درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Visual literacy (VL), despite its significance, has not received deserved attention in EFL classes in Iran. Addressing this pedagogic and research lacuna, the researchers integrated VL practices into a General English course attended by female university learners, and examined the vision competencies developed by them. The analysis of the data collected through class observation, learner documents, and semi-structured interviews revealed that the learners developed the vision competencies regarding compositional, affective, and critical dimensions of visuals. It is hoped that the findings of this small-scale study encourage language planners, materials developers, and English teachers to pay heightened attention to the visuals’ potential and open more spaces for VL development in their curricula, materials, and language teaching practices. 

Various types of focalization are important elements in creating suspense and surprise. This study finds use of narrative discourse analysis in order to discover the narrative affordances and limitations of internal focalization for creating suspense and surprise in Persian detective novels, specifically, Esmail Fassih’s The Falcon and the Owls . Duality (the existence of two temporal sets in the structure of the narrative), raising implicit questions in the first and other scenes of the novel, flashback, flashforward, different types of internal and external conflicts, spatial limitation of the focalizer and the suspense after the surprise are some of the affordances and limitations of the internal focalizer in creating suspense and surprise. In The Falcon and the Owls , the most significant strengths of the internal focalizer are the extensive attention given to narrative affordances such as raising implicit questions in the first and other scenes of the novel as well as going back and forth in time; while its weaknesses include giving insufficient attention to the tactic of multiple internal focalization, paying unnecessary attention to unimportant omissions and omitting important events.

This study attempted to determine the viability of the pedagogic interventions in ESP writing courses that fall within the ambit of Written Corrective Feedback (WCF). Considering this objective, 93 intermediate-level ESP learners in 3 intact classrooms of a medical sciences university in Iran were assigned to three groups. They were provided with corrective feedback; using three feedback strategies comprising direct, indirect, and metalinguistic WCF over ten treatment sessions. The researchers endeavored to itemize the utility of the interventions mentioned above via analyzing the participants’ performance on an immediate and a delayed writing posttest. The results displayed the efficacy of WCF for the betterment of the ESP learners’ writing performance. Furthermore, they accentuated the short-term and long-term supremacy of explicit WCF strategies (i.e., metalinguistic & direct) over the implicit ones (i.e., indirect). The findings might enable syllabus designers and curriculum developers to redress the English courses for students of allied medical sciences.

This study investigated the effects of dialogic tasks on Iranian English as Foreign Language learners' language learning anxiety considering the moderating effects of the learners’ gender and levels of proficiency as well. A total number of 213 male and female Iranian EFL learners within the age range of 15-19 were selected through convenience sampling from three language schools in Fars, Iran. Learners at two levels of proficiency (upper vs. lower intermediate), were chosen and assigned to experimental and control groups. Then, an adapted translated version of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz et al., 1986) was run as a pretest and posttest to measure the learners’ anxiety. The treatment was dialogic tasks operationalized through sequencing picture stories. The results revealed that dialogic tasks exerted a significant effect on reducing Iranian EFL learners' anxiety. Moreover, it was discovered that upper-intermediate learners experienced lower levels of anxiety than their lower-intermediate counterparts. Finally, it was found that female learners in this study suffered from more anxiety levels than male learners. Although integrating dialogic tasks into classroom activities has proved to be beneficial as learners could experience sufficient opportunities for speaking, this task could not assist learners of different levels of proficiency and gender in the same way. These findings will provide practical implications for language teachers and learners.

Scaffolding entails contingency, denoting teachers’ level adaptation in providing transient support. In this study, a symbiosis of the model of contingent teaching (MCT) and the contingent shift framework (CSF) was utilized. Therefore, 360 elementary and advanced EFL learners took a course and filled out two sets of related questionnaires twice, administered at the outset and the end of the course. The transcribed data including the class interactions and intervention strategies were organized into contingent or non-contingent fragments based on models’ criteria. According to the results of the Wilcoxon rank test and the Paired Sample t-test, there was a significant difference between the results of the pre and post-tests in the two mentioned levels for the two constructs. Furthermore, the results of the Single Sample t-test showed that the CSF was more utilized than the MCT in both levels. Moreover, the intervention strategies of the MCT significantly differed in the two levels. Questioning was a highly used strategy at both levels. Hints and modeling were the least utilized strategies in elementary and advanced levels, respectively. Therefore, such contingent symbiosis could have prolific results in self-regulation and gaining willingness to communicate

This study explored the competition between semantic and morphosyntactic processing in L1 and L2. In addition, the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and L2 semantic-morphosyntactic processing was scrutinized. To this purpose, 73 Persian learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) participated in an offline grammaticality judgment test (GJT), an L1 as well as an L2 semantically-primed test, and a WMC test. The results showed that L1 morphosyntactic processing was not affected by semantic priming. But, L2 morphosyntactic parsing decisions, irrespective of the participants’ WMC, was significantly influenced by semantic priming, indicating that L2 morphosyntactic knowledge in learners' interlanguage system might be shaky and subject to communicative aspects of input. Additionally, the findings revealed a significant relationship between the participants' WMC and their L2 semantic/morphosyntactic processing. The findings of the study provide some implications for foreign language teachers with regard to teaching morphosyntactic aspects of language and correcting morphosyntactic errors.

One important aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to comprehend and/or produce speech acts appropriately in different contexts. The acquisition and use of such an ability by non-native speakers of a language has been a major research line in interlanguage pragmatic competence (ILP) studies. Among different speech acts, the speech act of thanking is one of the most recurring acts, which has been comparatively less under the spotlight of ILP researchers. The purpose of this study is to explore how Iranian EFL learners express their gratitude and what thanking strategies they use in 14 different thanking situations. For this purpose, data were collected from 59 Iranian female advanced EFL learners through Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCT). Quantitative and qualitative analyses of data demonstrated a variety of thanking strategies were used by the participants in different thanking situations; however, the direct expression of gratitude without any preceding or succeeding complementary expression was the most frequently used strategy. Moreover, the diversity of different thanking strategies were almost similar in different thanking situations. The obtained results might imply that Iranian EFL learners need to be made more sensitive to both less direct and a wider variety of thanking speech act realization strategies.   

This experimental research centered on considering the effect of cognitive intervention instruction on the phonological awareness of Iranian dyslexic students at primary schools. For this purpose, 32 male and female students between 8 to 11 years of age with 90 to 110 IQs average, were purposefully selected from primary schools and randomly assigned to a control group and an experimental group. Wechsler Intelligence test (WIT), Karami and Noori (KNT) test, and a cognitive intervention package were used as tools in this research. Then, to check the participants’ phonological awareness, (KNT) measurement was applied to the students. The covariance analysis of the resultant data showed that this package was effective on the phonological awareness of the experimental group after receiving the cognitive intervention package in contrast to the control group. The independent sample t-test also showed that there was no statistically meaningful difference between dyslexic male and female students in the experimental group regarding phonological awareness. The findings recommend that instructors at primary schools should teach the students to use cognitive intervention programs in phonological awareness to accelerate and do their more effective homework and develop productive insights into their phonological awareness.