درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study compared the efficacy of explicit and implicit instruction of requestive strategies on upper-intermediate female English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ email writing development. Sixty-two participants in four intact classes were randomly assigned to two explicit and implicit groups. In this quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design study two email evaluation tests and two written discourse completion tests (WDCT) were used to collect the data. In the pretest phase, an email evaluation test and a WDCT were administered to the participants in two sessions. Next, the two groups were provided with ten treatment sessions. The explicit group received direct instruction and metapragmatic explanation on the use of appropriate requestive strategies in writing emails. The implicit group, however, received instruction on writing requestive emails without any explicit explanation about the requestive strategies in emailing. Then, the participants took the posttest of email evaluation test and WDCT in two successive sessions. The results indicated that both modes of instruction exerted significant effects on the learners’ production of requestive strategies in English. The comparison of the two modes of instruction, nonetheless, indicated that the participants who underwent explicit instruction significantly surpassed those in the implicit group. The findings have implications for materials developers and instructors.

Lexical inferencing has been recognized as an effective learning strategy in SLA. The present study investigated Iranian EFL learners’ development of reading comprehension as a result of exposure to lexical inferencing strategy instruction. To do so, 45 female participants studying in Simin Language Institute in Rasht, Iran were selected from among 60 students based on the results of a sample of Oxford quick Placement (OQP) test, who scored from 40 to 47. They were in two intact classes, assigned to one experimental (n=24) and one control group (n=21). The experimental group underwent the teaching of reading comprehension through lexical inferencing strategy to help learners infer the meaning of unknown words and promote their understanding of the text. However, the control group received the traditional instruction of reading comprehension concentrating on the translation of new words. The results of the pre- and post-tests of reading comprehension revealed the significant outperformance of the treatment group over the control group’s reading comprehension ability. It was concluded that lexical inferencing strategy teaching could develop the learners’ potential to improve their cognitive capacities in inferring the meaning of unknown words, which might be facilitative in their reading comprehension.

Co-teaching is a method that two teachers work together and deliver the instruction in the same classroom to a heterogeneous group of learners. This study was an attempt to find out the effect of one teach-one assist model of co-teaching on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension. To this end, a quasi-experimental design with the pre-test, post-test, and control group was employed and 35 female students within the age range of 15-18 at the elementary level were selected as the participants of the study from Sanjesh-E-No institute in Tabriz, Iran.  They were randomly assigned into the experimental and control groups after taking Key English Test (KET). The experimental group received instruction through two teachers while the control group was taught by a single teacher. Both groups took part in the pre-test and post-test of reading comprehension. The results of an independent-samples t-test revealed that the experimental group had significantly better reading performance compared to the control group. The results of the study can be useful for teachers, students, and any ELT program.

The present study aimed to investigate whether Reports on the results and Comments on the results moves’ recycling in the Research Article (RA) Discussion sections is affected by cultural/disciplinary variations. To this end, 600 empirical RAs in six Soft Science disciplines, including Economics, Sociology, Applied Linguistics, Linguistics, Management, and Psychology, with an equal number in each discipline and culture, published in the period from 2006 to 2018 were selected. Weissberg and Buker’s (1990) move model was used as a starting point to analyze the RAs. First, the Reports on the results and Comments on the results moves were identified in the Results sections. The Chi-Square test was then used to calculate and compare the frequency of their recycling in the Discussion sections across cultures and disciplines. The data analysis results revealed that changes in the disciplines or sociocultural settings do not result in variations in recycling the two moves under study. Given that the current study provides a relatively new framework for scrutinizing scientific discourse, it may promise certain pedagogical implications for native and non-native students in Soft Science disciplines, researchers, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instructors, and course designers.

The present study was aimed at exploring the use of pronominal reference for identity representation in terms of power and solidarity in English political discourse. The investigation was based on a corpus of four political interviews and debates amounting 26,500 words. The analysis was both qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative analysis, a discourse-analytic approach was used to find out the pronouns, their references and their identity load, and in the quantitative analysis, the distribution of different representations of identity were calculated. A nonparametric test, that is, Chi-Square was run in SPSS as the statistical operation needed for the current study. The analysis showed that most of the personal pronouns represented identity in the form of solidarity. The results also showed that political figures use <em>I</em>-pronoun and its variants to represent their identity in terms of power. The representation of identity in terms of power was also found to be correlated with the use of certain terms such as <em>veto</em> and active voice constructions. Furthermore, the results showed that when making claims, instead of giving pronominal reference to self, political figures use first-person plurals. In order to show solidarity, the speakers may also make use of discoursal proximity. Considering the important role that discourses play in constructing reality, it is important for CDA researchers to reveal sources of power, inequality and prejudice in discourses and interpret their hidden meanings. Pronominal choice and academic voice as linguistic constructions that are ideologically loaded need to be brought into the spotlight.

Languages as living and dynamic structured systems were influenced at the very first moments of the COVID-19 pandemic as they became medicalized by the use and practice of various jargons and technical terms. Meanwhile, homebound individuals around the world started to create a COVID-19 pandemic-related lexical-overload of neologisms (Coroneologisms or Corona coinages) in different languages which started to spread across the globe by mass media, and some of them even entered the official databases of the well-known dictionaries and Wikipedia corpora. This study was a scrutinized attempt to explore the English vs. Persian (Farsi) Coroneologisms across various Extensible Markup Language (XML) corpora and a huge body of E-resource discourses (websites, social media, and news channels and forums) based on embedded mixed-method design to provide a comprehensive insight into their types, structures, and meanings. To provide a better understanding of how and why particular Coroneologisms were created in terms of social, cultural, or political contributing factors, they were investigated based on the reflections of a series of sociolinguistic focus-group E-interviews with 184 volunteer English and Persian native speakers. This study might provide implications for sociolinguistics, corpus-based language studies, lexicographers, designers of corpora, etymologists, and discourse analysts in English and Persian.