درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study aimed to investigate the impact of pre-speaking activities on Iranian intermediate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ oral performance. The study followed a quasi-experimental design in which subjects of the study were non-randomly selected. Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was used to select 100 intermediate EFL learners as the main sample. Then they were divided randomly into two experimental and control groups. Prior to the treatment, participants of both groups were given a pre-test of speaking to ensure their speaking ability. After a treatment of pre-speaking activities to members of the experimental group, a post-test of speaking was administered to seek the effect of it. A t-test was run to examine the difference between the mean scores of each group in post-tests. It was found that there was a statistically significant difference between the experimental and the control group. That is, the experimental group outperformed the control group in oral performance.

Objective: The use of cohesive devices makes discourse comprehend. However, in the discourse of senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type (SDAT) participants, the lack of the use of cohesive devices hinders effective communication. The present study aims to investigate cohesion in the discourse of SDAT participants. Understanding how these people manage their interactions may lead to suitable approaches for them. Method: The methodology of this quantitative research was ex post facto type. The present study has been performed in one of the nursing home in Kermanshah in 2019. And also, the statistic population of this study included 20 participants (10 SDAT participants and 10 normal elderly participants (NE)) who were matched based on age (63-75 years old), gender, illiteracy, and Kurdish language (Kalhori dialect) speaker. To determine the severity of dementia, the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (CDR) was performed. Then, the collected interviews were transcribed and coded. The data were analyzed based on Halliday and Hasan's theory (1976) and independent t-test was used to obtain the statistic results. Results: The findings indicate significant differences between groups using grammatical cohesive devices, such as reference (p=0.006), conjunction (p=0.004), ellipsis (p=0.007), and substitution (p=0.426) and lexical cohesive devices such as the same word (p=0.006), synonym (p=0.012), superordinate (p=0.001), general word (p=0.002), and collocation (p=0.387). Conclusion: The results show that grammatical and lexical cohesive devices are used less in the discourse of SDAT Kurdish speakers. However, in the discourse of both SDAT and NE groups, grammatical cohesive devices have more frequency than lexical cohesive devices.

Communicative language use largely entails regular patterns consisting of pre-constructed phrases or sequences. These sequences have been examined by many researchers to find the situation-based formulas which may help L2 learners follow a possibly more target-like speaking system. This study, therefore, explored two categories of formulaic expressions including speech formulas and situation-bound utterances used by EFL learners. The randomly selective participants included 30 intermediate and 30 advanced learners, who performed a total number of 120 role-play tasks focused on the situations which required the use of thanking, requesting, offering, and apology speech acts. Audio-recorded data from role-plays were transcribed and analyzed based on existing lists of speech formulas. Results showed that the participants produced more than 102 types of formulaic sequences that could be called “a list of pragmatic routines for thanking, requesting, offering, and apologizing speech acts in the EFL context”.  This list includes 44 and 58 speech formulas and situation-bound utterances, respectively. Results further indicated that advanced language learners used more diverse situation-bound utterances in terms of its internal and contextual complexity than their counterparts in the intermediate group due to expert judgments. Because these formulas can increase coherence in speaking, and enhance effective and natural communication, their instruction could be part of the language teaching curriculum.