درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the Persian native speakers. 200 Persian respondents took a 24-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenting exchanges they either observed or participated in. The results suggested a significant effect for the treated intervening social variables of age, gender, educational background, social distance, and relative power as well as compliment topics in determining the type of compliment response. The responses were further suggestive of the contextual effects of the three systems of hierarchical, solidarity and deferential as well as a newly coined system as kinship system.

In an attempt to dispel the persisting fallacy that an individual’s grammar knowledge is indicative of the way they put this knowledge into practice, this study seeks to highlight the inconsistency which resides between one’s competence and performance in the domain of conjunctions. It aims to shed light on the discrepancy which lies between the knowledge and production of conjunctions. The research context was an Iranian high school in Tabriz and the participants included 40 pre-university students whose knowledge of conjunctions was checked once by analyzing the results of a grammar test of conjunctions and once more through the administration of a sentence-combining test of conjunctions. Eventually, the obtained results were juxtaposed for consistency comparison, the ultimate outcome of which suggest that an individual’s demonstrable knowledge of conjunctions in a grammar test cannot be necessarily generalized to the proportional use of them; hence, a set of correct responses given to the questions of a grammar test of conjunctions is not necessarily a valid indicator of their actual use or production. Overall, it is concluded that the participants tend to choose paratactic extending conjunctions over hypotactic ones and hypotactic enhancing conjunctions over paratactic ones despite their adequate knowledge of both.

As an integrative component of textual structure, formulaic expressions (FEs) play a key role in communicating the message and comprehending the text. Furthermore, interlingually contrastive features of FEs add to their both significance and complexity of their instruction. Given these facts, this study was an attempt to explore a sound mechanism on how to teach FEs; whether an explicit or CA-based approach to FEs instruction could entail various achievements among EFL learners’ reading ability. To this end, three groups of Iranian EFL learners, identified as homogeneous based on Nelson Proficiency Test, were classified into one control and two experimental (i.e. explicit and CA-based instruction) ones. They were exposed to conventional, explicit and CA-based instructions of a set of selected FEs developed into and presented in the form of an instructional handout. Their Knowledge of reading was also tested based on a researcher-made diagnostic test prior to the experiment. Both quantitative and qualitative paradigms were employed to measure both the achievements and the extent of contrast between Persian and English languages in terms of FEs. The former analysis revealed significance difference among the groups in terms of instruction type effectiveness; both explicit and CA-based instruction groups outperformed the control group; on the contrary, no statistically significant difference was revealed between the experimental groups. Additionally, the latter paradigm revealed differences and mismatches between Persian and English FEs in terms of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic parameters. The findings could be insightful for EFL instructors, learners, textbook writers, and syllabus designers to take into account issues like these in their pedagogical programs.