درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The primary purpose of the present study was to explore whether there was any significant relationship between attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction of Iranian EFL teachers on the one hand, and their choice of teaching strategies. Strategies mostly used by participants of the study with low, mid, and high levels of self-efficacy comprised another purpose of the study. To this end, a questionnaire was developed, piloted, validated, and its reliability was estimated for collecting the required data. Subsequently, based on cluster sampling, 420 male and female teachers from three different educational districts of Tehran responded to the questionnaire. Three separate MANOVAs were run to investigate the effect of teachers’ attitudes on strategies they employed for teaching grammar, vocabulary, and reading. This was followed by the same approach to study the effect of teachers’ self-efficacy and job-satisfaction levels, as well. The results revealed a significant relationship between three factors (attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction) and teachers’ choice of teaching strategies. Moreover, based on the scores obtained from the answers to the questionnaire, participants were classified into three levels of low, mid, and high which corresponded with their degrees of attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction. Accordingly, it was shown that high level of attitude, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction strongly affected teachers’ use of vocabulary teaching strategies; mid to high level of attitude and efficacy affected use of reading and grammar strategies. Also, it appeared that strategies for teaching vocabulary are used more frequently among teachers than grammar and reading.

The increasing use of technology in different parts of the world has inevitably led to the borrowing of a sizeable number of English words by many languages, including Farsi. This study was carried out with the aim of determining the extent to which a group of undergraduate Iranian EFL students studying at Sheikhbahaee University could accurately pronounce ten commonly-used technology-associated loan words with regard to two criteria: the placement of word stress and the pronunciation of words’ sounds. To this end, 50 students were randomly drawn from among the foregoing university’s students. Each student was given the chance to pronounce each of the ten loan words in and out of context. The students’ oral performance was recorded and then was subjected to quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis revealed that the errors’ frequencies were relatively high with respect to most words and very high with regard to two words. The qualitative analysis, which was done utilizing the literature of contrastive phonetics and pronunciation systems of Farsi and English, helped partly explaining many of the students’ errors and highlighting the need for the devotion of more pedagogical and research attention to the problems confronting Farsi-speakers in the area of the pronunciation of loan words.

Controversy has not been yet resolved among researchers in second language research over the pedagogical efficacy of feedback in enhancing various features of learners’ writing skill. Research findings highlighting the significance of interactive tasks and learners’ engagement in improving the learning process stimulated the present study, the purpose of which was to explore the effect of task-supported interactive feedback on the accuracy, fluency, and organization of seventy two Iranian English major sophomores at Islamic Azad University-Mashhad Branch. It was hypothesized that engaging learners in both tasks and providing feedback would enhance their writing performance. The participants in three intact classes were randomly assigned to three groups: a control group, with no task (NTG), and two experimental groups: the task-supported group (TG), and the task-supported group with interactive feedback (TFG). Four one way analyses of variance tests were run on the research data indicated that the apparent gain in the task-supported interactive group over the other groups did not reach significance level. However, the TG group outperformed the control group in all three aspects of writing. The findings have pedagogical implications and can be interpreted in terms of socio-cultural characteristics of Iranian students.

The original impetus for this cross-linguistic study came from a need to explore the effect of cultural factors and generic conventions on the use and distribution of metadiscourse within a single genre. To this end, the study as a contrastive rhetoric research, examined a corpus of 60 newspaper editorials (written in English and Persian) culled from 10 elite newspapers in America and Iran. Based on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, both interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources were analyzed. The results disclosed that genre conventions had a determining role in the writers’ choice of some metadiscourse resources that contributed to some similarities in the use and distribution of metadiscourse resources across English and Persian data. In addition, some differences were found between two sets of editorials which were attributed to cultural/linguistic backgrounds of both groups of editorialists. The interactional category and attitude markers proved to be the predominant metadiscourse category and subcategory in newspaper editorials genre. Overall, the findings suggested that metadiscourse has a decisive role in the construction of persuasion in newspaper editorials genre.

Media in general and news in particular constitute indispensable parts of modern life. TV news which contains visual elements in addition to the verbal aspects was used as the corpus of this study. In fact, this research culled out the ideologies of Iranian national television in presenting different issues. To be more precise, three internationally-significant pieces of news reports were chosen: one positive to “Us”, one hostile to “Others”, and one neutral. Then, these news reports were analyzed in detail and their lexical items, grammatical structures, and rhetorical figures were compared to find out about the differences. The results of the study showed that these three reports were presented to the audience via totally different strategies and ideologically-laden words were used to convey positive and negative meanings. In addition, the visual elements (angles, gaze, and distance) corroborated the findings of the verbal sections. The findings of this study show that lexical and grammatical choices are made purposefully in the media. So, it can be said that the results of this research contribute to the fields of linguistics, semiotics, and media.

This study aimed to translate MIDAS questionnaire from English into Persian and determine its content validity and reliability. MIDAS was translated and validated on a sample (N = 110) of Iranian adult population. The participants were both male and female with the age range of 17-57. They were at different educational levels and from different ethnic groups in Iran. A translating team, consisting of five members, bilingual in English and Persian and familiar with multiple intelligences (MI) theory and practice, were involved in translating and determining content validity, which included the processes of forward translation, back-translation, review, final proof-reading, and testing. The statistical analyses of inter-scale correlation were performed using the Cronbach's alpha coefficient. In an intra-class correlation, the Cronbach's alpha was high for all of the questions. Translation and content validity of MIDAS questionnaire was completed by a proper process leading to high reliability and validity. The results suggest that Persian MIDAS (P-MIDAS) could serve as a valid and reliable instrument for measuring Iranian adults MIs.

A critical discourse analysis (CDA) of English language teaching (ELT) textbooks can provide a theoretical description of existing ideological effects in the texts and a means to link linguistic and social practices. This study, thus, seeks to evaluate Summit 2B (i.e., the advanced book of Top Notch series) with a focus on the representation of male and female social actors. In so doing, this study drew on van Leeuwen’s (1996) social actor framework and Halliday’s (2004) transitivity model. To achieve the purpose of this study, content analysis was first carried out in the corpora obtained from the aforementioned textbook to find out the frequency and proportion of various social actors. The results obtained from the tests of significance (i.e., chi-square tests) and the qualitative data analyses revealed that there were some significant differences between males and females concerning role allocation (i.e., activation, subjection, and beneficialization), substitution (personalization/impersonalizaton), and personal pronouns. Compared with females, males were represented as more active, energetic, independent, and assertive forces; males were represented more frequently and placed in high-status positions; they were also individualized more frequently. The results indicated that though females and males were almost equally informalized and indetermined, there was not much serious attempt to eliminate the gender bias in Summit, used as a substitute for other ELT textbooks used in private language institutes in Iran. The findings suggest that textbook writers and publishers should be more cautious about the gender discourse, along with other criteria making ELT textbooks work, because gender bias can affect language learners’ perception and preference for the choice of language in second or foreign (L2) communication.

مفهوم ثروت در زندگی و آثار اونوره دو بالزاک از تشخصی ویژه برخوردار است. کمدی انسانی مشحون از شخصیت­های دلباخته پول و ثروت است. این نویسنده که در زندگی موقعیت­های پست و بلند بسیاری در مسایل اقتصادی تجربه کرد، همواره در جستجوی مال­اندوزی بود. در مقاله حاضر، ما در صدد مطالعه همزمان زندگی و آثار بالزاک بر خواهیم آمد و به خصوص به جایگاه ثروت و پول در این دو عرصه یعنی زندگی و آثار او خواهیم پرداخت. برای نیل به این مقصود، تعدادی از آثار داستانی و مکاتبات بالزاک را از این منظر مورد بررسی قرار خواهیم داد.