درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This article investigates Eimear McBride's novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing in the light of Bernard Stiegler's concept of disorientation. As a technical development, disorientation manifests itself in the girl's non-syntactic language and the gradual evolving linguistic repertoire as she matures. The article argues that McBride's usage of the idiomatic language and stream of consciousness is part of the narrator's tertiary memory or epiphylogenetic memory. The young protagonist-narrator cannot reach a state of equilibrium between her developing consciousness as an Irish girl and her "technic" of writing herself as the epiphylogenetic memory, hence her disorientation. The technics in the Irish context can include not only the Irish English, but also the theological and political technics which engulf the subject to form her or him to their image. Technics is a technical term used by Bernard Stiegler as the horizon of human existence. Technics, often used as a singular noun, is juxtaposed with episteme in order to highlight the ignorance of Western philosophy about the significant role it plays in the human evolution and consciousness.    

The present quasi-experimental study attempts to investigate the effectiveness of a context-sensitive framework of writing on the improvement of Iranian EFL students' writing performance. To this aim, sixty sophomores majoring in English language translation from two intact classes at Islamic Azad University of Tonekabon, Iran participated in this study. An Oxford Quick Placement Test was administered to assess the participants' degree of homogeneity and classify them in intermediate (receiving 28-36 out of 60) and upper-intermediate (receiving 37-44 out of 60) groups. Then, each group was randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. A pretest of writing was administered to all participants. The experimental groups practiced essay writing according to the context-sensitive framework. After 12 sessions, all participants took part in the post test. Paired sample t-tests and independent sample t-tests were run to examine whether there were statistically significant differences between the means of the groups. The results revealed that both the intermediate and upper- intermediate experimental groups significantly outperformed the control groups stating that the context-sensitive framework was effective to improve the students' writing performance. However, there was no significant difference between the posttest scores of intermediate and upper-intermediate experimental groups. It means that implementation of context-sensitive framework was equally effective in both experimental groups. The findings supported the use of a context-sensitive framework for promoting writing ability of Iranian EFL learners. The study has implications for writing teachers, practitioners, and learners.

  The present study aimed to investigate if learning English as an L2 has an effect on word recall and lexical activation among Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, a sample of 45 male and female EFL learners was selected and they were classified into two experimental and one control group, 15 each. Word recall and oral time-limited tests were conducted within the three groups; they had to listen to 16 non-cognate Farsi words, each by 2 seconds, remember and recall them to resay. For lexical activation, an experiment was carried out by asking them to memorize and retell words shown to them through a computer screen. Outcomes of the word recall test revealed that the mean score of participants with low exposure to English was higher than lower and upper intermediate. Results exhibited that the participants in the first group surpassed those in the experimental group in word recall test. In the lexical activation test, the control group who were participants with low exposure to English performed better than the participants in the other two groups. Results revealed no meaningful difference among the mean scores of the three categories in lexical activation test, though. The results of the present study have some implications for language teachers, material developers and students. In fact, language teachers can provide a link between learners’ vocabulary knowledge of two languages, and this way help their students to activate their L2 vocabulary knowledge more easily and with less cognitive load.