مطالب

Purpose- How to move toward community empowerment is one of the most crucial challenges in local and regional development programs. This is essential for the role of women in measures and programs for sustainable development that is founded on environmental activities. One of the South Khorasan province's local development measures is the RFLDL project in Sarayan county, and one of its selected techniques for achieving the project's main objectives is the local women empowerment. This study aims to evaluate the geographical and spatial aspects of the effects of women empowerment in the implementation area of the RFLDL project in Sarayan county.Design/methodology/approach- The current research is practical in terms of purpose and descriptive-analytical in terms of nature and method. Among the households whose women participated in the RFLDL project, 273 women was determined using Cochran's formula.Findings- The findings demonstrated that local women empowerment has increased greatly over the past ten years as a result of implementing the RFLDL project in the studied area. Women empowerment has resulted in improving the economic environment of human settlements and increasing the income of residents through the creation of small and home-based employment. In addition, self-confidence has improved, self-esteem has developed, and group participation has been promoted. The settlements are changing more and more in terms of ecology. Additionally, the development of human settlement ties and the strengthening of spatial links have benefited greatly from women empowerment.Research limitations/implications- The spread of the Coronavirus complicated efforts to collect data in the studied villages and significantly decelerated the article's production. Accordingly, surveys and interviews were conducted online to lessen the negative effects of this constraint.Practical implications- The development of human settlements and their transformations are significantly accelerated by women empowerment through spatial dynamism.Originality / value- The findings of the research are mentioned in this article, and according to the guidelines, the sources used, such as theses, articles and books all are cited. The use of traditional statistical indicators and the investigated villages within the RFLDL project's purview in Sarayan county provide the value and originality of this research.

The ability to assess the language learners’ progress has been known as one of the most important parts of EFL/ESL teachers’ literacy. Language assessment literacy (LAL). The notion of LAL has evolved over time, as a large number of researchers showed to be enthusiastic to study this research area. However, the number of studies on teachers’ Writing Assessment Literacy (WAL) is scanty. As writing skill is very necessary for language learners to communicate with native speakers of the English language, it is very important for writing teachers to develop assessment tasks to positively contribute to the rate of learners’ progress in writing skill. Therefore, it is of much significance to review the related studies on assessment literacy, language assessment literacy, and writing assessment literacy. In this review study, the relevant studies were reviewed and further directions for writing assessment literacy of EFL/ESL teachers are suggested to the researchers interested in the field.

Research on native vs. non-native formulaic language use in academic texts, despite its wealth in scope and frequency, lacks an inclusive conceptualization of a non-native language learning context. Impressed by such a flawed approach, the bulk (if not all) of studies in the field compared the use of different multi-word strings in the academic discourse of either foreign or second language learners with a native baseline. The current study sought to address the gap, focusing on the structural and functional use of lexical bundles in two culturally parallel corpora developed in two non-native learning context modes: English as a foreign (EFL) and second (ESL) language. To this end, research reports written by Iranian Applied Linguistics MA and Ph.D. learners studying in different universities in Iran and English-speaking provinces of Canada were compared by a structurally similar native corpus, running cross-tabulation, Chi-square, and residual analysis analyses. The results revealed a significant association between language learning context and lexical bundle use on a functional level. The contextual variations yielded significantly different patterns of use concerning several micro-functions underlying text-oriented and research-oriented functions. Compared to functional differences, the between-corpus structural differences were inconspicuous, specifically concerning micro-structures constituting noun, prepositional, and verb phrase-related bundles. The study embraced the notion that EFL writers need to have immense exposure and enhanced language input available in ESL and native learning contexts to foster a native-like formulaic language.