درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

From a Systemic Functional perspective, Grammatical Metaphor (GM) as is taken to be a chief driving force in the discourse of different genres, an important adult language machinery for ideational meanings to be semantically cross-mapped and realized through a different form in the stratum of the lexico-grammar, in order to convey changed meanings and tinker with the discursive flow and development of text in real time, mainly through nominalization of adjectives and verbs. Using a number of established works of the English novel as data, this study draws upon the author’s previous model for the categories of GM used in modern prose fiction, with the main focus placed on one of the six categories, Prepositional GM (PGM). PGM figures with a very high frequency in fiction and occurs when a GM is preceded by a preposition. This study finds that the language of prose fiction in English deploys some of these PGMsin either of two different meaning sof the adverbial, varying according to context. Again, as seen to be the hallmark of GM by many, GM is found to open up vast ideational meaning potentials in the semantics stratum, from which the lexico-grammar makes choices according to context and intended meaning. As argued elsewhere in the literature and here, and as backed up by the author’s own experience of the advanced teaching of writing and reading, broadened understanding of GM is a critically important component to writing instruction and its effectiveness, as seen in the large-scale horizons and agendas for effective teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Iran and beyond.

This study has aimed to compare the effects of two types of form-focused instruction, i.e. de-contextualized focus-on-forms instruction versus meaning-centered contextualized focus-on-form instruction, on the development of grammatical knowledge of Iranian high-school students. Two groups of male high-school first graders participated in this study.  One group was taught through de-contextualized deductive grammatical explanation, while the other group received enhanced input and contextualized grammar instruction embedded in meaning-centered activity based on dialogs. The results indicated that de-contextualized instruction as it is normally practiced in high-school contexts failed to promote successful use of the auxiliaries <em>do, does, </em>and<em> did</em> in a written production test. In contrast, adding the design features of meaning-based contextualization and enhanced input to instruction did result in better performance on a written production grammar test involving the use of the auxiliaries under study. In the delayed posttest, contextualized meaning-based instruction appeared to have a durable effect, but the effect was not significant enough to warrant any claim for the durable superiority of this form of instruction. 

Vocabulary is one of the essential components of language and learning phrasal verbs as part of vocabulary is quite challenging for foreign language learners. The present study aimed at investigating the effects of visual and auditory input enhancement on learning non-congruent phrasal verbs. The participants of the study were 90 intermediate English language learners who were divided into two experimental and one control groups. The first experimental group received visual input enhancement and the second experimental group auditory input enhancement, and the control group no enhanced material. All three groups were tested on their knowledge of non-congruent phrasal verbs before and after the treatment, using a non-congruent phrasal verb test developed by the researcher. The results of the data analyses indicated that both visual and auditory input enhancement were effective in learning non-congruent phrasal verbs by Iranian EFL learners, and that both groups outperformed the control group in their achievement.