درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study aimed to investigate the effect of teaching discourse markers (DMs) on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ speaking achievement. In the first step, 60 homogeneous intermediate students out of 110 were chosen from a private English language institute and randomly divided into two equal groups, namely an experimental group and a control group. Then they were pretested through a researcher-made speaking test. During the treatment, the experimental group was taught DMs by conversations. Then, they found the DMs in transcriptions of conversations. Also, the researcher used a researcher-made booklet containing the instructional materials related to DMs to be taught to the learners. On the other hand, there was not any direct instruction to DMs to the students in the control group. They only narrated the assigned storybook, and performed conversations by role play. These posters were used based on the related topics of the learner’s textbooks. After the treatment which took 12 sessions, the researcher administered the modified version of the mentioned pre-test as the post-test to find out the effect of the treatment on the participants’ speaking achievement. When the data were collected, one-way ANCOVA was run to analyze them. The results showed that there was no significant difference between experimental and control group in the post-test. Indeed, the findings indicated that teaching discourse markers (DMs) did not have any effect on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ speaking achievement.

The present study investigated the educational objectives of the English literature curricula at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Iranian universities based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Using a detailed checklist based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy and the respective classifications, the educational objectives associated with knowledge ( factual, conceptual, procedural , and metacognitive ) and cognitive ( remember , understand , apply , analyze , evaluate , and create) dimensions were analyzed. The results of the content analysis revealed the dominance of the lower-order thinking skills in the undergraduate curriculum and the prevalence of the higher-order thinking skills in the graduate curriculum. The results showed that the most frequent objective in terms of the knowledge domain was understand in both curricula. Regarding the knowledge dimension, conceptual and procedural knowledge occurred most often at both curricula, confirming that acquiring the knowledge of concepts and the processes safeguards the commended quality for the curriculum designers. Moreover, it was found that the metacognitive-related categories were almost missing from the categories. The results of the cross-tabulation revealed the superiority understand / conceptual in BA and the supremacy of understand/procedural in MA objectives. The findings entail the revisions of the educational objectives to accommodate critical thinking. The findings have pedagogical implications for EFL teachers, the curriculum developers, and policy makers.

In recent years, educational studies have acknowledged that academic motivation is a powerful predictor of students' academic achievement. Goal orientation is one facet of academic motivation that concerns the reasons for which students pursue achievement activities. Using AGQ and R-SPQ-2F instruments, this study seeks to identify dominant achievement goal orientation held by Iranian EFL learners and examine the relationships between students' achievement goals, learning approaches, and academic achievement. The sample consisted of 80 EFL students majoring in English Literature and English Translation. The results of the data analysis indicated that the mastery goal is the dominant goal orientation adopted by learners. Afterward, performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals are respectively the achievement goal orientations adopted by Iranian EFL learners. Significant correlations were found between both mastery and performance-approach goals and deep approaches. Performance-avoidance goals were found to be significantly and positively related to surface approaches to learning. In addition, performance-approach goals were positively related to academic outcome, whereas, performance-avoidance goals were negatively related to academic achievement. There was no relationship between mastery goals and students' outcomes. The study also bears some theoretical and practical pedagogical implications regarding the importance of motivation and goal setting which will be offered and discussed in detail at the end of the study.

Consecutive interpreting (CI) requires a lot of parallel cognitive and affective processes, which are challenging for the interpreter who has to deal with them concurrently . This study focuses on the problems trainee interpreters encountered intheir CI sessions. An analysis of the strategies they used to weigh whether they have been successful in completing their task is also given. The sample of the study consists of 50 senior students of Translation enrolled in CI course (English-Arabic) in the Fall Semester 2018/2019 at the Translation Department at Yarmouk University, Jordan. The Source Text (ST), which was divided into one-minute period for each time, was given to students for interpretation and then the Target Text (TT) was recorded. Most of the challenges encountered by trainee-interpreters were linguistic problems, memory problems, note-taking and reproducing the ST into the TL. It is imperative therefore that interpreter training should be as effective as possible and interpreters shoulddevelop a series of skills and strategies such as chunking and joining, shadowing, anticipating, listening and recalling and paraphrasing that can be used to solve the problems encountered.

This study examines conceptions of outsiders to the polity, focusing on the lexical items migrant(s), refugee(s), and exile(s) in both internet- and print-based sources. Drawing primarily on a subsection of the Genealogies Internet Corpus consisting of left-wing sources, I argue that left-wing politics is currently caught up in the rhetoric of the right and of mainstream institutions in society, largely reproducing the same discursive patterns even as it sets out to challenge them. Dominant patterns in left-wing Internet sources reveal, for example, that the economic migrant vs. political refugee distinction enforced by mainstream institutions remains largely intact, that the assumption of a “refugee crisis” unfolding in Europe is accepted at face value, and that the left is entangled in the same politics of labeling imposed by the right, reproducing designations such as “undocumented migrants” uncritically. Refugees and migrants, moreover, are represented as victims with no agency, are discussed in legal terms that serve to dehumanize them, and are repeatedly “quantified” as a homogenous and potentially problematic category. Acknowledging the contagious nature of dominant discourses and the difficulty of finding an alternative language with which to argue against established institutional rhetoric, the study further explores historical models that appear more consistent with the values espoused by left-wing politics today. It examines a subcorpus of modern English translations of ancient Greek texts such as Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War and Herodotus’s Histories to demonstrate the viability of adopting a different conceptualization of refugees and other outsiders to the polity that may be drawn from classical antiquity—and/or from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century receptions of texts originating in classical antiquity—and the possibility of developing an alternative discourse with which to speak about migrants in the present.