درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Obituaries serve as the most viable means to announce a person's death. Regarding the socio-political changes in Iran due to the Islamic Revolution, this descriptive-analytic study reports on a move-based analysis of obituaries belonging before and after the Islamic Revolution driven by Swales' (1990, 2004) genre move analysis. We employed a move-based analysis of 100 obituaries from two distinct periods collected via a library-documentary method. Our primary aim was to disclose the influence of a socio-political phenomenon on this specific genre, i.e., an obituary. After identifying the major moves of the two obituary sets, their similarities and differences were inspected. The results indicated that after the Islamic Revolution obituaries contained twice as many moves as their counterparts. There were overlaps between the two data sets in four moves, namely (a) identifying the announcer(s), (b) identifying the deceased, (c) identifying family members, and (d) outlining the time and place of the funeral. Four moves were only present in after the Islamic Revolution corpus, which included (a) opening, (b) including the picture of the deceased, (c) showing sorrow for the event, and (d) characterizing the deceased. The moves discussion will be supplemented with explanations instigated from the socio-economic, religious, and political context of both periods.

To be proficient in writing, learners of foreign languages are expected to communicate effectively and effortlessly with native speakers. Collocations, defined as the natural pairings of words, are essential for achieving proficiency in a language and enhancing writing quality. This research explored how incidental and intentional instruction of collocations affected the participants’ written task scores. This study included 60 students at the pre-intermediate level who studied English at Safir Language School in Tehran, Iran. These students were grouped according to their proficiency test results to ensure homogeneity. They used the Touchstone series and the English Collocations in Use as their primary textbooks. After each unit, they had to do a written task. The results indicated that both incidental and intentional instruction positively impacted the students' writing scores. Notably, those in the incidental instruction group outperformed their counterparts in the intentional group. The findings showed incidental instruction of collocations was more effective than intentional teaching.  The outcomes of the study can assist educators in choosing effective teaching strategies for collocations to boost writing performance, syllabus designers in incorporating these insights into educational materials to enhance vocabulary instruction, teachers in emphasizing the benefits of incidental learning, and learners in focusing on the importance of collocations, as unfamiliarity with these word combinations may hinder their writing skills. Conducting studies with larger sample sizes to validate the findings in broader settings, and exploring incidental/intentional teaching to students with varying skills, expertise, gender, and experiences are also suggested for further studies. 

Although the concept of favoritism has received attention in various areas of study such as management, business, and medical settings, this line of research has scarcely been explored in teacher education and especially in L2 acquisition context. The current study aimed to design and validate a scale that could explore English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ perceptions of academic favoritism. After developing the 40-item Academic Favoritism Questionnaire (AFQ), it was administered to the target participants of the study, and the required data were collected from 154 Iranian EFL teachers selected through non-random convenience sampling. The results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed eight underlying components of the model: damaging collaborative learning, educational inequality, teachers’ biased attitudes, teacher-student conflicts, learning barriers, unfair students’ treatments, negative learners’ experience, and unhealthy academic atmosphere. The study findings may shed light on this obscure topic in the field of education. The study provides important implications for different education stakeholders including researchers, teacher educators, supervisors, EFL teachers, and L2 learners as the findings could increase their awareness of favoritism and its likely influence on their professional practices and environment.

The diversity between a source language and a target language and the variation in their cultures make the task of finding equivalents a serious challenge. Expressive texts are among the most difficult text-types to be translated. Being deeply rooted in the culture of a nation, classical literary texts are seldom devoid of culture-specific concepts or cultural references (CRs). Sa‘di’s (1208-1291) Gulistan is a prominent masterpiece of classical Persian literature that abounds with CRs. It is translated by many translators. Anderson (1861) and Rosenbaum (2010) are among the earliest and the most recent translators of the Persian masterpiece, respectively. The paper aimed at identifying categories of CRs in translations, determining translators’ most and least frequent procedures and specifying the most challenging categories of CRs for each of them. The study aims at identifying various categories of the CRs in the Gulistan and the procedures employed by the two translators in rendering them. In order to specify the procedures, Davies’s (2003) model and Huber and Kairys’s (2021) taxonomy were used. The findings revealed that ‘substitution’, ‘literal translation’ and ‘generalization’ were averagely the most frequent procedures. Moreover, it was found that the terms belonging to the categories of ‘religion’, ‘garments’ and ‘social life’ were the most challenging concepts for the English translators.