فهرست مطالب مرضیه سوزنده فر

This study draws primarily on ZPD and concept of mediation (a key element in the sociocultural theory) to analyze the mediational talk in speaking group-works. The authors present an analysis of how EFL learners' speaking skill is socioculturally mediated and developed through teacher-student and student-student collaborative interactions. Situated micro genesis was used as a tool for analyzing the interactions generated between the participants during a dialog making task. The results showed the characteristics of a dialogic communication among the learners as they took part in diverse conversation-making tasks collaboratively. Consequently, the analysis of the communicative discourse of the EFL speaking tasks was indicative of precious insights into the nature of the peer-peer and student-teacher interactions as well as their pivotal contributions to scaffolding the EFL learners' speaking skill in different forms. The findings provide worthwhile evidence substantiating that dialogic exchanges in collaborative tasks are crucial as a mediationally facilitative activity conducive to the improvement of second language speaking ability. Finally, the study proposes some constructive implications for EFL instructors encouraging the integration of collaborative tasks in their speaking classes.  

Following an ethnographic approach, this study was intended to investigate how children transfer meaning in their drawings, as a manifestation of their visual literacy competence. To this end, 32 six- and seven-year-old Iranian male children were observed for six class sessions as they engaged in learning activities that involved drawing. Building upon Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996) theoretical framework of Visual Grammar, children’s drawings were analyzed. Field notes were also used to describe experiences and observations the researcher made while participating in the class. Furthermore, children’s descriptions of their own drawings were used as complementary evidence to the analysis. The results of the analyses revealed that drawing upon a variety of visual resources, such as talks, written texts, gestures, and objects, children made ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings in their drawings. Furthermore, although each drawing was uniquely created by different types of interests and provided the specific context for the visual structures and forms, some features such as use of space and line framings, diagonal lines, curved/bent figures, profile form, and tilted body position were shared by most children in their meaning-making act. The findings can help educators and practitioners promote children’s visual literacy, and propose pedagogical and practical implications.

This investigation is an endeavor to appraise the language of Resilient economy aiming at modeling it discursively for the first time in Iran. In this vein, postulating the thematic analysis proposed by Ary et al. (2010) as the analytical framework, this study integrated the concepts utilized in the discourse of Resilient economy extracted from various materials, articles, excerpts, interviews, and questionnaires through diverse qualitative techniques such as open, axial, and selective codifications. Moreover, to select a subset of common concepts and remove the redundant ones, factor analysis was applied as a quantitative technique. The findings elucidated two major theoretical views, i.e. macroscopic and microscopic. Macroscopic view accounts for the themes of history and philosophy behind Resilient economy, while microscopic view illuminates four themes of requirements, principles, objectives, and application procedures, which altogether comprised a model describing Resilient economy in the Iranian context. In the denouement, it was concluded that Resilient economy is the essence of Islamic and monotheistic economy where justice, fairness, democracy and knowledge shine as its premises, conducive to bolstering independence, flourish, innovation, entrepreneurship, and constant success and growth. Parenthetically, the study proposed some implications for economics teachers and discourse analysts at the end.

Authenticity has always been the concern of test developers in the history of second language assessment. This study was an attempt to investigate the authenticity of the present researchers' innovative idea of “Language Town” as a method for assessing learners’ speaking ability. To this end, a simulated town was designed like a real town in an outdoor space of about 400 square meters. The participants in this study were 31 undergraduate students of Translation Studies at Jahrom University who were taking the 4-credit course of Conversation 2. First, the students’ speaking ability was measured based on the IELTS testing system. Then each student was sent to the Language Town with a few definite missions determined in advance by the teacher; e.g. ordering food in the restaurant, depositing/withdrawing money in a bank, etc. Using IELTS band descriptors, each student’s speaking ability was measured by two raters in both tests. Then the correlation between the two sets of scores obtained from the IELTS test and the one in the Language Town were calculated. Using open-ended questions, a survey was also conducted to extract the students’ attitudes towards the Language Town. The results of the statistical analyses showed a weak correlation (0.36) between the two sets of scores. The survey also revealed that almost all the students were interested in and had positive views towards Language Town as an authentic method of assessment. A Virtual Language Town (VLT) could be a solution to the practicality problems of the Language Town.

The main objective of this study was to investigate how Iranian EFL learners used their literacy practices and multimodal resources to mediate interpretation and representation of an advertisement text and construct their understanding of it. Fifteen female adolescents at an intermediate level of proficiency read the «مبلمان برليان» (“Brelian Furniture”) advertisement text and re-created their understandings in pictures and sentences. The data was analyzed based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2001) theory of social semiotics. The findings suggest that students situated the meanings of the advertisement texts in specific contexts that reflected their own social and cultural experiences. Furthermore, the students demonstrated that the use of multimodal resources had the potential to enhance language and literacy learning in a way that was transformative and was affected by their identities. In addition, the use of multimodal/multiliteracies pedagogy permitted the students to enter into text composition from different paths. Finally, multimodal/multiliteracies pedagogy could foster critical literacy practices by offering EFL students the opportunities to create new identities and challenge discursive practices that marginalize them. The implications of the findings are also discussed.