درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This paper reports on a study that investigated the effect of self-assessment on a group of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students’ goal orientation. To this end, 57 EFL students participated in a seven-week course. The participants were divided into an experimental and a control group. At the beginning and at end of the semester, both groups completed a goal-orientation questionnaire. However, the participants in the experimental group completed a bi -weekly self-assessment questionnaire throughout the semester as well. The data were analyzed using a Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA). The findings revealed that the students’ learning goal orientation improved significantly in the experimental group. This suggests that practicing self-assessment on a formative basis boosts EFL students’ leaning goal orientation.

در سال­های اخیر مفهوم تحول حرفه­ای در حیطه آموزش زبان دوم خصوصا عوامل تاثیرگذار بر آن در دوره پساروش از اهمیت بسیار برخوردار شده است. این تحقیق با استفاده از پرسشنامه دلینگر و همکاران به ارتباط بین مولفه­های این پرسشنامه و سه عامل معلم شامل جنسیت، تجربه، و پیشینه تحصیلی می­پردازد. نتیجه تحقیق در مورد 59 معلم نشان می دهد که این عوامل عمدتا تاثیری بر برداشت معلمان ار کارآمدی خود ندارند. نتایج دال بر آن است که معلمان نیازمند رویکرد تامل­گرا هستند تا درک درستی از کارآمدی خود پیدا کنند.

The present study seeks to investigate the potentiality of the translation task as a testing method for measuring reading comprehension. To achieve this objective, two types of translation tests, open-ended and multiple-choice tests, and two types of reading comprehension tests, multiple-choice reading comprehension and open-ended cloze tests were developed in this study. The reliability of the tests was computed in order to estimate which translation test was more reliable and valid. Correlation coefficients were run in order to investigate whether translation tests worked as reliable and valid measures of reading comprehension, and to examine the relationship between proficiency in reading comprehension and proficiency in translation. The results indicate that the open-ended translation test is more reliable and valid than the multiple-choice one; translation has a high potentiality to work as a reliable and valid tool to assess reading comprehension; and there exists a high positive correlation between the participants’ proficiency in reading comprehension and their proficiency in translation. The findings of this study might have pedagogical implications for instructors. They may be justified to highlight the role of translation tests and benefit from them in their reading comprehension classes.

Literature is the aesthetic manifestation of language. It is ‘as old as human language and as new as tomorrow’s sunrise.’ This paper explores the interrelationships between language and literature from 600 AD to the present day. The grammar of present-day English is closely related to that of Old English with the same tense formation and word orders. The verse unit is a single line and its organizing device is ‘alliteration’. The range of Chaucer’s English did much to establish English as a national language. The writers of the Elizabethan period reshaped the literary language by borrowing foreign words and by coining new expressions and figures of speech. Shakespeare’s language and modern English have enough in common so that historians consider that they both belong to the same stage in the history of English. Milton attempted to reinvent the English language through his Paradise Lost. The writers of the seventeenth century developed a prose style that could bear the weight of the most serious and complex ideas. Then, the writers of the eighteenth century devoted themselves to developing out a formal, polished, and “correct” style of expression. Wordsworth and Coleridge intended to purify and renew the literary language and make it closer to the everyday speech of the ordinary people. Modernism tried to articulate a representation of the world and the way of seeing it through complexities of mind using the spoken rather than the formal language.