80 F*k words were identified for further analysis based on Sharifi and Darchinian's (2009) model. Descriptive statistics were used to determine frequencies and percentages of the applied strategies in the Persian subtitled and dubbed of the F*k words. The findings showed that Substitution, and Euphemism were the first and second used strategies by Iranian translators for dubbing and subtitling the F*k words, respectively. Additionally, the results of the Chi-square test revealed that there was not a significant difference between Iranian translators’ strategies for subtitling and dubbing F*k words. The results of the present study can be beneficial for Iranian subtitlers, dubbers, and translation students in the subtitling and dubbing of F*k words as taboos in crime drama movies from English into Persian.

This study employed the Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) to investigate the effect of cross-linguistic influence (CLI), target language proficiency as well as their interaction in the acquisition of L3 English past perfect, present progressive, and present perfect tenses by L1 Kirundi-L2 French bilinguals. In that perspective, 90 learners including 30 L1 Kirundi-L2 English bilinguals, 30 L1 French-L2 English bilinguals, and 30 L1 Kirundi-L2 French-L3 English trilinguals completed an Oxford Quick Placement Test, a Background Information Questionnaire, and a Grammaticality Judgment Task. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, multivariate analysis of variance, post hoc comparisons, and independent sample tests. Results revealed that neither Kirundi nor French exerted an exclusive influence in the L3 past perfect and present progressive tenses. However, concerning the L3 present perfect, the results indicated a significantly facilitative effect from L2 French.  The results showed also a significant effect of target language proficiency: while lower-proficiency learners experienced a relatively negative influence from previous languages, higher-proficiency learners utilized their complex multicompetence to overcome difficulties linked to structural differences. Besides structural similarity reported in the already existing L3A studies, the findings herein point to L3 learners’ complex multicompetence as a new factor capable of driving CLI in the LPM framework.

This study investigates the pragmastylistic features employed in English and Arabic religious texts, with a specific focus on the concept of rewarding. Drawing on Narmin Abbas Lutfi Baqqal's PhD dissertation, the research examines the pragmatic and stylistic characteristics of rewarding in Biblical and Prophetic Hadith texts. The study addresses two primary research questions: (1) What are the pragmastylistic features used in English and Arabic religious texts to convey rewarding? (2) Which pragmatic and stylistic features are more prevalent in these texts? By analyzing 20 Biblical verses and 20 Prophetic Hadiths, the paper identifies the linguistic and rhetorical devices used to express rewarding, highlighting both similarities and differences between the two languages. The findings reveal that both texts employ declarative and imperative speech acts, deixis, and figurative language, but with distinct stylistic preferences. This study contributes to the fields of pragmatics, stylistics, and religious discourse analysis, offering insights into how language shapes religious messages across different cultural and linguistic contexts.

The current quasi-experimental research aimed at exploring the influence of Lexically-Based Language Teaching (LBLT) on task response and coherence and cohesion aspects of the writing proficiency of Iranian university EFL learners. The research sample of the study included sixty male and female university students (N = 60) attending two university classes. They were selected by using a convenient sampling procedure and were assigned to experimental and control groups. To ascertain the groups' homogeneity at the beginning of the study, the researchers gave two groups the Key English Test (KET). Prior to starting treatment, two groups took the pretest writing task. While the participants comprising the experimental group were instructed consistent with the lexical approach's underlying practices and activities, those constituting the control group were instructed based on conventional techniques applied to present essay writing in universities. At the end of the experiment, the posttest writing, identical to the pretest, was given to both groups. To compare the two groups' mean scores with respect to coherence and cohesion and task response aspects of post-test writing, One-way Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) and independent T-test were drawn upon. Version 20 th of the SPSS software was applied for this end. The attained results were indicative of a significantly positive influence of the lexically-based language teaching on both coherence and cohesion and task response aspects of writing proficiency. However, the attained improvement was greater in the task response aspect. The findings suggest some implications for English language teachers and university instructors.

Several languages displayed in Language Landscape (LL) in tourism cities are foremost to be explored since they can depict the battle and position of each language. As China has a tight cooperation with Indonesia and other countries, Mandarin has begun to be utilized in the public sphere, such as in the LL. Thus, this present study intends to analyze the use and position of Mandarin, the underlying reasons for using Mandarin, society’s perspective, and its implication. The qualitative method was applied in which all data were explained descriptively by engaging documentation and a questionnaire for data collection. The former was done through the 831 signs displayed in tourism cities in East Java (27 Mandarin LL involved). The latter was conducted through the 127 responses from various backgrounds: old and younger generations. The results indicate that (1) Mandarin LL with top-down signs get a higher percentage than bottom-up signs in which Mandarin is in the fourth position, (2) the utilization of Mandarin in LL is to reveal their identity of the LL owner, (3) it is not vital to display Mandarin in LL due to the lack knowledge of it. Even if societies have negative perceptions of Mandarin, they confess that Mandarin is extensively spread due to its fast growth in any sector. Consequently, this study is crucial to give a wake-up call to the government and speakers of indigenous languages that they should take essential action to preserve the position of local-ethnic languages in LL.

The purpose of this study was twofold: to determine pre-university talented students’ perceptions, strategy use, and challenges of reading comprehension section of the university entrance exam and to investigate the difference between low and high-achieving talented readers in strategy use and attitudes to reading. The participants were 121 EFL students at pre-university centers for talented students in Borujen, Iran. The instruments were three questionnaires on reading strategy, reading attitude, and reading difficulty followed by five open-ended questions. The results revealed that talented students used metacognitive strategies more than affective and cognitive strategies; most talented readers had positive attitude to reading; and their most frequent challenges were insufficient vocabulary knowledge, inability to adapt their speed to allotted time, decentralization, and ineffective study. The results of backward stepwise binary logistic regression also indicated that high and low achieving talented readers were different in retrieval and anxiety-coping strategy use and reading self-efficacy. The findings have implications for teachers of talented students to consider their diversities and orient their teaching toward individual characteristics through providing instructional varieties.

The study scrutinized the probable significant relationship between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Translation Competence (TC) in the Iranian students of Translation Studies. The first stage of the study followed a conventional statistical approach, in which the significant relationship between the variables as well as the predicting role of emotional intelligence for translation competence of the participants was examined through Pearson correlation and linear regression analyses. Two questionnaires of emotional competence, derived from Bar-On (1997), and translation competence, derived from Alavi and Ghaemi (2013), were utilized in the study. The findings of the initial phase revealed the significant relationship between the participants’ emotional intelligence and translation competence. In the second stage, modeling approach was employed to probe the relation between emotional intelligence and translation competence through structural equation modeling, using LISREL. The results demonstrated a significant relationship between EI and TC, justifying the results of the first non-modeling stage. The findings are of significance as the association between translation competence and emotional intelligence has been scarcely explored. Moreover, the relation between two variables was deeply explored through using non-modeling as well as modeling approach, adding the novelty of research. The results reflected that emotional intelligence plays a significant role in predicting the language learners’ translation competence. The results have some implications for language teaching. Language teachers can promote language learners’ emotional intelligence to reach successful learning outcomes. Through using useful techniques such as discussion, group-work activities, answering questionnaires, the learners' emotional intelligence can be significantly improved, leading to effective translation achievement.

Pinpointing the role of language, emotion, and culture in intercultural interactions as the three basic needs of intercultural interactions is one of the most important problems in the intercultural field. Therefore, this paper probed the role of language, emotion, and culture simultaneously in intercultural communication in Iran. By using convenience sampling, one hundred Iranian language teachers were chosen and their language proficiency and ICC levels were specified by using Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) questionnaire. Then, the researchers used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to classify ICC questions under language, emotion, and culture categories.  After classifying the questions, the researchers used confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), standard solution coefficient, standard path coefficient, T value, and Sobel formula to analyze the collected data from the ICC questionnaire based on participants' answers. The results revealed that language, culture, and emotion were the main macro-elements of intercultural communication. Also, it was shown that language was the most important need and macro-element in intercultural communication and then the second and third place went to culture and emotion respectively.  It was found that emotion acted as a mediator variable between language and culture and there was a relationship among language, culture, and emotion, too. This study was of high importance for language teachers, curriculum designers, textbook writers, intercultural experts, and cultural psychologists

Reading aloud is recommended as a simple technique to measure speaking ability (Hughes & Hughes, 2020; Madsen, 1983). Reading aloud is currently used in the Pearson Test of English and a couple of other international English as a second language proficiency tests. Due to the simplicity of the technique, it can be used in conjunction with other techniques to measure foreign and second language learners’ speaking ability. One issue in reading aloud as a testing technique is its psychometric modelling. Because of the peculiar structure of reading aloud tasks, analysing them with item response theory models is not straightforward. In this study, the Rasch partial credit model (PCM) is suggested and used to score examinees’ reading aloud scores. The performances of 196 foreign language learners on five reading aloud passages were analysed with the PCM. Findings showed that the data fit the RPCM well and the scores are highly reliable. Implications of the study for psychometric evaluation of reading aloud or oral reading fluency are discussed.

Enhancing one's proficiency in English grammar represents a foremost objective for individuals who are learning a foreign language. In EFL contexts, it is commonly observed that children tend to acquire knowledge of grammar rules incidentally, whereas adults usually require formal instruction to attain a more advanced level of proficiency. Numerous contemporary approaches have undergone substantial investigation, yet comparatively limited emphasis has been placed on the acquisition of grammar learning strategies. This article investigates the perspectives of learners with regards to the utilization of grammatical learning strategies during the duration of an English language course. This research centers on the cognitive and affective viewpoints of individuals participating in a grammar study group. The objective of the research is to investigate the utilization of specific strategies by learners for the acquisition of varied grammar structures. Novel methodologies and empirical investigations have the potential to enhance the comprehension of the educational process and self-regulation. The aforementioned holds the possibility of significant repercussions for individuals engaged in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning process, educators facilitating such learning, and professionals responsible for designing EFL curricula.