فرزاد سلحشور

Workplace stress among employees has been known to impede work efficacy, a phenomenon usually referred to as burnout. Recently, there has been a growing research on this issue in educational contexts, particularly at pre-tertiary levels, giving rise to a need to do this kind of investigation at higher education level as well. As a response to this need, the present paper is a report of a case study aimed at examining the causes of burnout experienced by two Iranian EFL academics. The results of the thematic analysis of the interviews with the participants indicated five main conceptual categories associated with the subjects’ burnout experiences: Institutional demands, interpersonal problems, discordant outlooks, lack of student motivation, and lack of institutional supports. The discussion on each of these categories shed light on how these categories may contribute, in varying degrees of course, to the burnout among academics.

“Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics, has been under consideration in investigations related to bilingual and multilingual societies. First proposed by Haugen (1956) and later developed byGrosjean (1982), the termcode-switching refers to language alternation during communication. Although code-switching is unavoidable in bilingual and multilingual contexts, its role and motivational determinants in language classes are sometimes ignored. The goal of the present article was to investigate the motivational determinants of classroom code-switching in EFL classrooms. The research was conducted with 400 participants, including 374 students and 26 teachers. The data collection techniques included questionnairesand observation checklist, all of which were designed based on Hymes’ (1962) framework and Poplack’s (1980), Myers-Scotton’s (1989), Blom and Gumperz’s (1972), and Gumperz’s (1982) categorizations. The data were analyzed through the software SPSS (Version 20). The results revealedthat providing the listener with better understanding, clarification, and checking comprehension are the most important motivational determinants for codeswitching.

This study is a corpus-based study of interactional metadiscourse in natural and social science master theses. For this purpose, 30 natural and social science master theses in six disciplines were randomly selected out of the library of five universities. Five master theses were selected in each discipline, in a period of six years (2010-2016).This study analyzed only the discussion and conclusion sections of master theses. To investigate interactional metadiscourse, Hyland’s (2005) classification was used. The results of this study demonstrated that the percentile proportion of total interactional metadiscourse markers in social science master theses was more than natural science master theses. Among the analyzed resources, hedges was the most frequent role in both corpora while attitude markers in social science and self-mention in natural science was the least favored role. The results of the present study suggested that being aware of interactional metadiscourse markers can shed light on the way of writing of academic texts because these markers help writers to negotiate with their readers and make the text more comprehensible and coherent. The results of the present study might offer pedagogical implication of this aspect of metadiscourse for postgraduate students.

Communication strategies (CSs) are systematic attempts by language learners to encode or decode meaning in a target language in situations where the appropriate target language rules have not been formed. Based on this view, communication strategies can be seen as compensatory means for making up for linguistic deficiencies of second or foreign language learners. Within the conceptual framework outlined, this paper is a report on a research conducted at Azarbaijan Teachers Education University on the students majoring in English Language and Literature. The main aim was to seek a relationship between the subjects’ use of communication strategies in solving communication problems and their proficiency levels in English as a foreign language. The data was collected by means of one-to-one interviews with the participants, and were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results indicated that the frequency of communication strategies applied by the participants varied according to their proficiency levels, i.e. low proficient learners tended to employ more communication strategies in comparison with high and moderate ones. The type of communication strategies employed also varied according to their oral proficiency level. It was revealed that high level participants employed more L2-based communication strategies where the low proficient learners used more L1-based ones.