محمدرضا محمودی

Arabic, as the only medium of performing religious rituals, is a widely used language in Islamic communities. Amongst uses of Arabic, reading and recitation of the Holy Qur’an enjoy a critical position. Accordingly, many religious schools have invested in teaching Qur’an and its required skills. Research findings have shown that Qur’anic teaching follows a traditional procedure in theory and practice. Considering the importance of conducting applied linguistics studies on teaching Qur’anic reading, the current research was an attempt to investigate the effect of semantic-structural elaboration of Qur’anic reading efficiency, encompassing reading reaction time, fluency, and comprehension. To this aim, an intact group of intermediate Qur’anic learners was selected through non-random convenience sampling and an experimental (pretest/intervention/posttest) design was employed in which the group underwent three different experiments. After raising awareness on five frequent Qur’anic roots and their derivations that occurred in different Qur’anic verses, tests were administered and parametric data were collected and analyzed through SPSS. Research findings revealed that intervention adversely affected reaction time by a significant increase (t (24) = -12.067, p < 0.000.) while promoting reading fluency and reading comprehension (t (24) = -9.643, p < 0.000, and t (24) = -6.914, p < 0.000, respectively). It was suggested that, though semantic-structural elaboration significantly increases learners’ knowledge of semantic, syntax, and morphology and promotes language skills, form-focused instruction is cognitively demanding and must be done with due caution. These findings could have implications for Qur’anic teachers, learners, and applied linguists in general.

The term Globalization undoubtedly has affected all parts of humanity life in current century. Globalization as a comprehensive phenomenon has influenced economical, political, social and cultural aspects of our societies. Contemporary architecture as a multidimensional category is depended on various factors and needs to be pursued in different fields, in order to reach to a perfect comprehending of it. In countries that they have not experienced modernity completely and also they have not passed the traditions, facing with global flows will cause different encounters. Although some defend the global and homogenous behaviors, the others as a reflection to that, support of particular and heterogeneous ideas. This dilemma also could be seen in traditional societies in confronting with modernity, but by the aim of global flows it has an incredible speed which could not be imagined before. By the rise of consideration to complexity theories and relational and fuzzy discourses, some kind of symbiosis ideas have aroused that are not going to omit while they are trying to connect contradictory issues together. The specifics of these points of views are going to be clarified and reviewed, so that to make clear the globalized and localized approaches in contemporary architecture and also to conceive an interconnection of them as a “glocalized” architecture.