Intermediate level

Armed with technological development, the present study aimed at gauging the effectiveness of exposure to news and movies as two types of audiovisual programs in improving language learners’ listening comprehension at the intermediate level. To this end, a listening comprehension test was administered to 108 language learners and finally 60 language learners were selected as intermediate language learners and randomly divided into group one and group two. During the experiment, group one participants had exposure to audiovisual news stories to work on in and outside the classroom. On the contrary, the participants in group two had only exposure to a sample selected utterances extracted from different kinds of movies. At the end of the experiment, both groups took another sample listening test to find out to what extent the participants in each group could enhance their listening comprehension. The results obtained from the posttest were indicative of the fact that the participants who had exposure to news outperformed the participants who had exposure to movies. The findings of the present research seem to indicate that the language input embedded in the type of audiovisual programs which language learners are exposed to is more important than the amount of exposure.

George James Frazer (1854-1941), the spiritual father of myth-ritual school, was bred up in the British tradition of empiricism. Believing in the evolutionary process of culture, Frazer mainly focused his attention on explaining such epistemic forms of thought as magic, religion and science. Accordingly, while interpreting the processes through which magic leads to religion and finally evolves into science, Frazer noticed the importance of myth and ritual and their position in this process. However, most researchers regard his reasoning in this regard as incoherent and variable. Thus, in this article, the author tries to reconsider the methodology and axioms on which Frazer relies as well as to make clear the position of myth in his anthropological system. The author believes that Frazer’s dual viewpoint about myth’s position results in no way from the attributed incoherency of his thoughts, but in fact his contemplations on intermediate levels, which make possible going from one stage to the other, provides him with an adequate explanation of the position of myth and its relation to ritual. In the end, it is revealed that Frazer thinks of myth as posterior to ritual in the first intermediate level, while prior to ritual in the second intermediate level. Accordingly, analyzing the validity of Frazer’s reasoning as well as his methodological and epistemic viewpoints, the author has put forth a couple of critical suggestion