مطالب

This paper elaborates on Persian and English orthographic shared aspects to study the effects of L1 Persian on learning English as a foreign language. While there are some examples of letter and sound mismatches in the orthographic system of both languages, those of English are more complex than Persian. In order to see the effect of the mismatch between orthography and transcription, 40 Persian EFL learners were divided into two proficiency groups i.e., advanced and elementary, and their performance was examined on comprehension and production tasks. The learners’ production skills were checked via a list of 76 pseudo words requiring the learners to read them while their voices were recorded. After one week time interval, a comprehension test consisted of 34 items was administered, requiring the learners to listen and choose among the orthographic forms presented to them. It was hypothesized that being educated in L1 Persian comprising semi-opaque orthography system, the learners would tackle the English opaque graphemes better on the mismatches. However, it was observed that both elementary and advanced groups had difficulty learning English orthography system, showing almost no positive effect from L1. Only in rare cases more proficient learners performed better due to more schooling education in English.

We deal with a wide range of colors in our daily life. They are such ubiquitous phenomena that is hard and next to impossible to imagine even a single entity (be it an object, place, living creature, etc) devoid of them. They are like death and tax which nobody can dispense with. This omnipresence of colors around us has also made its way through abstract and less tangible entities via the interaction between culture and cognition. In an attempt to shed further light on the way that color meanings could be extended in different languages and cultures, the present study sought to investigate the semantic extension of Persian and English color terms based on cultural data. The findings revealed the existence of both language-idiosyncratic and general tendencies for both Persian and English languages with respect to semantic extension of color terms. It was also shown that Persian and English speakers mostly use the same mechanisms of metonymy, metaphor and sense of opposite relation based on cultural data and their experience of the physical world to develop more and more color meanings. Furthermore, the study suggested that the direction and development of the semantic domain of a color term mainly depends on its already developed semantic properties and is not accidental. Two other accidental points were also found in the study. First, the borrowing, acceptance and the usage of a color expression from another language might depend on the already developed semantic properties of the related color term in the recipient language. Second, it is possible to predict the direction and development of the new connotations and meanings of a color term in a specific language.