Essay

Purpose : The aim of this study was to evaluate the nature of multicultural teaching from the perspective of professors of Islamic Azad University of Kermanshah. Methodology : The approach of the present study is qualitative and applied in terms of purpose. The statistical population includes a range of types of professors in the three fields of humanities, basic sciences and engineering of the Islamic Azad University of Kermanshah province. Snowball sampling is a non-random method. In this method, future members of the group are selected and introduced through former members of the group. The number of samples in this study is 27 after reaching the theoretical saturation. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. The findings were analyzed by content analysis method by MaxQDA software. Findings : The findings indicated that the nature of multicultural teaching includes the scope of teacher education, macro policies of the educational system, manpower, barriers and problems of multicultural teaching and teaching outcomes. Conclusion : Professors with a greater understanding of the multiplicity of students' culture, welcome multicultural teaching to improve the quality of teaching for all students and be able to overcome the challenges in this field with more reflection.

Hedging and boosting are significant communicative resources to construe and attain persuasion in different fields and particular genres of academic writing. Hedges allow the researcher to address possible problems, raise objections or anticipate opposition to the research claims while contributing something new to the ongoing dialogue in a research field. Boosters enormously help to achieve the essential writers’ need to convince their readership of the truth in their propositions. They are mainly used whenever writers consider it not too risky to include them in their propositions. This study aims to investigate the frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters in academic students' essays. To meet this end, 96 students' essays (a total of 269.428 words) were selected from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP), including English and Psychology disciplines. The corpus was analyzed based on Abdollahzadeh (2019)classification of hedges. The results showed that hedges and boosters were frequent enough to be considered in teaching writing, either reducing or increasing the force of written utterances. The results of this study could be used directly in the syllabus designed for academic essay writing.