مطالب

Test method facet is one of the factors which can have an influence on the test takers’ performance. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of two different response types, multiple-choice cloze and multiple-choice test, on the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers’ reading comprehension performance. To this end, 40 pre-intermediate and intermediate learners participated in the study. To counterbalance the practice effect, the participants of the study at both pre-intermediate and intermediate levels were randomly assigned into two groups. For each level, there were two types of tests and two test administrations. Within each level, the two groups took these two tests in a different order. For all participants of the study there were two scores based on multiple- choice cloze and multiple-choice tests. Two Paired sample t tests were separately run to compare the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers’ performance on multiple-choice cloze and multiple-choice tests. Two independent samples t tests were run to compare the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers on these two tests. There was no significant difference between the pre-intermediate test takers’ performance on these two types of tests. There was a significant difference between intermediate test takers’ performance on the tests. There was no significant difference between the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers’ performance on the multiple-choice cloze tests. The intermediate test takers outperformed the pre-intermediate test takers only on the multiple-choice tests. Based on these results it can be concluded that test methods can have an influence on the test takers’ performance, especially at higher proficiency levels and learners may need to have reached a certain level of proficiency to be able to understand the text.

Naming as an inseparable sign of a country’s language has attracted the attention of many linguists to formulate and test hypotheses regarding the culture and language of the people of a certain area. Iran appears like a proper destination for conducting a research focusing on naming based on several factors such as geography or chronology. The present article aims to take a specific look at the impact of political era (sociopolitical factors) in addition to dialect over naming practices. Chronological data is gathered from 5 politically significant consecutive periods. Separately, 5 districts are chosen speaking 4 different native dialects to examine the second hypothesis regarding the influence of dialect on naming. 50 most popular names were collected on the two aforementioned different bases and analysis was conducted by SPSS software. The results revealed that time with concentration on political spans did not form an influential factor except for minor fluctuations. The other hypothesis regarding the factor of dialect is rejected for male names while females do confirm a limited consistency of dialect and name choice in most of the areas.

The study of lexical bundles, among types of text analysis, is gaining importance over the others in the last century. The present study employed a frequency-based analysis approach to the use of lexical bundles. The discussion section of 60 political science articles, with corpora around 253,063 words were investigated in three aspects of structure, form, and function of lexical bundles. The present study selected its data pool out of scholarly articles from qualified journals in the field of political sciences. One part of the data pool was made up of 30 articles written by American native speakers. The second half of the data comprised the 30 articles written by Iranian scholars in political sciences. The findings showed that native and Persian-speaking writers employed the same forms of lexical bundles, and there were significant differences concerning the nativeness and functions. Bearing in mind the findings of the present study, material developers would think of the possibility of the addition of lexical clusters into the materials. It can similarly be valuable for the development of the second language writing strategies, for those who need to write in academic contexts especially political contexts.