درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study examines the effectiveness of long-term formant frequency distributions (LTFDs), Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and their combined application in distinguishing Kurdish-Persian bilingual speakers. Speech samples were collected from 20 early male bilingual speakers who read the fable ' The North Wind and the Sun ' in Kurdish (Sorani dialect) and Persian. The Random Forest algorithm was employed to analyze the data. Feature importance for formant frequencies and MFCCs was evaluated using the mean decrease in accuracy metric. The results indicated that LTFD measures provided moderate accuracy in speaker differentiation, reflecting their capacity to capture vowel-related articulatory patterns. In contrast, MFCCs demonstrated superior performance, effectively encoding spectral and speaker-specific characteristics. When LTFDs and MFCCs were combined, system accuracy was slightly improved compared to using MFCCs alone. This marginal enhancement underscores the potential benefits of integrating LTFDs with MFCCs in forensic voice comparison, where even small gains can have significant practical implications. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of bilingual speaker variability and provide insights for optimizing speaker identification systems in bilingual contexts.

The Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE-A), a widely used high-stakes language proficiency test for university admissions and migration purposes, underwent a notable change from a three-hour to a two-hour version in November 2021. The implementation of the new version has prompted inquiries into the washback effects on various stakeholders. Focusing on a small sample of Chinese test takers (n=10), this paper explores washback effects following the revision of PTE-A and the complexity of test preparation through in-depth semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest a shorter test length is preferred and several different methods are adopted for test preparation which gives evidence to the positive washback. However, participants reported some confusion regarding certain test items, leading to the adoption of construct-irrelevant methods. This, in turn, may affect the face validity of PTE-A. While addressing the literature gap in this field, recommendations for improving the test design to better meet test takers’ needs are provided.

Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an international assessment that measures the reading literacy of fourth-grade students (aged 9-10 years old). PIRLS aims to evaluate and compare the reading abilities of students across different countries. It assesses how well students can understand and interpret written texts, which is fundamental to their overall educational development. In this study, psychometric analyses were run on a portion of the multiple-choice items of PIRLS 2016 taken by 4th graders in the USA. The 3PL item response theory model was utilized to examine the test. Discrimination, difficulty, and guessing parameters were estimated along with the fit values, reliability, item characteristic curves, and item-person map. M2, CFI, TLI, and RMSE statistics showed that the test is reliable and the model, overall, fits the data. Item fit statistics outfit and infit showed that most of the items fit the 3PL model. Findings showed that while all the items have acceptable discrimination values, two items have unacceptable guessing parameters. Examination of the ICCs showed that graphical displays are important, in addition to numerical values, for examining item quality. Item-person map showed that items do not target the whole ability scale.

Research on relative clause (RC) ambiguity resolution in first and second-language contexts has produced conflicting results, with some studies indicating a preference for high attachment, others favoring low attachment, and some reporting no clear preference. In conjunction with other variables, these mixed results may be due to variations in the methodological features employed across studies. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a systematic review of the methodological features of relevant offline tasks to evaluate how these differences may lead to conflicting results critically. To address this issue, a systematic methodological review was conducted analyzing 108 features of offline tasks, including identification, context, materials, design, administration, data analysis, open science practices, and transparency. The results revealed significant methodological variation in the literature and a moderate mean transparency score of 59.77. These findings emphasize the need for methodological standardization and greater transparency in future research to ensure reliable and comparable RC ambiguity resolution research results.

This study aimed at investigating the differential effects of three types of mediational artifacts (EMW, EDW, and EMDW) through the CBI approach on EFL learners’ expository writing and learning transfer of rhetorical genre. Therefore, 57 advanced students were randomly assigned into one of three mediational groups, namely EMW, EDW, and EMDW. Participants in the EMDW group were provided with all mediational mechanisms, including instructors’ oral deductive explanation of concepts, SCOBAs material, students’ demonstration of their understanding, and writing practices. However, in the EMW group, students received instructors’ explanations of concepts along with SCOBAs material and writing practices, while the EDW group was provided with students’ demonstrations of their understanding instead of SCOBAs material. After assuring homogeneity of the participants in three groups at the outset of the study with regard to their pre-task scores, the CBI was held over a course of three weeks on expository rhetorical structure. Data for the first research question was gathered through a post-task on expository writing after the treatment. Learners’ opinions were also reflected through a semi-structured interview after the post-task. To testify transferability of rhetorical structure, a delayed post-task was administered after one week. The obtained results indicated that three mediational conditions led to differential expository writing performance. Further improvement was determined in the EMDW group, followed by the EMW group. Furthermore, rhetorical transfer to a new writing task was significantly different among the groups, as the EMDW group could outperform the other groups. Finally, the satisfaction of participants toward CBI was reflected.

In light of ongoing challenges in writing education and the needs of digital-native learners, this study explored the effectiveness of using the free version of Grammarly in the writing development of EFL learners. Thirty-three TEFL students at Shahid Rajaee University were randomly selected and participated in the study. Using a quantitative one-group design, their writing performance was assessed through six tasks and analyzed via one-way Repeated Measures MANOVA. The results indicated a consistent improvement in overall writing performance through the regular use of Grammarly as an automatic corrective feedback tool. To identify which writing components improved, an RM-MANOVA was conducted on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and clarity. The analysis showed significant improvement only in grammatical accuracy, with other aspects remaining unchanged. These findings highlight Grammarly’s potential in enhancing grammatical skills. The study contributes to ELT by encouraging the integration of ICT-related content into the EFL curriculum and teacher training programs, emphasizing the role of AI tools in language learning. These findings highlight the increasing impact of AI-powered tools in improving writing skills for language learners. Educators should balance automated feedback with personalized instruction. As research on effectiveness of Grammarly is still limited, further studies are necessary to fully understand its educational potential.

Although instructional strategies, obstacles, solutions, and technologies designed to assist students with special educational needs (SEN) learning a foreign language were much discussed both in special and inclusive schools, little evidence addresses how English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers construct their identities as legitimate inclusive school practitioners as they witnessed and encountered a range of disabilities. To fill this void, this study reports on a narrative inquiry scrutinizing how Indonesian inclusive EFL teachers construct their identity in teaching 15 students with SEN. Drawing upon Johnston's framework of teacher identity, this study showcases how inclusive EFL teachers cultivated a positive rapport with students with SEN through the utilization of a personal approach and the incorporation of humor in teacher-student relation. Regarding professionalism, they perceived it as service-oriented by consistently motivating all of their students, particularly those with SEN, exhibited tolerance for the regular ones, and implemented co-education or peer-mediated instruction strategies. In light of teachers’ religious beliefs in English language teaching (ELT), they accomplished well by embedding numerous character values, referred to as profile pelajar pancasila, in English classrooms. The implications of this study are to bring potential implementations of specialized teaching strategies training of professional development for inclusive EFL teachers and differentiated assessment for students with SEN.

The representation of future pre-configuration through policy-making processes has been an in-vogue area of study in the field of discourse analysis. Equally important is the reconstruction of future pre-configuration in the institutional translations of political text and talk. The objective of this study is to investigate the conceptualization of futurity in the preemptive policy-making in the speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader and their English institutional translations. The data for the present study comes from 20 speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader and their translations, spanning from 2015-2020, issued by the Office of the Supreme Leader. We employed semantic-syntactic analytical tools such as mood, modality, and aspect to study the conceptualization of futurity in the policy discourse. In conclusion, the findings of the study indicate that these reconstruction of futurity in the preemptive policy-making process in the English institutional translations are to a greater extent similar to the semantic-syntactic properties of the original texts. However, modalization and mood transformation are instances of differences between original and translated versions of texts. Besides, we argued that any instance of the occurrence of similarity or differences stems from on-line dialectic relationships between micro-pragmatic and macro-pragmatic factors

This study strived to specify and particularize Iranian medical field specialists and EFL teachers’ predominant and overriding textual interventions, which fall within the ambit of convenience editing. To this end, we required 20 field specialists and 20 EFL instructors to edit the unedited versions of 80 published medical research articles in a way that rendered them apt for publication in quality medical journals. We categorized the obtained data of the edited articles using an editing strategy framework that distinguished four editing micro-strategies and five macro-strategies. The findings revealed that medical specialists and EFL teachers’ micro-editing strategies outnumbered their macro-editing ones. Furthermore, there were significant differences between the editing micro-strategy uses of the above-mentioned groups of the participants. The results highlighted the need for a synergic collaboration between the medical field specialists and the EFL teachers to ameliorate medical articles’ formal, stylistic, and genre-related features and to expedite their publication process. 

L’analyse des mécanismes résultant de l'expérience abstraite ou de la rencontre sensorielle du sujet actif avec l'univers a été négligée du point de vue de la sémiotique classique et celui-ci résiste à des concepts tels que : « présence », « expérience », « corps » et « le sensible ». Landowski défend l’idée du sens constituée d’une condition à la présence et il introduit les quatre régimes d’espace dans lesquels le sens de discours dépend de l'interaction sensorielle-perceptive entre le sujet et le monde extérieur. Dans ses régimes, l’espace-tissu est en interaction avec la programmation, l’espace-volute se présente par l’ajustement, l’espace-abîme est manifesté par l’assentiment et l’espace-réseau est en rapport avec la manipulation. La question principale de cette recherche consiste aux régimes du sens de Landowski se présentant dans le texte littéraire. Pour trouver la réponse, cette recherche applique les régimes d’espace de Landowski à savoir l’espace-volute et l’espace-abîme sur La montagne du dieu vivant de J.M.G Le Clézio dont les récits mettent en scène de beaux passages sur l’interaction entre les personnages et les espaces différents. Cet article aurait pour objectif d’examiner l’interaction entre le sujet et l’espace dans un texte littéraire à partir de la théorie des régimes du sens de Landowski pour effectuer le pouvoir de l’espace sur la perception humaine. Par une analyse sémiotique, cet article montrera enfin la relation entre le sujet et l’espace tout en se basant sur les phrases du sujet parlant et l’espace qui l’a entouré. Cette relation produit un sens profond.