درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Novice academic writers, particularly Iranian graduate students (IGSs), upon entering an academic community, are hypothesized to face probable difficulties in practicing rhetorical expectations set by the experienced (EXP) members, hence, not being able to write in a way acceptable to these professionals. To explore the probable rhetorical distance between them, this study investigated the employment of interactional metadiscourse markers (IMMs) in the writings of IGSs (MA and Ph.D.) and EXP figures in Applied Linguistics. 120 recent research articles (RAs) served as the corpus of the study. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, all occurrences of the five types of IMMs were functionally identified, and compared. To detect any possible significant differences between the corpora, Chi-square tests were run. The results indicated that the IGSs used far less IMMs than the EXP ones in their RAs. However, the general pattern of their metadiscourse use was similar to the EXP writers’. It can be concluded that although the IGSs are relatively aware of general rhetorical framework of the genre based on IMMs, they seem to be far away from the rhetorical standards set by the established members of the discipline. Finally, the possible justifications and implications of the study were presented.

This study aimed at exploring the influence of the role that a teacher employs on his/her professional success. The teacher role was investigated from a new outlook, Goffman's footing theory. According to Goffman (1981), a speaker's role can be classified into three categories of animator, author, and principal, characterized as the repeater of the ideas made by the others, the paraphraser of concepts, and the creator of original ideas, respectively. Applying this theory in the educational context, the researchers selected 36 university professors of TEFL in the MA level and asked their students (N=118) to identify their professors' dominant role as animator, author, or principal, both generally and individually, via a metaphor checklist and their professional success via the Characteristic of Successful Iranian EFL Teacher Questionnaire. The results of Chi-square analysis indicated that the professors dominantly take on the author and animator roles respectively. One-way Anova results also demonstrated that the professors taking on the principal role enjoy higher professional success than those adopting the animator and author roles. The results offer implications and suggestions for pedagogical consideration within the Iranian university context.

This study deals with spotting the grammatical errors committed by the Iranian students majoring in English translation while translating the Persian sentences into English and investigating the effect of two teaching methods, including Grammar-Translation Method (GTM) and Communicative Language Teaching Method (CLT), on minimizing these errors. For this purpose, the grammatical errors in the translation of thirty students were identified. These errors were analyzed and classified according to Keshavarz’s model of error analysis.  The students were divided into two groups; the first group received the learning materials based on GTM, and in the second group CLT was applied. Afterward, a test which included English sentences extracted from Modern English 1 and 2 was designed based on the errors taken from the corpus compiled by the students’ translations. Then the frequency of the errors in both groups were analyzed by SPSS software to determine the significance of using these methods on minimizing the grammatical errors made by the students in their translations into English. To determine the level of significance, the probability value was calculated for raw errors, GTM and CLT errors. The analysis of Pearson correlation showed that both methods had their significance; however, the communicative method proved to be slightly more effective than the other. Undoubtedly, this does not mean to underestimate the efficacy of grammar translation method since it seems that it plays a complementary role in teaching environment, and achieving better pedagogical results cannot be prescribed on a single method.