مطالب

Concerns over the phony nature of textbooks and artificiality of their contents in reflecting authentic language have been raised by a number of researchers. It has been argued that many language teaching programs result in the failure of learners of English to successfully communicate in the target language. The problem with these programs is that there is no general agreement about the success of these materials in developing the pragmatic competence necessary for interlocutors’ mutually intelligible communication[D1] . Hence, this study explored communicated requests for nonverbal/verbal goods and services (RNGS/RVGS) in the dialogues of 5 textbooks and 8 English movies. The utterances of the textbooks and movies were evaluated on six criteria deriving from research on speech act theory, politeness, and conversation analysis. These included whether the textbooks discussed second pair parts, the forms of requests, the context of request occurrence, the nature of the devices through which the requests are mitigated, and multi-turn request forms. The results of the analysis revealed that, except for re-requests and dispreferred responses of RNGS,textbooks’ strategies including forms, face, contexts of RVGS, and strategies of RNGSwere not realized through adequate examples compared to their variants in movies.Most importantly,except for bald on record, internal mitigators of RVGS, external mitigators, and direct and indirect forms of RNGS, the other request strategies in the textbooks showed less variety than those of their counterparts in the movies. Internally mitigated RVGS were the onlystrategies variouslyexploited in the textbooks.The findings revealed that textbook designers should improve their instructional materials by incorporatingmore accurate samples of communicated requests in their future textbooks.

Nowadays, intercultural communication via email among various groups and societies has been increasingly important as an aspect of communication. This research aims at investigating aspects of politeness meaning negotiation via emails exchanged between English and Persian speakers with different cultural backgrounds. The present study also reveals the potentials for using emails to experience culture as a process of meaning negotiation. To do this, 18 English and Persian speakers (aged 22-60) were asked to exchange emails for 12 weeks. After collecting the required samples, the interplay between the computer-mediated communication, speech act and politeness is explored by using the analytical frameworks of Hyme’s ethnography of communication (1974), Searle’s speech act theory (1969) and Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (1987). The methodology of this research is descriptive analytical. The results of this research show that “politeness” is not a stable construct. Rather it is constantly (re)negotiated by the interactants who take into account the relevant contextualization cues. In addition saving the face of the sender and the receiver is concerned simultaneously in the process of email exchanging.

This experimental study attempts to see whether incorporating supplemental podcasts into the blended module of second language (L2) vocabulary teaching and learning leads to better learning outcomes in comparison with other common teaching and learning methods as self-study and conventional. To that end, undergraduate students from Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences were summoned up via an announcement to take part in the study. Volunteers were homogenized via Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) and were then randomly divided into three groups to learn English vocabulary items via three different scenarios during 32 sessions. The collected data from the participants’ answers to the attitude questionnaire and interview as well as the data from assessing their performance throughout the course were analyzed both descriptively and inferentially. The analysis of the data revealed that the podcast-mediated blended L2 learning scenario appeared as the most successful scenario in L2 vocabulary learning. Consequently, it could be concluded that providing miscellaneous practicing opportunities for students would facilitate learning process and contribute to learning improvement.