مطالب

“You are able to consume everything but your bodies…”. This stereotypic phrase is a very repetitive one, endorsed in most of the workshops on “body and archaeology”. The workshops, I am holding for three years is various cities of Iran are actually based on Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed and the very concept of Docile Bodies of Michael Foucault. My very goal in these series of workshops is to clarify the process of oppression for students of anthropology and social sciences using a method more than describing the theoretical dilemma. Over the last couple of years, it has been more clarified to me that over half of the youths attending the workshops have no motivation to move or present their body and voice abilities. They prefer to remain the silent audiences of an instructor’s monologue. The rate of such a desire increases in larger cities representing the increasing rate of body control. To manage Boal’s plays, I usually conduct the machine play to warm up minds but surprisingly, more I practice, more these are female participants who share their experiences of body oppression while male students remain silent. Is there any recognized pattern which shapes their exception of presenting the bodies? Are they fearful of losing their social agency towards playing new Avant-garde roles? I believe that the answer is positive. There are patterns of docile bodies which are objectively observable in the process of playing Theater of the Oppressed in Iran and mostly these patterns are gender-based. In this article, I intend to describe the body patterns derived from the workshops on Body and Archaeology in order to a better understanding of docile bodies based on acts and practices.

Motivation for learning a new language does not have an all-or-none impact. It is gradually ‎formed and fluctuated over time and on each timescale has varying levels of influence on a ‎person’s endeavor to learn a language. At the present time, scholars claim that throughout the ‎Second Language Development (SLD) different timescales interact with each other and this ‎interaction is nonlinear, complex and dynamic in nature (de Bot 2015). The present study ‎attempted to investigate the motivational dynamics of a group of Persian learners in longer ‎timescales composed of a number of tasks performed on shorter timescales. Ten participants were ‎interviewed at the onset, while performing tasks and at the end of the course to better picture the ‎interplay of different motivational themes over time. The findings confirmed temporal variation ‎in participants’ motivation. Although some individual specific variation was observed, the ‎average group motivation was increasingly tending toward an overall stable state. Moreover, the ‎data revealed the fact that motivational themes were not equally effective over the course and ‎during task performance. It was shown, for example, that factors influencing learners’ initial ‎motivation were less influential during the task completion. Finally, L2 motivation was found to ‎contain an interrelationship of a number of dynamic and complex factors which varied over ‎different timescales and had different motivational intensity in each specific stage. Finally, some ‎implications were driven from the findings of the study.‎

The present study was an attempt to provide a psycholinguistic account of cognitive processes underlying responding and questioning. It also strived to identify the potential differences between responding and questioning cognitive processes in Target Language Use Situation tasks. To accomplish the objectives, 65 Iranian general IELTS applicants from two foreign language learning institutes in Shiraz, with two different language proficiency levels (intermediate and advanced), were randomly selected. They were administered a normal responding and a reverse questioning IELTS oral tasks. Two seven-point Likert scale questionnaires were also used to measure the task difficulty and mental effort that the applicants perceived while doing the tasks. Additionally, the applicants’ recorded voices in tasks were transcribed and analyzed to assess the number of grammatical errors and pause lengths. The analysis of the numerical data through descriptive statistics and paired-samples t-tests indicated that, in general, the cognitive processes underlying oral responding and questioning are significantly different in terms of mental effort, task difficulty, length of pauses, and the number of grammatical errors. More specifically, the results suggested that the applicants took more mental effort and perceived more task difficulty while constructing the questions for given responses irrespective of their proficiency levels. Both groups also paused significantly longer and committed significantly more grammatical errors when completing the questioning tasks. The paper discusses the study implications for second language teachers and assessors.

Understanding the policy cycle, as well as scrutinizing the text of hidden and obvious policies and rules, requires a model of discourse analysis based on which discursive ap-proaches of policy makers are understood and estimated. However, when it comes to presenting a policy model, we have to use the views of policy theorists to see how a problem as a "public goods" can be found in the policy agenda setting. Regarding public policy-making procedures, quantitative or descriptive approaches, in studies the state, are often used to pathologizing policies or to obtaining policy advice models. However, this paper attempts to show that studies the state is a discourse that is described by the dominant discursive signifiers in the target society in which policy-makers make mean-ing to concepts. If we assume that the policy making cycle is something other than a several stages, such as defining a problem, finding a solution to it, decision making and implementing, then it is clear that the definition of a problem, whether the presentation of solutions and the process of decision making and its implementation, cannot be out-side the discourse. Therefore, public policy at the macro level and studies the state, as one of its examples and functions, is a discursive, which its understanding is possible only if the dominant discourse and its relation to the realities of the society in question are well understood.