stories

Researchers and teaching practitioners have been trying to find more effective methods of teaching idioms due to the significance of these expressions in language learning contexts. The present study sought to investigate the effects of three verbal mnemonic tools (grouping, stories, and conceptual metaphor) on EFL learners’ recognition and recall of English idioms. Ninety EFL learners at intermediate language proficiency level who were preparing themselves to take IELTS participated in this study. They were in three groups of thirty members each. Each group was randomly assigned to one of the experimental conditions and was instructed idioms using one of the verbal mnemonic devices. The collected data were analyzed using the one-way ANOVA procedure. The results showed statistically significant differences among these devices, with ‘stories’ being the most effective on recognition and ‘conceptual metaphor’ being the most beneficial in the recall of idioms. The findings of the study can have potential theoretical implications for researchers and pedagogical implications for curriculum developers, language teachers, and learners.

One of the most important documents of orientalists to prove the non-revelatory origin of the Qur'an is the misconception of the difference between the structure of the Qur'anic stories and the Testaments’; the view of these researchers have been analyzed on three axes of "different narrative expression in Makkī and Madanī surahs", "repetition of stories", "ambiguity and incoherence of stories". Important factors such as the dominance of historical and literary approach to the content of Qur'anic stories, neglect of the single divine origin of monotheistic religions, and the perception of revelation as the personal experience of the Prophet (PBUH) have led to mention doubts about the structure of Qur'anic stories. This article criticizes and analyzes the doubts of orientalists in this field with intra-religious citations (Qur’an, commentary, dictionaries, etc.) and extra-religious citations (Testaments, opinions of Orientalists and historical evidence).

People are constrained by their culture and social life when telling stories. A second language learner then cannot be expected to tell stories in the target language without cross-cultural effects that influence the way of narration. The present study examined the role of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) in the organization of narratives by focusing on Persian speakers’ and EFL learners’ lived narratives. For this purpose, 125 oral stories were voice recorded. Seventy-five EFL learners’ narratives and 50 Persian narratives as told by Iranian native speakers were collected via classroom discussions and interviews. To examine the substantive effect of L2 knowledge, the EFL learners were selected from pre-intermediate and upper-intermediate proficiency levels. The Labovian analytical narrative model was employed for the analysis. The findings indicated that EFL learners’ narratives were mostly affected by L1 rather than L2. Furthermore, English linguistic knowledge, rather than the English narrative structure itself, affected the organization of EFL narratives