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Translation quality assessment with its focus on the formulation of a comprehensive model for translation evaluation has gained a growing interest in the field of translation studies. However, little attention has been paid to the use of linguistic theories in the evaluative judgment of a translation. The aim of this study was to apply a particular kind of linguistic analysis based on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as a framework for the translation quality assessment of a novel. Meanwhile, it aimed to identify the kinds of overt errors and the used translation strategies in English to Persian. To this end, thirty pages of The Sound and The Fury by Faulkner (1329) and its translation by Bahman Sholevar (2003) were selected and the mismatches across the three metafunctions of ideational, interpersonal, and thematic meanings were identified based on SFL. The comparison of the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) revealed that the ideational meaning had the greatest number of errors as produced by the translator. Moreover, omission constituted the largest kind of overt translation error. Thus, the translator mostly used reduction strategies and text expansion strategies in translating the ST. The results showed that SFL can successfully be applied to evaluate the correct translation of the three metafunctions of language. This study has important implications for syllabus designers of translation studies, translation teachers, and literary translators.    

This synthesis reviews the methodological issues in empirical studies investigating the effect of working memory capacity (WMC) on relative clause ambiguity resolution where results have failed to be consistent cross-linguistically and even intra-linguistically. This discrepancy might have occurred due to ‘methodological inconsistencies’ in the design (Liu & Brown, 2015), administration, and scoring of WMC measures. This study aimed to investigate the aggregative and developmental status of the methodological practices of WMC measures and describe how transparently such practices have been reported. Based on a comprehensive search, 39 experiments were retrieved from 25 studies, culminating in a collection of studies with a time span of 22 years from 1999 to 2021, and coded for 46 features. Results revealed that although over the past 22 years, the field has witnessed significant improvements in the employment of WMC tests, there are still a lot of variations and inconsistencies calling for attempts to raise methodological awareness among researchers to afford more attention to quality and transparency in reporting WMC tests. The article concludes with a call for reform in standardizing WMC tests and a number of other recommendations for future primary and secondary research.

This study examined the correlation between advanced EFL students' syntactic knowledge and their writing and speaking proficiency to determine whether students' syntactic knowledge can influence their productive skills. A total of 50 advanced students aged between 18 and 25 were chosen purposefully to take part in the study. Four tests, including a placement test, a syntax test from Oxford University Press, a writing test, and one test for speaking proficiency were employed to collect the required data. Because the data for this study were quantitative, a correlational/descriptive design was chosen for the data to be analyzed. The researcher then decided to find a correlation between the students' writing and speaking scores and their syntax scores based on the obtained data. Both the t-test and the Pearson correlation demonstrated that there is no real correlation between the syntactic, speaking, and writing proficiency of the students. Further findings showed that there is no difference between the relationship between syntactic knowledge and speaking proficiency and the relationship between syntactic knowledge and writing proficiency. The implication of this study is that grammatical competence is not a valid predictor for the proficiency of students in writing and speaking courses. If a student’s grammatical competence is low, his proficiency in writing and speaking can still be average or even above average depending on the process of assessing these skills. Additionally, learners must understand that possessing a strong grasp of grammatical knowledge does not inevitably ensure their ability to produce language effectively in spoken or written form.

Perhaps the degree of test difficulty is one of the most significant characteristics of a test. However, no empirical research on the difficulty of the MSRT test has been carried out. The current study attempts to fill the gap by utilizing a two-parameter item response model to investigate the psychometric properties (item difficulty and item discrimination) of the MSRT test. The Test Information Function (TIF) was also figured out to estimate how well the test at what range of ability distinguishes respondents. To this end, 328 graduate students (39.9% men and 60.1% women) were selected randomly from three universities in Isfahan. A version of MSRT English proficiency test was administered to the participants. The results supported the unidimensionality of the components of MSRT test. Analysis of difficulty and discrimination indices of the total test revealed that 14% of the test items were either easy / very easy, 38% were medium, and 48% were either difficult or very difficult. In addition, 14% of the total items were classified as nonfunctioning. They discriminated negatively or did not discriminate at all. 7% of the total items discriminated poorly, 17% discriminated moderately, and 62% discriminated either highly or perfectly, however they differentiated between high-ability and higher-ability test takers. Thus, 38% of the items displayed satisfactory difficulty. Too easy (14%) and too difficult (48%) items could be one potential reason why some items have low discriminating power. An auxiliary inspection of items by the MSRT test developers is indispensable.

Despite its importance, a review of the related literature reveals not many studies have examined criticality in EAP. Accordingly, in the present study, whether critical approaches were followed in Iranian EAP classes were investigated among EAP teachers and students based on Benesch (1993). To do so, 40 EAP teachers and 150 EAP students were selected based on convenience sampling. The study drew on both qualitative and quantitative approaches as the participants completed a researcher-made questionnaire and attended an interview. The quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and independent-samples t -tests and inductive content analysis respectively. The quantitative results indicated that Iranian EAP classes (from both teachers and students’ views) suffered low levels of criticality and that there was a significant difference between teachers’ and students’ perspectives on the existence of criticality in EAP classes. The qualitative findings also confirmed EAP teachers’ low familiarity with criticality in EAP courses. The inhibitors and facilitators in the journey towards criticality were finally identified based on the teachers’ perspectives. 

This study was designed to highlight the potential effects of different types of Explicit Syntactic Markers (ESMs) on the sentence comprehension of EFL learners of different age-range and proficiency levels. Consequently, two hundred and forty beginners, intermediate, and advanced Iranian EFL learners were selectedfrom an initial pool of six hundred and sixty learners. They were selected based on their McMillan Placement Test (MPT) performance. Subsequently, they were categorized into two age groups teenagers and adults. An online software application (Com-Chron) was utilized to provide learners with a set of ESM and non-ESM English sentences on the screen to measure the accurate comprehension and the elapsed time needed for the perception of the presented sentences. Data analyses revealed that participants had a significantly superior performance for comprehending the ESM items (though they were longer sentences than non-ESM items). Furthermore, it was revealed that proficiency level, unlike age, caused a statistically significant difference in comprehending the ESM sentences. It was also concluded that different types of explicit syntactic markers imposed different degrees of comprehension difficulty both in terms of accuracy and the needed time for the participants’ comprehension; sentences with punctuation marks and conjunctions were the easiest for the participants, while those including determiners and link breaks were the most challenging. Results also indicated that all the ESMs (except for the link breaks) can significantly account for English sentence comprehension and can be assumed as comprehension predictors to various degrees .

Complexity measures in academic writing have experienced a shift from clausal to phrasal indices in recent years. Drawing on a subset of Biber et al.’s (2011) hypothesized stages of writing development, we explored phrasal complexity across sections (part-genres) of research articles (RAs) in applied linguistics and clinical medicine. A 389,332-word corpus consisting of 80 randomly selected RAs from leading journals in applied linguistics and clinical medicine was compiled for the purposes of the present study. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent-samples t -test, as implemented in SPSS (version 25), were employed to find differences across the RA sections and between two groups of academic writers. The findings indicated that RAs in clinical medicine relied more heavily on noun phrase modifiers in all sections than those in applied linguistics, suggesting that the distributional pattern of these linguistic expressions is discipline-independent. The implications of the distributional pattern of phrasal complexity are discussed in relation to L2 writing pedagogy and the development of genre-based, discipline-specific academic writing.

Cross-linguistic influence is a documented cause of errors committed by second language learners. Since Talmy (2000) proposed two categories to classify languages of the world regarding their preferred lexicalization patterns of a literal motion event, known as verb-framed and satellite-framed languages, the effect of typological properties of the first language on second language acquisition specifically in the domain of motion expressions has been subject to extensive scrutiny. The present research examines whether the typological properties of Persian (L1) and English (L2) affect adult second language acquisition, particularly in the spatial domain comparing controls (English and Persian native speakers). To this end, three groups (every 25 members) of participants were asked to watch 12 short animated cartoons representing voluntary motion carried out in vertical and trajectory directions. The participants’ descriptions were recorded and analyzed regarding information density, semantic focus, and semantic locus of utterances. The findings of the research revealed that in spite of different lexicalization patterns to encode manner in English and Persian, Persian learners of English across two levels of proficiency, do not face challenges to lexicalize motion components in English, but they produce utterances with low density which is the typical way of focusing on spatial components in their native language, suggesting that the challenge learners face encoding motion events was not a linguistic issue, but rather a cognitive one. Persian learners’ use of English motion expressions regarding information density was more aligned with that of English motion expressions as they advanced to a higher proficiency level.