درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Annually, researchers in various scientific fields publish their research results as technical reports or articles in proceedings or journals. The collocation of this type of data is used by search engines and digital libraries to search and access research publications, which usually retrieve related articles based on the query keywords instead of the article’s subjects. Consequently, accurate classification of scientific articles can increase the quality of users’ searches when seeking a scientific document in databases. The primary purpose of this paper is to provide a classification model to determine the scope of scientific articles. To this end, we proposed a model which uses the enriched contextualized knowledge of Persian articles through distributional semantics. Accordingly, identifying the specific field of each document and defining its domain by prominent enriched knowledge enhances the accuracy of scientific articles’ classification. To reach the goal, we enriched the contextualized embedding models, either ParsBERT or XLM-RoBERTa, with the latent topics to train a multilayer perceptron model. According to the experimental results, overall performance of the ParsBERT-NMF-1HT was 72.37% (macro) and 75.21% (micro) according to F-measure, with a statistical significance compared to the baseline (p<0.05).

This article examines the impact of gender, age, and education on the attitudes of Kurdish speakers in Mahabad towards standard Persian and the Kurdish language. Since people’s emotions towards their own or others’ languages are related to their language attitudes, this important component plays a significant role in measuring success in language planning, learning speed, language selection and use, and predicting the extinction or sustainability of a language. The study’s statistical population consisted of 80 Kurdish-Persian bilinguals in Mahabad who were randomly selected. This study is situated within the theoretical framework of sociocognitive linguistics, and the research perspective was measured through an indirect method (matched-guise test). After distributing the questionnaire and conducting the matched-guise test, the collected data were analyzed. The results of the statistical analysis showed that the variables of gender, age, and education in Mahabad had no significant impact on the attitudes of bilingual Kurdish speakers towards standard Persian and the Kurdish language. The Kurdish speakers of Mahabad exhibited numerically positive attitude towards the standard Persian language compared to Kurdish language, but no significant difference in terms of any of the mentioned variables was observed between the two languages under study.

This article investigates the comitative constructions in Persian. These constructions consist of three members named accompanion, accompanee and accompanying setting. Previously, studies considered ‘bā’ (WITH) as a preposition in traditional grammar. All traditional grammarians introduced ‘bā’ as a preposition except those who pointed to ‘bā’ (WITH) in accompanying situations. One of the aims of the present research is to answer this question: Is ‘bā’(WITH)  a preposition in all sentences or  is it a conjunction or both? So, this study attempts to show its syntactic and functional features in Persian. Another goal is to compare coordinated and comitative constructions. The hypothesis is that ‘bā’(WITH) can be considered as a conjunctor and a preposition as well. Thus comitative constructions are divided into two groups: 1) symmetrical constructions in which [ with + DP2 ] is not an adjunct (an argument). The type of the verbs in this group are as follows: collectives, combining, relational predicates and similar comparison.  2) asymmetrical constructions in which [ with + DP2 ]  is an adjunct. The second type does not depend on the type of the verbs. It consists some members named non-collective verbs, instrumental, body organ, transportation. The instrumental type are of mediatory and facilitating. The findings of the present article can be used in the teaching of Persian grammar as well as syntactic analyses.  

The current study investigates the feasibility of implementing EFL teachers' Individual Development Planning at Iranian public schools. It further explores the underlying reasons for the (imp) possibility of practicing this program and seeks the teachers' suggestions to improve the schools' condition. To this end, data were collected from 180 EFL teachers using a researcher-made questionnaire and a follow-up semi-structured interview. The results of one-sample t-tests revealed a slight possibility following the interviews which indicated 14 underlying reasons for the insufficient grounds at public schools. Participating teachers also argued that equipping a room with necessary technological tools, allocating monetary resources, assigning specific teachers time to practice IDP, taking advantage of head teachers, changing the school administration delegation, and performing advocating cultural acts can provide a ground for IDP implementation. The findings demonstrate the necessity of creating changes by policymakers, school principals, and EFL teachers so that they can all benefit from this program.

Pragmatic failure is an issue usually occurring in cross-cultural communication when L2 learners cannot express themselves appropriately. This study aimed to discern the factors leading to cross-cultural pragmatic failure (CCPF) and the challenges EFL learners face in trying to overcome miscommunication problems. Following a qualitative research design, in the first study phase, one of the researchers observed 10 EFL teachers’ classes for 90 minutes each, twice a week during the term to take the required field notes for further analysis. To obtain more in-depth information, in the second phase, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 EFL teachers and learners, and the data were collected. The EFL teachers were from private English language institutes, and the student participants were EFL learners studying either in state-run universities or private language centers. The results of the thematic analysis revealed that EFL classroom context, time and budget, assessing pragmatic knowledge, ELT textbook, and teacher education were perceived as the causes of CCPF by the interviewees. Moreover, the extracted themes associated with learners’ challenges included linguistic incompetency, investing insufficient time and effort, psychological factors, cultural and sociocultural differences, inappropriate teaching methodology, and teachers’ pragmatic competence.

Task complexity has recently attracted great attention in second language (L2) studies. However, its potential impacts on learning transitional devices have not been considered. The current study was an attempt to analyze the impacts of manipulating task complexity conditions on EFL learners’ grammatical enhancement in terms of learning transitional devices through doing writing tasks. For this purpose, 75 intermediate EFL learners learning English in three English language institutes in Iran were randomly selected. They were assigned to four experimental groups and one control group (each with 15 participants). Each of the experimental groups was presented with a pretest, writing tasks, an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest. The participants took part in 9 sessions and in each session some transitional devices were introduced to the experimental groups with which they were supposed to write a paragraph based on a special topic using all those transitional devices. The different experimental groups received writing tasks with different complexity levels which were determined through the manipulation of factors including ± few elements and ± planning time. The participants in the control group just participated in a regular English class for 9 sessions without doing such tasks. The performances of all groups were analyzed, and the findings revealed statistically significant differences among the five groups in both the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest, after controlling for the effect of the pretest. The findings of the current study have practical implications for curriculum development and EFL writing instruction.

There have been a number of research concentrating on the request production of ESL/EFL, and native speakers. There have been some studies investigating the production of request speech act of EFLs and ESLs. However, no research has yet focused on the production differences of request speech act among Iranian EFLs and ESLs in terms of internal and external modification devices. First, the participants were given Oxford Placement Test (OPT) to determine their English proficiency level and 95 learners were chosen out of 123 ESLs and EFLs to respond to the scenarios adopted from Schauer (2009). Second, the scenarios were given to the participants via email or an already-made GoogleDoc link of the scenarios. The results of the independent t-test revealed that Iranian ESLs outperformed their EFL counterparts. The results regarding request head act, internal and external modifiers demonstrated that ESLs mostly applied conventionally indirect request strategies while EFLs mostly tended to apply direct request strategies. It was also revealed that requests produced by ESLs were more native-like with no or few grammatical mistakes and that both EFLs and ESLs utilized external modifiers more than internal modifiers. This study implies that due and sufficient attention is to be paid to EFLs since they lack sufficient exposure to L2 and such impoverished pragmatic input might result in inappropriate applications of speech acts in general and request speech act in particular.

Although processing instruction (PI) has been a very popular grammar teaching method over the last years, there are, however, very limited if any attempts to explore different proficiency learners’ achievements using this approach. This study was, therefore, an attempt to investigate the role of PI in possibly bringing about enhanced acquisition of three grammatical structures: regular past tense, causatives and relative clauses. In addition, it sought learner’s attitudes towards PI as it is believed that the success of an approach is highly dependent upon the viewpoints of its practitioners and the students being exposed to it. Three proficiency groups of elementary (n = 42), intermediate (n = 38) and advanced (n = 40) EFL learners were compared. The results of a set of independent samples t-tests revealed significant effects for the use of PI in all the groups except for a lack of improvement for elementary learners’ production of the regular past tense structure. The analysis of the attitude questionnaire and learners’ further ideas on the effectiveness of PI revealed their appreciation of the integration of this instructional practice in their target language courses. The results are discussed in relation to effective grammar and writing pedagogy.

Earlier research has shown that fair assessment plays a crucial role in the classroom and is closely associated with students' academic success. Besides, multiple studies have consistently indicated that the cognitive aspect of test anxiety significantly and meaningfully influences test performance, highlighting the connection between test anxiety and academic achievement. Therefore, this correlational study was done to investigate the relationship between Iranian EFL learners' perceptions of fairness in classroom assessment and their cognitive test anxiety. It followed a quantitative method and a total number of 201 learners, 88 males along with 113 females, participated in the present study voluntarily. A convenience and random-sampling method were applied, using fair assessment and cognitive test anxiety questionnaire. The results of the study, using Pearson-moment correlation and Regression analysis, revealed that there was no significant relationship between Iranian EFL learners' perceptions of fairness in classroom assessment and their cognitive test anxiety. It also indicated no significant difference between male and female learners' perceptions of fairness in classroom assessment and their cognitive test anxiety. The findings of the study can be implemented in educational systems by teachers, learners, programmers, and researchers. It can be considered as a guideline for teachers, especially EFL teachers in academic environments to find solutions for the problems and difficulties in the fairness of classroom assessment.