Research Article
Ali Emamjome
Abstract
Drawing on recent developments in linguistic description and applied linguistics, it can be concluded that learning a language necessitates getting to know something and being able to do something with that knowledge: competence, and performance. Structural approach to language description attaches ...
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Drawing on recent developments in linguistic description and applied linguistics, it can be concluded that learning a language necessitates getting to know something and being able to do something with that knowledge: competence, and performance. Structural approach to language description attaches importance to the former; communicative approach to the latter. Appropriate classroom discourse, for structural approach, is the one which facilitates the internalization process of systemic knowledge; no matter if the classroom discourse itself is contrived or simplified. For communicative approach, however, what matters is replicating the conditions of natural language learning in classroom. Here appropriate classroom discourse is the one which facilitates the attested language use in natural context. Simplification and contrivance are considered as deviance from authentic language use. Now the question is what type of classroom discourse is more appropriate and why? This is what the present paper endeavors to answer from Widdowsonian point of view.
Ebrahim Khezerlou
Abstract
The study aimed at measuring the perceived burnout levels of Iranian (N= 230) and Turkish (N=156) EFL teachers, determining the teacher autonomy predictors of EE, DP and PA burnout processes, and exploring their cross-cultural roles. The MBI-ES was used to measure the perceived burnout levels ...
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The study aimed at measuring the perceived burnout levels of Iranian (N= 230) and Turkish (N=156) EFL teachers, determining the teacher autonomy predictors of EE, DP and PA burnout processes, and exploring their cross-cultural roles. The MBI-ES was used to measure the perceived burnout levels of the participants, and a self-developed Teacher Autonomy Scale (11 items) based on the six-component teacher autonomy model of LaCoe (2008) was employed to measure the participants’ autonomy perceptions in the areas of (a) pedagogy, (b) curriculum evaluation, (c) decision making and (d) problem solving. The internal consistency reliability of the 11-item scale was r=0.762. The results revealed that there was a slight significant difference between Iranian and Turkish groups only in EE processes, three dimensions of the teacher autonomy scale predicted the EE, DP and PA burnout processes, and its curriculum evaluation, problem solving, and decision making dimensions played discriminatory role in EE, DP and PA processes across Iranian and Turkish teachers.
Ahad Mehrvand; Moussa Pourya Asl
Abstract
Attempts to present a definitive rational explanation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have been a growing concern since its publication in 1847. The abundant, yet incoherent, interpretations of Wuthering Heights, each taking one element of the novel and extrapolating it towards total ...
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Attempts to present a definitive rational explanation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have been a growing concern since its publication in 1847. The abundant, yet incoherent, interpretations of Wuthering Heights, each taking one element of the novel and extrapolating it towards total explanation, make the need for this research timely. This article focuses on ways to achieve a truer and more rational interpretation of the novel. The study indicates that in order to solve the enigma and crack the codes of the novel, the conscious and unconscious thoughts of the author, performing within the text, have to be discovered. The research approach adopted in this study is what is referred to as psychobiography or the Freudian psychoanalytic criticism. Freud's ideas have been employed due to the increasing shift to him in the recent decades, particularly in the discipline of psychobiography. The findings of this research underline that: First, Emily Brontë grew up in an oppressive milieu, and she compulsively created phantasy worlds within which she continuously repeated certain patterns; Second, nearly all the characters of the novel are stricken by their mother's death, and they not only undergo the processes of dejection, melancholia, and hysteria, but also suffer from certain core issues—fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment, fear of betrayal, low self-esteem, insecure or unstable sense of self; Third, in Wuthering Heights, religion, civilization, and conventional principles of Victorian novel writing are satirically rejected. The main conclusion to be drawn from this article is that Emily Brontë was a neurotic person whose unconscious obsessions of psychoanalytic love of mother and hatred of father are projected in Wuthering Heights.
Mehdi Nowruzi; Elmira Vahedi
Abstract
A review of previous research on receptive skills among EFL learners reveals that in contrast to extensive research in reading, fewer studies have focused on the process of listening comprehension in EFL contexts. The current study examines the effects of discourse signaling ...
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A review of previous research on receptive skills among EFL learners reveals that in contrast to extensive research in reading, fewer studies have focused on the process of listening comprehension in EFL contexts. The current study examines the effects of discourse signaling cues on Iranian EFL students' listening comprehension in academic lectures and also investigates the effect of teaching Iranian EFL students about the role and function of discourse signaling cues on successful listening comprehension of lectures. A total of 77 Iranian EFL students were divided into three groups. The first group did not receive any training on the role of discourse signaling cues and only listened to signaled lectures. The second group listened to the non-signaled text and did not get any training on the role of discourse cues. The third group, however, listened to the signaled text and also received training on the role of discourse cues. The analysis of data on recall tasks shows that discourse signaling cues play an important role in EFL students’ listening comprehension. The findings also indicate that training the students about the role and function of discourse signaling cues has significant effect on the students' EFL listening comprehension.
Karim Sadeghi; Zainab Abolfazli Khonbi; Fatemeh Gheytaranzadeh
Abstract
This study investigated the effect of gender and type of written corrective feedback (WCF) on Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners’ writing. Four intact classes were assigned to experimental and two intact classes to control groups. The learners were homogenized using a pre-test which was ...
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This study investigated the effect of gender and type of written corrective feedback (WCF) on Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners’ writing. Four intact classes were assigned to experimental and two intact classes to control groups. The learners were homogenized using a pre-test which was followed by sixteen sessions lasting one hour and forty five minutes. After receiving instruction on how to write a standard short essay, while the participants in the experimental group one (n = 36) received Direct Corrective Feedback and the participants in the experimental group two (n = 33) received Indirect Corrective Feedback, the learners in the control group (n = 38) received no feedback on their writing except for an overall grade. The statistical analysis tools of t-test and two-way ANOVA on the post-test and a final exam, were used to check whether there were any significant differences in the participants' writing ability. Statistically significant differences were found between control and experimental groups on the dependent variable of writing ability. The students who received direct WCF performed significantly better than those who received indirect WCF and those in control groups, gender had also a significant impact on the learners' writing ability with females performing better than males.
Farzad Salahshoor; Hamideh Baggali; Bahram Behin
Abstract
Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the humanities are increasingly apprehending dialogism; however, few studies have applied it in the realm of critical discourse analysis. The present study presupposes that a fundamental similarity exists between ...
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Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the humanities are increasingly apprehending dialogism; however, few studies have applied it in the realm of critical discourse analysis. The present study presupposes that a fundamental similarity exists between dialogism and critical discourse analysis in their respect for different human voices to be heard. To present a study embracing dialogism in the given field, this research analyzed Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" and Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet", as two leading political speeches in the history, using two master concepts of dialogism, self and other, in line with utterance, polyphony, centripetal and centrifugal forces and architectonics. The results showed that the explored political utterances were the locus of struggle between centrifugal and centripetal forces through which self-other architectonics in "The Ballot or the Bullet" appeared primarily in the form of binary opposition and relative dominance of one voice; in contrast, the architectonics in "I Have a Dream" showed various examples of polyphony and reconciliation of the voices. The domination of a single voice in the former and plurality of the voices in the latter yielded the speech utterances respectively as the monologic and dialogic utterances where covert maintenance of power in monologism, in contrast to dialogism, can serve the aim of critical discourse analysis to study the relation between discourse and power.
Fatemeh Tabrizi; Nesa Nabifar
Abstract
Systemic functional grammar constructs a grammar for the purpose of text analysis to investigate how grammar is used as a means of making meaning. Grammatical metaphor is one of the language phenomena introduced by Halliday (2004) in the framework of functional grammar. The present work focuses on the ...
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Systemic functional grammar constructs a grammar for the purpose of text analysis to investigate how grammar is used as a means of making meaning. Grammatical metaphor is one of the language phenomena introduced by Halliday (2004) in the framework of functional grammar. The present work focuses on the application of Halliday’s metafunctional framework in health texts of English newspapers. The analysis of data was conducted through a description of English newspaper texts, based on ideational grammatical metaphor. To this end, the researcher conducted some statistics to this strand of meaning, including frequency and percentage of nominalization type of ideational grammatical metaphor in health texts. The obtained results indicate that health texts of English newspapers are using the nominalization of ideational grammatical metaphor and also transitivity analysis in health texts shows how we can express the same meaning in different ways.
