Journal of Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature: Dynamics and Advances
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Winter-Spring 2013

The current study was after probing the would-be correlation between emotional intelligence (and its subcomponents), on the one hand, and metacognitive listening strategies used by academic EFL learners, on the other. Benefiting from 72 female and 40 male university students from Urmia University, Urmia Azad University and Salams Azad University, the current study also strived to find the possible effect of gender on the gained results. The main instruments used in the study were Bar-On’s emotional quotient inventory and metacognitive listening strategy use questionnaire. Using Pearson correlation coefficient, the researchers came up with a significant amount of correlation between the use of metacognitive listening strategies and total emotional intelligence score as well as the learners’ scores on the subscales of emotional intelligence (Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, adaptability, and general mood) with the mere exception of stress management. Moreover, the relationship between all the 5 subscales of emotional intelligence and the use of monitoring strategies, and the relationship between interpersonal skills and evaluating strategy were found to be significant. Finally, based on the obtained results, gender was reported to have no effect on the relationship between emotional intelligence and use of metacognitive strategies in listening.

Language, science and politics go together and learning these genres is to learn a language created for codifying, extending and transmitting scientific and political knowledge. Grammatical metaphor is divided into two broad areas: ideational and interpersonal.This paper focuses on the first type i.e. Ideational Grammatical Metaphor (IGM), which includes process types and nominalization. The main objective of the current work is to analyze a corpus comprising 10 scientific and 10 political texts. The IGM framework was used to carry out an analysis on these texts to pinpoint their similarities and dissimilarities. The analysis indicates that IGM has dominated political and scientific texts and surprisingly is used exactly with the same frequency in both genres and the prevailing process types in both are material and relational types. Consequently, the tone of the writing is more abstract, pretentious and formal. In science, instances of IGM enable technicalizing and rationalizing; and in politics they deal with dominance, provocation and persuasion toward an intended objective. Based on the findings of this study, some implications can be drawn for academic writing and reading as well as translators and teachers involved in writing and reading pedagogy.

The processes of cultural transformation in Britain in the second half of the 20th century, the fall of the Empire, immigration from former colonies and the expansion of the multiculturalism, have influenced new ways of looking at the conceptions of identity of diasporic subjects within Britain. Examining these experiences, diasporic novelists write about the second generation immigrants in contemporary Britain who accentuate hybrid existence and complex identities. Hanif Kureishi in The Buddha of Suburbia delineates the formation, the existence, the refashioning of the conceptions of cultural identities of predominantly the second generation immigrants, British born migrants of his own generation and the challenges the perceptions of such identities as essentialist and fixed concepts. The novel depicts a protagonist whose cultural identity is fragmented and far from homogeneous. London with its heterogeneous character is symbolized as a place of social encounter and cultural intermixture, a decentered place that stimulates the exploration of transnational models of identity. Kureishi’s writing can be seen as an example of the fact that many conceptual binaries, such as centre and periphery, self and other, inside and outside, have been challenged and have given way to more mutable concepts of hybridity, transculturation, border lives and ‘in-between’ space.

With recently widespread use of mobile phones and SMS communication in Iran and reformulation of conventional communication practices, short message advertisements have recently started to gain prominence in the world of advertisement as a quick, less costly, available and reliable means of introducing the products and services offered by the companies and institutions. With this in mind, the present study focuses on a qualitative /quantitative sociolinguistic study of 100 SMS advertisements in Iran. Having divided the messages into four categories according to message senders, it has tried to highlight statistically the effect of message type on message length, the role of semiotics, the lexicogrammatical tools of nominalization, intensifiers, and connotatively-loaded consumerism discourse as well as foregrounding, intertextuality and the type of address terms in persuading the message receivers to buy or use the products and services advertised and impose them on the recipients in addition to a reference to the effect of prevalent ideology on the contents of the message.

The absolute hegemony of international code of (academic) communication has resulted in the development and spread of the discoursal voice of the culture form which historical English has emerged, and, as a consequence, any violation from the generic conventions and thinking patterns born out of such a discourse has resulted in the deprivation of non-native thinkers form active participation in production, publication and distribution of their academic findings. The argument in this paper is based on the proposal that if some of the formulated, standardized patterns of the production of academic knowledge are to be challenged and a new movement towards scientific, academic pluralism is to begin, development of a wider atmosphere for a better treatment and acknowledgment of cultural-historical voices of thinkers of different ethnic, cultural backgrounds seems inevitable. This approach necessitates some different, non-conventional ways of defining the role of language in general and English in particular in academic communication. Our conception of 'international' in this proposal is the development of a virtual code which possesses the capacity of reflecting and encoding various national-cultural discourses within international academic communication. This multi-voiced English would encourage alternative ways of thinking about and understanding the realities of the world, discourage its users from non-critical reading of the superficial patterns of texts, and develop the understanding of its users about the underlying ideologies of discourses shaping and constructing the realities of our world.

The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as well as in the field of ESP/EAP course design. The present paper has attempted to use genre analysis to account for the rhetorical features of research article introductions written by Iranian academics in two disciplinary fields of Education and Economics. The corpus comprised 40 research article introductions (20 from Education, 20 from Economics fields). Applying John Swales’ (1990) CARS model and based on the notions of generic move, and step, our analysis showed a high degree of compatibility between our data and Swales’ model. The only marked difference was that the frequencies of occurrence of moves 1 and 2 were significantly higher than that of move 3. Some minor differences were also identified and discussed. The findings may be of some value both to contrastive rhetorical studies and genre analytic studies. They may also be practically useful for EAP syllabus designers in developing genre-oriented EAP material, and EAP teachers in postgraduate courses aiming at developing academic writing skills.

Wide-ranging sociological studies have been conducted on the history of Iranian intellectuality and modernism. The findings jointly acknowledge that due to communication with the West and following the effects that was received from modernism, the first generation of Iranian intellectualism was emerged. It is said that having benefited from the translated works in its general concept, i.e. including any kind of contact with Western thinkers, the intellectuals as main agents actively contributed into the establishment of new modern social structures and democratic institutions. Although have implicitly been acknowledged the subject of adaptation both in the sociological works and the intellectual's of their own bibliographies and correspondences, little content analytical studies have been conducted on the quality of the effects that they have received from Western countries. Hence, having considered the judicial, education and political systems as well as literature as main areas that commonly are being questioned by intellectual discourses, the authors employed textual method of analysis in a bid to trace the scope of ideas and expectancies inherited in the three works written by famous Iranian intellectuals circa Qajar Dynasty. Having collected the main themes, comparatively classification and coding, I pursued the parts including ideas similar as those of were previously been written in two books by two Western thinkers, i.e. Voltaire and James Morier. Employing the theoretical rational of intertextuality, and relying on two other theories i.e. New historicism and bibliographical criticism the results came to a consensus that confirms Iranian modern intellectuality as a partially product of intertextuality.