Iranian Journal of English for Academic Purposes
Volume:4 Issue: 1, Autumn 2015

The present study examined the effects of using English in products advertisements published in magazines in Iran on their Persian-speaking target audiences. 180 respondents, classified based on their gender and education, participated in this study. Respondents’ perceptions of the product/brand image and attitudes towards the advertisements, their purchasing intention, and degrees of their comprehension of the English texts used in the advertisements were measured through a written questionnaire, which included ten advertisements containing English phrases or sentences. Findings revealed that the use of English in Persian advertisements positively affects Iranian target groups. However, in terms of their attitudes towards the product/brand and towards the advertisement and their purchasing intentions, this had more positive effects on Iranian women than men, on Iranian non-English students than English students, and finally, on Iranian MA and MS students than Iranians having a high-school diploma, BA or BS respectively. The findings of this study confirm the claims in the literature about the positive effects of using English in international advertising because of its symbolic value and its function as a prestige language evoking positive connotations regarding the brand. The results of this study are useful for ESP courses of business and marketing.

Speaking assessment is still construed as a complicated, under-researched process from the vantage point of tasks and rater characteristics. The present study aimed at investigating if and how English Major and none English Major teachers differ in their perception of the construct of oral proficiency while assessing learners’ L2 oral proficiency. To this end, 38 male and female non-native EFL teachers were asked to rate 10 monologs on a 4-point rating scale and provide concurrent verbal reports. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient shows that the inter-rater reliability is relatively high, however; EM teaches are on the whole more reliable while doing the assessment task. On the other hand MANOVA reveals no significant difference in the teachers’ holistic rating of the speech samples (F=1.44, ρ≥0.05), and the adopted approach while doing the assessment task in EM versus NEM teachers’ modes of assessment.

Research on multiword clusters (chunks) is based on the assumption that native speakers use plenty of chunks in their everyday language and they are considered as fluent speakers of language. Therefore the present study was an attempt to investigate the impact of using chunks on speaking fluency of Iranian EFL learners. In the first phase of the study, the students of two intermediate classes sat for a general proficiency test and then were interviewed for their speaking ability. Next, the two groups were statistically compared in terms of their general proficiency and speaking fluency which indicated that they belonged to the same population. The 18-session instruction of the control and experimental groups included the same content and skills, but the experimental group received training on how to use chunks. At the end of the instruction period, the participants were interviewed once again in a posttest to track possible differences in their speaking improvement with respect to the frequency of chunks. The findings showed that the treatment had significantly improved speaking fluency of the experimental group and that there was a direct correspondence between the number of the chunks used and the listener's perception of the participants` speaking fluency.

This is a longitudinal case study of two Farsi-speaking children learning English: ‘Bernard’ and ‘Melissa’, who were 7;4 and 8;4 at the start of data collection. The research deals with the initial state and further development in the child second language (L2) acquisition of syntax regarding the presence or absence of copula as a functional category, as well as the role and degree of L1 influence in lexical and functional categories. Some studies in the field of child first language (L1) acquisition are discussed to determine similarities or differences between child L1 and child L2 acquisition. Examining data collected from the children’s spontaneous speech, the researcher’s diaries and translation, and other tasks over a period of 20 months. The competing claims of the two most prominent hypotheses about early L2 grammars are tested: Vainikka & Young-Scholten’s (1996) Minimal Trees/Structure Building hypothesis and Schwartz & Sprouse’s (1996) Full Transfer/Full Access hypothesis. Word order, use of rote-learned formulae, and suppliance of verbs (lexical category) and copula (functional category) are investigated, and the conclusion is reached that lexical categories are influenced by L1 whereas functional categories are absent at the initial state and that they emerge without the learners’ reliance on their L1, consistent with Minimal Trees/Structure Building.

Translation, whose first traces date back at least to 3000 BC (Newmark, 1988), has always been considered time-consuming and labor-consuming. In view of this, experts have made numerous efforts to develop some mechanical systems which can reduce part of this time and labor. The advancement of computers in the second half of the twentieth century paved the ground for the invention of machine translation (MT). One of the most commonly used MT systems is Google Translate, which currently supports 64 languages, including Persian. In consideration of the fact that Google Translate is easily accessible, it is almost always the first MT system to which Iranian users resort for meeting their translation needs, the reason which prompted the researcher to conduct a study on the output quality of the English-to-Persian translations produced by this MT system. To narrow down the study, the researcher decided to investigate the translation of adjectives of all types, i.e. simple adjectives, adjectives of similarity, comparatives and superlatives. To this end, a test suite of 140 sentences (randomly chosen among 1400 sentences) containing all types of adjectives was prepared and translated by Google Translate. The analysis of the results revealed that Google Translate translates simple, comparative and superlative adjectives fairly accurately and naturally, while it fails to distinguish adjectives of similarity and, thus, translates them quite inaccurately.

Multi-word lexical units are a typical feature of specialized dictionaries, in particular monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The paper studies the concept of the multi-word lexical unit and considers the similarities and differences of their selection and presentation in monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The work analyses such issues as the classification of multi-word lexical units by their form and syntactic/semantic structure. Two classes of examples of multi-word lexical units are studied and contrasted across a number of languages: true maritime multi-word terms and specialized multi-word terms which include items from the general lexicon.

The main concern of this study was communication strategies (CSs) which are used to compensate for communication breakdown. The goals of this study were to examine whether proficiency level of Iranian students had any relationship with their choice of CSs. This research was descriptive in nature. The participants were 15 pre-intermediate and 14 intermediate EFL learners between 16 to 21years old in a Language School in Shahrekord, Iran. 48 sessions was recorded and eight sessions of each level were randomly selected, transcribed and then coded. The coding categories included 22 types of CSs based on integrated model of taxonomies presented by Dornyei and Scott (1997),Tarone’s (1980), Faerch and Kasper’s (1983) taxonomies. In order to examine the relationship between learner’s proficiency level and the choice of CSs, a chi-square test was conducted. The significance level of .297 (p > 0.05) indicated that there was no significant relationship between the use of CSs and the proficiency levels of Iranian EFL learners.