درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The well-established affiliation of metadiscourse research tradition to the philosophy of ESP raises some inevitable expectations on how much and how well the concept has been geared to meet the practical necessities of academic writing pedagogy. In light of such an expectation, a corpus of 35 academic writing coursebooks published during the last three decades was evaluated in terms of the possible realizations of key resources of interaction in pedagogical tasks. Due to its theoretical rigor and analytically operationalized nature, Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2005a) was taken as the guiding framework for the current evaluation. The quantitative findings emerging from the analysis of the corpus did not sound sufficiently promising, suggesting that those theoretical developments have not yet been ideally translated into pedagogical designs; however, the rich range of resources identified in the tasks (i.e., the 55 categories emerging from the evaluation of the corpus) suggest that the rigorous tradition of research in metadiscourse has contributed to the effective operationalization of the concept for pedagogical objectives. It has been argued that through the effective introduction of the concept of metadiscourse into pedagogical designs and its appropriate operationalization, novice participants of academic/scientific discourse communities would be enabled to redefine the nature of academic communication and get rid of a large number of misconceptions which have become fossilized through long years of the dominance of positivistic thinking.

Written corrective feedback (WCF) refers to the feedback given by writing instructors and tutors on novice writers’ performances. Although extensive importance has been attached to the implications of WCF for improving writing skill in L2 writing studies, there is a paucity of research into research on whether student writers benefit differently from elaborated and evaluative feedback. Having this in mind, the aim of this research was to examine the effect of teacher’s text-specific and rubber-stamped comments on Iranian EFL learners’ writing ability at intermediate level. Quick Placement Test was employed to select 40 pre-intermediate EFL learners as the participants of this research. Then, they were randomly assigned into two experimental and control groups. Prior to the treatment, the participants of both groups were given a pretest to disclose their initial writing ability. After administering the rubber-stamped comments to the experimental group and text specific to the control group, a posttest was administered to seek the effect of two types of instruments. An independent samples t-test was used to see if the treatment was effective. Paired samples t-test was also employed to determine the amount of progression between pretest and posttest of the experimental group. The results of the study revealed that rubber-stamped comments improved the learners’ writing ability. Implicationally, instructors can use rubber-stamped comments to help learners improve their writing ability.

Different linguistic constructions, including comparative, superlative, similative, and equative constructions, are employed to convey the concept of comparison. Equative and similative constructions exhibit the highest semantic and structural resemblance out of all the specified constructions. In such constructions, two entities -referred to as the comparee and the standard- are compared based on a specific characteristic or quality. In equative constructions the comparison is based on a gradable property, where one of the referents has the property to a higher degree, while similative constructions compare the similarity in manner. This study explored the equative constructions in the Laki language by primarily relying on classification put forth by Haspelmath (2017). The data for the present study consists of 123 equative sentences taken from spoken interviews with twelve individuals residing in Noorabad city. The findings indicate that speakers mainly use seven strategies to convey the concept of equality in Laki. Furthermore, the data show that in numerous equative constructions in Laki, there is a preference for omitting the standard marker while retaining the degree marker