داوود کوهی

Abstract Since student L2 achievement is the primary objective of all language education contexts, a huge number of inquiries have explored the role of various elements including teachers’ qualities in promoting their L2 achievement. Teachers’ qualities, such as professional commitment, have been shown to affect students’ achievements; however, some factors such as academic burnout seems to play a role in disturbing teachers’ commitment, even though the association between two concepts is not crystal clear. Due to the importance of commitment and burnout, this qualitative research intends to systematically uncover Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions towards the dynamic interaction between academic commitment and burnout. To this end, a sample of 50 EFL teachers from high schools and language institutes of Urmia, Iran was selected based on the convenience sampling and they were interviewed to express their perceptions towards different types of commitment (to school organization, to the teaching profession, and to students) they experienced, the role of burnout and its relationship between professional commitment and burnout level. Based on the thematic analysis, the results indicated that teachers in both high schools and private institutes were aware of three types of commitment and they believed in the negative interplay between the two concepts. The majority of the participants indicated that they feel stressed and anxious due to the heavy workload and low salary that resulted in limited opportunities for professional development.

Academic discourse enables others' voices in a text to be realized through conventionalized citational patterns. However, form amongst a variety of factors, one thing which may influence the way others' voices are textualized is writers' affiliations to different cultures. Following this assumption, the present contrastive study attempted to explore manifest intertextual constructions across the academic articles written by English and Iranian writers in the field of applied linguistics in a ten-year period (2000-2010). The typology of citation elaborated by Swales (1990), and subcategorized by Thompson and Tribble (2001) and Thompson (2005) were explored as the analytical framework of this study. The analysis demonstrated the dominance of different strategies of citations in the two corpora. The findings of this research may be helpful for novice writers and researchers in applied linguistics.

In light of the understanding that the analysis of the generic features of different academic genres can enhance the ability of non-native members of academic discourse communities to understand, and where appropriate, to produce them, the present study aimed at investigating the dominant generic structure of research articles in mathematics. To start with a relatively narrow focus, a corpus of thirty mathematics research articles were randomly selected from The Bulletin of the Iranian Mathematical Society(BIMS), and were analyzed in terms of their macro-organizational structure. An eleven-move structure was identified in the analyzed corpus, while it was also found that the research articles in the corpus did not follow the conventional Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion structure found in many other disciplines. Methods and Discussion sections which are frequently encountered in research articles of many other disciplines were missing in the analyzed articles. It is argued that the findings may have theoretical implications in revealing some discipline specific conventions of organizing macro structure. Since all the authors were Iranian, the emerging model should be treated cautiously because some aspects of the emerging macro structure may also be under the influence of culture specific conventions.

The view that academic writing is purely objective, impersonal and informational, which is often reflected in English for Academic Purposes materials, has been criticized by a number of researchers. By now, the view of academic writing as embodying interaction among writers, readers and the academic community as a whole has been established. Following this assumption, the present study focused on how second/foreign language writers enact, construct, and invent themselves through writing. In this study, the theoretical stance on identity is grounded on Ivanič’s (1998) four interrelated aspects of writer identity, namely autobiographical self, discoursal self, authorial self, and possibilities for self-hood in the socio-cultural and institutional contexts. Hyland’s model of metadiscourse (2004a) was used as the analytical tool for analyzing texts. Based on a corpus of 30 research articles, the overall distribution of evidential markers, hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions were calculated across four rhetorical sections (Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Discussion and Conclusion) of the research articles. According to the results of this study, identity is a critical aspect of writing which should be brought into the mainstream of second/foreign language writing pedagogy through consciousness -raising or the specific teaching of certain features.

The original impetus for this cross-linguistic study came from a need to explore the effect of cultural factors and generic conventions on the use and distribution of metadiscourse within a single genre. To this end, the study as a contrastive rhetoric research, examined a corpus of 60 newspaper editorials (written in English and Persian) culled from 10 elite newspapers in America and Iran. Based on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, both interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources were analyzed. The results disclosed that genre conventions had a determining role in the writers’ choice of some metadiscourse resources that contributed to some similarities in the use and distribution of metadiscourse resources across English and Persian data. In addition, some differences were found between two sets of editorials which were attributed to cultural/linguistic backgrounds of both groups of editorialists. The interactional category and attitude markers proved to be the predominant metadiscourse category and subcategory in newspaper editorials genre. Overall, the findings suggested that metadiscourse has a decisive role in the construction of persuasion in newspaper editorials genre.