درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Although images are abundant and play significant aesthetic and pedagogical roles in today’s EFL course books, they are still one of the less explored areas of research. The present study is an attempt to examine the role and function of images in Iranian high school EFL course books; it also aims to cast a critical eye over their suitability and efficiency. To this end, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) model of visual grammar was adopted. The findings revealed that although the informative and/or illustrative functions of the images make them important resources in Iranian high school EFL course books, their full potential for language learning does not seem to be adequately exploited. This relates to flaws at the representational mode of meaning making, such as outdated portrayal of objects, gender stereotyping, and overdramatizing national identity as well as shortcomings at the interactive mode, such as poor modality due to grayscale printing and plain graphics with no contextualization or pictorial detail. These flaws make the images seem out of today’s world and hardly credible for high school students who are already adept at new technology. Since these shortcomings may sacrifice pedagogical objectives, the study calls for changes in both technical quality and underlying messages of images in the course books.

The present study aims at discussing whether metaphors in the Qur’an, revealed more than 1400 years ago, are dead, moribund or live and how these three types of metaphors have been translated in three English and three Persian translations of the Qur’an. The results reveal that among 70 metaphors examined, while only about 32.85% are live metaphors, about 67.14% are moribund, but none of the cases are completely dead. Furthermore, based on Newmark’s (1988a) classification of procedures for translation of metaphors, there is no image in 15.21% of the procedures used in the English and Persian translations of live metaphors while there are images in 84.78% of them. On the other hand, 43.26% of the procedures used in translations of moribund metaphors transfer the images whereas 56.73% of them omit the images, although these metaphors are not dead. Yet the point is that when the majority of Qur’anic metaphors, that are moribund, had been considered by translators as dead metaphors and their images had been omitted, the translations fail to represent one of the important aspects of the original text’s literary style that is its metaphorical and literary language.

Foreign Language Reading Anxiety (FLRA), distinguished as a distinct phenomenon from general language anxiety, has been shown to have a negative impact on reading comprehension skill especially for less proficient EFL learners. FLRA is believed to originate from "unfamiliar writing system" or learners' difficulty in pronouncing words and sentences (Saito, Graza, & Horwitz, 1999). Slow or word by word readers are often anxious while trying to read unfamiliar words. In addition, readers experience anxiety when they want to relate texts' message to their background knowledge; FLRA comes from "unfamiliar cultural materials" (Saito, et al., 1999). Pedagogical implications of FLRA studies usually suggest anxiety free situations as well as anxiety reducing strategies to help low level learners overcome their reading anxiety and better develop their reading skills. This study was conducted to find the possible effect of an amalgamate of scaffolded and extensive reading (SER) to relieve FLRA. Fourty low-ability readers were divided into two groups, control and experimental groups. Experimental group read 10 story books during ten weeks in a scaffolded environment, whereas control group continued their traditional reading class. Analysis of the results of the study indicated that after treatment, the experimental group was significantly less anxious than the control group and confirmed the effectiveness of the program to reduce FLRA of Iranian low proficient readers