درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Having witnessed the unprecedented prevalence of online education during the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, the present research was motivated to explore the challenges facing an EFL teacher throughout an online English course of intermediate level. To this aim, a process-tracing approach (Checkel, 2006) was employed to unravel the causal mechanisms involved in the beginning, middle, and end of the course. The results showed that deficient technological resources caused the greatest challenges throughout the course, especially in the initial and mid-sessions. Also, the two other causal categories, human and content resources, were at their peak at the beginning of the course and were no longer noticeable at the end of the course. The most troublesome challenges the teacher faced were platform limitations, internet connection, and human resources’ unpreparedness for online education. Furthermore, the teacher’s and most students’ technological knowledge, as well as their media literacy, increased by the end of the course, but some students’ rather slow adaptation to the sudden online environment challenged the teacher during the course. Finally, suggestions were made to prevent these challenges or handle them effectively upon occurrence, especially in developing countries, where the required infrastructure for online education is lacking, and the majority of teachers, students, and institutions might not be yet adequately prepared for the online mode of teaching and learning languages.

The present study aimed to investigate the attitudes and perceived nature of thinking and understanding towards intercultural communicative competence (ICC) among International English major students. Accordingly, this study employed the paradigm of a sequential mixed-method research, in which it comprised a qualitative phase followed by a quantitative phase. The participants of the first phase of the study were 30 undergraduate English major students in their third year at Isfahan Islamic Azad University in Iran; and the participants of the second phase of the study included 30 international ESL students in their first year at Gonzaga University (GU), in Washington, U.S. The analysis of narratives in the first phase of the study indicated that the participants had diverse attitudes towards intercultural encounters. The results of the statistical analyses of the second phase of the study showed that the most important individual difference variables directly influencing students’ intercultural communicative competence were their communication apprehension and their perceived communicative competence. This study also showed that students’ self-image as communicators were of utmost importance: if students believe they are good communicators in English, theyare more likely to be self-confident and are more likely to take part in intercultural encounters. Thus, instructors should help students achieve a realistic self-image about their performance in English and support them if they lack self-confidence.  

این مقاله به بررسی تکواژ اشتقاقی در پسوندهای خاص در زبان های فارسی و روسی می پردازد. شواهد مثال از کتاب «ذخیره خوارزمشاهی» اثر معروف سید اسماعیل جرجانی برگرفته شده است. نویسنده این دانشنامه پزشکی به رغم ورود اصطلاحات فراوان زبان عربی به زبان فارسی، به منظور حفظ و صیانت زبان فارسی با اجتناب از کاربرد کلمات و اصطلاحات عربی و لاتین، اثر خود را به زبان مادری یعنی زبان فارسی نگاشته است. نویسندگان این مقاله تلاش کرده اند تا با روش های گوناگون، پسوندها را در این دو زبان مطالعه و بررسی کنند. با توجه به دستاوردهای پژوهش حاضر می توان گفت که سازنده ترین شیوه برای ساخت اسم و صفت، استفاده از پسوند است. در این مقاله ابتدا پرکاربردترین پسوندهای زایا و غیرزایا فارسی استفاده شده در کتاب ذخیره خوارزمشاهی و سپس معادل آن ها در زبان روسی مشخص شده و شباهت های معنایی آن ها بیان گردیده است. همچنین به این نکته اشاره شده که تلفظ بعضی از پسوندهای فارسی در گذر زمان از روزگار پیشین تا دوره معاصر تغییر یافته است. بعضی از پسوندها به عنوان کلمات جداگانه دارای معنا بوده اند، اما در حال حاضر آن معنا را از دست داده و به پسوند اشتقاقی تبدیل شده اند.

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.