Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies
Volume:10 Issue: 1, Spring 2018

Textbooks considered as one of the most important genres of academic writings would guarantee effective teaching and learning in EFL/ESL courses. Since textbooks are gaining more and more importance, the knowledge of their rhetorical organization that provides learners and teachers with efficient use of their content seems necessary. This article describes the rhetorical organization of the textbook genre based on Parodi’s three-tiered framework consisting of macro-move, move, and steps, which provides a detailed description of a textbook as an extended and lengthy genre. This study aims to rhetorically investigate four ESP textbooks written for undergraduate university programs for accounting students that were developed and published by Payam-e Nour University (PNU), as one of the largest universities in Iran. In order to fulfill the goals, the article aims to investigate the changes made over time in terms of move analysis between two series, each include introductory and advanced ESP textbooks, as well as explicate moves, steps, and their communicative purposes with their accompanying examples. The results aiming at enhancing learners’ and teachers’ perspective toward this genre provide a vivid picture of different rhetorical parts associated with various communicative purposes.

The present research was an attempt to shed more enlightening light on the current wave of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), which is gradually sweeping the traditional ideologies in the field of ELT. To that end, this study examined the Iranian teacher trainees’ attitude towards ELF. What makes the present research markedly different from the other language attitude studies is in the context of research, namely Iran, an underrepresented country in the literature concerning ELF. To collect the data, the researchers employed mixed methods design, using questionnaires and follow-up semi-structured interviews. The results indicated that many a participant maintained contradictory and ambivalent attitudes towards ELF-related issues. Whilst they appeared to be favorably inclined to agree with the statements pertaining to ELF, they did not display uniform attitudes about ELF-related issues in an in-depth analysis of the results. In fact, the results revealed an underlying tendency towards NS norms among the participants. Results of the study may have implications for teacher trainers and ELF researchers.

The present study has aimed at finding out whether or not students’ language background and gender bring about a distinction between the frequency and types of metadiscourse elements occurring in their papers. To this end, a dataset of 40 student papers in four series written by native male, nonnative male, native female, and nonnative female writers was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the use of metadiscourse resources following the metadiscourse model proposed by Hyland and Tse (2004). The results of the frequency count and chi-square tests (p-value<0.05) revealed more or less notable differences in the overall employment of metadiscourse markers in the two major types of metadiscourse resources (i.e., interactive and interactional) and the categories related to each type (i.e., transitions, frame markers, etc. versus hedges, boosters, attitude markers, etc., respectively) by the four groups of university students.

There has been increasing interest in utilizing corpora in linguistic research and pedagogy in recent years. Rhetorical organization of different sections of research articles may appear similar in various disciplines, but close examination may show subtle differences nonetheless. One of the features that has been at the center of attention especially in recent years is the idiomaticity of a discourse which can be examined from the perspective of multi-word units captured by the automatic retrieval of lexical bundles. This study takes a corpus-based approach for the identification of lexical bundles. A corpus of 801,894 words from 790 articles was collected. In order to fulfill the purposes of the present study, ABBYY FineReader 10 professional edition, Total Assistant, Antconc 3.2.3, and WordSmith Tools 5 were used to identify lexical bundles. Then these bundles were classified structurally and functionally based on the presented taxonomies in the literature. The results of the current study indicated that the writers of medical research articles mostly rely on text-oriented bundles in the discussion section of research articles to establish academic discourse.

The present study aims to investigate the probable relationship between self-regulated strategies and home cultural attachment among Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. To achieve the purpose of this study, 90 EFL upper intermediate and advanced levels students (both male and female) were selected according to convenience sampling from different language institutes in Mashhad, Iran. They were asked to complete the 'Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire' and the 'Home Cultural Attachment Scale'. In order to achieve anonymity, each participant was also given a written consent form which elaborated the confidentiality of the obtained data. The findings based on correlation, demonstrate the theoretical expectation of a link between self-regulation and home cultural attachment. In addition, the result of the findings indicated that among the components of self-regulated strategies, 'self-regulation' and 'self-efficacy' have the highest correlations with students' home cultural attachment. Subsequent data from step-wise regression showed that among sub-components of self-regulation, regulation is the best predictor of learners' home cultural attachment. The implications of the research are further discussed with reference to earlier findings.

Over the last decades, there has been a plethora of interest in possible challenges encountered by researchers while publishing research articles (RAs) in various disciplines for English for academic purposes (EAP).Given this, this study aimed to examine how a sampled number of EAPIranian researchers perceive the competence of academic RA writing, the major reasons for RA rejection, and difficulties the authors face in writing up publishable RAs. Data for this study came from an examination of rejection emails and follow-up interviews with a number of Iranian EAP researchers who have published in highly prestigious journals. Analysis of the data resulted in 545 codes, 40 subcategories, and six core categories. The main categories included the potential reasons of RA rejection; the authors’ challenges in RA writing; RA linguistic features; RA stylistic features; essential elements of writing RA sections; and the features of RA citation and referencing.Pedagogical implications are discussed.

The present study set out to delineate to what extentfive intermediate learners engaged in structuring and problematizing scaffolding in two writing tasks. The study aimed at illuminating how the participants engaged with structuring and problematizing scaffolds cognitively, behaviorally, and affectively.  Learners’ written essays, think-aloud protocols, and interviews shaped the data sources which were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Modifications made in the final drafts were quantitatively analyzed to provide insight into the behavioral engagement of participants with scaffolds. The profundity of cognitive engagement was gauged by the interview questions designed to elicit the depth of processing and illuminate whether participants had merely noticed the existence of a problem or they had understood what was required to be done. Researcher also compared the use of cognitive and metacognitive operations after learners were presented with structuring and problematizing scaffolds through the analysis of think-aloud protocols generated in final drafts each session. Finally, attitudinal and affective engagement was gauged qualitatively through interviews.  The results indicated that structuring scaffolds engaged learners more behaviorally, cognitively, and affectively compared to problematizing scaffolds. Implications for instructors and material developers are discussed.

Issues related to bilingualism and the effects which might have on language learners’ cognitive and meta-cognitive variables have attracted the attention of a couple of researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA).Since a couple of decades ago, there has been a plethora of studies on cognitive and metacognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. However, the impact of bilingualism on EFL learners’ WMC and verbal intelligence has not be explored yet. The present study aimed at comparing the WMC and verbal intelligence of bilingual and monolingual language learners. In so doing, 30 Baluch EFL learners and 30 Persian speaker EFL learners were selected through convenience sampling. The data of the study were collected through running WMC measure and verbal intelligence test. The data of the study were analyzed through running descriptive and inferential statistics tests (independent samples-t-tests). Results showed that bilingual language learners outperformed the monolingual language learners in both WMC measures and verbal intelligence test. Therefore, it could be concluded that bilingualism affects EFL learners’ WMC and verbal intelligence. The findings have theoretical implications for applied linguists and psycholinguists and practical implications for teachers and syllabus designers.