مطالب

Despite being an important category of multimodal tourism discourse, Inflight magazines and their roles in promoting international airlines’ profile and their host country, are mostly under-researched. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the application of different visual and semiotic strategies regarding social actors' race, age and social class and how people are represented in different international airlines’ inflight magazines. For this purpose, 16 international airlines’ inflight magazine issues were selected depending on the host country's geographical location and availability. Using Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006 [1996]) and van Leeuwen’s (2008) visual grammar, the data were analyzed based on ideational, interpersonal and compositional levels. The results revealed that inflight magazine designers, content developers and advertisement agencies tend to apply certain visual and semiotic resources. They reinforce bias and false stereotypes towards certain groups of people in terms of their age, race and social class originating in political, historical and ideological perceptions and standpoints of higher institutions across the world. The findings also highlight the importance of visual literacy being promoted to the target audience, including air travelers and EFL learners.

This study investigated Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ remotivational strategies drawing on an integrative framework encompassing Ecological Systems Theory (EST) and Self-Determination Theory (SDT). In this framework, the four EST layers consisting of microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem and the three related aspects of SDT, including autonomy, relatedness, and competence, were integrated to unravel teachers’ remotivational strategies. The participants included 32 Iranian EFL teachers teaching at six language institutes in Isfahan and Hamedan provinces in Iran. The data were collected via conducting semi-structured interviews. The results of a thematic analysis indicated that Iranian EFL teachers’ remotivational strategies were embedded in the four EST layers consisting of the immediate classroom setting, situations beyond the immediate setting, the linkages and processes taking place between the settings, and the manifestation of a particular subculture. Moreover, the results revealed that teachers’ remotivational strategies were also situated within the three SDT aspects, including autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Overall, the results of thematic analysis led to the emergence of various themes positioned in the four layers of EST, while such themes conceptually fit the three aspects of SDT. The results provide EFL teachers and teacher educators with awareness concerning how remotivational strategies are nested across multiple systems while simultaneously being informed by a certain motivation-specific theory.

This synthesis reviews the methodological issues in empirical studies investigating the effect of working memory capacity (WMC) on relative clause ambiguity resolution where results have failed to be consistent cross-linguistically and even intra-linguistically. This discrepancy might have occurred due to ‘methodological inconsistencies’ in the design (Liu & Brown, 2015), administration, and scoring of WMC measures. This study aimed to investigate the aggregative and developmental status of the methodological practices of WMC measures and describe how transparently such practices have been reported. Based on a comprehensive search, 39 experiments were retrieved from 25 studies, culminating in a collection of studies with a time span of 22 years from 1999 to 2021, and coded for 46 features. Results revealed that although over the past 22 years, the field has witnessed significant improvements in the employment of WMC tests, there are still a lot of variations and inconsistencies calling for attempts to raise methodological awareness among researchers to afford more attention to quality and transparency in reporting WMC tests. The article concludes with a call for reform in standardizing WMC tests and a number of other recommendations for future primary and secondary research.

Despite extensive studies concerning written error correction, it is imperative that more research be conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of error correction on improving L2 writing. Driven by this gap, this study aimed to examine whether unfocused direct and indirect types of written corrective feedback had any impact on the writing accuracy of the Iranian English language learners’ new compositions. Through the random matching technique, ninety Iranian English language learners from seven foreign language centers in southwestern Iran were split into two groups for treatment and one group for control. As part of the evaluation, a writing test was utilized to determine whether the learners had improved their writing accuracy due to the treatment. The results showed that the participants in both treatment groups improved their writing accuracy, though the learning gains from both treatment were not significantly different. This study concludes with some implications for teachers regarding their use of appropriate types of written error correction. 

The expansion of mobile wireless technology into education in recent decades has offered an incredible opportunity to design learning differently and to enhance students' learning experiences that extend beyond the typical teacher-led classrooms. Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent closure of educational institutions around the world, distance/mobile learning has become a widely accepted form of information and communication technology-enhanced education. Given the infancy of technology-enhanced education at Iraqi educational institutions, this study was conducted to determine how Iraqi EFL learners preferred information and communication technology-enhanced education and how ready they were to adopt mobile learning for English learning purposes in higher education. This study also examined whether there were any significant differences in the learners' preferences and readiness for mobile learning considering their gender. Methodological triangulation was undertaken using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with some Iraqi EFL learners at four public universities so as to seek the research objectives. Descriptive analysis was used to analyze the data from the questionnaire. The data of the interviews were then analyzed using thematic analysis to identify and report the common themes of the two coders of the interviews. The findings revealed a plethora of evidence indicating learners' positive attitudes towards using mobile learning as a viable medium for language learning purposes in intra- and extramural situations, as it expanded the boundaries of learning beyond the limitations of traditional pedantic educational settings. Besides, no significant differences were found in the preferences and readiness of Iraqi EFL learners considering their gender for the adoption of mobile learning in higher education, though females liked mobile learning better than males.  

The present article investigates Emily Dickinson's poem "I taste a liquor never brewed" and aims to solve the confusion of scholars that struggled to specify the precise meaning of some of the terms in the text and fully appreciate the psychic dynamics of it in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first question the article asks is how is 'desire' represented, and the second is whether the speaker of the poem longs for an 'Other jouissance.' In Seminar XX, Lacan defines Other jouissance as the most intense and ineffable kind and equals it to the jouissance of the mystics. Desire, in Lacanian teachings, is unattainable and an inevitable consequence of language. The famous Lacanian maxims "desire is the desire of the Other," and the "Other is the treasure trove of signifiers" indicate that desire could be represented through signifiers. The article integrates These Lacanian notions in Paul Ricoeur's three-staged hermeneutic Arc, which consists of 1) explanation, 2) understanding, and 3) appropriation. The poem will undergo these three stages of interpretation. By the end of the last stage, the world of the text is appropriated by the selected Lacanian notions. The results of the study are the following: 1) the poem is unique in displaying what Lacan termed 'Other jouissance,' 2) it demonstrates an intense desire for a supreme being—the Other, 3) desire is explicitly named in the poem: it is manifested explicitly in the words ‘liquor," tankards," Alcohol," inebriate," debauchee," drams," drink," little tippler.'

This paper aims to analyze the impact of the traumatic experiences on the identity formation of Shaila Abdulla’s main character in Saffron Dreams and elaborates on how she manages to overcome her diverse emotional burdens. The author, who is concerned with Muslim women’s multiple identities and struggles in the American Diaspora, discusses the challenges of living in the increasing Islamophobic climate in the aftermath of 9/11 through the life of her heroine, Arissa Illahi, a Pakistani writer and artist, who loses her husband in the collapse of the World Trade Centre. Judith Herman’s conceptions of trauma and recovery are applied to discuss the impact of trauma on the identity formation of the character and how she succeeds to go through the process of healing. The paper also analyzes the literary strategies and narrative techniques in this feminist trauma narrative to indicate how the author has tried to represent what is originally marked by voicelessness. The results of the study demonstrates that although the traumatic event of 9/11 and its consequences has devastating effects on Arissa, she as an artist is able to utilize her psychological resources and to take advantage of familial ties to cope successfully with the traumatic experiences in her life, tolerate adversities, and even develop an optimistic view point about new possibilities for her future life. This paper supports the aim of contemporary feminist traumatology which is to make women’s trauma visible, give meaning to it, and ultimately create frameworks that promote the healing of trauma. Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, and Laurie Vickroy are among the main theoreticians of the research.     

This study seeks to explore the effectiveness of flipped instruction on the Iranian intermediate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners reading comprehension and grammar learning. As the participants of the study, 60 Iranian intermediate EFL learners from a language institute in Kerman, Iran, were recruited based on convenience sampling in the form of two intact classes. Then, to conduct randomization, the two classes were randomly assigned to two groups namely, flipping group and control group. Next, the two groups were exposed to 14 treatment sessions in which reading comprehension and grammar were taught to the flipping group through explicit flipped instruction and to the control group through non-flipped mainstream instruction used in the institute. Data collection tools employed in the study included the Quick Placement Test (QPT), Michigan test of grammar, Michigan test of reading, and SPSS 21 software. The results revealed the significant effectiveness of flipped instruction on the Iranian intermediate EFL learners' reading comprehension and grammar learning. Accordingly, it is suggested that EFL teachers use flipped instruction if they seek to enhance EFL learners' reading comprehension and grammatical knowledge.