عباس مهرپویا

Nature has aesthetics of its own, what can provoke the human mind into better recognizing the concept of beauty via mental perception. As such, human mind can interact with the nonverbal expressions of nature only to better his/her primitive aesthetic knowledge and reach a more novel recognition of aestheticism via the practice of interpretative deduction. This article has been the result of a series of discussions and dialogues between the authors on the nature of aesthetic geotouring and exploring the natural phenomena based on the Dialectical Method of Socrates and modelled after the Platonic dialogues. The outcome of this dialectic study brings to light the fact that touring in nature through providing the due opportunity for mental perception of aesthetic phenomena can provide a clearer definition of ‘beauty’ in its rich variety. Aesthetic search as such will culminate in forming a more illuminated mental concept of beauty in mind, what can influence human rationale for aesthetic judgment and enrich even more the texture of human aesthetic creation. Such aesthetico-interpretative endeavor might lead to a higher potential for creating more original works of literature and art and culminate in a better judgment about such aesthetic creations.        

Looking through the lens of forensic pragmatics, this study aims to critically analyze a typical textual sample of cyber-fraud correspondence as addressed to a candidate email-user. As such, the virtual correspondence which is written by a seemingly legitimate sender seems to be authorized in its claims to the extent that even the Gmail spam-identifying system has not report it as devious. Due to the questionable subject of such virtual correspondence(s) (VC) or cyberspace correspondence(s) (CC) being issued, that is the claim of offering a huge winning bid to the addressee and the significance of identifying the authenticity of such abrupt proposals, it can be hypothesized that such a text consists of fraudulent claims and therefore is subject to forensic cyber-crime examination. As such, the present study plans to provide a discursive analysis of an authentic sample based on a CDA procedure itself based on Fairclough’s (1989) formula presented in his influential book titled ‘Language and Power’. There are two main questions this study has aimed to answer: 1) How the text at hand lends itself to CDA analysis in terms of the main tenets of discursive manipulation proposed in Fairclough’s CDA formula? and 2) What manipulative patterns might be detected in a discursive piece of email correspondence allegedly presumed to be fraudulent. The main findings of this study are: 1) The lexical, sentential, and textual levels in the Fairclough’s CDA formula are applicable to the email-correspondence text at hand, though modified in accordance with the text’s discoursal specifications, 2) The outcome of the CDA analysis of the cyberspace correspondence sample under study provided definitive clues to support the existence of manipulative intention(s) hidden in the text at hand, 3) The results might be applied to similar pieces of discourse at different levels of lexical, sentential, and textual composition.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of task-based language teaching on news-story writing in Iranian EFL context. To this end, a quasi-experimental, pre- and post-evaluation research design was employed. First, 78 Iranian BA sophomores majoring in translation at Islamic Azad University, Hamedan Branch, were selected through convenient sampling as the participants of the study. They were then randomly divided into two treatment and control groups--task-based group (TB) and conventional teaching group (TC) respectively. Both groups were initially given a test on news story writing to measure their writing ability at the pre-treatment stage. Then, the control group was taught through explanations abstracted from some deductive plans and reading-oriented method of teaching news story structure. The other group was exposed to a six-weak TB treatment based on Willis’ TBL framework. The post-treatment researcher-made test was then administered to compare the participants’ writing progress. The obtained statistical results showed that the employment of the task-based language learning scenario does not lead to an overall significant improvement of Iranian EFL learners’ performance in news-story writing as compared with the conventional teaching of the same skill. This is perhaps due to learners’ negative attitude towards TBLT, which originates from the inconsistency of TBLT with the educational philosophy in Iran. Therefore, TBLT programs may need to be modified on the basis of the local and traditional specifications of the education in the target community to be able to develop the learners’ news-story writing skill.