اکبر حسابی

Mastery of English phrasal verbs is regarded as a stumbling block for English language learners, even at advanced levels. Possible sources of difficulty can be a lack of clear meaning and the random nature of particles. The lack of an organized approach to present phrasal verbs to the learners might be a factor that could exacerbate the situation of learning them. This study takes this issue as its point of departure. It investigates whether employing radial categories, conceptual categories with one prototypical concept and some peripheral members that are organized around it, is influential in the learning and long-term retention of these verbs. Moreover, the effect of employing radial categories to teach PVs on learners' cognitive load is investigated. For this purpose, 60 intermediate high school students in 10th and 11th grade were assigned to two groups, one experimental and one control group, each containing 30 students. The study results indicated that the experimental group learners who were taught phrasal verbs using radial categories outperformed control group learners who were taught using a traditional approach. This result suggests that radial categories may help facilitate learning phrasal verbs.

Language teacher immunity has recently attracted the attention of the scholars interested in teacher psychology. Following the previous line of research in teacher psychology, the present study explored the immunity types among 260 Iranian EFL teachers working in schools and language institutes. Drawing on Hiver’s (2017) categorization, this study found that the participants were classified into productively and maladaptively immunized teachers through cluster analysis. It was also found that gender played a significant role, and female participants were more productively immunized than men. Regarding the role of teaching experience, it was found that EFL teachers’ immunity fluctuated in the late stages of their practice to a more fossilized, negative one. Regarding age differences, the results also suggested different immunity types among the participants of different age groups. The results implied that teacher education programs should enhance EFL teachers’ understanding of language teacher immunity as an important factor in their effectiveness and well-being as well as students’ achievement.

Today technology is an integral part of professional translation; and it is generally assumed that translators’ attitudes toward translation technology tools influence their interaction with technology (Bundgaard, 2017). Therefore, the present two-phase study seeks to shed some light on what translation technology tools are and how professional translators feel toward them. The research method used is exploratory in nature, as it tends to discuss issues on which little research has been done and relies on secondary research for its data. The data required for answering the first question have been mined utilizing document analysis from language service providers’ (LSPs) websites, while the data for working out the answer to the second question have been obtained from ProZ.com Quick Polls. Based on our findings, translation technology tools fall into eight broad categories, of which the most commonly used are translation memory (TM) or computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools. In addition, it was found that most translators either do not have a love-hate relationship with technology or love it. This research is envisaged to form the basis of more detailed and conclusive studies.

The present study investigates the implantation of political science terminology approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL) in the Hamshahri corpus made up of news text from Hamshahri newspaper and their acceptability among MA students of English translation studies (ETS), English literature (EL), and Political science (PS). To conduct this research the frequencies of the political terms approved by the APLL with their competing terms were compiled from the corpus. For analyzing another group of terms without competing terms, 90 MA students were purposively selected from the abovementioned majors. Accordingly, a 60-item 5-point Likert Scale questionnaire (including 60 political terms) along with an open-ended question were administered. The implantation coefficients (IC) of the first group of the terms with competing terms indicate that the factors such as conciseness and derivative capabilities result in higher IC. The descriptive results indicated that around two third of the ETS and EL students agree with the APLL-approved political science terms, while less than half of the PS students accept these neologisms. Moreover, the Chi-Square test (value of 92.000, p= 0.000 < 0.05) revealed that there is a correlation between the level of agreement and the major. In addition, Cramer’s V test result with the value of 0.092 indicated a weak correlation between the academic major and the attitude. Finally, analysis of the open-ended question showed that conciseness, transparency, morphological well-formedness, and familiarity with neologisms were the main reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with them.