درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL learners who were speaking Persian as their first language and 60 native English speakers. Through a written Discourse Completion Task comprised of eight different scenarios, compliments were analyzed with regard to topics (performance, personality, possession, and skill), functions (explicit, implicit, and opt-out), gender differences and the common positive adjectives used by two groups of native and nonnative participants. The findings suggested that native English speakers praised individuals more implicitly in comparison with Iranian EFL learners and native speakers provided opt-outs more frequently than Iranian EFL learners did. The analysis of data by Chi-square showed that gender and macro functions are independent of each other among Iranian EFL learners’ compliments while for native speakers, gender played a significant role in the distribution of appraisals. Iranian EFL learners’ complimenting patterns converge more towards those of native English speakers. Moreover, both groups favored explicit compliments. However, Iranian EFL learners were more inclined to provide explicit compliments. It can be concluded that there were more similarities rather than differences between Iranian EFL learners and native English speakers regarding compliment speech act. The results of this study can benefit researchers, teachers, material developers, and EFL learners.

هدف اصلی این مقاله بررسی اعتبار زبان و عوامل هوشی به منظور طبقه بندی عملکرد انشا نویسی در فراگیران زبان انگلیسی ایرانی می باشد. از شرکت کنندگان ایرانی این مطالعه سه آزمون به منظور بررسی دستور زبان، وسعت و عمق واژگان، و دوآزمون به منظور بررسی هوش کلامی و روایتی گرفته شد. همچنین شرکت کنندگان تعدادی انشای تحلیلی در پاسخ به نمونه آیلتس انجام دادند. تعدادی تحلیل تابع تفکیکی برای بررسی قدرت طبقه بندی پنج متغیر با هدف تمایز بین توانایی بالا و پایین نویسندگان زبان دوم مورد استفاده قرار گرفت. نتایج نشان داد که در میان عوامل زبانی، عمق واژگان (دانش هم نشینی) بهترین عملکرد تفکیک را تولید می کند. به طور کلی، هوش روایتی قابل اطمینان ترین پیش بینی کننده برای عضویت در گروه های پایین و بالا ارزیابی شد. همچنین مشخص شد که در میان پنج زیر سازه هوش روایتی، ""طراحی داستانی"" بالاترین ارزش طبقه بندی را داراست. در نهایت، کاربردها ی این پژوهش برای پژوهشگران زبان دوم، متخصصان علوم شناختی و زبانشناسان کاربردی مورد بحث قرار گرفت.

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.

In this paper we analyzed some of the phonological rules of Russian loanword adaptation in Persian, on the view of Optimal Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2003). It is the first study of phonological process on Russian loanwords adaptation in Persian. By gathering about 50 current Russian loanwords, we selected some of them to analyze. We found out that vowel insertion, vowel prothesis, no palatalized consonants are the phonological processes occur on Russian loanwords in Persian.

The study of lexical bundles, among types of text analysis, is gaining importance over the others in the last century. The present study employed a frequency-based analysis approach to the use of lexical bundles. The discussion section of 60 political science articles, with corpora around 253,063 words were investigated in three aspects of structure, form, and function of lexical bundles. The present study selected its data pool out of scholarly articles from qualified journals in the field of political sciences. One part of the data pool was made up of 30 articles written by American native speakers. The second half of the data comprised the 30 articles written by Iranian scholars in political sciences. The findings showed that native and Persian-speaking writers employed the same forms of lexical bundles, and there were significant differences concerning the nativeness and functions. Bearing in mind the findings of the present study, material developers would think of the possibility of the addition of lexical clusters into the materials. It can similarly be valuable for the development of the second language writing strategies, for those who need to write in academic contexts especially political contexts.