درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In this paper, we argue the effects of explicit multimodal metaphor training in developing speaking and listening skills in an EFL context. To examine the effects of using conceptual metaphors in English language classrooms and assess the metaphorical ability of EFL students, we directed two measuring instruments: pre-test and post-test for control and experimental groups in both listening and speaking skills. The pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group who were exposed to explicit multimodal metaphor training were compared with the control group's scores through this bipartite study. The outcomes of this paper can shed light on teaching and learning the multimodal language in an EFL context. The findings showed that learners who were exposed to multimodal metaphors and received explicit instruction from their teacher resulted in better scores. In other words, this paper found that explicit multimodal metaphor instructions can lead to some improvements in metaphor comprehension and production in an EFL context.

The main role and responsibility of second language writing teachers is to help learners to write with minimal errors. To do so, teachers need to provide students with appropriate types of feedback. In this research, the researchers examined the effect of post-text written corrective feedback on written grammatical accuracy of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. In the first phase, Nelson Proficiency Test was administered to 45 intermediate students studying in two different classes at Cambridge Language Institute in Sari. 35 students were selected. Then, they were randomly assigned to experimental and another groups. The research was carried out in 12 sessions. The experimental group received post-text feedback on their writing tasks while the control group received the conventional type. After collecting data, the researchers used paired and independent sample t-tests to analyze the data. The results indicated that those students who received post-text feedback outperformed the ones in the control group. It means that indirect corrective feedback is more beneficial to students than the direct one. Therefore, post-text feedback can be adopted by EFL instructors to promote students’ written grammatical ability.

The present study sought to cast light on differences in strategies of compliment responses used across Persian and American English. For this purpose, 110 participants, under three groups of Persian native speakers, American native speakers, and Persian learners of English, answered a Discourse Completion Test (DCT), followed by a semi-structured interview with the Persian learners of English to cross-check the findings of the DCTs. The collected responses from the DCTs were coded at macro and micro-levels. Moreover, a macro-level of Persian cultural schemas was used for the Persian groups. The chi-square test revealed the independent performance of the three groups. Judged by the written DCTs while performing in English, the learners’ responses displayed cases of utilizing the native Persian cultural schemas. More specifically, the English learner respondents employed different instances of ta’arof and shekaste-nafsi . Confirmed by the interview, such failures resulted from insufficient exposure to the American English culture and more importantly from their lack of instruction and awareness of cross-cultural pragmatic differences.

This study aimed to shed light on young Iranian EFL students’ oral proficiency improvement through explicit instruction of formulaic sequences (FSs). This pretest-posttest quasi experimental study was conducted in a bilingual school in Shahrekord, Iran. Accordingly, based on ACTFL OPI test, two groups of low intermediate students with age range of 11 to 12 were chosen to be assigned as control and experimental groups. The control group with 20 participants continued its regular instruction focusing on analytic grammar rules and discrete vocabulary, while the experimental group with 40 participants received explicit FSs-based instruction through readings, by adopting a teaching procedure inspired by Lewis’ prescribed strategies for lexicon instruction. After 24 sessions of instruction, the participants were interviewed again, and their oral performance was recorded and transcribed to be scored by two experienced judges. Subsequently, ANOVA results revealed the significant oral proficiency improvement of experimental group in comparison to the control group, pointing to the effectiveness of FSs instruction.

Circulation of scientific discoveries occurs in various discourse communities. Adopting an audience-oriented view of writing (Hyland, 2010) and drawing on the appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), the current study aimed to explore the evaluative strategies psychologists would use to share their specialist knowledge with scholarly and non-scholarly readers. To this end, a corpus of 38 academic research articles and 38 popularized science articles from the archive of an English international refereed journal, Current Psychology , and two English popularized magazines, Newsweek and New Scientist , were analyzed in terms of attitude resources of appraisal, namely appreciation, affect, and judgment . The results of the study revealed that palpable degrees of persuasion were achieved through including certain attitude elements in both corpora despite no statistically significant difference. The results debunked the myth of objectivity in academic discourse and disclosed the psychology experts’ appealing to persuasive tools for convincing the specialist and non-specialists of the truth value of their research outcomes. The findings carry pedagogical implications for English for the students of psychology courses. Indeed, future psychologists need to get familiar with the common discursive strategies to address their intended audience in academic and non-academic settings.

Global EFL coursebooks are used in numerous educational contexts throughout the world based on the assumption that they are the optimal source of English educational input. Their widespread use calls for a systematic analysis of these coursebooks using a framework that can reveal their defining characteristics. One such framework is the knowledge process framework, which is based on the multiliteracies pedagogy. The present study deployed this framework in an attempt to analyze seven widely taught coursebooks in the Iranian context. The findings revealed that knowledge processes of "analyzing functionally" and "applying appropriately" were more frequent in the analyzed coursebooks and the other knowledge processes were present in lower numbers. Based on the findings of the study, EFL teachers in the Iranian context are encouraged to include more activities with the knowledge processes of "analyzing critically" and "applying creatively" to address the absence of these knowledge processes while teaching the global coursebooks.

Corrective feedback refers to a teacher or student’s reaction to a learner’s target language production containing an actual or perceived error. The last three decades have witnessed a large amount of research on the impacts of various types of corrective feedback on students’ written production. Along the same vein, the present study seeks to explore the effectiveness of providing teachers’ metalinguistic feedback vs. peers’ collaborative feedback on students’ writing performance. In so doing, the present study adopted a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design including three upper-intermediate groups (i.e., two experimental and one control). The participants of the study were a total of 62 English as a foreign language (EFL) freshman students from two public universities in Tehran, Iran. The writing tasks utilized in the present study were adopted from IELTS writing Task 2. The results of one-way between groups analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that students produced significantly more lexically diverse as well as grammatically accurate language as a result of both treatments. Moreover, it was observed that collaborative peer feedback led to significantly higher lexical diversity than those of other two groups. The findings of the present study suggest that L2 teachers can opt for a combination of corrective feedback strategies to help learners improve their writing performance.

The present study aimed to examine the translatorchr('39')s solutions to the translation of conversational implicatures from English into Persian. To do so, 120 conversational implicatures were extracted from the novel the Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954) and classified based on Gricechr('39')s (1975) categorization of Maxims, including quality, quantity, relevance, and manner. Mur Duenaschr('39')s (2003) taxonomy of translation strategies was used as a valid framework to find out the translation strategies the translator employed to transfer the 120 conversational implicatures. Furthermore, the most /least frequent translation strategies applied by the translator were investigated. At the end, the effectiveness of the source text (ST)-and target text (TT)-oriented strategies in transferring the same meaning of implicatures to the target text was determined. As the results indicate, the translator employed five out of six of Mur Duenaschr('39')s translation strategies, namely TL cultural cognate, SL cultural and linguistic borrowing, replacement of the SL cultural reference by explanation, TL cultural reference suppression, and TL cultural reference literal translation, of which SL cultural and linguistic borrowing and replacement of the SL cultural reference by explanation were the most/least frequently-used strategies. Moreover, the translator preferred to employ the ST-oriented strategies rather than the TT-oriented ones that referred to the employment of the ST-oriented strategy for the whole text. Based on Gricechr('39')s theory, the researcher concluded that the ST-oriented strategies were more effective than the TT-oriented ones and helped the translator to produce comprehensible translations and convey the meaning of implicatures to the target readers.

This paper investigates the most influential factor of anxiety in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) context through classroom observation and questionnaires in a private vocational higher education in Indonesia. It also explores the differences in the anxiety level based on the year of study. One hundred seventy-one students participated in the study. The Foreign Language Anxiety Classroom Scale (FLACS) questionnaire was adapted to find out the students’ anxiety levels. The questionnaire was administered using Google form, then collected and statistically analyzed using SPSS. It was revealed that the most influential factor of students’ anxiety was the domain of Communication Apprehension. Furthermore, the ANOVA test showed that all students in each year suffered from anxiety. The most notable cause of the Communication Apprehension domain was performing without preparation. Self-negative evaluation was the primary cause of the Fear of Negative Evaluation domain. Meanwhile, for the domain of Test Anxiety, failure in language tests was the principal reason. This study implies that teachers should frame pleasant communication in the classroom as well as create fun and collaborative activities to reduce students’ anxiety.