درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Morphological complexity is one of the dimensions of complexity that has been increasingly analyzed over the last few years. However, results from previous studies drawing on only a single text type are inconclusive. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of text types (descriptive, narrative, and expository) on the morphological complexity of essays written by Iranian English language learners. The participants included 87 lower-intermediate male and female L2 learners at six language institutes in Qazvin, Iran, who were selected from 127 language learners taking an Oxford Quick Placement test. The participants wrote on each text type in three consecutive weeks as a part of their classroom activity. The morphological complexity of verbs and nouns was separately calculated using the morphological complexity index. The data were analyzed using a series of Friedman and Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests. The findings did not show any statistically significant differences across text types for nominal inflectional diversity; however, verbal inflectional diversity was statistically significant across text types, with narrative essays morphologically more complex than descriptive and expository essays. The findings may have theoretical and pedagogical implications for researchers and L2 teachers.

This quantitative study aimed to investigate the combined effects of two types of strategic planning, namely collaborative and teacher-led planning conditions and task complexity on Iranian intermediate language learners' oral production in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To achieve this purpose, 90 EFL learners were selected through convenience sampling from a language institute in Shiraz, Iran, and randomly assigned to two control and four experimental groups. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design in the form of pretest, treatment, and posttest. In the first step, all participants took part in a speaking pretest in which they were required to narrate a story based on a series of picture description tasks. While the experimental groups underwent 10 treatment sessions of picture description task performance along with two planning types i.e., teacher-led and collaborative planning conditions, the control groups were not allowed to plan the task performance. In the last session, the language learners took a posttest whose results were compared with those of the pretest. The findings revealed that the language learners in the collaborative planning groups outperformed the other groups in terms of both fluency and complexity. Further, teacher-led groups did better than the other groups in terms of accuracy. This study carries crucial implications for EFL teachers, material developers, syllabus designers, and speaking skill examiners.

The literature on second/foreign language (L2/FL) discourse is replete with corpus-based studies into the use of various features representing lexical proficiency. Nonetheless, the lexical construct of English for academic purposes (EAP) texts developed by postgraduates majoring in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) still sounds like a relatively unexplored domain that merits further multi-dimensional investigation. To narrow the gap, the authors in the current study set out to evaluate the lexical richness of a corpus containing doctoral dissertations written by Iranian TEFL students in terms of lexical density, diversity, and sophistication. Taking advantage of the computational tool Coh-Metrix to analyze the lexical features, the corpus was analyzed in comparison with a first language (L1) baseline containing doctoral dissertations written by English native speakers. The comparative analysis of the L1 and L2 corpora revealed that the texts written by Iranian TEFL learners were lexically less diverse but more sophisticated. Additionally, the lexical density of the L2 corpus exceeded that of the L1 one in terms of nouns and adjectives. Based on the results drawn from a discriminant function analysis (DFA), the features representing lexical sophistication and density were found to be the best predictors of lexical richness since they could significantly discriminate between the two sub-corpora. The findings may provide new insights into the ways of evaluating and enhancing the lexical richness of FL/L2 written discourse.

The importance of language teacher identity has been widely recognized recently as teachers’ professional development is highly influenced by the ways teachers view themselves. Critical orientation towards identity has also received considerable attention recently. The present study, thus, investigated the effect of a Critical Teacher Education Course (CTEC) on EFL teachers’ identity (re)construction. The participants included thirteen teachers who were first interviewed using a 20-question interview checklist whose items enabled the researchers to elicit teachers’ professional identity with a focus on critical pedagogical orientation. The teachers then attended an in-service CTEC held for ten sessions. The course was primarily dialogue-based where different premises of transformative education and critical pedagogy were introduced and discussed. This was followed by the second interview session in which the teachers were asked the same questions as the first interview. In the meantime, the teachers were also required to critically reflect on their classroom practices through reflective journals. The data were subjected to content analysis (inductive category development). The findings revealed that prior to their participation, the teachers viewed teaching English as a neutral act unaffected by contextual factors, whereas after the CTEC, they became more aware of the social, cultural, economic and political factors that might affect the whole process. Secondly, compliance with the rules and regulations, policies, and the status quo marked teachers' identities. However, they changed to more integrative teachers with critical orientations after CTEC. The findings might imply that EFL teacher training/education programmes become more localized, dialogic, interaction-based, negotiation-oriented and integration-driven.

This study investigates the effect of Pot-luck Flipped Classroom (PFC), meaning the implementation of pot-luck, as an innovative technique, in a flipped classroom (FC), on the development of translation competence (TC). The advances and developments in science and technology and the need to exchange the newly-developed information, knowledge, and technology highlights the demand to train professional translators, and thus, the development of TC becomes an essential skill of 21st. century. FC learning model and pot-luck innovative teaching technique have proven the enhancement of the effective learning. Therefore, in this study, we combined them as PFC to develop TC via collaboration and active involvement in a learner-centered environment. A total of 57 Translation Studies students, including 27 boys and 30 girls took part in this study. We used a quasi-experimental design with an experimental (PFC) and control group. Data were collected via Translation Competence Acquisition Questionnaire before and after the intervention of PFC. Findings showed a statistically significant difference (significant at 0.05) in all TC components in experimental group after the intervention of PFC. Thus, PFC proved to be efficient. Finally, pedagogical implications are discussed and suggestions for further studies are also provided.

The present study was an evaluation attempt to investigate the practicality of interpretation procedures proposed by Fairclough (1989) in the critical analysis of Persian texts. The evaluation was implemented on the basis of a goodness criterion, analytical induction (AI) framework developed by Silverman (1993). In so doing, we went about the interpretation of the inaugural speech made by the president of Iran, Dr. Rohani to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2013. The interpretation was done according to the Fairclough’s interpretation model in light of AI theoretical framework. The outcome of the study supported the practicality of the overall interpretation model in the Iranian context. However, considering Iranian special sociolinguistic context, the study also put forward some suggestions with respect to the interpretation of local coherence and text structure in the lower section of the model as well as situational context and intertextual context in upper section.