درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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.

The effects different awareness-raising techniques might have on language learners’ performance have been studied by many researchers. The present study specifically focused on improving EFL learners’ oral narrative task performance in terms of accuracy, fluency and complexity by awareness raising through semantic fields. The participants in the study included 40 intermediate learners whose initial homogeneity in terms of language proficiency was assessed via a Preliminary English Test (PET). They were further randomly assigned as one experimental group and one control group, each comprising 20 participants. The amount of instructional time was 17 sessions, during which the participants in the experimental group received an awareness raising technique through 'semantic fields'. Before and after the treatment, an oral narrative test was administrated. The results of the data analysis revealed that the experimental group which received the awareness raising technique outperformed the control group in three measures of accuracy, fluency and complexity on their performance. The participants showed significant improvements in language proficiency as they retold the narratives. The findings of the present study can create the floor for researchers to go deep through the EFL contexts and find more about the probable effects awareness raising techniques might have on language learning and teaching.

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.