درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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.

ELT has recently witnessed a shift away from a method-bound orientation and toward a post-methodic view of teaching English. Consequently, the focus of some second language teacher education programs has shifted toward sociopolitical aspects of ELT (Miller, 2004) and its contributions to reinforcement or transformation of the status quo (Kumaravadivelu, 2003a). Yet, in many countries, including Iran, ELT teacher education has maintained a relatively method-bound focus on technical dimensions of teaching English and has avoided adopting a critical and sociopolitical approach to ELT. In order to investigate the ways in which teacher education as currently practiced facilitates or stifles implementation of postmethod in ELT, the present study explored English teachers’ perceptions of the dominant approaches to teacher education in ELT centers in Iran and their ideological and pedagogical bases. To this end, 23 language teachers were interviewed about the logistics, content, and procedures of the teacher education programs they had attended. The analysis of the interviews, as directed by grounded theory, yielded three themes, namely no/little teacher learners’ involvement in course design and implementation, dominance of a transmission model, and dominance of a linguistic and technical focus

This study was inspired by VanPatten and Uludag’s (2011) study on the transferability of training via processing instruction to output tasks and Mori’s (2002) work on the development of talk-in-interaction during a group task. An interview was devised as the pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest to compare four intervention types for teaching the simple past passive: traditional intervention as the comparison group and three task-based groups were processing instruction, consciousness-raising, and input enhancement. The interviews and the interactions during the treatments were also analyzed qualitatively. Task-based instruction (TBI) proved significantly more effective than traditional intervention and processing instruction significantly outperformed all others on both posttests. Furthermore, processing instruction was the only task-based intervention to retain its improvement till the delayed posttest. Qualitatively, processing instruction led to true negotiation of meaning and deep-level learning, consciousness-raising led to massive negotiation over the function of the target structure and deep-level learning, input enhancement led to enormous unfocused interaction about meaning, and traditional intervention just led to interaction about the forms. It was concluded that a well-planned processing instruction is a promising intervention for focusing on language form; however, due to the strong points cited for the other two tasks, their roles should not be ignored.

Systematic phonics instruction in first language education has recently received considerable research attention due to its critical role in facilitating phonological awareness and processing skills. However, little is known about the effects of systematic phonics instruction on foreign language reading and spelling in an EFL context. This study examined the effects of spelling-based phonics instruction on 9-12 year old Persian speaking learners’ reading and spelling English words. The participants were randomly assigned into two groups: a control group who received non-phonics instruction, and an experimental group who received spelling-based phonics instruction. CORE Phonics Survey (2003), a battery of diagnostic tests and tasks, was used to uncover the effects of phonics on oral reading and word spelling development of the learners. The results of independent-samples t-test revealed that after 10-weeks of instruction, the spelling-based phonics instruction had really significant effects on improving both young Iranian EFL learners’ oral reading and whole word spelling. In other words, the experimental group benefited from spelling-based phonics instruction compared to the group with non-phonics instruction.