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One of the most important needs in learning a second or foreign language is vocabulary acquisition. Certainly, failure to keep vocabulary in mind is a problem for both typically-developing learners as well as those with a learning disability (LD). This language demand requires teachers to use techniques in order to reinforce vocabulary recall. The current study is an attempt to investigate the effect of two post-teaching vocabulary learning techniques of diglot-weave and cooperative learning on vocabulary knowledge of LD students and to compare them with the common instruction of picture-word definition. To this end, 90 Iranian female LD students from 10 intact classes in two Junior Exceptional Schools in Shiraz were randomly assigned to one of the three groups. After the intensive teaching sessions, the test was administered to examine their vocabulary recall performance in each group and after a two-week interval, the same test was used to examine their vocabulary retention. The results by conducting the one-way ANOVA indicated that both experimental groups of diglot-weave and cooperative learning techniques outperformed the control group of picture-definition in the vocabulary recall and retention tests. However, there was no significant difference between the performance of diglot-weave and cooperative learning groups. Therefore, the findings of the present study could provide useful implications for foreign language teaching programs particularly in Special Education and students with LD.

The present study aimed at investigating the effect of peer feedback (PF) on EFL learners’ writing performance and writing anxiety. To this end, two intact classes including 48 intermediate EFL learners were selected and assigned into two groups of experimental and control (24 learners in each). This study had a quasi-experimental design including pre-test, treatment, and post-test to assess the students’ overall writing performance before and after the PF sessions. For data collection, the researchers used pre-test, post-test, 7 writing topics, and Cheng’s (2004) Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI). The results of paired sample t-test and Mann-Whitney U Test revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group due to the implementation of PF. Moreover, the researchers conducted Cheng’s SLWAI questionnaire at the end of the study. The findings indicated that the anxiety level of the experimental group receiving PF decreased to a significant extent. The implications are discussed in terms of writing instructors’ use of PF into writing classes to make the environment safer and more comfortable for the language learners to flourish their ideas.

D’un point de vue sémiotique l’art est un effet de sens ; l’ effet de l’art , le saisissement artistique, est un événement esthétique, affectif, cognitif, présent dans toute œuvre d’art. Cet effet résulte d’un processus que nous pouvons reconstruire, l’ artistisation . Nous devons donc circonscrire un objet (l’ œuvre ), qui induit un effet (l’ art ), en exprimant un processus (l’ artistisation ). L’œuvre picturale ne se résume donc pas à des images : c’est un objet sémiotique composite, un hybride composé de processus, supports, matières, énergies, et tout ce qui lui confère un mode d’existence social et culturel. C’est précisément le cas des œuvres de Mehdi Sahabi ; nous ne pouvons examiner ici la totalité de ce qui en fait des œuvres, et nous nous limiterons au fait essentiel : une œuvre , pour Sahabi, est toujours une série , c’est sa manière de faire œuvre d’art . Nous examinerons donc dans ses séries picturales (1) les tensions caractéristiques de la « nouvelle figuration », et les manifestations d’une pratique inter-picturale ; (2) les isotopies et allotopies transversales de l’expression sérielle et multilinéaire ; (3) le travail des strates picturales et des couches actantielles, et l’expérimentation des dynamiques imaginaires. Le processus d’artistisation, en production comme en interprétation, est celui de l’ intuition (impression > synthèse > anagogie > imagination).

L’identité et l’ethos sont deux des notions importantes qui servent à révéler les traits de caractère intradiscursifs et extradiscursifs du sujet parlant dans les analyses du discours. Cet article a pour but de jeter quelque lumière sur les traits identitaires et l’ethos discursif d’un leader exceptionnel qu’est Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, commandant de la Guerre d’indépendance turque et fondateur de la République de Turquie. Le corpus étudié a été délimité par certains extraits de discours tenus entre 1919 et 1939, où Atatürk a utilisé le pronom « je » (et « nous »). Le cadre théorique est composé de deux notions relevant de l’analyse du discours : l’identité et l’ethos. Dans les analyses effectuées, il a été traité d’une part l’identité personnelle, l’identité de positionnement et l’identité discussive d’Atatürk, de l’autre, la dimension catégorielle, expérientielle et idéologique dans les extraits de discours d’Atatürk. Et les différents ethos ressortis à travers le corpus ont été précisés comme ethos combatif, solidaire et honnête ; ethos résolu et hardi ; ethos humble ; et ethos collectif.

The aim of the current study was to examine conjunctions in academic texts. The corpus included 200 conference abstracts, of which 100 were written by Iranian novice writers and 100 by English native speakers. Each group of texts consisted of 50 abstracts from soft sciences and 50 from hard sciences. Following Liu's (2008) taxonomy, the frequency and type of conjunctions were examined. The results revealed that non-native writers use more conjunctions in their conference abstracts. Furthermore, it was found that compared to hard sciences, more conjunctions are employed in soft sciences. Regarding the role of L1, the results showed that non-native writers in soft sciences are more likely to use conjunctions. Moreover, the findings indicated that the most frequent conjunction type used by both native and nonnative writers are adversatives and additives in soft sciences, and additives and adversatives in hard sciences, respectively. The findings of the study have implications for teaching academic writing and material development for writing courses.

New technologies can change everything in the world and people can have different reactions to them. Some people tend to use innovations but some people do not, due to the influence of different factors. Personality type can be considered as one of those factors that might have a relation with the feelings toward the innovations. Therefore, this paper explores the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ personality traits and their sense of technophobia and technophilia. Two hundred and ten Iranian EFL teachers participated in this study. The Big-Five Personality Traits Questionnaire (John & Strivastava, 1999) and Technophobia and Technophilia Questionnaire (Martínez-Córcoles, Teichmann, & Murdvee, 2017) were used in the current study. To find the answers to the research questions, Pearson correlation, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), and independent-sample t-test were used. The results showed that all subscales of personality traits were negative significant predictors of technophobia except Neuroticism. Moreover, the results indicated a positive significant relationship between overall technophilia and all constructs of personality traits.

This study aimed to investigate the syntactic errors that the Iranian deaf and hearing-impaired (DHI) make in their L2 writings. To this purpose, 60 male and female Iranian DHI students with different social status were selected, through convenience sampling procedure, as participants from among the students of a deaf community in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Their general writing performance was assessed through a proficiency test (pre-test) before they received a six-week writing instruction, in which they were provided with model written utterances and common syntactic points such as sentence order, word order, subject/verb agreement, etc. At the end of the treatment, they were given two topics and asked to write short paragraphs (post-test). Then, different syntactic errors were spotted, analyzed and categorized based on Keshavarz’s linguistic taxonomy of errors. The obtained results indicated that the writing quality of the participants improved from pre-test to post-test. It was also found that majority of the participants committed more syntactic omission errors than syntactic addition errors and syntactic substitution errors. It was further found that syntactic errors in written language were not affected by the gender and social class of the participants. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence for teaching syntactic order to deaf and hearing-impaired students in order to enhance their L2 writing performance.

Placing non-native speakers of English into appropriate classes involves mapping placement test scores onto proficiency levels based on predetermined cut scores. However, studies on how to set boundaries for different levels of proficiency have been lacking in the language testing literature. A top-down approach to standard setting in which a panel of experts set cut scores has dominated the typical standard setting procedure. A less utilized approach is to proceed bottom-up by clustering learners based on test scores. The purpose of this study was to fill this gap by examining Education Testing Services (ETS)’s mapping of TOEFL® iBT Test scores to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) levels. The study examined TOEFL® iBT score data from ICNALE (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) and conducted optimal Kernel Density Estimation to find peaks in the distribution of test scores. In addition to the number of peaks, the local minima of the resulting distribution were chosen as boundaries of cut scores for delineating different ability groups. This method of separating scores, also known as contrasting groups, finds clusters of test takers based on maximum differences in scores. The results showed that ETS’ guide for cut scores linking to CEFR levels was comparable to Kernel Density Estimation with some exceptions, namely two out of three cut scores were found to be similar. Implications are discussed in terms of test-centered versus examinee-centered method of standard setting and the need to consider the demographics of the examinee population in determining cut scores.

L’histoire de la poésie négro-africaine moderne, telle que tracée depuis la Négritude, était fixée sur des clichés idéologiques et esthétiques connus et ressassés depuis longtemps par les auteurs comme par la critique. Les thèmes de la liberté, de la dénonciation du racisme, des spoliations diverses, de la quête d’identité entre autres, rencontraient généralement ce besoin de ressourcement dans les traditions orales négro-africaines. D’une façon ou d’une autre, cette esthétique orale s’est presqu’imposée au fil du temps à ces auteurs, mais aussi aux épigones qui vont leurs succéder. Contre toute attente cependant, il va subsister des styles, des formes de discours et des fonds idéologiques qui semblent s’en démarquer et que nous découvrons de plus en plus comme un courant spécifique traversant certes plusieurs stades historiques, mais qui restent homogènes dans leur construction du fait poétique. L’exemple d’ Au tréfonds de mon âme d’Okaré Kouadio est si typique, qu’il nous permettra d’aborder les liens fondateurs et leurs principes d’écriture qui, visiblement, les démarquent des modèles poétiques connus dans l’environnement poétique négro-africain.