درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The Covid-19 pandemic has been with us, for almost a year now. It has affected our lives in multiple ways and challenged our achievements as well. Daily life has changed in aspects we never would have imagined. We had to change our habits and behaviors quickly in order to assure the health of our family, our neighbors and the rest of the world. While facing this “unprecedented” situation, there are terms that appear to describe the health crisis and its consequences. This planetary pandemic has also changed human behavior. In this article, we will see how the word Covid-19, a real agent of change in our existence, initiated changes in language and our behavior. Indeed, within the generative process of meaning as envisioned by semiotics, Covid-19 is an actant that crosses the different stages of process, from denomination to discourse. The discursive effervescence of Covid-19 is narrative. It appears as the prototype of the anti-subject. Perfect and absolute embodiment of evil. A single narrative program motivates it: propagation. We also see that Covid-19 is no longer just the anti-subject of this story. It truly becomes the Anti-Sender, leading in the shadows an army of villains, capable of reinventing themselves at one’s leisure. This is a spectacular example of actantial cumulation.

Working memory is believed to interact with a second language (L2) learning at the cognitive level. The present study sought to explore the impact of L2 readers’ prior knowledge on the contribution of working memory to reading comprehension. Eighty Iranian English learners were divided into two groups of high and low by their scores on L2 knowledge and the topic knowledge tests. Their working memory spans, and reading comprehension abilities were measured via a working memory test and a reading comprehension test respectively. The results indicated that working memory significantly predicted L2 reading comprehension only when the readers had sufficient topic knowledge. The results also show that the learners’ comprehension was mostly determined by their L2 linguistic knowledge, even when they had considerable working memory capacity. The findings imply that readers’ prior knowledge could moderate the contribution of working memory in L2 reading comprehension. A certain level of knowledge in the target language and on the topic is required for L2 readers to help working memory work more efficiently.

Subtitling, like all other types of audiovisual translation, has always been influenced by cultural factors, and in turn, subtitles have influenced their target readers. The relation between culture and language in interlingual subtitling might cause some problems in translating Culture References (CRs). The aim of the present study was to classify the samples of CRs in the “Harry Potter” movie series based on Klingberg’s (1986) model. It was also intended to investigate the strategies applied by Iranian translators in subtitling the (CRs) in “Harry Potter” movies from English into Persian based on Diaz Cintas's (2007) proposed strategies. To do so, instances of CRs were drawn from the two series of Harry Potter entitled Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire (2005). The data analysis was carried out by descriptive statistics to indicate the frequency and percentages. The findings revealed that “Personal Names” and “Magical Objects”, were the most frequently used CRs in the two selected series of Harry Potter movies based on Klingberg’s (1986) model. Additionally, the results showed that “Loan” and “Calque” were the most frequently used strategies in subtitling the CRs. The findings of the present study may be useful for English translation students, subtitlers, and fansubbers who do subtitle English movies in the Iranian context

The current paper primarily provides an account of how apology speech acts are internally intensified in Persian. Moreover, the study checks to what extent contextual variables, namely social distance and severity of offense, may motivate the internal intensification of apology speech acts. To these ends, the study collected the required speech acts through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) from among Persian male native speakers. The data was analyzed based on the coding scheme developed by Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989). The results revealed that apology speech acts are intensified in Persian in most cases through universal strategies of internal intensification. Moreover, the Persian speakers are sensitive to severity of the offense, as a context-internal variable, which motivates more internal intensifications of apologies. The findings, however, revealed that social distance as a context-external variable does not prompt the use of internal intensifications differently in situations where there is social distance between interlocutors compared to situations where there is no social distance between interlocutors.

The research objective of this study was to explore the cultural differences and challenges encountered by the Chinese Immersion Teacher (CIT) and how the CIT deal with the cultural differences in the immersion classroom. A qualitative case study approach was chosen for this research. The participant was a novice kindergarten immersion teacher who was born and educated in a Chinese-speaking country. There were 13 children with diverse ethnic backgrounds in the teacher’s classroom. Interviews and observations were the primary sources of data. The data collection and analysis stages were undertaken concurrently. The researcher used thematic analysis to analyze the data. The findings of this study show that a novice CIT typically faces several challenges owing to the differences between Chinese culture and American culture, including the differences in the expectations regarding learning, teacher status, teacher authority, teaching methods, and learning styles. Moreover, the study found that the CIT struggled with these differences and did not know how to do her job without considerable support and training. The research led to suggestions to improve cultural awareness, management of cultural differences, and CIT training.

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.

The present study examined the comparative effects of Etherpad-based writing instruction and face-to-face writing instruction on EFL learners' writing quality and writing self-efficacy. It also aimed at finding the learners' attitude towards the influence of Etherpad and their reason for success/ failure in this writing course. To this end, ninety students were selected through convenience sampling and randomly assigned to one of the two instruction groups. In addition to an IELTS writing task, Self-efficacy in Writing Scale (SWS) was administered. During the course, the students received instruction on writing an argumentative essay. After the treatment, the SWS and another IELTS writing task were given. Subsequently, a semi-structured interview was conducted with twenty Etherpad-based learners to find their attitudes towards the reason for their success/ failure and the effectiveness of Etherpad. The results revealed that the Etherpad-based group significantly outperformed the face-to-face group in the writing posttest and demonstrated a higher level of writing self-efficacy. The interview data showed that the students attributed their success to both internal and external factors. Whereas, they ascribed their failure to internal factors rather than external ones. It was also revealed that the students found Etherpad as a predictor of their success in writing performance.

This study aimed to investigate the grammatical complexity based on Biber, Gray, Staples, and Egbert’s (2020) linguistic description in research articles published in Iranian local journals and international journals. The corpus of the study included 40 Applied Linguistics research articles, 20 published in Iranian local journals and 20 in international journals in 2019-2020. The research articles were selected through purposive sampling from two Iranian journals, namely Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics and Journal of Teaching Language Skills, and two international journals, including Journal of English for Specific Purposes and System Journal. The research articles were analyzed in terms of three dimensions of grammatical complexity, including the structural types, syntactic functions, and specific structural/syntactic features. Moreover, for intra-rater consistency, the researcher re-analyzed the corpus after one month to see whether the same results were found. According to the results, in terms of the first dimension, i.e., the structural types, the frequencies of structures indicating higher grammatical complexity (non-finite dependent clauses and dependent phrases) outnumbered the frequency of structures showing lower grammatical complexity (finite dependent clauses) in both local and international journals. Concerning the second dimension, i.e., syntactic function within the structural type, the frequencies of more complex syntactic functions were higher than those of simple functions in both sets of research articles. Concerning the third dimension, i.e., specific structural/syntactic features, both groups of writers preferred to use more complex specific structural/syntactic features than simple ones.

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.

Metacognitive reading strategies play a significant role in reading comprehension and educational success. Being noticeably absent from many Iranian classrooms and largely unaware of by many language learners and teachers, metacognitive reading strategies have fallen into oblivion in English language teaching, research, learning, and assessment. The present study was an attempt to measure the metacognitive reading strategy (MRS) awareness among Iranian university students majoring in English Translation Studies. It also aimed at determining whether gender and learners’ different academic levels would make any difference in using various types of MRS. Furthermore, it investigated the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ awareness of MRS and their reading comprehension performance. A sample of 45 EFL university students majoring in English Translation at Chabahar Maritime University participated in this study. They were asked to complete the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) questionnaire adapted from Tavakoli (2014) and to take a TOEFL Junior Standard Reading Comprehension Test. The results revealed that although the overall strategy use among these students was low (M=2.42), support reading strategies were used the most and problem-solving strategies were the least frequently used ones. Additionally, no significant difference was found between males and females as well as different academic levels in the use of MRS. No significant relationship was found between students’ overall use of metacognitive reading strategies and their reading comprehension achievement. The study concludes with a number of pedagogical implications and lists several guidelines for future research.