درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study aims at discussing whether metaphors in the Qur’an, revealed more than 1400 years ago, are dead, moribund or live and how these three types of metaphors have been translated in three English and three Persian translations of the Qur’an. The results reveal that among 70 metaphors examined, while only about 32.85% are live metaphors, about 67.14% are moribund, but none of the cases are completely dead. Furthermore, based on Newmark’s (1988a) classification of procedures for translation of metaphors, there is no image in 15.21% of the procedures used in the English and Persian translations of live metaphors while there are images in 84.78% of them. On the other hand, 43.26% of the procedures used in translations of moribund metaphors transfer the images whereas 56.73% of them omit the images, although these metaphors are not dead. Yet the point is that when the majority of Qur’anic metaphors, that are moribund, had been considered by translators as dead metaphors and their images had been omitted, the translations fail to represent one of the important aspects of the original text’s literary style that is its metaphorical and literary language.

Alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. These approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996). The present study tries to explore the effect of two alternative assessment approaches (self-assessment and conference) on students’ production of four speech acts (apology, complaint, request, and refusal) plus politeness markers. A sample of 64 EFL students participated in this study. Metapragmatic explanations were given to three groups of university students studying English as a foreign language. The two treatment groups received instruction through self-assessment and conference and a comparison group was exposed to the conventional one-shot testing. The results of the One-Way ANOVA conducted after the treatment revealed an outperformance of alternative assessment approaches to the conventional one in the production of the four speech acts and politeness markers in WDCTs. A qualitative analysis of students’ self-ratings in the self-assessment group revealed that they focused more on linguistic criteria during the initial sessions and on pragmatic ones by the end of the treatment. It can be concluded that alternative assessment approaches are beneficial to students’ production of speech acts and politeness markers. In the end, the applicability and the positive effect of alternative approaches in pragmatic assessment are emphasized.

This article was written based on the key concept of polysystem theory which, in translating any literary text, emphasizes the transference of the social systems in which a text is embedded. As stated by Tynjanov (1978a), polysystem theory saw translated literature as a system operating in the larger social systems of the target text. Thus, the task of understanding as well as transferring such systems in their translations, which can certainly affect the readers’ adequate understanding of texts, is a challenging job for most of the literary translators. After identifying three main social systems in The Great Gatsby as the corpus which was ranked second in the lists of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, the source and the target texts were studied attentively, to study the way the respective systems were translated by the Iranian literary translators. Therefore, the prominent element of Nord’s textual analysis (1991), macrostructure, was focused throughout data collection procedure. Then, it was demonstrated that especially through an appropriate transference of the major conflict between the two predominant classes in the novel, the translator has managed to suitably convey most of the text’s social systems in his translation. Finally, it could be deduced that most of the literary translators in Iran, somehow transferred the concerned systems into some significantly adequate equivalents in their works.

Although images are abundant and play significant aesthetic and pedagogical roles in today’s EFL course books, they are still one of the less explored areas of research. The present study is an attempt to examine the role and function of images in Iranian high school EFL course books; it also aims to cast a critical eye over their suitability and efficiency. To this end, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) model of visual grammar was adopted. The findings revealed that although the informative and/or illustrative functions of the images make them important resources in Iranian high school EFL course books, their full potential for language learning does not seem to be adequately exploited. This relates to flaws at the representational mode of meaning making, such as outdated portrayal of objects, gender stereotyping, and overdramatizing national identity as well as shortcomings at the interactive mode, such as poor modality due to grayscale printing and plain graphics with no contextualization or pictorial detail. These flaws make the images seem out of today’s world and hardly credible for high school students who are already adept at new technology. Since these shortcomings may sacrifice pedagogical objectives, the study calls for changes in both technical quality and underlying messages of images in the course books.

بررسی کارپوشه تولید گفتاری زبان آموزان ایرانی در زبان فرانسه (از ارزشیابی تکوینی به خودارزشیابی) روح الله رحمتیان دانشیار دانشگاه تربیت مدرس، تهران r_rahmatian@yahoo.com مرضیه مهرابی دانشجوی دکتری دانشگاه تربیت مدرس،تهران marzieh_mehraby@yahoo.fr ژاله کهنمویی پور استاد دانشگاه تهران jkahnomi@ut.ac.ir تاریخ دریافت:28/11/1391 تاریخ پذیرش: 23/5/1392 امروزه متخصصان علم آموزش بر این باورند که ارزشیابی جزء لاینفک فرایند یاددهی/ یادگیری زبان هاست و باید با استفاده از ابزارهای مناسبی مانند کارپوشه تحقق یابد. هدف پژوهش حاضر، بررسی کاربرد و کارآمدی کار پوشه تولید گفتاری زبان آموزان ایرانی در کلاس فرانسه به عنوان زبان خارجی بوده است. به عبارت دقیق تر، مؤلفه های زبان گفتاری از جمله توانش دستوری، تلفظ و آهنگ کلام، توانش گفتمانی، روانی در کلام و تعامل میان زبان آموزان تحلیل شده است. در این جستار، ابتدا چارچوب نظری موضوع بررسی و سپس نتایج حاصل از تحقیقات مطالعه میدانی ارائه شده اند. جامعه آماری متشکل از یازده زبان آموز بزرگسال در سطح B1 زبان فرانسه می باشد. بر اساس دستاورد این تحقیق، زبان آموزان به کمک روش کار پوشه در تمام مؤلفه های تولید گفتاری پیشرفت داشته اند و توانسته اند توانایی خودارزشیابی خویش را رشد دهند. کلید واژگان: ارزشیابی، کار پوشه، تولید گفتاری، زبان آموزان ایرانی.

لغت عنصر مهمی در مهارتهای چهارگانه زبانی است. مسئله به خاطرسپاری بلندمدت لغات برای معلمان زبان انگلیسی همواره دارای اهمیت زیادی بوده است. چرا که اغلب معلمان شاهد هستند که دانش آموزان لغات آموزش داده شده را پس از مدت کوتاهی فراموش می­کنند. این مطالعه بر آن است تا تأثیر استفاده از نرم افزار ""ورد سیفت"" (word sift)را که ابزاری وابسته به اینترنت برای تولید ابر کلمات است در به خاطرسپاری بلندمدت لغات زبان آموزان زبان انگلیسی بررسی نماید. برای این منظور 60 زبان آموز که داری سنی بین 17 تا 24 سال بودند انتخاب شدند و به دو گروه شاهد و آزمایش تقسیم شدند. 100 لغت که در 6 متن بکار رفته بودند به آنها آموزش داده شد. آموزش اصلی شامل 12 جلسه تدریس بعلاوه یک جلسه اضافی برای بررسی تاثیر آموزش در به خاطرسپاری بلندمدت کلمات بود. نتایج آزمون t و تحلیل واریانس یک راهه نشان داد که استفاده از نرم افزار ""ورد سیفت"" و بکار بردن ابرکلمات به طور کلی تاثیر معنادار مثبتی بر به خاطرسپاری بلند مدت لغات در زبان آموزان زبان انگلیسی دارد.

This study investigated the impact of using the technique of self-monitoring on non-academic EFL learners’ composition writing. Fifty female students studying English at Navid English Institute in Shiraz, Iran were chosen based on the results of a proficiency test. They were all 16-20 years old and were intermediate learners of English who were divided into two control and experimental groups and took a writing pre-test. The experimental group (EG) received a training program on the effective use of the technique of self-monitoring proposed by Charles (1990). That is, they learned to add annotations expressing doubts and queries on various parts of their five composition drafts. The students in CG wrote their drafts without annotations. At the end of the twenty-second session course, both groups took a writing posttest. The results indicated that the learners in EG performed significantly better and the global features of organization and content in their writing were enhanced. Surveying the students’ views on self-monitoring, through a questionnaire, revealed their interest in taking charge of their writing task. Findings point to the efficacy of the self-monitoring technique in promoting learners’ writing proficiency and autonomy in handling writing tasks.

In response to the increasing interest in and need for a practical brief measure in language testing, this study explored the properties of an offline short-form test (OSF) versus a conventional lengthy test. From the total of 98 vocabulary items pooled from the Iranian National University Entrance Exams, 60 items were selected for the conventional test (CT). To build the OSF, we created an item bank by examining the item response theory (IRT) parameter estimates. Data for the IRT calibration included the responses of 774,258 examinees. Upon the results of the item calibration, 43 items with the highest discrimination power and minimal guessing values from different levels of ability were selected for the item bank. Then, using the responses of 253 EFL learners, we compared the measurement properties of the OSF scores with those of the CT scores in terms of the score precision, score comparability, and consistency of classification decisions. The results revealed that although the OSF generally did not achieve the same level of measurement precision as the CT, it still achieved a desired level of precision while lessening the negative effects of a lengthy test. The results also signified an excellent degree of correspondence between OSF and CT scores and classification results. In all, findings suggest that OSF can stand as a reasonable alternative for a longer test, especially when conditions dictate that a very short test be used.