Meaning making

The main objective of this study was to investigate how Iranian EFL learners used their literacy practices and multimodal resources to mediate interpretation and representation of an advertisement text and construct their understanding of it. Fifteen female adolescents at an intermediate level of proficiency read the ""مبلمان برلیان"" (“Brelian Furniture”) advertisement text and re-created their understandings in pictures and sentences. The data was analyzed based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2001) theory of social semiotics. The findings suggest that students situated the meanings of the advertisement texts in specific contexts that reflected their own social and cultural experiences. Furthermore, the students demonstrated that the use of multimodal resources had the potential to enhance language and literacy learning in a way that was transformative and was affected by their identities. In addition, the use of multimodal/multiliteracies pedagogy permitted the students to enter into text composition from different paths. Finally, multimodal/multiliteracies pedagogy could foster critical literacy practices by offering EFL students the opportunities to create new identities and challenge discursive practices that marginalize them. The implications of the findings are also discussed

This study aimed at investigating shades of identity in TEFL textbooks. Most identity studies have focused on authors as knowledge producers. They have neglected authors' roles in constructing identity. Further, few scholars have considered disciplinary specific textbooks in their analyses of identity. Trying to bridge these gaps, we applied Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics to investigate identity through the lens of sociocultural theory. The study corpus consisted of nine commonly used textbooks on language testing, language teaching, and linguistics in Iranian EFL context. The textual analysis revealed various levels of self and other-regulation mediated by interpersonal, textual, and ideational metafunctions. These findings suggested that studying their disciplinary specific texts, students of TEFL may develop not only their academic knowledge but also their ideological positions and academic voices.

Intersubjectivity has priority over subjectivity because meaning is discussed and constructed in a two-way process that happens in a conversation. According to this, the research aims to show the terms of change for meaning production in psychotherapy with clients. Two cases (a child and an adult) were selected with apparent symptoms of anxiety and fear with the case study method and available sampling. They were treated by the technical integrative method. Conversations were coded by process-focused conversation analysis. Analyzing results by process-focused conversation analysis showed that in both cases, to happen changes in psychotherapy, besides terms of conversation, a particular type of psychotherapy response is essential (Khayyami's cycle), and client change is not explained by the merely particular response of the therapist; but, the therapist can, by the method used in the research, acquire the meaning hidden behind client's verbal response and symptoms on the dialogue process and show Lacani's transcendental signified and signified chain.