درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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 This relates to flaws at the representational mode of meaning making, such as outdated portrayal of objects, gender stereotyping, and overdramatizing national identity as well as shortcomings at the interactive mode, such as poor modality due to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.

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.

This study investigated the comparative effect of teaching idiomatic expressions through practicing them in conversation and paragraph writing on intermediate EFL learners’ idiom learning. The participants were sorted out of a population of 134 intermediate students in Zabansara Language School in Khorramabad based on their scores on a Preliminary English Test (PET) and an idiom test piloted in advance. The selected 84 participants were divided randomly into three groups: two experimental groups, namely, conversation and paragraph writing groups, and one control group. The two experimental groups received different treatments. In one class, idioms were taught and learners were asked to make a conversation practicing the new idioms, and in the other class, they were asked to write short paragraphs using the idioms. In the third class, the control group, the new idioms were presented and then practiced through different written exercises. At the end of the treatment period, the researchers administered an idiom posttest. The analysis of the collected data revealed that using new idioms in conversation and paragraph writing helped students learn idioms more efficiently than just practicing them through different written exercises. Moreover, the use of idioms in conversation proved to be more effective than using them in paragraph writing. The findings can have implications in preparing materials, teaching/learning foreign languages, and designing syllabus.

The importance of input has been a broadly documented concept in the field of second or foreign language acquisition. However, kinds of input and ways of its presentation are among the controversial issues in L2 classroom research. Therefore, this study was designed to compare the effects of three kinds of input-based instruction on intake and acquisition of the English causative structures by Iranian EFL learners. A total of 105 university students in four intact classes were randomly assigned to four different conditions: processing instruction (PI), textual input enhancement (TE), consciousness-raising (C-R), and control (CO). A pretest/posttest (immediate and delayed) design was used, where participants’ ability to interpret and produce the target structure was assessed through administering a multiple choice interpretation test and a sentence-level production test. Moreover, a grammaticality judgment test was run to assess the amount of intake. Results revealed that learners in the PI group significantly outperformed learners in the other groups on both immediate/delayed production posttests. The findings also indicated that, C-R group could not retain the significant effect of instruction on delayed production posttest and TE tasks were not effective in improving the learners’ production of the target structure. Moreover, the PI group outperformed the other groups on grammaticality judgment test too. Based on these findings, we can conclude that PI which encompasses the most outstanding features of both focus on form and meaning instruction might be a more effective approach in helping EFL learners to acquire the target grammatical forms.

The present study is a theoretical attempt to illustrate how Fillmore's Scenes and Frames Semantics (SFS) could be employed as a framework to portray the process of understanding and translating hybrid texts. It first reviews the origin of SFS; then it maps SFS onto Nida’s linguistic model of translation process and the Interpretive Theory of Translation; it examines in the next section, within the framework of SFS, different forms of understanding and translating hybrid and pure texts with reference to the selection of linguistic frames and more importantly the activation of scenes. The paper explains all four processes of hybridization, dehybridization, rehybridization and hybridity preservation using SFS. The study concludes that, although hybridity is a complex phenomenon, Fillmore’s scenes and frames semantics can adequately explain and justify its different aspects and manifestations. Moreover, it revealed that understanding, seen in SFS model, has an element of individuality and this gives rise to a broader perspective on translation where there can potentially be as many valid translations as there are translators. This has significant implications for our conception, analysis and assessment of translation.

"ارتباط زبانی در یک فضای تعاملی ایجاد می گردد و در آن حداقل دو نفر تبادل نظر می کنند. صحبت کردن گوینده و درک سخنان وی توسط شنونده به عوامل زیادی از جمله شناخت زبان مورد نظر و قواعد و آداب ارتباطی و فرهنگی آن بستگی دارد. نویسنده این مقاله با دنبال کردن هدفی آموزشی، در نظر دارد تا چگونگی برقراری ارتباط زبانی را در یک کلاس زبان خارجی بررسی کند. این مطالعه اجمالی به خوانندگان امکان مشاهده محاسبن و معایب (اگر در بعضی موارد وجود داشته باشد) فعالیت های مختلف در کلاس های زبان را خواهد داد. مقاله حاضر با چند پیشنهاد که حاصل تجربه نویسنده آن است جهت ارتقا سطح بیان شفاهی زبان آموزان جوان ایرانی به پایان می رسد.