درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Simultaneous decoding and encoding of information substantiate the foundations of natural processing of language in translation. The present study analyzed two Persian translators’ pragmatic strategies in translating the Quranic temporal discourse marker thumma into Persian. The source text corpus consisted of 6 sections of the holy Quran and was selected randomly; and the target text corpus is comprised of two Persian translations of the same sections. Theoretical perspectives in discourse and translation studies were applied in approaching parallel corpora analysis in the study. The findings indicate that different types and combinations of Persian temporal discourse markers were applied in 53% of the cases by the translators. Moreover, in 47% of the instances, it was replaced with Persian elaborative, contrastive, and inferential discourse markers. This creative, flexible, and innovative discourse construction approach was substantiated on the basis of the recognition of differences between discourses, cultures, and languages. Consequently, this dynamic approach was employed in the construction of an appropriate discourse for the addressee. The bases, resources, and foundations of these dynamic and discourse sensitive translation strategies were discussed pragmatic awareness raising in explicit teaching of these elements, development of sensitivity to unsteady social contexts in language use, and utilizing the findings in lexicography, translation quality assessment, and syllabus design were suggested.    

The importance of incorporating graduate students' needs into academic writing courses has established a good reputation in EAP/ESP research. In addition, writing and publishing research articles (RA) is a universally established benchmark for students' academic flourish. The present study examines the status quo of academic writing courses in graduate programs to determine the extent academic writing needs of Applied Linguistics students, mainly RA writing needs, are addressed and practiced in the course. Drawing insights from the literature on academic writing, we developed two similar interview protocols for graduate students and course instructors to capture these key stakeholders' retrospective views on the course. We found that the course mainly focuses on proposal/thesis writing, not regarded as a critical need based on students' perspectives. Moreover, both students and instructors echoed the importance of RA writing as a significant area to be covered while emphasizing the need to integrate RA genre literacy into classroom practices. In this paper, we call for the reconsideration of students' primary needs in designing and running graduate writing programs and suggest that RA writing with a genre-based orientation become an instrumental component of academic writing courses in English as an Additional Language context (EAL).

Most studies on Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) have focused either on ESL or EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices. However, it is still not known how teachers who teach second or foreign languages other than English will provide information on the learners’ written language production. To bridge the gap in the literature, this current study reports on an interview study investigating nine university lecturers’ beliefs and their actual practices about WCF on an assignment done by the third-year exchange student of Thai as a foreign language (TFL). Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through feedback tasks and semi-structured interviews. The findings indicated that there was alignment between teachers’ beliefs of their WCF practice and their actual practice in terms of types of WCF and feedback techniques. However, the amount of feedback provided and the teachers’ time constraint, not the level of students’ ability as they thought, appeared to be the reasons for these misalignments of TFL teachers’ beliefs and practices

The present study explored the effects of three forms of reading-based L2 vocabulary tasks on learning and retention of 40 target words by Iranian intermediate and advanced male English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. To this end, 176 EFL learners were randomly selected and assigned to three experimental and one control condition across two levels of intermediate and advanced proficiency levels. The participants in the experimental conditions read 8 texts including 40 target words and performed word-focused (WF) tasks, oral reproduction (OR) plus summary writing (SW) tasks, and WF plus OR vocabulary tasks incorporating target words according to their task designation. The results of two-way MANOVA and Scheffe’s post-hoc test demonstrated that while all three experimental conditions significantly outperformed the control group in terms of learning and retention of target words, the WF plus OR task was found to be the most effective condition. The results are justified in light of Laufer and Hulstjin’s (2001) Involvement Load Hypothesis, Nation and Webb’s (2011) Technique Feature Analysis, the Skill Acquisition Theory, and Swain’s (1985) Output Hypothesis. The study concluded with pedagogical implications for language teachers and materials developers with regard to including both word-focused and meaning-oriented L2 vocabulary tasks in language classes and language textbooks.

In regard to recent revolution in the education domain, English Language Teaching (ELT) assigns a sociopolitical dimension to itself in the light of Critical Pedagogy. The present study, in line with the recent educational revolution, aimed to investigate the effectiveness of critical thinking on improving EFL learners’ productive skills. The statistical population consisted of 164 pre-intermediate attendees of EFL in an English Language Institute in the city of Babol selected for taking an Oxford Placement Test (OPT). The participants were 80 Iranian pre-intermediate EFL students within 10-20-year range, enrolled in Shokouh English language institute in Babol, who were randomly divided into two experimental and two control groups of (N=20) for each group during summer 2018 through the non-probability sampling design. Then, IELTS pre-intermediate speaking and writing tests were taken as the pre-test to make sure that they have failed to have a previous knowledge of objective structures. Unlike the control group, the participants in the experimental group were told to apply critical thinking instructions in learning speaking and writing skills. After intervention, the same pretest was taken to the participants in both groups as the posttest to determine the result of gaining the medical aid. Independent and paired sample t-tests were run to answer the research questions. The results indicated that critical thinking is highly contributive in learning productive skills. The findings of this study can be applied in methodological issues.

The present study was an attempt to explore the effect of clinical supervision on EFL teachers’ level of burnout. For this purpose, a total number of 80 male and female EFL teachers within the age range of 26 and 47 who were working at a language school in Tehran participated in this study. Forty teachers in the experimental group underwent a clinical supervision program which comprised the three steps of pre-observation conference, observation, and post-observation feedback conference while the other 40 teachers who were in the control group were subjected to the conventional supervision program of the language school. The program for both groups spanned a total period of 12 weeks. Prior to the program, the Maslach Burnout Inventory questionnaire (MBI) was used to measure the level of all of the teachers’ burnout as the pretest and again at the end of study, both groups took the MBI questionnaire as the posttest. The analysis of the test scores using a test of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) revealed that the clinical supervision program had lowered significantly the participants’ burnout. As a result of this study, the researchers suggest that ELT establishments take into consideration the practice of clinical supervision to enhance their teachers’ performance.

The importance of language teacher identity has been widely recognized recently as teachers’ professional development is highly influenced by the ways teachers view themselves. Critical orientation towards identity has also received considerable attention recently. The present study, thus, investigated the effect of a Critical Teacher Education Course (CTEC) on EFL teachers’ identity (re)construction. The participants included thirteen teachers who were first interviewed using a 20-question interview checklist whose items enabled the researchers to elicit teachers’ professional identity with a focus on critical pedagogical orientation. The teachers then attended an in-service CTEC held for ten sessions. The course was primarily dialogue-based where different premises of transformative education and critical pedagogy were introduced and discussed. This was followed by the second interview session in which the teachers were asked the same questions as the first interview. In the meantime, the teachers were also required to critically reflect on their classroom practices through reflective journals. The data were subjected to content analysis (inductive category development). The findings revealed that prior to their participation, the teachers viewed teaching English as a neutral act unaffected by contextual factors, whereas after the CTEC, they became more aware of the social, cultural, economic and political factors that might affect the whole process. Secondly, compliance with the rules and regulations, policies, and the status quo marked teachers' identities. However, they changed to more integrative teachers with critical orientations after CTEC. The findings might imply that EFL teacher training/education programmes become more localized, dialogic, interaction-based, negotiation-oriented and integration-driven.

This study investigated a new blended approach for enhancing vocabulary achievement. To this end, the project used a convenience sample of 50 intermediate EFL learners ranging from 19-35 years of age from three intact classes studying English translation at university. They were randomly assigned to two groups of 25 students each. In the experimental group, the treatment consisted of providing photos/cartoons related to the sessions’ course of instruction on Instagram, with the learners discussing and exploring the meaning of vocabularies via peer scaffolding using metacognitive strategies. The control group followed the syllabus and assigned homework according to the class program. To investigate the vocabulary achievement of the participants, a piloted multiple-choice vocabulary posttest was administered. The results that were analyzed through independent samples T-test revealed that the blended approach could significantly affect the performance of the experimental group. This study has implications not only for teachers, researchers, and syllabus designers but also for EFL learners with unpacking the notion of metacognition and peer scaffolding, proposing an integrated framework that illustrates how it may pervade the teaching-learning process as an educational goal. The implication of this study supports student responsibility, a student-centered classroom, and higher levels of cognition.

This study intended to explore the perceptions of Iranian high-school English teachers and the perspectives of policymakers on success in teaching English. Data were collected through questionnaires and curriculum documents. To this end, one-hundred-twenty Iranian high-school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers contributed to the research. National Lesson Plan and Fundamental Reform Document of Education (FRDE) were used to explore policymakers’ perspectives on success in teaching English at the high school level. The data were analyzed using both the Constant Comparative Method (Charmaz, 2006) and template coding to realize similarities and differences between the answers. General themes and patterns were recognized and discussed. The results of this study showed that while the teachers tended to improve students’ communication skills, policymakers must also be aware of the fact that change is an all-inclusive phenomenon demanding full cooperation and commitment from a host of policy workers. In conclusion, teachers’ perceptions of success in teaching English and expectations of educational change should be modified in such a way that the teachers see the importance and relevance of educational change to their professional success. In this respect, most Iranian high school EFL teachers are needed to modernize, i.e., to provide them with valuable pre-service and in-service courses with communicative frameworks that they can operate in their classrooms. The findings can be helpful for EFL teachers to reflect on their perceptions and accord them with their practices, use communicative activities that are more constructive in their classrooms.

The status of teaching ESP has been studied both internationally and locally. However, it seems that the challenges of teaching ESP in medical universities of Iran have not been studied appropriately. The main objective of the present study was to explore the main challenges of teaching ESP in medical universities of Iran. Due to the nature of the study, a qualitative res earch design (Phenomenological) was used. The data were gathered through interviewing 25 ESP stakeholders from two universities of medical sciences in Tehran. The data were analyzed through content analysis techniques. The results showed that the challenges are classified into three main themes: institution challenges, learner related challenges, and teacher related challenges. Institution related challenges consisted of undetermined aims, structure of the curricula, and content of syllabus, evaluation, time limitation and classroom size. The learner related challenges included lack of motivation, poor GEL background, and learners’ focus on test, and learners’ inappropriate needs’ analysis. ESP teachers’ related challenges included teacher’s language proficiency, teachers’ content knowledge, teachers’ perception of ESP, teachers’ teaching method, teachers’ familiarity with material development, and testing skills. The findings of the study can be used to promote the status of teaching ESP in medical universities.

In the present technology era, a new trend of using social media or social networking sites (SNSs) has been developed. Social media has a lot to offer when it comes to education in general and second language acquisition (SLA) in particular. This study aimed at investigating the impact of Telegram, as an available social network, on learning L2 vocabulary by Iranian EFL beginners. To achieve this aim, a quasi-experimental research design was used. Thirty one Iranian students, aged 10-14, were selected through the convenience sampling method. The teacher taught English vocabulary to the participants in two ways: for four weeks by using Telegram and for another four weeks through the traditional face-to-face classroom instruction. Comparison of the scores obtained from words taught through Telegram and the scores of the traditionally-taught lexical items gave rise to the conclusion that learning vocabulary through the social network was more effective than the traditional approach. This study could help the teachers and material developers to consider incorporation of technology and common applications in language classes for the purpose of L2 vocabulary acquisition.