درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Flipped learning is a rather recent practice where the teacher provides the learners with the content of the teaching and videos of his or her teaching prior to the class meeting. Students are required to study and be prepared, and the class time is devoted to activities which involve higher-order thinking skills. This study aimed at assessing the perception of students of the flipped classroom and the effectiveness of flipped learning in a university testing and assessment class with bachelor's students of English Language Teaching. The first half of the semester was taught through the flipped strategy and a half was taught through traditional lecturing. Results indicated that students had a positive view towards flipped learning, and flipped learning led to a better performance of the students on the section of the exam which involved higher-order thinking skills such as application, analysis, and synthesis. Results further showed that successful intelligence was a better predictor of academic performance of the learners on the exams than the Big Five (NEO) personality traits, and creative intelligence was the component of successful intelligence significantly associated with students’ performance. It can be concluded that flipped teaching is worth the time and energy spent by the teacher and the learners on preparation for the classroom and it can motivate and engage learners.

This study investigated the effect of two different types of offline planning, namely cooperative and individual, on the oral proficiency of impulsive and reflective EFL learners. Accordingly, 114 intermediate learners studying at a private language school in Tehran were chosen nonrandomly through their performance on a Preliminary English Test (PET). The participants also filled out the Eysenck and Eysenck’s (1991) Impulsiveness Questionnaire (EIQ) through which they were categorized into two subgroups within each offline planning setting consisting of impulsive and reflective learners. All in all, there were four subgroups: 28 impulsive and 28 reflective learners undergoing the cooperative offline planning treatment, and 32 impulsive and 26 reflective learners experiencing the individual offline planning treatment. Following the 14-session treatment, the mean scores of all four groups on the speaking posttest were computed and a two-way ANOVA was run to test all the four hypotheses raised in the study. The results revealed that the effect of offline planning to a great degree depends on the cognitive learning style of the learners: while impulsive learners benefit more from cooperative offline planning, reflective ones prefer to perform the task individually.

The goal of this study was to compare the use of conceptual metaphors in English novels written by native and nonnative writers of English. Therefore, two novels were selected: To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee, a native English writer, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a nonnative English writer. To find the instances of conceptual metaphors in each book, approximately 10% of the pages of each novel was randomly selected and examined line by line based on the framework introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). In the next step, to find the number and type of metaphors used in each book, the identified metaphors were categorized under their underlying concepts and counted. Then, the frequencies of different types of metaphors in each book were tallied and tabulated, and with the use of a chi-square test, the possible differences among the 2 writers’ use of different types of metaphors were found. Results indicated that, in both novels, there were significant differences among the 5 types of metaphors that were identified, namely structural metaphors, ontological metaphors, orientational metaphors, metonymy, and personification. Findings revealed that, in both books, ontological metaphors were the most frequently used type and personification was the least frequently used one. Also, no statistically significant difference was seen between the two writers’ use of the different types of metaphors. Findings are claimed to bear some implications for L2 pedagogy, benefiting teachers, syllabus designers, writers, and L2 learners.

Language transfer refers to the application of previous language knowledge to the target language learning. Using questionnaires, this paper investigates the lexical transferring behaviors of 230 Dongxiang-Chinese bilingual and monolingual students who are in the early stage of learning English vocabulary. The results display that Chinese predominates the transference, while bilinguals’ Dongxiang Language is described as a barrier during the process of English learning. To show the individual-level differences, several learner-based factors: age, linguistic background, social background, cognitive level, emotion, and learning attitude are also confirmed, which appear to promote or inhibit this transferring behavior. The experiment data suggest that there are two different types of the factors mentioned above, which depend on whether they are affected by context-based factors---learner-based factors and learner-context-based factors. The paper also concludes with suggestions to teachers and policymakers in Dongxiang area for the modification of current teaching methods based on the quantitative analysis of surveys.

The present study aimed to investigate whether Reports on the results and Comments on the results moves’ recycling in the Research Article (RA) Discussion sections is affected by cultural/disciplinary variations. To this end, 600 empirical RAs in six Soft Science disciplines, including Economics, Sociology, Applied Linguistics, Linguistics, Management, and Psychology, with an equal number in each discipline and culture, published in the period from 2006 to 2018 were selected. Weissberg and Buker’s (1990) move model was used as a starting point to analyze the RAs. First, the Reports on the results and Comments on the results moves were identified in the Results sections. The Chi-Square test was then used to calculate and compare the frequency of their recycling in the Discussion sections across cultures and disciplines. The data analysis results revealed that changes in the disciplines or sociocultural settings do not result in variations in recycling the two moves under study. Given that the current study provides a relatively new framework for scrutinizing scientific discourse, it may promise certain pedagogical implications for native and non-native students in Soft Science disciplines, researchers, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instructors, and course designers.

Emotion and cognition are both considered influential factors in language learning. In this study, the role of "emotioncy" (which is a combination of emotion and frequency) in the cognitive load and sentence comprehension of a group of language learners was examined. Emotioncy includes emotions that are evoked by the senses. To this aim, 200 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners were asked to fill out the NASA Task Load Test, a sentence comprehension test, and an emotioncy scale. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was run to measure the construct validity of the emotioncy scale. Subsequently, Pearson Product-Moment correlation coefficient and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data. The results showed that emotioncy has a significantly negative and positive relationship with cognitive load and sentence comprehension, respectively (p

Studies on the generic structure of thesis and dissertation acknowledgments have resulted in some influential models such as Hyland’s (2004) and Al-Ali’s (2010) models. Few studies, if any, have investigated the generic structure of acknowledgments in books. Therefore, the present study was an attempt to find out whether the acknowledgments of books follow an organizational pattern. To this end, 200 books (100 written by native and 100 by non-native speakers of English) which included acknowledgements section, from a mass of 1000 books, were considered. The data were analyzed with reference to Hyland’s (2004) scheme. The results obtained from the analysis of the acknowledgments written by both native and non-native writers of English revealed that the overall structure of the acknowledgements section of the books follows an organizational pattern which is a combination of two models: Hyland’s (2004) scheme (all moves and steps), Al-Ali’s (2010) model (Praising and Thanking God Step and Signing off Move) and two new moves: Copyright Move and Commenting Move. The findings suggest that a full appreciation of this organizational pattern can help writers to enjoy this unique space for thanking all those who have contributed to completion of their work and academic identity formation.

Languages as living and dynamic structured systems were influenced at the very first moments of the COVID-19 pandemic as they became medicalized by the use and practice of various jargons and technical terms. Meanwhile, homebound individuals around the world started to create a COVID-19 pandemic-related lexical-overload of neologisms (Coroneologisms or Corona coinages) in different languages which started to spread across the globe by mass media, and some of them even entered the official databases of the well-known dictionaries and Wikipedia corpora. This study was a scrutinized attempt to explore the English vs. Persian (Farsi) Coroneologisms across various Extensible Markup Language (XML) corpora and a huge body of E-resource discourses (websites, social media, and news channels and forums) based on embedded mixed-method design to provide a comprehensive insight into their types, structures, and meanings. To provide a better understanding of how and why particular Coroneologisms were created in terms of social, cultural, or political contributing factors, they were investigated based on the reflections of a series of sociolinguistic focus-group E-interviews with 184 volunteer English and Persian native speakers. This study might provide implications for sociolinguistics, corpus-based language studies, lexicographers, designers of corpora, etymologists, and discourse analysts in English and Persian.