درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The aim of the present paper is to study the status of the short vowels /i/ and /u/ in five selected Iranian Balochi dialects. These dialects are spoken in Sistan (SI), Saravan (SA), Khash (KH), Iranshahr (IR), and Chabahar (CH) regions located in province Sistan va Baluchestan in the southeast of Iran. This study investigates whether these two vowels have the same qualities as the short /i/ and /u/ do in the Common Balochi inventory (i, iː, u, uː, a, aː, eː, oː). The Common Balochi inventory is the vowel system represented generally for Balochi language, which is a North-Western Iranian language, a sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian family. The data for this survey are gathered from villages, rural areas, and cities in these regions in the forms of free speech and verbal elicitation from more than 20 literate and non-literate male and female language consultants, 2 males and 2 females for each dialect. The investigation reveals that the short /i/ and /u/ show strong tendencies towards a lower position. This study suggests phonemic systems in which the short /i/ is modified to short /e/ in all dialects, but /u/ is modified to /o/ only in SI, SA, and CH; the lowering of the short /u/ to short /o/ in KH and IR may still be in the transition stage. It is possible that Persian, as the dominant language has had its influence on these dialects causing a lowering tendency in the two vowels under study.

The ability to write effectively is becoming progressively important and instruction in writing is assuming an increasing role in second and foreign language education. Students’ writing abilities have been tested through various writing tasks. Independent tasks of writing or writing-only tasks have been utilized to test students’ writing ability; however, they have been criticized for their lack of authenticity and validity and integrated tasks of writing have been proposed as an alternative. In this regard, this study attempted to examine the impacts of reading-to-write and writing-only tasks on the writing ability of Iranian EFL learners. The main participants of the study were 68 intermediate-level EFL learners divided into two homogeneous groups: experimental and control. After the writing pretest, the experimental group was given reading-to-write tasks for 15 sessions, while the control group was provided with writing-only tasks. Eventually, a writing posttest was administered. The statistical analyses of the collected data revealed a statistically significant difference between the writing ability of the participants of the two groups. To be precise, reading-to-write tasks were found to be more effective than writing-only tasks. The data collected via the reading-to-write questionnaire was likewise analyzed with the results showing a unanimous preference for reading-to-write tasks.

This study aimed to assess the quality of Persian translation of Orwell's (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four by Balooch (2004) based on House's (1997) model of translation quality assessment. To do so, 23 pages (about 10 percent) of the source text were randomly selected. The profile of the source text register was produced and the genre was realized. The source text profile was compared to the translation text profile. The result of this comparison was dimensional mismatches and overt errors. The dimensional mismatches were categorized based on different dimensions of register including field, tenor, and mode. The overt errors which were based on denotative mismatches and target system errors were categorized into omissions, additions, substitutions, and breaches of the target language system. Then, the frequencies of occurrences of subcategories of overt errors along with their percentages were calculated. The overt errors and dimensional errors were analyzed carefully. The dimensional mismatches as well as a large number of major overt errors such as omissions and substitutions indicated that the translation was not in accordance with the House's view stating that literary works needed to be translated overtly. In other words, mismatches on different levels of register showed that the cultural filter was applied in translation and the second-level functional equivalence required for overt translation was not reached. As a result, the Persian translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four did not fulfill the criteria to be an overt translation. Instead, this translation tended to be a covert one.

Being able to communicate effectively is the optimal goal of all language learners; therefore, despite difficulties they face and restrictions they have while expressing themselves, they rely on employing diverse communication strategies (CSs). This descriptive study was set to analyze Iranian EFL learners’ use of CSs in oral and written performances at two levels of proficiency. To this end, 60 university students of EFL were selected and assigned to two distinct groups. The participants’ oral and written performances were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively using Dornyei’s (1995) taxonomy of CSs. The results of the study revealed that the context of communication plays a significant role in the use of communication strategies. The use of CSs by participants’ significantly varied by their level of proficiency. The most frequent problem areas were 'lexical gaps', 'problems in discourse management', and 'uncertainty in conveying the message', which can be considered by language teachers and material designers.

In this study, corpus-based techniques were utilized in order to investigate the quantitative and qualitative features of adjectives across literary and technical texts. The corpus was composed of five literary novels and five engineering academic books in English. Seventy paragraphs were randomly drawn from each corpus and the frequency distribution of adjectives with respect to their position (attributive, predicative) and syntactic functions (descriptive, verbal, numeral, etc.) were tallied and summed. The results revealed that there is a significant difference in the frequency use of adjectives across the two corpora. From a register perspective, the high frequently use of adjectives in technical texts in comparison to literary texts (67.3% and 32.7%, respectively) may be due to the fact that almost all technical texts employ “expository” linguistic features which have a generally “informational purpose”, while most novels employ “narrative’’ linguistic features which have a direct functional association with the communicative purpose of telling a story of events which have occurred in the past. From a genre perspective, academic texts in engineering tend to be highly informational, non-narrative, and characterized by an impersonal style, whereas novels generally share the same primary communicative purpose of narrating a story whose purpose is to entertain.

لغت عنصر مهمی در مهارتهای چهارگانه زبانی است. مسئله به خاطرسپاری بلندمدت لغات برای معلمان زبان انگلیسی همواره دارای اهمیت زیادی بوده است. چرا که اغلب معلمان شاهد هستند که دانش آموزان لغات آموزش داده شده را پس از مدت کوتاهی فراموش می­کنند. این مطالعه بر آن است تا تأثیر استفاده از نرم افزار ""ورد سیفت"" (word sift)را که ابزاری وابسته به اینترنت برای تولید ابر کلمات است در به خاطرسپاری بلندمدت لغات زبان آموزان زبان انگلیسی بررسی نماید. برای این منظور 60 زبان آموز که داری سنی بین 17 تا 24 سال بودند انتخاب شدند و به دو گروه شاهد و آزمایش تقسیم شدند. 100 لغت که در 6 متن بکار رفته بودند به آنها آموزش داده شد. آموزش اصلی شامل 12 جلسه تدریس بعلاوه یک جلسه اضافی برای بررسی تاثیر آموزش در به خاطرسپاری بلندمدت کلمات بود. نتایج آزمون t و تحلیل واریانس یک راهه نشان داد که استفاده از نرم افزار ""ورد سیفت"" و بکار بردن ابرکلمات به طور کلی تاثیر معنادار مثبتی بر به خاطرسپاری بلند مدت لغات در زبان آموزان زبان انگلیسی دارد.

یادگیری لغات اغلب باید به صورت اتفاقی از طریق شنیدن و خواندن به وجود آید. این یکی از دلایلی است که به اهمیت وجود یک برنامه خواندن وسیع و قابل توجه در یادگیری زبان انگلیسی اشاره می کند. مطالعات وسیع این فرصت را به فراگیران زبان می دهد تا به خواندن حجم زیادی از مطالب و موادی که در سطح سواد آنهاست بپردازند. یادگیری زبان از طریق شرایطی چون تکرار، بازیابی، استفاده خلاقانه و توجه کامل به وجود می آید. این شرایط را می توان در حین خواندن به شیوه های مختلفی از طریق باریک خوانی، خواندن مجدد، خواندن و ارتباط با مهارت های دیگر، خواندن و بحث، و یادگیری از طریقه تمرینات خواندن افزایش داد. فعالیت های رایانه ای می توانند با فراهم کردن فرصتی برای یادگیری عمدی موثر واقع شوند، اما باید در نظر داشت که یادگیری عمدی نباید جایگزین خواندن وسیع شود.