درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

At the age of globalization and the dominance of media, the audiovisual translation is no more considered as a marginal area and plays an important role in bringing cultures closer to each other. While taboo terms are an inseparable part of American movies, the movie maker companies have to reflect the authenticity of their language in audiovisual products in order to make them more tangible for their audiences. However, one of the biggest concerns of Iranian official audiovisual translators is cultural and ideological items such as taboo terms in audiovisual products. One of the aims of the present study was to investigate the strategies applied in the translation of taboo terms in two dubbed American movies by Iranian official audiovisual translators. The results indicated that most of the taboo terms have been altered or deleted ideologically during the process of translation due to the cultural differences between the source and the target culture. Finally, Iranian official audiovisual translators attempted to tone down the strong language, offensive expressions, vulgar descriptions, etc. in the process of dubbing and create an acceptable translation for their audiences.

Technology mediated learning brings together the users with shared interests. This method makes learners informally engaged in language learning. This study intended to investigate the effect of technology mediated instruction on cognitive scaffolding, academic performance and motivation. Employing a quasi-experimental research, 80 learners from two intact classes at Islamic Azad University, Osku Branch were selected as the experimental and control groups. Telegram as a tool was used in the experimental group, while the control group received traditional way of instruction. Critical ethnography approach was implemented to consider the amount of cognitive scaffolding. To measure the students’ motivational level in both groups, Course Interest Survey (CIS) was administered at the end of the semester. The total average score for each group was calculated. To compare students’ academic achievement, their average scores in the final academic test were considered. An Independent samples t-test in was used to compare the mean scores. The results indicated that technology mediated learning brought about cognitive scaffolding and the students in the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of motivation and academic achievement. The results of the study suggest that to bring about academically successful students, practitioners should use technology mediated instruction.

Emotion and cognition are both considered influential factors in language learning. In this study, the role of "emotioncy" (which is a combination of emotion and frequency) in the cognitive load and sentence comprehension of a group of language learners was examined. Emotioncy includes emotions that are evoked by the senses. To this aim, 200 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners were asked to fill out the NASA Task Load Test, a sentence comprehension test, and an emotioncy scale. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was run to measure the construct validity of the emotioncy scale. Subsequently, Pearson Product-Moment correlation coefficient and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data. The results showed that emotioncy has a significantly negative and positive relationship with cognitive load and sentence comprehension, respectively (p

Over the last decades, there has been a plethora of interest in possible challenges encountered by researchers while publishing research articles (RAs) in various disciplines for English for academic purposes (EAP).Given this, this study aimed to examine how a sampled number of EAPIranian researchers perceive the competence of academic RA writing, the major reasons for RA rejection, and difficulties the authors face in writing up publishable RAs. Data for this study came from an examination of rejection emails and follow-up interviews with a number of Iranian EAP researchers who have published in highly prestigious journals. Analysis of the data resulted in 545 codes, 40 subcategories, and six core categories. The main categories included the potential reasons of RA rejection; the authors’ challenges in RA writing; RA linguistic features; RA stylistic features; essential elements of writing RA sections; and the features of RA citation and referencing.Pedagogical implications are discussed.

مقاله حاضر به بررسی ترجمه افعال روسی با پیشوند от- و معادل آن ها در زبان تاجیکی می پردازد. پیشوند от- در زبان روسی معاصر از جمله پیشوندهایی است که معانی متعددی دارد. مثال های مورد استفاده در این مقاله، مستخرج از فرهنگ روسی-تاجیکی و همچنین دو اثر لف تالستوی: آنّا کارنینا (ترجمه Рањим Њошим) و جنگ و صلح (ترجمه Њабиб Ањрорї)، می باشد. معادل های افعال روسی با پیشوند от- در زبان تاجیکی بیش از همه ساختارهای ساده و مرکب هستند. در ترجمه های بررسی شده، ساختارهای زیر مشاهده گردید: قید + فعل، قید فعلی مرکب گذشته + فعل، عدد+ فعل، عدد+ قید فعلی مرکب، عدد+ قید + فعل، عدد + اسم + فعل، قید فعلی گذشته + فعل، قید нагз+ فعل. پژوهش حاضر ثابت می کند بررسی افعال پیشونددار روسی یکی از مسائل روز و مهم زبان شناسی معاصر و بیان روش های ترجمه و انتقال آن ها به زبان تاجیکی به هنگام فراگیری زبان روسی در کلاس های تاجیک زبانان لازم و ضروری است.

This study investigated the effect of two different types of offline planning, namely cooperative and individual, on the oral proficiency of impulsive and reflective EFL learners. Accordingly, 114 intermediate learners studying at a private language school in Tehran were chosen nonrandomly through their performance on a Preliminary English Test (PET). The participants also filled out the Eysenck and Eysenck’s (1991) Impulsiveness Questionnaire (EIQ) through which they were categorized into two subgroups within each offline planning setting consisting of impulsive and reflective learners. All in all, there were four subgroups: 28 impulsive and 28 reflective learners undergoing the cooperative offline planning treatment, and 32 impulsive and 26 reflective learners experiencing the individual offline planning treatment. Following the 14-session treatment, the mean scores of all four groups on the speaking posttest were computed and a two-way ANOVA was run to test all the four hypotheses raised in the study. The results revealed that the effect of offline planning to a great degree depends on the cognitive learning style of the learners: while impulsive learners benefit more from cooperative offline planning, reflective ones prefer to perform the task individually.

The relationship between language and culture has become a rich source of inquiry in the context of English language teaching. Learning materials can depict cultural content in different cultural senses, namely aesthetic, sociological, semantic, and pragmatic. The present study aimed to investigate the way cultural aspects are represented in the reading and dialog sections of global ( American English File) and localized ( The ILI English Series) ELT textbooks which are widely used in Iran. The framework adopted to analyze the cultural contents of the materials was Adaskou, Britten, and Fahsi (1990) to explore how culture in aesthetic and sociological senses is realized in the series. The findings demonstrated that more emphasis was put on the sociological sense and that this aspect of the culture dominated the aesthetic sense in the cultural contents of the two series. The cultural and culture-free contents represented in the two global and localized series were found to be entirely different in frequency and sense realization. Most of the contents in the localized series were culture-free, while the culture-free contents in the global series were reasonably less than the sociological and aesthetic senses. Additionally, the findings revealed that compared with the worldwide series, the localized textbook was less representative of cultural features in sociological and aesthetic senses. The results imply that ELT materials should be inclusive enough regarding the sociological and aesthetic senses of culture to help learners get engaged in the development of their cultural understanding.

The paradigm shift from testing the outcome to assessing the learning of process shines a light on the alternative assessment approaches, among which portfolio-assessment has sparked researchers’ interest in writing instruction. This study aimed at investigating the effect of portfolio-assessment on Iranian EFL students’ writing achievement through the process-centered approach to writing. To this end, fifty-three sophomores, studying English translation at Islamic Azad University, Tehran Science and Research Branch, were chosen as the participants of this study. The researchers randomly divided them into two groups--an experimental and control. The experimental group received an instruction based on the four stages of the writing process--brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and editing--and underwent the portfolio-assessment. For ten weeks, the participants of the experimental group practiced reflecting on their writing through formative self-check, peer-review, and teacher-feedback on each of the stages written as homework assignments.  The revised paragraphs were regarded as the final portfolio. The control group, however, received a product-based writing instruction, to which portfolio-assessment, individualized-feedback, and reflection did not adhere. The results of the quantitative data analysis showed that the students in the experimental group performed better than the students in the control group in their writing achievement. The qualitative findings also revealed the students’ positive perception toward the portfolio-assessment on the writing process. The results suggest some pedagogical implications for EFL writing instruction and assessment.

This paper examined impoliteness strategies used by characters and their resulting reactions in five American comedy series. Drawing on Culpeper’s models (1996 & 2003), the comedy series were watched several times with one month interval to make sure that the impolite utterances and their reactions were put in the correct categories. The results of the study revealed that sarcasm was the most frequently used strategy among other strategies, and male and female characters were not distinct in using this strategy. However, male characters exploited the bald on record strategy more than their female counterparts. One striking result was the frequent use of offensive reactions by male actors. The reasons behind the variable use of these strategies are twofold. First, impoliteness is used as a tool to show off the power of the male characters. Second, using impoliteness strategies in comedy series reflect the entertaining role of sarcasm used by the actors.

The studies on the merits of processing instruction (PI) and output-based instruction (OI) have mostly treated the two approaches as mutually exclusive. To address the potentials of combining interpretation and production activities, this research compared the two isolated approaches of PI and OI with two combined approaches in which processing and output tasks were used in two opposite orders suggested by the researcher, i.e. processing-output-based instruction (POI) and output-processing-based instruction (OPI). The target structure was English passives. Participants included 185 Iranian EFL students from five intact classes, with four assigned to each treatment and one comprising a control group. Results on sentence-level interpretation and production tests administered before, immediately after, and one month following instruction indicated similar improvement for the treatment groups on the first interpretation posttest, and the superiority of POI over OPI and PI over the delayed posttest. On the first production test, POI, OPI, and OI performed equally well and better than PI, while more accurate uses of the target form were observed by POI and OPI on the delayed posttest. It was concluded that the combined approaches, particularly POI, could produce more persistent outcomes by giving learners the opportunity to both process a form and produce it.

From the view point of the classical structural semiotics, the "empirical experience" is considered as a pre-semiotic alien to any signification of the world, and it's based from there, by nature, below the threshold of the analyzable. While structuralist semioticism has given "narrative discourse", that is, what conveys the empirical life to "narrate", and while giving it a "textual" effect, this makes it susceptible to be the subject of the analysis of a semiotician, which justifies the great slogan of Greimas "out of the text point of salvation". On the contrary, we have the opinion that these are two processes of meaning production that the one does not necessarily exclude the other. As a result, we have two sets of views on the world that each have a specific design regime. By giving examples of a variety of domains, and more particularly of literature, the purpose of this series is to demonstrate that the "empirical experience", as well as the "discourse of the narration "both relate to the rejection and semiotic analysis.

Speaking is a significant skill that many foreign language learners are trying to master. In this study, the effectiveness of two different speaking activities, i.e. oral presentation vs. free discussion, was investigated from quantitative and qualitative points of view. To achieve this purpose, 44 intermediate learners from a language institute in Tehran participated in the study. Half of the participants experienced oral presentation while the other half (22 in two other classes) experienced free discussion for eight sessions. The two activities were exchanged between the two groups after the end of the quantitative phase of the study for eight more sessions. The results of an independent samples t-test performed on the scores ofthe speaking section of a sample Preliminary English Test (PET, 2012 ) after the first phase of the study (the first 8 sessions) indicated that the learners who experienced oral presentation significantly outperformed the learners who experienced free discussion though both activities proved to be significantly useful. Furthermore, the results of the interview with 10 participants from each activity through purposeful sampling, after the second phase of the study (the second 8 sessions) through thematic analysis indicated that both free discussion and oral presentation activities had some merits and demerits. Based on the results it can be advisable to include the two activities as complementary.