Journal of Language Horizons
Volume:5 Issue: 2, Summer and Autumn 2021

Interest in metadiscourse markers use in Research Articles (RAs) of different disciplines has grown among discourse and genre researchers. Among the hard sciences, Geology and its’ sub-disciplines have received scant attention. This is while Geology postgraduate students’ original research findings fail to get published in high ranked journals of their specialty, partly due to their insufficient knowledge of the correct use of metadiscourse markers in their RAs. In the present study, using Hyland and Tse’s theoretical framework (2004), we focused on the type and frequency of metadiscourse markers use in six main Geology sub-disciplines (i.e., Engineering Geology, Sedimentology, Seismology, Petrology, Palaeontology, and Geotechnics). To answer the research questions raised in the study, 180 RAs from 73 high ranked journals were selected from the main corpora. The results from the word by word analyses of the articles revealed that, except for endophoric markers, the six sub-disciplines demonstrated a statistically significant difference in the type and frequency of metadiscourse features. In addition, the results indicated that Petrology, Engineering Geology, and Sedimentology demonstrated a higher frequency in the employment of interactive markers compared to their three Geology counterparts. Contrarily, the three sub-disciplines, namely Seismology, Palaeontology, and Geotechnics showed a higher frequency in the application of interactional metadiscourse elements. The findings of the study have implications for genre researchers, ESP instructors, and Geology novice authors.

Considering the leading role of needs analysis (NA) in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses and the necessity of reconsidering such courses in Iran, this study was designed to investigate the present and target academic English language needs of undergraduate physiotherapy students through triangulation of sources and methods. To this aim, data were elicited from 132 undergraduates, 20 graduates working as physiotherapists, 20 content teachers, and 9 language teachers at four medical universities in Tehran. The quantitative and qualitative data were gathered through two versions of an NA questionnaire and semi-structured interview protocols, respectively. The findings indicated that, although most of the skills and sub-skills in target needs were considered important or very important by all the stakeholders, there were differences in the preferences and priorities of different groups. The results of the self-assessment section also revealed the skills in which the students need improvement. The findings also signified some issues and options in EAP courses for physiotherapy students and promise implications for refining and enhancing EAP courses and materials through triangulating the multiple points of view on the students' target needs and demands of their present situation.

This study investigated the effect of face-to-face and computer-mediated peer feedback on L2 introverted and extroverted learners’ writing ability and language-related episodes. Eighty-six L2 intermediate English language learners were randomly assigned to two different treatment groups: computer-mediated and face-to-face peer feedback. In computer-mediated classes, the participants exchanged peer feedback and discussed comments using Google Docs platform. Meanwhile, in the face-to-face group, the participants exchanged comments on paper; they also gathered once a week to discuss comments face-to-face. The results revealed that the introverts in the computer-mediated group improved more significantly than the introverts in the face-to-face group. However, the extroverts of both face-to-face and computer-mediated groups improved equally. The findings also indicated that both introverts and extroverts in the computer-mediated group produced more language-related episodes than their counterparts in face-to-face group. Further, the pairing patterns of introverted and extroverted learners were found to have effects on the number of language-related episodes generated by them.

This study sought to probe the efficacy of interactive whiteboard-mediated corrective feedback versus conventional corrective feedback for Iranian EFL learners’ target language vocabulary development. To this end, a sample of 80 EFL learners at the intermediate proficiency level was selected based on scores obtained from a language proficiency test. The participants were then randomly divided into three groups: two experimental and one control. The first experimental group (n = 30) was taught the target vocabulary items while receiving interactive whiteboard-mediated corrective feedback, and the second experimental group (n = 25) was taught the target vocabulary items while receiving conventional corrective feedback; the control group was taught the target words receiving no feedback of either kind. The ANOVA test results indicated that conventional corrective feedback slightly improved target vocabulary learning by the participants. Interactive whiteboard-mediated corrective feedback, however, proved to be significantly effective in this respect. The findings can be said to provide innovative insights into the area of CALL and new techniques in L2 pedagogy.

In this research, it was tried to follow the recent Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) approaches that map text over relevant context as supported by Van Dijk (2006). The main intention is to look at political discourse via the lenses of PDA to see whether ideologies and power relations of interlocutors in the target setting of this study could have possibly been aligned with linguistic elements -here rhetorical devices- and to see to what extent such text-context mapping is recognized as relevant to language tools within the selected datasets. Accordingly, the researcher tried to follow a sample of political talk -live 2008 US presidential debates- between two republic vs. democratic campaigns. To do so, some political strategies for argumentation including Van Dijk’s model representing 'Authority', 'Topos or burden', 'Future Representations’, ‘Comparison', 'Consensus', 'Counterfactuals', 'Populism’, 'Generalizations', and 'Number Games' were mapped over some linguistic rhetorical devices such as ‘Metaphor’, ‘Hyperbole’, ‘Irony’, ‘Euphemism’, etc.  The common discoursal moves in Obama’s vs. McCain's speech statements were compared and contrasted among similar strategies to find any emergent rhetorical devices. Findings indicate that 1) the political candidates had made use of rhetorical and political moves in tandem within the same propositional units, 2) some of the employed discourse devices were paralleled with the majority of political strategies like Repetition and Metaphor, and 3) some political strategies had been used to excess like 'Comparison’, 'Populism', and 'Future Representation’.

Inspired by intercultural rhetoric theories and their distinctions between big and small cultures, the current study strived to investigate whether Move Recycling (MR) in English soft science research articles (RAs) was sensitive to cultural and disciplinary variations. To this end, 600 English RAs, half of which were written by Iranians and the other half by native English authors in six soft science disciplines, published from 2006 to 2018, were selected. Weissberg and Buker’s (1990) Move model was used to determine the main Moves prevalent in the RAs; then, the frequencies of recycled Moves in various sections of the RAs were calculated. The quantitative data analysis results revealed that the use of MR was not associated with the authors’ cultural background. However, some differences were found in the distribution of recycled Moves across RA sections and disciplines. That is, MR was most frequently found in the Discussion and least frequently in the Method sections. Moreover, it was most often observed in Economics RAs and least often in Psychology RAs, which was attributed to discipline-specific conventions. In the qualitative phase of the study, some RA authors’ rationales for using MR elicited via emails underwent content analysis, and their three common reasons for using MR, including reader guidance, discipline conventions, and RA length, were identified. The findings of this study may serve as a guide for course designers to prepare discipline-specific materials for EAP writing classes in which MR is emphasized.

The present study explored the effectiveness and efficacy of concordance-based instruction on learning and using proposition collocations (PCs) by Iranian EFL learners. Furthermore, we explored the instructional issues involved from both students and the teacher's perspectives. To this end, 60 homogeneous intermediate EFL learners participated in the study as the two thirty-subject groups of experimental and control. A researcher-made test on PCs was administered as the pretest to make sure that the learners’ knowledge of PCs was approximately equal. Two parallel versions of the pretest were administered, in turn, as the immediate and delayed posttests with the aim of evaluating the possible effect(s) of eight sixty-minute treatment sessions. The results of a repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant difference between the performance of the experimental group and control group from the immediate to the delayed posttests. Also, the effect for the interaction of time and group was significant. At the end of the study, a 20-item questionnaire was administered to elicit participants’ attitudes towards using concordancing to learn PCs. The results revealed that almost all respondents expressed positive attitudes towards learning PCs through concordancing, although some participants faced some practical or technical difficulties while using this technology. We also surveyed the teacher’s attitude towards concordance-based PC instruction via an interview, proposing further issues and options for the classroom teaching practice. Lastly, the implications of the study for language teaching and applied linguistics are discussed.

As a result of the role of teachers’ psychological factors in affecting their performance, there has been an ever-increasing interest in the significance of teachers' constructs in influencing their effectiveness and work engagement. As an attempt to shed more light on the relationships between teacher psychological factors in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context, the objective of this research was to probe the role of teachers’ self-efficacy and their collective efficacy as the predictors of work engagement for Iranian EFL instructors. To this end, a sample of 168 English teachers completed the self-report scales of the constructs under investigation. Structural Equation Modeling was adopted to evaluate the causal relationships among the variables. The findings revealed that teachers’ sense of efficacy explained 23.7% of the work engagement variance whereas teacher collective efficacy accounted for 10.5% of the variance in work engagement. It was revealed that, although each variable had a unique contribution to work engagement, teachers’ individual self-efficacy was a more powerful predictor of work engagement than their collective efficacy. Based on the findings, important implications can be provided for EFL teacher education programs.

Since the last decades of the 20th century, trauma theory has gained academic status for analyzing literary representations of various forms of violence, oppression, and social upheavals. Drawing upon the Freudian model of trauma and more recent categorizations of post-traumatic stress disorder, this paper aims to study Fadia Faqir’s third novel, The Cry of the Dove. The author, who writes about and from diaspora, leads her young Muslim female character to fight for her identity in a Western country. The paper analyzes the literary strategies and narrative techniques in this feminist trauma narrative to indicate how the author has tried to represent what is originally marked by voicelessness. In order to imitate the forms and symptoms of the impact of trauma, the novel’s narrative style features fragmentation, non-linearity, repetition, poetic prose, and stream of consciousness. This paper proves that the interplay of these techniques helps the reader understand the evasive nature of traumatic experience and engage her or him emotionally with the narrator’s story. Cathy Caruth, Anne Whitehead, and Laurie Vickroy are among the main theoreticians of the research.

ENGAGE model, as a unique brilliance learning system, has been proposed to help language teachers to revolutionize language learners’ experiences by transcending the limitations of conventional methodologies and addressing the whole being of the learners. The present study sought to investigate the impact of using ENGAGE model on the speaking skills of Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, from the target population of students learning English in one of the language institutes in Iran, 100 female intermediate students with an age range of 18 to 25 were randomly selected out of 150 participants and assigned to three groups, receiving their instruction based on the principles of Audio Lingual Method (ALM), (n = 32), Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) (n = 33), and ENGAGE model (n = 35). Applying a tripartite cycle comprising pretesting, intervention, and post-testing, the obtained data were analyzed via SPSS. The outcome of the posttest data analysis revealed that the participants taught by ENGAGE model significantly outperformed those in other samples on target L2 speaking tasks.  Subsequently, the participants in the three groups were interviewed to see how they perceived the inherent merits of the ENGAGE model in real practice. The qualitative data drawn from the interviews with the students were analyzed through content analysis relying on open and axial coding forms and the results reflected that the ENGAGE model was the most pedagogically efficient method compared to TBLT and ALM. Notably, the findings could have interesting implications for ELT practitioners, program developers, and EFL teachers.

Learners owe their success to various factors that may lead to individual differences. Among those contributing factors, motivation and learners’ belief as two distinct features have been investigated in this research. To this end, 120 intermediate EFL learners in the 15-30 age range, studying in different English language institutes in Tehran participated in this study. They were asked to complete the Motivation Questionnaire (Dörnyei & Taguchi, 2009) as well as the Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (Horwitz, 1988). The results of the regression analyses revealed that there was a significant relationship between learners' motivation, learners’ belief, and their reading comprehension scores. The results also indicated that 42% of variability in the Iranian EFL learners' reading comprehension scores was predicted by their motivation, and 27% of variability in their scores was predicted by their beliefs toward EFL learning. In fact, both motivation and learners’ beliefs were significant predictors of the participants’ reading comprehension scores. These findings showed that motivation and learners’ beliefs can be used to predict students’ reading comprehension scores to some degree. The implications and suggestions for further studies were also highlighted.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the most unorthodox works ever written, substantially differs from most of the novels of its time and later eighteenth century in its plot, narration, and treatment of characters. In this paper, different aspects of the novel that challenge and deconstruct the points of origin in the life and character of Tristram Shandy are examined. It is demonstrated that Tristram Shandy detaches itself from the unconditional stages in the traditional narratives that are often taken for granted, including the birth as the genesis of the characters, a solid belief in the purposefulness of a narrative for moral or educational ends, the fixity of beginnings, and the rational order of ideas in the human mind. The article is divided into four major parts, including the birth, history, life, and human subjectivity, and aims at showing several unique aspects of the novel while being mindful of the close reading of the text as well. To this end, the article concentrates particularly on the events revolving around Tristram Shandy, his father Walter, and Uncle Toby. The Lockean association of ideas, which Sterne turns into a parody of Locke’s original thesis later in the narrative, is explored in the article as well.