درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Course books play a crucial role in educational process and are believed to be the pivotal ingredient of language teaching. Every new textbook needs to be analyzed in order to reach its best. Hence this study aims to analyze three Iranian English course books to reveal how various cultures are shown via the course books characters’ race, nationality, gender, and intercultural communications. The inspection of the course books revealed unequal cultural representations with the dominance of white and male characters. Furthermore, regarding the intercultural interactions, most examples included conversations among Iranians in a superficial level of cultural engagement. It was also found that males’ roles are more highlighted throughout the series. Hence, in some cases, the leading ideology floating in this series is prototyping the Iranian-Islamic culture and values by means of English. Overall, this series seemed to suffer from biased embedded ideologies in terms of presenting cultures, races and genders. The findings of this study are of great help for language teachers, language learners, textbook developers, and curriculum developers to adopt an international position toward education.

The present mixed-method study sought to investigate the efficacy of using an interventionist dynamic assessment and specifically its formats namely the cake and the sandwich ones on learners’ grammatical English Tenses. In doing so, 45 advanced learners of English language at Iran Language Institute (ILI) in Shiraz, Iran were selected. They were randomly assigned to 3 groups, each including 15 participants. Two experimental groups namely the cake and the sandwich ones received the interventionist dynamic assessment test while the third group received a non-dynamic grammar test which was functioning as a control group. As the study utilized a sequential exploratory design (QUAN → qual) of mixed method approach (MMR), the quantitative part was carried out via a well-established grammar test and in the qualitative component, six informants (3 from the cake group and 3 from the sandwich group) were selected to be interviewed and their quotations were descriptively analyzed through a sociocultural perspective. The quantitative component of the study revealed the outperformance of the two experimental group over the control group. However, the two modes of delivering mediation in experimental groups had no statistically significant difference on the degree of the acquisition of grammatical English tenses by learners. The interview analysis of the negotiations also demonstrated positive viewpoints of learners about the two experimental groups. Merging the quantitative and qualitative analyses, the study found that interventionist dynamic assessment, in both modes, could have positive effects on learners’ ability to improve their acquisition of English tenses.

The present study set out to determine the effect of implementing exploratory-cumulative talk in comparison to disputational talk on cognitive (meaning development and organization of thought as well as problem solving ability) dependency of intermediate level students in translation studies. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, a quasi-experimental-pretest-posttest-statistical study was conducted in which 63 linguistically homogeneous B.A students in translation studies at the IAU-Shahreza branch, in experimental and control groups were the participants. Administering cognitive dependency questionnaire before and after implementing the treatment, exploratory-cumulative talk, helps the researcher to find out the possible effect of it against the control group, disputational talk, in translator training courses. The results of the data analysis indicate that the difference between the posttest mean scores of the experimental and control groups do not reach statistical significance. However, by conventional criteria, the difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the experimental group was considered statistically significant by large effect size. The application of the present study findings in translator training courses may pave the way for translation teachers and translation students to follow more fruitful approaches.