درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study sets as its purpose to explore Young Learners’ (YLs) channels to voice their perspectives on English language classroom-based assessment, schooling, and school experiences. Qualitative research design was used to collect data through focus group interview from 42 participants drawn from English-medium primary schools. Their selection was by purposive sampling from 7 schools. Field notes were also employed to highlight salient points and corroborate participants’ opinions. Findings indicate that pupils are afraid of answering a question in class wrongly; their peers give them this fear of being laughed and mocked. There is lack of solidarity amongst the pupils. They wish for a variety of assessment methods and techniques but parents seem to maintain a strong position in the children’s lives so that they would not want to disappoint parents by not doing well in their assessments. Teachers’ feedback does not seem to be transparent, even though pupils did not mention this in the group interviews. Pupils have many beliefs when attributing success and failure and some of these beliefs are superstitious, and they go to school for instrumental as well as for reasons of knowledge acquisition.

Translation seems a spoon feeding activity if it is taken mere transference of meaning from one language to another i.e. source language to target language. A good translation is usually considered, a translation in which merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another as to be distinctly apprehended by the native speaker of the country to which that language belongs as it is by those who speak the language of the original work. This vendetta leads to the presupposition that there may be other types of translations i.e. a bad translation, an average translation, or the best translation. There is another controversy of free (sense) and literal translation (sense & style). Sometimes it is taken as word for word translation and sometimes as sense for sense translation. But the problem arises when the cultural, poetical, linguistic, stylistic, and technological issues are involved in translation. To find out its inherent impossibility, the participants were given one quotation to translate it from Urdu to English. It is concluded that although the quotation which was given for translation was quite simple and did not have cultural and equivalence problems to a great degree, yet the varied responses with respect to structure, understanding, punctuation, and expression show that it was not an easy task

This study tried to compare the possible differences between female and male EFL students with respect to the use of lexical hedges in their academic spoken language. To fulfil this objective, 40 Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners majoring in TEFL were chosen from Islamic Azad University of Abadan, Iran. The selected participants were assigned into two equal groups namely male group (n=20) and female group (n=20). Then, five discussion sessions in a single gendered context were separately recorded for male and female participants. Frequency counts and chi-square were used to analyze the obtained data. By utilizing the framework of hedges, it is deduced that that there are differences among female and male respondents’ propensity in selecting word of lexical hedges. Female responders tend to utilize more lexical hedges than male responders. In such manner, most frequently lexical hedges of fillers such as; hmm, uhh, you know, yeah were used most frequently by female respondents in their utterances; while male respondents most repeatedly utilized lexical hedges of fillers like; I think, uhh, yeah in their utterances. Female respondents had broad range variegation in picking words of lexical hedges while male respondents were not sufficiently productive in selecting the words of lexical hedges. It was demonstrated by the number of lexical hedges applied in giving viewpoints in debate and discussion context.