درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study aimed to investigate the washback effect of three alternative assessment procedures, namely oral-conferences, portfolios, and corpora-based feedback on the writing achievement and attitudes of Iranian EFL university learners. The participants taking part in the study were 156 native Iranian students in a mixed Reading-Writing course. Through the two three-month semesters, the learners were studied in terms of three experimental and one control groups. It should be mentioned that revision was a major component of the pedagogy and learners were asked to incorporate feedback into their revision processes. The findings revealed that the aforementioned assessment procedures led to a significantly better performance of the participants and created a considerable change in their attitudes.

Linguistic information can be conveyed in the form of speech and written text, but it is the content of the message that is ultimately essential for higher-level processes in language comprehension, such as making inferences and associations between text information and knowledge about the world. Linguistically, inference is the shovel that allows receivers to dig meaning out from the text with selecting different embedded contextual clues. Naturally, people with different world experiences infer similar contextual situations differently. Lack of contextual knowledge of the target language can present an obstacle to comprehension (Anderson & Lynch, 2003). This paper tries to investigate how true contextual clue selection from the text can influence listener’s inference. In the present study 60 male and female teenagers (13-19) and 60 male and female young adults (20-26) were selected randomly based on Oxford Placement Test (OPT). During the study two fiction and two non-fiction passages were read to the participants in the experimental and control groups respectively and they were given scores according to Lexile’s Score (LS)[1] based on their correct inference and logical thinking ability. In general the results show that participants’ clue selection based on their personal schematic references and background knowledge differ between teenagers and young adults and influence inference and listening comprehension. [1]- This is a framework for reading and listening which matches the appropriate score to each text based on degree of difficulty of text and each text was given a Lexile score from zero to four.

Aiming at highlighting the important role of print media discourse in the implicit transfer of the dominant ideology of discourse context, the present data-driven paper demonstrates how the lexical features of repetition and synonymy as well as the structural and thematic features of passivization, nominalization and predicated theme were utilized by the discourse producers to mediate between their own underlying ideology and the target readers' understanding of the events of September 11, 2001. Through a comparative statistical analysis of the print media discourse of the data for the study written in two ideologically opposing contexts of Syria and America, we have tried to explicate how the discourse producers utilized various lexical and thematic strategies to produce different impressions of the event and implicitly impose the underlying ideology on the readers.

The present article reports a study carried out to investigate whether or not awareness of functional translation theories has any impact on the translation quality of translator trainees. 2oo Iranian undergraduate students took part in this study. They were divided into four groups -two- experimental and two control groups. After homogenizing the participants by a TOEFL test, a translation pre-test was administered and then functional theories of translation like Translational Action and Skopos Theory were taught to the experimental groups who were later required to use the material taught in their classroom translation practice during one academic semester. The control groups were instructed traditionally as widely practiced in Iranian undergraduate translation classes. A translation post-test was given to all the groups at the end of the semester. The statistical results demonstrated a significant difference between the pre- and post- test in the two experimental groups as compared with the control groups.