pause

Listening taking over half of the learners’ time and effort (Nunan, 1998), forms a basis for acquiring much of a language. There are factors affecting listening comprehension and its perception, such as the speech rate, phonological properties of the text, the quality of the recording, the learners’ anxiety, and listening comprehension strategies (Goh, 2000; Hamouda, 2013). At the Iran Language Institute in Dezful, S.W. Iran, some teachers attributed some learners’ perception of partially unsuccessful comprehension of the recorded material to factors such as rate of speech, T-unit length, and pauses between T-units or inside T-units. This study aimed at the probable association between learners' and teachers' perceptions of these variables and compare them to the real qualities of the recordings they listen to. Thus, in an analytic single-shot design, a researcher-made questionnaire was developed and was answered by 504 (229 male and 275 female) participants together with their teachers in 21 classrooms across the six levels of proficiency at the Iran Language Institute. The results, not normally distributed, were juxtaposed with Kendall's tau and Spearman's rho correlation coefficients to ensure maximum agreement between the statistical analyses. The results indicated a strong or moderate correlation between the audio tracks' characteristics with neither learners' perceptions nor teachers' perceptions. Teachers' and learners' perceptions showed a moderate correlation between the perceived rate of speech and a weak correlation between their perceptions of between-T-unit pauses.

Le structuralisme et le formalisme ont tendance à décomposer les textes afin d’en étudier les constituants. Ce fait aboutit à la séparation de la forme et le contenu et donc à la séparation du temps et de l’espace, l’aspect narratif et l’aspect descriptif du texte. Ainsi, la description se définit-elle comme un mode de la représentation qui arrête la succession temporelle des évènements dans le récit et y exerce une pause temporelle. Pourtant, nous savons que les rôles attribués aux constituants du texte ne sont pas définitifs. Nous connaissons aussi certains types narratifs qui s’introduisent dans le récit, comme un récit enchâssé et y font la pause temporelle. Ceux-ci se trouvent dans un autre niveau temporel que celui où sont narrés les évènements du récit principal. Dans deux romans de Marie NDiaye, La Sorcière et Rosie Carpe, nous observons les récits de rêve qui se trouvent au même niveau narratif où sont rapportés les actions et les évènements principaux et y produisent une pause.

In reciting the verses of the Holy Qur’ān, making pauses at appropriate places is one of the important issues of Tajwid, neglecting which can potentially distort the meanings of the verses and reverse their intended purpose. The present study seeks to analyze how translators have dealt with the concept of inappropriate pause by investigating four English translations of the Holy Qur’ān through answering the following questions: Has the concept of inappropriate or impermissible pause been observed in the English translations of the Holy Qur’ān? Is it possible to express the concept of inappropriate pause using English punctuation? If yes, is it possible to achieve a standard to convey the concept of inappropriate pause? If not, how can this gap be filled? Through a comparative analysis of all 68 cases of inappropriate pause in the Holy Qur’ān and their corresponding translations into English, it seems that English lacks equivalent punctuation to convey the concept of inappropriate pause. Based on the obtained results, it can be concluded that colon is the most appropriate punctuation in English to convey the concept of inappropriate pause. However, the findings of this research show that the translators used commas in 43.7% of the verses with impermissible pauses. The authors presented a “standards table” by examining the function of English punctuation marks, and by observing the approach taken by the translators when facing an inappropriate pause, a “descriptive table” was also presented to illustrate these observations. Then, considering the relationship between these two tables, the closest English punctuation mark for conveying the concept of inappropriate pause was introduced.