مطالب

This paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the Persian native speakers. 200 Persian respondents took a 24-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenting exchanges they either observed or participated in. The results suggested a significant effect for the treated intervening social variables of age, gender, educational background, social distance, and relative power as well as compliment topics in determining the type of compliment response. The responses were further suggestive of the contextual effects of the three systems of hierarchical, solidarity and deferential as well as a newly coined system as kinship system.

This study investigated the comparative effect of teaching idiomatic expressions through practicing them in conversation and paragraph writing on intermediate EFL learners’ idiom learning. The participants were sorted out of a population of 134 intermediate students in Zabansara Language School in Khorramabad based on their scores on a Preliminary English Test (PET) and an idiom test piloted in advance. The selected 84 participants were divided randomly into three groups: two experimental groups, namely, conversation and paragraph writing groups, and one control group. The two experimental groups received different treatments. In one class, idioms were taught and learners were asked to make a conversation practicing the new idioms, and in the other class, they were asked to write short paragraphs using the idioms. In the third class, the control group, the new idioms were presented and then practiced through different written exercises. At the end of the treatment period, the researchers administered an idiom posttest. The analysis of the collected data revealed that using new idioms in conversation and paragraph writing helped students learn idioms more efficiently than just practicing them through different written exercises. Moreover, the use of idioms in conversation proved to be more effective than using them in paragraph writing. The findings can have implications in preparing materials, teaching/learning foreign languages, and designing syllabus.

In this article, the low back vowel // in word-final positions in Eghlidian dialect, one of Persian dialects, is studied. This vowel is represented phonetically as [], [] and [] in different phonetic environments. Therefore many words were collected via interviewing ten native speakers so that these different alternant forms can be accounted for appropriately. Since one of the authors of this article is a native speaker of the dialect, the verity of the data is confirmed. In writing this article, the collected data were classified in terms of different alternations of the vowel //, then related contexts were analyzed. Analysis of data showed that, firstly, in individual words, the final vowel // is pronounced as [o] when it is preceded by a non-glottal consonant; however, it is pronounced as [] when preceded by a glottal consonant and, secondly, in continuous speech, as a result of an assimilation, the final position vowel // is pronounced as [o] and [], respectively according to the graveness and acuteness of its preceding consonant.

Since the emergence of the process-oriented approach to second language writing instruction two main questions have been what and how error feedback should be given to the students. The question of whether teachers should provide feedback on grammar in the writing assignments of English as a foreign language students, and if so how, has been a matter of considerable debate in the field of second language writing. The present study investigated the possible effect of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on descriptive writing accuracy of Iranian intermediate EFL learners (N=39) in Hamedan Islamic Azad University. Two groups were selected: explicit corrective feedback group (N=22) and implicit corrective feedback group (N=17). They received corrective feedback on three grammatical structures. The results showed that written corrective feedback can lead to writing accuracy improvement in the short-term, but it may be unhelpful in the long-run.

Literature is the aesthetic manifestation of language. It is ‘as old as human language and as new as tomorrow’s sunrise.’ This paper explores the interrelationships between language and literature from 600 AD to the present day. The grammar of present-day English is closely related to that of Old English with the same tense formation and word orders. The verse unit is a single line and its organizing device is ‘alliteration’. The range of Chaucer’s English did much to establish English as a national language. The writers of the Elizabethan period reshaped the literary language by borrowing foreign words and by coining new expressions and figures of speech. Shakespeare’s language and modern English have enough in common so that historians consider that they both belong to the same stage in the history of English. Milton attempted to reinvent the English language through his Paradise Lost. The writers of the seventeenth century developed a prose style that could bear the weight of the most serious and complex ideas. Then, the writers of the eighteenth century devoted themselves to developing out a formal, polished, and “correct” style of expression. Wordsworth and Coleridge intended to purify and renew the literary language and make it closer to the everyday speech of the ordinary people. Modernism tried to articulate a representation of the world and the way of seeing it through complexities of mind using the spoken rather than the formal language.