مطالب

The present study aimed at evaluating the effect of using three types of teacher gestures including representational (iconic, metaphoric) and emblematic gestures on the long-term retention of some L2 (here, English) concrete, and figurative idiomatic structures among a group of volunteering female junior high-school learners in Sabzevar, Iran. Via a multi-stage, mixed-method research design, over a period of eight weeks mainly focusing on an action research design, twelve learners of the eighth and ninth grades of high schools were presented with forty-eight English idiomatic phrases. Post-tests on the immediate and delayed recall and recognition tests served as the primary tools for collecting the essential data along with frequent teacher notes on their performance. The report from Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test indicated that the median delayed post-test ranks were not statistically significantly different from the median immediate post-test ranks Z=12, p≥.754, which proved a positive effect of using gestures on long-term retention of idiomatic phrases. In the second phase, teachers’ and students’ views were also scrutinized which showed positive feedback over the process. Implications for L2 classes were then presented in the light of recent multi-modal strategies for teaching target language forms having idiomatic expressions for the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context.

Previous research has shown the differential effects of task-related prompts on syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity when L2 learners use writing prompts to produce a piece of writing. However, the extent to which the freedom in the selection of prompts affects these linguistic facets in L2 argumentative essays is still unknown. The present study, therefore, was designed to investigate differences between syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity in argumentative essays. Seventy-one upper-intermediate male and female Iranian English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners from Imam Khomeini International University in Qazvin and Safir Plus institute in Tehran participated in this study. Five-paragraph essays were used to collect data, and SPSS (version 25) was used to analyze the data. Results of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed statistically significant differences between syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity. Results from post-hoc analyses revealed statistically significant differences between lexical diversity and grammatical accuracy as well as lexical diversity and syntactic complexity, but no statistically significant differences were found between grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity in argumentative essays.

The small and medium entrepreneurs’ and managers’ main interest is to avoid the problems resulting from the economic and social crisis during COVID-19. One way to prevent these problems is to increase the organizations’ resilience to achieve optimal business performance. Resilience helps with business continuity and performance, simultaneously assisting social, economic, and cultural policymakers and planners in their tasks. This study investigates the impact of  corporate resilience dimensions on performance in the food SMEs industry in Iran during the COVID-19 era. After reviewing the literature on organizational resilience (planned and adaptive) based on Porter’s value chain, the effects of  five dimensions (human resources, marketing, finance, supply chain management, and services) on corporate performance were assessed. Ninety-five questionnaires were collected from food industry SMEs using the simple random sampling method. SPSS 26 and SMART PLS 2.0 were used to analyze the data. The results of data analysis with Partial Least Squares (PLS) showed that all dimensions had a positive effect on corporate performance because all the items  had high t coefficients (t > 1.96). With GOF, the overall validation of the model is high. Appropriate changes in Porter’s value chain components (Human Resources, Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Services) under the COVID-19 influence have a positive effect on performance.