درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study explored the impact of etymological elaboration and captioned video on the development of English idiomatic expressions among Iraqi EFL learners. Recognizing the significance of idioms in language mastery, the research aimed to identify effective teaching strategies that enhance learners' comprehension and usage of idiomatic expressions. A sample of 70 advanced female learners, aged 19 to 26, was randomly assigned to three groups: an etymological elaboration group, a captioned video group, and a control group. The study employed a pre-test and post-test design to measure idiom familiarity before and after a 10-session treatment program. Results indicated that both etymological elaboration and captioned videos significantly improved idiom learning, with etymological elaboration proving to be the most effective method. The findings highlight the importance of integrating cognitive and multimedia strategies in EFL instruction to facilitate idiomatic expression acquisition. This study explored the impact of etymological elaboration and captioned video on the development of English idiomatic expressions among Iraqi EFL learners. Recognizing the significance of idioms in language mastery, the research aimed to identify effective teaching strategies that enhance learners' comprehension and usage of idiomatic expressions. A sample of 70 advanced female learners, aged 19 to 26, was randomly assigned to three groups: an etymological elaboration group, a captioned video group, and a control group.

This study examines the effectiveness of long-term formant frequency distributions (LTFDs), Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and their combined application in distinguishing Kurdish-Persian bilingual speakers. Speech samples were collected from 20 early male bilingual speakers who read the fable ' The North Wind and the Sun ' in Kurdish (Sorani dialect) and Persian. The Random Forest algorithm was employed to analyze the data. Feature importance for formant frequencies and MFCCs was evaluated using the mean decrease in accuracy metric. The results indicated that LTFD measures provided moderate accuracy in speaker differentiation, reflecting their capacity to capture vowel-related articulatory patterns. In contrast, MFCCs demonstrated superior performance, effectively encoding spectral and speaker-specific characteristics. When LTFDs and MFCCs were combined, system accuracy was slightly improved compared to using MFCCs alone. This marginal enhancement underscores the potential benefits of integrating LTFDs with MFCCs in forensic voice comparison, where even small gains can have significant practical implications. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of bilingual speaker variability and provide insights for optimizing speaker identification systems in bilingual contexts.

The current paper intends to exploit the Many Facet Rasch Model to investigate and compare the impact of situations (items) and raters on test takers' performance on the Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) and Discourse Self-Assessment Tests (DSAT). In this study, the participants were 110 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan in Iran. The students were asked to complete the WDCT and rate themselves on that test. Four raters scored the WDCT tests. According to the FACETS results, there were significant differences in students' performance between the two methods. The stable fit statistics and differing levels of difficulty measures for each test method indicated that each test had a unique way of differentiating the test taker's pragmatic ability. Based on the results, both DSAT and WDCT are acceptable measures for pragmatic ability; however, there are some fitness problems in DSAT. This shows the unpredictable pattern of ratings in the DSAT. It is recommended to have rater training to obtain more accurate results from the DSAT. Finally, the implications were discussed.

One of the key components for effective communication and promoting second/foreign language learners’ ability to produce meaningful performance is controlling their language anxiety. This study investigated the relationships among personality types, locus of control, and foreign language anxiety within the context of Iranian EFL learners. A non-experimental type based on a quantitative approach, the present study enjoyed a correlational design. Its participants were 317 Iranian EFL learners who all were undergraduate university students from both genders. The context of this study was the EFL face-to-face educational settings and the participants were from different fields of study at the university level in Iran. Data collection was conducted via three psychological questionnaires for measuring the variables. For data analysis, Pearson correlation and Regression analysis were used to specify the correlation between variables. To examine the mediation role of variables, Z Sobel and Bootstrapping tests were incorporated in the analysis. This study revealed significant relationships among participants’ personality types (extroversion and introversion), locus of control, and foreign language anxiety. The findings showed that there was a significant negative relationship between personality and locus of control and also a significant negative relationship between personality types and foreign language anxiety. Mediation analyses further illuminated the negative mediating role of the locus of control and the positive mediating role of the personality, shedding light on their nuanced dynamics. This study has implications for language educators, practitioners, and policymakers in terms of tailoring interventions to address individual differences and create supportive learning environments.

This study strived to specify and particularize Iranian medical field specialists and EFL teachers’ predominant and overriding textual interventions, which fall within the ambit of convenience editing. To this end, we required 20 field specialists and 20 EFL instructors to edit the unedited versions of 80 published medical research articles in a way that rendered them apt for publication in quality medical journals. We categorized the obtained data of the edited articles using an editing strategy framework that distinguished four editing micro-strategies and five macro-strategies. The findings revealed that medical specialists and EFL teachers’ micro-editing strategies outnumbered their macro-editing ones. Furthermore, there were significant differences between the editing micro-strategy uses of the above-mentioned groups of the participants. The results highlighted the need for a synergic collaboration between the medical field specialists and the EFL teachers to ameliorate medical articles’ formal, stylistic, and genre-related features and to expedite their publication process. 

The representation of future pre-configuration through policy-making processes has been an in-vogue area of study in the field of discourse analysis. Equally important is the reconstruction of future pre-configuration in the institutional translations of political text and talk. The objective of this study is to investigate the conceptualization of futurity in the preemptive policy-making in the speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader and their English institutional translations. The data for the present study comes from 20 speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader and their translations, spanning from 2015-2020, issued by the Office of the Supreme Leader. We employed semantic-syntactic analytical tools such as mood, modality, and aspect to study the conceptualization of futurity in the policy discourse. In conclusion, the findings of the study indicate that these reconstruction of futurity in the preemptive policy-making process in the English institutional translations are to a greater extent similar to the semantic-syntactic properties of the original texts. However, modalization and mood transformation are instances of differences between original and translated versions of texts. Besides, we argued that any instance of the occurrence of similarity or differences stems from on-line dialectic relationships between micro-pragmatic and macro-pragmatic factors

It is argued that teacher identity greatly influences teaching practices, teacher-student relationship, and professional development of teachers. In the current study, implicit and explicit professional identities of 117 pre-service and 127 in-service Iranian EFL teachers were explored in order to add to the growing literature on language teachers' professional identity. The participants were Iranian English teachers from Sistan and Balouchestan, Golestan, Qom, Khoozestan, and Tehran provinces, who were chosen via convenience sampling. Teacher Professional Identity Scale (TPIS) developed by Kao and Lin (2015) and Professional Identity Questionnaire (PIQ) by Abu-Alruz and Khasawneh (2013) were applied to measure the implicit and explicit professional identity of these teachers respectively. The participants responded to the questionnaires online. The results of t-test demonstrated that there is a significant difference between the average teachers' explicit and implicit professional identity indicators of these teachers. Besides, the average indices of explicit and implicit professional identity of in-service teachers were higher than the average indices of explicit and implicit professional identity of pre-service teachers. What is more, among indicators of implicit professional identity, instructional skills and knowledge and teacher's duties were the highest ones both in in-service group and in pre-service group. These results highlight the necessity of taking into consideration pre-service teachers' professional identity construction and development in teacher educational programs.

Despite some research on identity processing styles, there is a significant gap on identity processing styles in Iraqi EFL learners, a population with distinct sociocultural and educational backgrounds. This study aimed to address this gap by developing a model of identity processing styles tailored to Iraqi EFL learners. The participants were 30 conveniently selected Iraqi EFL learners, comprising 10 males and 20 females, who were already passing their General English course in different universities of Iraq. A semi-structured interview was conducted to collect the data about (the components of) identity processing styles. Utilizing a grounded theory approach, the gathered qualitative interview data was subjected to manual thematic analysis. According to the findings, the following major components were identified for identity processing styles from Iraqi EFL learners' viewpoints: Diffuse-Avoidant Style, Normative Style, and Informational Style, each consisting of some sub-components. The component Diffuse-Avoidant Style consisted of two sub-components including Positive Thinking and Negative Thinking. The sub-components of the component Normative Style were Religious Thinking, Personal Norms Thinking, and Social Norms Thinking. Finally, the component Informational Style was associated with two sub-components including Problem-Based Thinking and Reason-Based Thinking. The findings have some implications for Iraqi EFL teachers, learners, curriculum planners and teacher educators.