درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Regarding the belief that willingness to communicate is strongly tied with developing some insights into the L2 culture, such a connection may not be always positive and the issue of cultural attachment and identity may sometimes function as a hindrance. Individuals are believed to be highly emotional in terms of “religion and spirituality", among other components of cultural identity. This study aimed at investigating the interrelationships of willingness to speak and cultural identity with English speaking proficiency. To this aim, 215 Iranian intermediate and upper intermediate EFL learners took part in this survey study to complete the Home Culture Attachment Scale and the Revised Version of Willingness to Communicate questionnaire. Using SEM, path analysis showed the degree to which the variables were related to one another. Also, Pearson Correlation was used for verification. The findings revealed positive significant relationships between all subscales of Home culture Attachment and both speaking and willingness to speak, except for the element of religious attachment. Further, willingness to speak was positively and significantly correlated with speaking skill. Having found a rather negative influence of religious attachment, it may be concluded that religion, as a cultural barrier, may hinder the process of L2 learning.

This study was an attempt to investigate the relationship among EFL learners’ language aptitude, anxiety, and willingness to communicate (WTC). Accordingly, two questionnaires and a battery were used: Language Aptitude Battery for Iranian Learners (LABI), Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), and WTC Scale. A total of 164 undergraduate students majoring in English literature and English translation of Islamic Azad University Central Tehran took part in this study, among whom 119 (52 males and 67 females) whose age ranged from 19 to 35 years responded to the three instruments completely and were thus considered as the actual participants. The researchers carried out a series of both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses and the results supported the notion that learners’ anxiety was negatively correlated with their WTC while learners’ language aptitude was positively correlated with their WTC. Hence, the major implication of this study is that by helping learners reduce their anxiety and enhance their aptitude, they can increase their WTC.

This comparative study aimed at finding out the types of grammatical shifts which have occurred in two English translations of the Quranic rhetorical questions, and the impact of such shifts on the said rhetorical questions. For these purposes, the study firstly analyzed the Arabic and English texts syntactically using the x-bar theory for Haegeman (2006) and then classified the grammatical shifts according to Catford’s (1965) kinds of shifts. The X theory has been applied as a tree diagram and liner structure. Where necessary “al-Gadwal fi i’arab al-Quran”/the Quran grammatical analysis” of Safi published in (1995) has been used. The two English translations used in the study were “the Koran Interpreted” by Arberry (1955) and “the Noble Quran: English translation of the meanings and commentary” (1996) by al-Hilali and Khan. According to the analysis, different types of grammatical shifts, e.g. class, unit, structural and level shifts have occurred in the two translations. Further, another kind of shift has appeared in the two translations. This refers to the syntactic shift where a question has been changed into a statement. With respect to the impact of such shifts on the meanings of the Quranic rhetorical questions, sometimes the entire meaning of the ST rhetorical questions is distorted like in al-Hilali and Khan’s translation. In addition, the intended reason of the function is changed like in Arberry’s translation. By and large, it can be argued that the shifts committed by Arberry affected the ST rhetorical questions more than those made by al-Hilali and Khan.

There has been a burgeoning of research in teacher, peer, and self-assessment in terms of reliability and validity, the use of rubrics, the implementation of these kinds of assessments in different academic settings, the effect of demographic variables in these assessments, and the benefits of these assessments. However, the effect of these assessments on subsequent learning has rarely been explored. To fill that void, this study set out to examine the effects of these kinds of assessments on subsequent learning as evidenced by students’ final exam scores. Two intact classes were chosen and teacher, peer, and self-assessments were employed in a general English class. The scores achieved on the students’ oral presentations exhibited a statistically significant correlation between the teacher awarded scores and those on the final examination of general English proficiency as a course. Peer awarded scores could also predict final exam scores, though not as good as teacher awarded ones. Self-assessment failed to correlate significantly with final exam scores and teacher/peer assessments. The reasons for the findings are discussed further in the paper.

Plagiarism is considered as a serious problem in academia around the world. The issue of plagiarism has recently received global inquiry in different fields of science, especially in foreign language (L2) academic writing. To meticulously assess the Iranian academics for plagiarism at both theory and practice grounds, developing an accountable instrument seemed to be inevitable. To bridge the gap, in phase 1 of the study, a conceptual framework for Iranian academics’ grasp of plagiarism and its components was designed after a thorough review of literature. In phase 2, a number of M.A. graduates and graduate students (n = 224) in six State and Islamic Azad universities in Iran were recruited to partake in piloting the newly-designed plagiarism questionnaire. After a two-step revising the inefficient items (n = 11), the final draft of the developed questionnaire with 36 items was administered with the main sample of participants (n = 288). An Exploratory Factor Analysis was performed to identify the components of the instrument, followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis to measure its construct validity. As a result, the final draft of the Sociocultural Plagiarism Questionnaire contained 31 Likert-point and 5 multiple choice items in four components of awareness (10 items), attitude (8 items), sociocultural beliefs (8 items), and perception (5 Likert-point and 5 multiple choice items), which were suggested as having fundamental contributions to the Iranian academic writers’ sensitivity to plagiarism. Findings of the study suggested that (a) the Iranian academic writers’ normative sociocultural beliefs can probably reduce their sensitivity to plagiarism, (b) while the Iranian academics might have relatively high awareness and deep perception about plagiarism, their attitude toward plagiarism seems relatively neutral or even insensitive.