Journal of Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature Dynamics and Advances

Colonialism has been practiced by many countries in the last centuries or so. The kind of relationship between the colonizers and the colonized has had mutual effects on the culture, identity, and many more aspects of the two countries. This paper deals with the concept of colonialism from both inner and outer views regarding Harold Pinters Caretaker and Chinua Achebes No Longer at Ease with some references to Bhabhis ideas, respectively. Basing its method on content and text analysis, it reveals that the kind of colonialism going on regarding human attitudes, identity, and individual independence between Nigeria and England which is indicated by Achebe, on the one hand, as an example of outer colonialism, may be the inspiration for a paragon of inner colonialism in England portrayed in Pinters work, on the other hand. The novelty of the papers illustration of the theme would be promising for further analysis and search.

The present study investigated the effect of extensive and intensive listening on the accuracy of tense use among EFL learners in Iran. It was based on pre-test, post-test with intact classes. According to the purpose of the study, a sample (n = 60) of homogeneous participants were selected. From among the 6 intact classes, one experimental group (n = 19, 9 male and 10 female participants) was identified to take intensive listening method as treatment, another experimental group (n = 20, 12 male and 8 female participants) was identified to take extensive listening as a treatment, and a control group (n = 21, 9 male and 12 female participants) was identified in order not to take intensive listening or extensive listening activities. All groups of the study were given pre-test of verb tense usage in order to measure their grammatical knowledge in verb tense prior to the treatments of the study. After finishing twenty five sessions of treatments for all groups, a post-test including verb tense was given to the participants. The data gathered from the study were compared through SPSS. It was found that extensive listening and intensive listening had positive effects on the accuracy of tense use among EFL learners in Iran. In addition, it was found that none of intensive listening group and extensive listening group outperformed each other and there was not any significant difference between these two groups performances.

The study of drama is one of the most interesting, thought-provoking, and pleasing experiences in the field of English literature, but it seems there are some reasons why it may not look like to be so for some of the students of drama in the context of Iranian universities. It seems, first of all, there are some plays which appear baffling when students read them for the first time; secondly, some of expert university teachers follow their fixed sanctified method of drama teaching when they encounter so dissimilar plays. This paper explores innovative and resourceful teaching methods for teaching of drama in the context of Iranian universities. The purpose of this paper is to provide drama teachers with ideas and suggestions for responding to any classic, modern, and postmodern plays that they might encounter as part of the course at university. The present research paper gains significance as the findings may shed more light on groundbreaking and ingenious teaching methods for teaching of drama in the context of Iranian universities.

The purpose of this study was to elicit lived images about English learning from male and female Iranian English language learners. Ninety male and 210 female language learners from Iranian universities and language institutes chose from an inventory of images and provided own images. The 781 valid responses by males and 1903 valid responses by females were listed as images. The researcher examined the images and slightly summarized them under more generic labels. The number and percentages of males and females who offered each image were tabulated. The images by each gender were also arranged in descending order and their rank differences were calculated. The examination of the types of images and the frequencies of participants who chose or provided them offer patterns which reveal their conceptual models and lessons which can be of value to language teaching practitioners. Some of these patterns and insights are briefly discussed but many are left to the judgment, deliberation, and reflection and practical wisdom of the readers.

By the force of our social constructivist gyrations, we have developed glimpses of a social, cultural, and historical dimension in which the discourse of science operates. These glimpses indicate to us how much the discourse of science is part of complex webs of humans social interaction. Recognizing this social, cultural, and historical nature, the present paper looks at the way informal elements are penetrating into the discourse of science. Working on a corpus of scientific journal articles, scientific magazine articles, and scientific newspaper articles, the present article shows that regardless of their generic qualities, communicative purposes and the target audience, all scientific texts included in the three corpora are vulnerable to the penetration of informal elements. However, the differences in terms of communicative purposes and target audiences affect the way informal elements are distributed in the three corpora. Providing a deeper sociolinguistic explanation on the observed variations, the paper is concluded with some implications of the findings for ESP pedagogy.

Learning the third language is one of the issues that has attracted much attention in recent years. In this research, the influence of Persian language as a mother tongue and English as a second language on the correct orthography of French as a third language is studied. This study investigates three hypotheses of transfer, L1 Transfer Hypothesis, L2 Status Factor, and Cumulative Enhancement Model. We examined the role of voice and text in correct orthography of the third language. This study accounts for the acquisition of coda consonant clusters of French by Persian EFL learners. Twenty-two participants of two levels of pre-and upper-intermediate of English proficiency and beginner level French proficiency were selected. In this study, first we measured the level of learners English knowledge by the Oxford Quick Placement Test and then we studied the effectiveness of the first and second languages on the third language learning by the Production test, and the Grammatically Judgment Test. The results of the transfer effect provided a major role for the CEM. The overall results of the two groups performance were not significant, which in turn reflected the fact that L2 proficiency had no effect on the acquisition of French orthography.

The basic assumption in applied linguistics is that the expert disciplinary study of linguistics can yield insights which can be applied to an understanding of how language is actually experienced, and so provide a principled basis for intervention by proposing ways of resolving the problems that peoples experience in using and learning language gives rise to. But the validity of this assumption depends on how is expertise in linguistics to be defined, and how far, as it has been conventionally practiced, can it claim to account for the reality of how individuals experience language? What, for example, does it tell us, and not tell us, about how users and learners think and feel about their own and other peoples language, and what effect their attitude has on their using and learning? These are crucial questions about the scope of linguistics and its applied linguistic relevance since they have an immediate and urgent bearing on the problematic issues that applied linguistics would claim to address of how communication is enacted across different lingua-cultural and ideological borders in a globalized world. Since this global communication is predominantly mediated by the expedient use of English as a lingua franca, it raises the applied linguistic question that this talk will be centrally concerned with of what pedagogic implications this has for how English is conventionally taught as a foreign language subject.

Tehran, and then managed a small British Council curriculum unit in Ahwaz. After completing his masters degree in Applied Linguistics at Lancaster University, he set up educational projects in Syria and Egypt between 1980 and 1990, which provided the experience of the global politics of English and the ethnographic material that informed his PhD thesis at Lancaster University in 1991. Professor Holliday supervises PhD students in critical qualitative studies in the sociology and cultural politics of English language education and intercultural communication, where he has published widely including

It is widely acknowledged that emotion is deeply embedded in literary criticism. Even when we aspire to scientific analysis and objectivity, we assume that we share a love of literature. Loving Literature is a deep and fascinating exploration of this important assumption. Literary critics and professors of literature are expected not only to know but also to love their work. In the case of professors, they are also historical origins of such expectations, and discusses their implications for readers, students and professors. Lynch does not assume that love is necessarily a healthy emotion: it can also be painful. Readers and literary critics forget this at their peril. To understand the role of love in literature, Lynch argues that it is necessary to study the eighteenth century and its ongoing discussions of literary history and the canon. The eighteenth century marked the beginning of English as an academic discipline. Lynch examines not only what early critics knew about literature but also how they felt about it. Only when we know this can we understand how literary studies evolved to its present form. From the eighteenth century, books were closely bound up with the identities of their authors. This gave rise to the all-Lynch raises the question of whether it is important to love authors as people. Books, she concludes, and our attachment to them, have exercised considerable influence on our private lives. This influence has an historical context: our perception of books as objects of affection goes back to eighteenth-and nineteenth-century publishing practices, reading habits and even domestic history. Reading, Lynch demonstrates, is very much a private affair. It can also be a possessive one, as in the case of the book collector. Our passion for books is often a long-term commitment, one that may continue even after the initial passion has declined. How is this possible? Lynch addresses this question in six chapters:-Steady:

The aim of this article was to examine three advanced textbooks in Iran Language Institute (ILI) in an attempt to establish if they differed in the extent to which they distribution of references of cultural category, and also what themes predominated. The analysis identified just the cultural elements, and culturefree linguistic items were not counted. The statistical analysis suggested that the dominant culture category was the target culture with the least attention given to source culture. It was also found out that although the occurrences dimension in advanced textbooks 2 & 3 were slightly higher than those of big there was a wide gap between two dimensions in advanced textbook 1 which tended highly to lack of consistency in the occurrences of considerable lack of source information and imbalanced representation of cultural themes might not be sufficient to flourish communication competence (ICC) and thus might make intercultural communication difficult for them.

The field of Applied Literature is concerned with the practical usages of literature, including the potentials of literature to empower and transform individuals. Jungian criticism, with its suggestions of the possibility of individuation and self-actualization in individuals, has been an important source for scholars in the field of Applied Literature for healing. Still, the traditional Jungian approach to literature has been criticized in recent years, especially due to its apparent universalist assumptions and its insensitivity to context-specific issues in texts. For the same reason, New Jungian critics have been recently exploring the possibilities of reconciling Jungian concepts with more context-oriented literary theories. This paper, then, in accordance with this new trend, attempts to do a New Jungian reading of a contemporary postcolonial novel, Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb , as a case study, to investigate the potentials within this approach of extension of Jungian ideas and dialogue with other more modern literary theories after poststructuralism. The research benefits from the views of New Jungian critics as well as the theories in relation to the identity issues of migrants. The paper is concluded with the proposition that, as the exploration of this novel testifies, the New Jungian approach as well as the contemporary fiction of identity construction can prove as valid resources for Applied Literature for healing.

The central theme of Ta'ziyeh, as one of the Islamic tragic drama and folk theater, in one of the major denominations of Islam (the Shia) is a representation of the siege and massacres of Karbala. This study investigated Ta'ziyeh (alternatively Ta'zïye, Tazīa, Ta'zīya) and its discourse, a form of declamation. The data were collected from library resources (e.g. books, electronic resources) and observation. The data were analyzed based on Gee's discourse and society model. The study confirmed that Ta'zieh was the most important tragedy in Shiism. The discourse used in Ta'ziyeh, contrary to the Western variations, appeared to be a more spiritual practice than a dramatic genre. Furthermore, the role of Ta'ziyeh writers and performers was explored as agents who have distributed the accounts of the Karbala battle for generations in Iran. The findings, from a global perspective, might emphasize how diverse a culture's perceptions of religion and its related rituals could be and how a language variety (e.g. declamation) could help frame such perceptions in dramatic genre. The findings could also guide the categories that multi-cultural studies of tragedies may take into account.

The last thirty five years have created a challenging situation for Iran and its people: on the one hand, the discriminatory British and American policies towards the country have given rise to considerable bitterness; on the other, we continue to teach both British and American English. If Iranian people wish to play a more active role internationally, it is time to review our English language teaching policy, practices, and pedagogy. There are many different approaches such as EIL (English as an International Language), WE (World Englishes) and ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), which have challenged the superiority of such notions as 'the Queen's English', 'Received pronunciation', or 'General American'. By adopting any one of the three approaches, we can align both our teachers and our English language teaching system with the new trends in thinking and teaching. The focus of the present paper is on ELF. It is a relatively new trend, which originated in Finland in 2008 and has spread to many European and Asian countries. Increasingly, the younger generation, irrespective of country, is interested in developing social and cultural relations with other parts of the world. ELF thus deserves a more prominent position in the Iranian educational system. This paper addresses six important principles of ELF. These are based on Kirkpatrik (The Pedagogy of English as an International Language, 2014). The paper discusses their relevance and potential in relation to the present cultural and teaching situation in Iran, focusing on the position of the native speaker and the importance of mutual intelligibility, intercultural competence, the importance of training local multilinguals, the value of lingua franca contexts as learning environments, the difference between spoken and written English, and the adaptation to the Iranian context of assessment procedures. Our paper ends with a brief discussion of the implications for pedagogical practice of the use of the Internet, including the use of blogs, in the ELF classroom.

This paper unearths the contribution of lexical cohesion to the textuality and overall meaning of Malcolm X's speech 'The Ballot or the Bullet'. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan's (1976) and Hoey's (1991) theory of cohesion, specifically lexical cohesion, whose main thrust is the role of lexical items in not only contributing to meaning but also serving as cohesive ties, the paper discusses how Malcolm employs words in serving a dual role of contributing to meaning by serving as cohesive ties and their literary use for an aesthetic touch to his 'The Ballot or the Bullet'. Discussions show that Malcolm X employs both simple and complex lexical structures to achieve cohesion in 'The Ballot or the Bullet'. The same lexical structures espouse the literary device of repetition, for emphasis and rhythm. Malcolm, therefore, combines linguistic and literary phenomena by his employment of lexical items in not only conveying meaning or passing information to his audience but also doing that with artistic beauty.

The Qur'an is the only holy book of Muslims all around the world. Each person with any religion and language is interested in comprehending and accepting the rules and regulations of their own belief. It is highly decorated in its splendid style, and heavenly informative, instructive, and enlightening in its profound and sagaciously communicated meaning. Translation of the Qur'an is only an attempt to present its meaning. One of the most challenges in translation of the Qur'an is collocation. A collocation is a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. The present study concerns a comparative analysis of the collocations in the Holy Qur'an. This article examines the possibility of losing the original features during the translation. In order to find this, the researchers considered three Arabic-English translations. The English translators are Muhsin Khan and Muhammad Al-Hilali (1999), Muhammad Pickthall (1938), and Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1934-1938). The framework is based on Vinay and Darbelenet's (1995) Model of Translation to see which strategies happened during the translation and if there is any relationship between the translation texts or not. The result shows that some of the collocations translated were different from one translator to other one. Moreover the translations of each translator are adapted to one of the different methods of Vinay and Darbelenet's Model of translation.

This study aimed at examining the effect of pictorial presentation of vocabulary on EFL students' retention relying on Dual Coding Theory and Additivity Hypothesis, both of which emphasize the additive effect of images on recall. To that end, 63 students who were in grade three of high school served as the participants of the study. They were randomly divided into three groups of still picture experimental, motion picture experimental, and control groups. During the eight sessions of treatment, 40 new words were taught to the three groups. The experimental groups received the words visually, using software, and the control group was instructed in traditional way. The participants were tested for their memory of the target items twice: immediately at the end of the course as a final exam (post-test) to assess their short-term memory and three weeks after the final exam to test their long-term retention. Data analysis using a mixed between-within subjects analysis of variance (split-plot ANOVA/SPANOVA) and a post hoc Scheffé test demonstrated the positive effect of pictorial presentation of vocabulary on the learners' retention of words. The results also revealed that teaching vocabulary using motion picture mode was more effective.

One of the most important language skills affecting students' success in academic settings is reading comprehension and the ability to read fluently in a second language. Japanese EFL learners' less-than-satisfactory performance in standard English tests led Shinozuka, Mizusawa, and Shibata (2014) to design the read-aloud method. This study investigated the effectiveness of this newly designed method on Iranian EFL Learners' reading comprehension. The aforementioned method with its high priority on reading aloud enjoy four main activities: chunked reading practice, read-aloud practice, cloze test, and concurrent read-aloud and summarization. Participants of this study, selected through convenience sampling, were 140 undergraduate students whose English reading comprehension was considered poor based on the pretest. Then, the subjects were assigned in two groups of control (N = 40) and experimental (N = 100). The subjects in experimental group received 8 teaching sessions, while the control group received no specific training. Using a pretest-posttest design we attempted to see if read-aloud method turns to affect our subjects' reading ability level. Therefore, some T-tests were run. The results of the statistical analyses demarcated that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the posttest. The pedagogical implication of this study is that ESL/EFL instructors can implement the read-aloud method in their classes to promote their students' reading comprehension.

The present study is conducted to compare 'From 7 o'clock to 9:30' by Abbas Na-albandian and 'Erostratus' by Jean-Paul Sartre based on Bakhtin's intertextual approach with an eye on Bakhtin's notion of dialogic imagination. Bakhtin in his approach focuses on the text, rather than the author, and that is why the approach is so demanding at present time. Also his dialogism refers to the fact that the various languages which stratify any single language are in dialogue with one another. So that a work of art is in relationship with other works of art. The aim here is to see if there is this kind of relationship between the mentioned works which are from two different cultures and languages as the major components of culture, namely Persian and French. The co-relational analysis of the short stories indicates a significant relationship between them in the realms of plot, setting, characteristics, theme, etc. Therefore, the applicability of Bakhtin's approach is emphasized through the resulted similarities which do exist in the mentioned works.

This article aims to investigate and analyze the perceived English language needs of engineers who want to develop their job position through English Language in their workplaces such as public relations, technical and operational, engineering support of production, planning and development, financial, general accounting, and legal affairs. In today's competitive world, the economy needs more people with higher level skills in the workplace. Taking into consideration the specializations mentioned above, the article focuses on the perceived needs of engineers concerning Business English, not general English. Due to the business and economic development of the last decades in Iran, English has rapidly become the language used all over the world. Developing an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course in their workplaces is another purpose of this study. Questionnaire, interviews, and observations were used to gather information in this research. Engineers' expectations, managers' demands, economy's needs ask for more reliable methods to provide a better learning in workplace situation. Finally, based on the findings obtained from this study, it can be concluded that workplace courses have lots of effect on the engineers' job and development and by passing the time they ask for more variable ESP courses relating to their job.

The effectiveness of the written corrective feedback has gained much interest among second language acquisition researchers since 1970s. In spite of large body of research, there seems to be no unified agreement on the effectiveness of written corrective feedback in L2 learners' writing. The present study seeks to investigate the effect of explicit and implicit corrective feedback on the narrative writing of advanced Iranian EFL learners. In so doing, the study was conducted with 76 advanced level EFL learners from 3 intact classes at a English language teaching institute in Mahabad, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran. The sample was selected from among 92 EFL learners by means of Oxford Quick Placement Test. After the researchers administrated the placement test, the participants were assigned into two experimental groups and one control group randomly. Following this phase of the study, the participants in the experimental and control groups were invited to write their first composition as the pre-test of the study. Then one experimental group received explicit corrective feedback as treatment and the other experimental group was offered implicit corrective feedback as treatment. The control group, however, did not receive any treatment. Within a time lapse of two weeks, the same procedure was repeated for the second composition which served as the post-test of the study. The results of t-test and covariance revealed positive effects of giving written corrective feedback on the advanced EFL learners' writing. Furthermore, the results highlighted the superiority of giving explicit corrective feedback over the implicit one in written tasks. The results of the study have some implications for teachers, learners, and material designers.

EDITORIAL Dear JALDA reader, Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature in the sense that we would like to use them should result in academic activities that are social in their orientation. Academics are not isolated individuals equipped with scientific tools and working within laboratory like situations. Their close encounter with the real world situations is a fundamental necessity. Reading theories and literary texts in the library is not undertaken for the sake of creating mentalities to judge what lies outside our reading and library. There should, instead, be an interactional process between what we read and what we experience in the world out there that seems to be unruly and messy in nature. This attitude seems to have consequences for us in our academic behaviour. One of them, for instance, should be our attempts to look for non-traditional forms and formations of research and practice. Employing mere quantitative research methods, what we have inherited in the name of 'science' from the past, we may end up in failures. 'Science' is no longer a sacred institution whose colossal columns are untouchable, especially for us in developing countries that seem to be lagging behind the fast moving states and institutions forming categories of insiders and outsiders for themselves, for instance. There have been so many glossy theories of language and literature that are regarded either as totally obsolete or impractical for many reasons today. 'To be in the world' demands prolific readers. The phrase should not imply at all that the act of 'reading' is obsolete. On the contrary, reading theories and texts should happen in abundance but without their mythologization; we have a herculean task of knowing what others have to say, but we should beware of being quixotic. Language, as it is stated by philosophers, has the power to cut the world into categories and present them to us as reality, while they are little more than useful fictions. But language itself is a reality in itself amidst the massive reality of the world out there and absorption in it can lead to Quixote like characters. Therefore, a balance, so to speak, should be established between 'reading' and the observation of the world. Any kind of 'alienation' should be avoided. And for this, we should find the proper methods. We have learned in the academic context that methods come under the last fancy word in the hierarchy of ontology, epistemology and methodology. It is the preceding fancy word that determines the nature of the following fancy word. Then if, according to our ontology, there is a real world out there that is important to us, our methods should be the appropriate ones to lead us to a better understanding of that world. Many methods would be imaginable on our way to our goal, the real world.

The purpose of the present study was to compare the PhD dissertations written by native and nonnative English writers in the field of Applied Linguistics with regard to the use of self-mentions. To this end, 40 Applied Linguistics PhD dissertations (20 written by native English writers and 20 by non-native English writers), were selected randomly among academic texts written in 2007-2017. The present study analyzed only the introduction and discussion sections of these PhD dissertations. The results of the chi-square analyses revealed that native English writers used more self-mentions in the introduction and discussion sections of Applied Linguistics PhD dissertations than their non-native counterparts. In the light of the findings of the study, it was recommended that Iranian writers in general and PhD candidates in particular have to move away from positivist impersonalized writing presentation towards more socialist performance of knowledge claims and authors' voice and stance.

Euphemism is a communicative strategy used to frame a polite or less offensive language and to save people's public face in communication. This study investigated the euphemistic strategies used by Persian speakers in situations associated with death and lying. Warren's model of euphemism was drawn on as the analytic model guiding the study. To conduct the study, 60 male and female university students were randomly selected. The data were gathered through copies of an open-ended questionnaire and then analyzed. It was found that "figurative expression", "implication", "overstatement", "understatement", and "particularization" were the most frequently used euphemistic strategies among the participants in the contexts of death and lying. The study also revealed that there was no relationship between gender and the choice of euphemistic strategies. The findings implied that euphemistic strategies might reflect cultural and religious values.

Peer assessment has gained growing popularity in education and teaching. Being a learning tool, evaluating their peers can equip learners with skills to develop judgments about what forms high-quality work. There have been however research gaps in the literature showing a lack of adequate work on the investigation of peer assessment in a group-oriented classroom context. The present study intended to compare the effectiveness of group work with peer assessment and scaffolding with lack of it on learners' oral accuracy. For this purpose, the regular past tense-ed grammatical target structure as a challenging feature was selected. A total of 34 low-intermediate Iranian EFL learners in two intact classes took part in the study. Although one class was exposed to group work enhanced by peer assessment and scaffolding, the control class did not receive any such instruction. Participants provided answers to pre-and post-grammar tests and their performance was subjected to statistical data analysis by means of ANCOVA. The results indicated the superiority of the experimental group in comparison to the control group. The findings were therefore in line with the cognitive elaboration hypothesis and the sociocultural theory. The findings were discussed with relation to implications for language teachers.

My article addresses the qualities of "good" literature and how an understanding of the nature of literary devices, so-called "literariness", can enhance the reading experience. Focusing on Hans Rosling's Factfulness (2018), I discuss some of the most important features of good writing. Six literary devices have been selected for special attention: point of view, tone, amplification, anecdotes, flashbacks, and parallelism. Factfulness is not only good writing, it carries an important message: "[w]hen we have a fact-based window, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems-and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better" (p. 255). Rosling emphasises the importance of knowing the facts about our planet, and relying on these rather than primitive instincts to make assessments and decisions. The elegance of Rosling's language makes the message not only convincing but also palatable.

EDITORIAL Dear JALDA reader, Our journal experiences transformations. In its title "Discourse Analysis" gives way to "Applied Literature." The reason is that our Department offers undergraduate and graduate courses in both English Literature and English Language Teaching and we believe that our Journal should cover both disciplines. We would also like to put emphasis on the "applied" aspect of the disciplines because we believe that within the context of what we have done so far in our Journal this is a meaningful step we take towards dealing more with the "real world" than before. We had a similar intention from the very beginning of our Journal, but, due to mostly theoretically-orientedness of Applied Linguistics and textually-orientedness of Discourse Analysis, we started to realize that we miss the lion's share of what is called the "real world." Working within the mainstream findings in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Analysis eventually leads to what we have experienced so far: a contribution to the verification of findings we have received from the authorities in the disciplines. This sounds, within the context of today's globalization, somehow problematic. Do we really look like one another? Do we have similar problems in language teaching and learning and in studying and understanding texts? Should we read literary texts mostly within the frameworks we have received from sources that are usually culturally far from us because they are "great" sources? Another problem with mainstream research in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Analysis is that the researcher working in these disciplines stands at the centre of research process and determines, on the basis of his theoretical standpoint, what is right and what is wrong and what should be done and what shouldn't. Such an attitude has been criticised for some remarkable time especially by those who have an orientation towards the real world rather than scientific theories. In the traditional approach, the relationship between the researcher and the researched is that of subject and object, whereas, to our view, the relationship should be between subject and subject. We believe that research should take us into the unknown aspects of the real world so that we may use the teaching and learning of language and literature for effect-driven purposes in our particular societies instead of contributing to what is known as the mainstream flow of knowledge in its academic sense. The researches we would like to be undertaken should show the peculiarities of the researcher's context of situation and challenge our already held concepts and presuppositions of what language and literature are and how they may be tackled for real world purposes. Our standpoint towards worldly phenomena is regarding them as precious and invaluable in themselves. We do not eliminate anything because we would not like

Euphemism is a communicative strategy used to frame a polite or less offensive language and to save people's public face in communication. This study investigated the euphemistic strategies used by Persian speakers in situations associated with death and lying. Warren's model of euphemism was drawn on as the analytic model guiding the study. To conduct the study, 60 male and female university students were randomly selected. The data were gathered through copies of an open-ended questionnaire and then analyzed. It was found that "figurative expression", "implication", "overstatement", "understatement", and "particularization" were the most frequently used euphemistic strategies among the participants in the contexts of death and lying. The study also revealed that there was no relationship between gender and the choice of euphemistic strategies. The findings implied that euphemistic strategies might reflect cultural and religious values.

Due to the special (procedural) nature of the language (verbal communication) "knowledge", the dominant trends in applied linguistics research in the last few decades have been advocating "acquisition" rather than "learning" activities where the main focus in SL & FL education should be on "meaning" while some "focus-on-form" being justified. But the "form" to be "focused-on" is mostly misconceived to be "grammaticality" of sentences. This misconception is driven by the traditional outlook on language which considers it as a set of sentences carrying THE meaning deposited upon them, disregarding the true nature of verbal transactions where meanings are discursively constructed by the participants in interaction , and the text (enabled by its textuality) rather than sentences (supported by their grammatical accuracy) mediates this discursive process. The present paper argues that textuality representing an underlying discourse should be the "form" to be focused on in SLA facilitation tasks. It is the textuality and its "impulse-creating and impulse-reiterating agencies which, upon their perception, help the receiver to grasp the hierarchical integrity of the linearly organized text. Each text can be seen as containing a set of units which are psycho-socio-linguistically determined packages facilitating the linear presentation of the textual hierarchy. These units, labeled as T-units in written text, can be defined as stretches of text occurring between two full-stops. These T-units are the epicenters for "impulse-creation" while carrying some "impulse-reiterating" elements as well. Variations in the overall configuration of the T-units including what is chosen as their main verb (epicenter), the number of impulse-reiterating elements revolving around it and their mode of realization will be discussed. It will be argued that the SLA "focus-on-form" activities designed to raise the language learners" consciousness should be along these textuality dimensions; and examples of such activities (mainly oriented towards reading/writing skills) will be discussed.

Applied literature is a term that is the outcome of a need to put literature to tangible uses in the ‗real' world. A medical practitioner looking for a definition of life, for instance, finds literature a useful source for the answer. With paradigm shifts in scientific studies, interdisciplinarity has been a method to overcome the alienations that resulted from the isolation of disciplines from one another. Some would go even further to problematize the concept of being solely confined to the limits of disciplines or the textuality of literature because they are still hindrances to coming into direct contact with the ‗real' world. Arguing that tangible real world should lie at the core of applied literary studies, this paper is an attempt to show how a path may be opened up towards the diverse nature of reality in literary studies through a critical review of relevant aspects of literary theory and by drawing upon studies of cultures.