Journal of Language Horizons
Volume:6 Issue: 2, Summer 2022

This article proposes a socio-cognitive approach toward the instruction of source-based writing, a common practice that students are required to perform in the academic milieu at higher education. Writing from sources entails cognitive processes of critically selecting the reliable sources of input, connecting their content to one’s own ideas, and integrating them into one’s written text to construct meaning. It also requires knowledge of socio-contextual dimensions of academic writing literacy, including ethics of acknowledging the authorship of sources and writers’ awareness of their disciplinary genre (Dovey, 2010). The purpose of this interpretive qualitative research, accordingly, is to inquire into the status quo of the approaches implemented in the Iranian academic writing courses of English majors, i.e. English Literature, English Translation, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), to practice source-based writing. To this end, seven university professors who had the experience of teaching academic writing courses in the context of interest were selected based on purposeful sampling to take part in in-depth semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that the academic writing courses fail to effectively value the cognitive processes of meaning-making involved in writing from sources; these are overshadowed by the existing dominant product-based pedagogy and a number of constraints underlined by the interviewees, including learners’ limitations, time restraint, and technological facility impediments. The implications of the study for the curriculum developers and academic writing instructors will be discussed.

Considering the significance of ecopoetry and how it widens the ecological horizons of the readers, tracing the ecopoet’s mental transition from the moment of direct sensual experiences in Nature to the act of composition enables the readers to fathom out what lies behind the poetic imagination, bringing about the ecological sense of union with the natural. As for the purpose of this study, the researchers intend to examine the ecocentric-ecopoetic elements of the selected ecopoems out of Mary Oliver’s New & Selected Poems, Vol. 1 with the aim of bringing to light the fact that Oliver’s main attempt is inviting her readers to reach mental growth through her bringing forth the consciousness that derives from the power of imagination and acute attention given to the world of the non-human, enabling the speaker-poet and her readers to do away with the barriers of self-centeredness and take part in a collective reunion with Nature. Accordingly, the general framework that has been used to conduct the following research is Ecocriticism and its celebration of ecological wholeness between human and non-human agents.

United States adopted the nineteenth century British model of colonialism for the twentieth century, specially in the exercise of controlling people's perspectives within the country while undertaking the adventure of directly interfering in other countries’ affairs. When President Bush addressed three countries around the world as Axis of Evil on January 29, 2002, he was following the same route. Nevertheless, coining the phrase was not enough, and making people believe it required the main task that became possible through creating an intellectual atmosphere in which the focus was to promote the picture of good and evil embedded in the addressing of Axis of Evil. Consequently, any voice out of tune was hushed instantly, even if it meant Sam Shepard who had previously won great fame on the American stage by his family plays. Shepard never stopped on the notion of revealing the multiplicity of self, interacting with different geopolitical situations. As such, it is no wonder that his God of Hell is pursuing the same aim, a play totally neglected by the critics and reviewers for being too political and incoherent. Nevertheless, the research at hand is to demonstrate that Shepard is a true intellectual or, in Rorty's term, a liberal Ironist, able to entangle himself from the tissues of the aforementioned cultural war by considering people's susceptibility to humiliation.

This study aimed to investigate the extent to which L2 learners' use of L1 improves their speaking ability. Employing a quasi-experimental research design, the researchers studied the effect of learner code-switching on their speaking accuracy, fluency, and complexity scores. The participants of this study were 117 lower-intermediate students receiving English instruction in eight intact classes in different branches of a private institute. These classes were assigned to two +code-switching and –code-switching treatments randomly. While the participants in the +code-switching group could use Farsi for at most 30 seconds in each activity, those in the –code-switching group were not allowed to switch to their mother tongue. The findings of this study showed that there were no significant differences between the students’ speaking ability in terms of fluency and accuracy across the two groups. The complexity scores of the +code-switching group, however, was significantly higher than those in the –code-switching group. The results also showed a significant improvement in the speaking of the students in both groups. Based on the results, it can be said that that the use of controlled amounts of learner code-switching could be useful when complexity is the focus of an activity. Furthermore, no sign of detrimental effect of learner code-switching was traced in our study.

The present study explores the factors that shape learner engagement in writing tasks and the role that output-based instructions could perform in elevating the level of engagement. In so doing, to develop a measure for evaluating learner engagement in writing tasks, a pool of eight university teachers was interviewed and five university students participated in a think-aloud protocol and a total of 139 English-major university students were asked to complete the newly-developed inventory. The result of inter-coder reliability was acceptable and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) provided support for the factor structure of the measures. The final validated inventory comprised four factors and 23 items. Following this, the findings obtained from an experiment on 31 English-major students revealed that both types of task-based collaborative instructions including debating and dictogloss could elevate the level of students’ engagement in writing tasks. More specifically, the statistical analyses indicated that the debate-based instruction could increase the students’ engagement in writing tasks more than the dictogloss instruction. In the end, the linkage between task-based collaborative output activities, engagement in writing tasks, and engagement components were discussed, and the pedagogical implications were offered based on the results of the study.

Examination of language learners’ strategy use within the context of language ability may contribute to realizing the role of language knowledge in strategic competence. Employing a mix-methods sequential explanatory design, this study examined whether level of listening proficiency as a part of language knowledge affects Iranian EFL learners’ cognitive and metacognitive strategy use. The objective was to explore the role of listening proficiency level in EFL learners’ strategic competence. Therefore, in the quantitative part of the study, 343 Iranian EFL learners answered a cognitive and metacognitive listening strategy questionnaire (CMLSQ) before and immediately after completing the listening section of a TOEFL test. The results of the MANOVA revealed that the high proficiency group was significantly different from the low proficiency group regarding their strategic knowledge (measured by trait cognitive and metacognitive strategies) and strategic regulation (measured by state cognitive and metacognitive strategies) as the two dimensions of strategic competence. The qualitative data also showed that high proficiency listeners adopted a wider range of strategies than did low proficiency listeners. Both the quantitative and the qualitative data analyses proposed that the high proficiency listeners dealt with the test tasks more strategically than the low proficiency ones. The results of the current study suggest that the implementation of strategic competence depends upon the availability of a certain level of linguistic competence in second language. The findings emphasize the need for a judicious approach to teaching listening, considering both listening skills and listening strategies.