bahram behin

The present case study aims to compare human translators and machine translation engines to determine the differences in transferring the register of the original text. Khaksar and Sohrabi as human translators are selected to be compared to Google and Targoman as translation machines. Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole is selected to contain the data samples. The method is descriptive qualitative, and quantitative analysis is used to quantify the qualitative data. To deal with the concept of register, Halliday's register theory in systemic functional linguistics is used which mainly considers register as a concept for investigating the contextual factors that consist of three dimensions: field, tenor, and mode. The products of the four translators are analyzed and compared based on the Hallidayan register. The results demonstrate that humans have been able to transfer the register of the selected samples with higher quality than the machines. However, the difference in transferring the three dimensions of the register by each translator implies that there are similarities between the humans and the machines when transferring the dimensions of the register is considered since the distribution of problematic items among the dimensions of the register is extremely similar for all translators.

I came across this hypothetical exchange on the Net the other day: “Q: Why is linguistics important? / A: Linguistics helps us understand our world.” With my personal interest in the significance of everyday life and the real world in our education, as a response to the exchange, I immediately started contemplating the meaning of the world, and especially of ‘our world’ in the exchange. “Do we have a common world to call it ‘our world’”? “How big is this world?” “What aspects of it are we supposed to understand by means of linguistics?” “What is meant by ‘understanding the world’?” My assumption is that those behind the hypothetical exchange should be ready to answer such questions, regardless of whether the answers are agreeable or not. But what matters in this regard is that such general statements as “Linguistics helps us understand our world” should be rendered in the direction of the concretization of findings so that all scientific endeavours may turn out to be fruitful in the context of our everyday lives in the real world.

 In the present study, it was intended to investigate whether Iranian EFL learners with different personality types could benefit from corrective feedback(CF) or not. 317 EFL learners from 4 Institutes in Tabriz took the TOEFL test; 271 participants scored between 477 and 510; the scores of 164 of them fell between ±1SD; 34 of them agreed to participate in the study and were asked to deliver a 200-word composition. Their compositions were analyzed based on CAF (complexity, accuracy, and fluency). Afterward, they were asked to answer the questions relating to the Extroversion-Introversion dimension to investigate their level of introversion. Then the participants were provided different types of corrective feedback through 10 class discussion sessions. After passing this period, they were asked to deliver another 200-word composition. This final composition was analyzed based on CAF again. The result showed that the text quality of the introverted language learners did not differ significantly from the text quality of the extroverted language learners.

The present qualitative research sought to investigate EFL teacher educators’ experiences and attitudes toward critical thinking and its role in teacher professional development. The adopted design was a case study and the theoretical framework was the theory of transformative learning (Mezirow, 1978). For the data collection purpose, 30 EFL teacher educators participated in in-depth interviews. The  whole procedure of  the data collection was audiotaped for further reference in data analysis. The interviews were transcribed to familiarize with the data and the transcribed interviews were member checked with the participants. The collected data were analyzed through reflective thematic analysis. The data analyzed paved the way for generating three themes: cognition, metacognition, and personal growth/self attainment. The findings of the study comprise a number of implicatios for both theory and practice. One aspect of our contribution is that the notion of critical thinking can be conceived as more than cognitive and metacognitive one; it should be conceptualized as possessing both facets as well as other possible subsets. Beyond that, we suggest that critical thinking should be conjectured as being both a process and a product.

Corrective feedback (CF) is an inseparable part of second language acquisition (SLA) and has been the focus of numerous studies since the concept of CF was introduced in the field of SLA. This study focused on investigating the differences between two modes of providing CF, namely, online and traditional modes, which would affect Iranian EFL learners’ writing ability. To serve this purpose, 317 EFL learners from four language schools in Tabriz took the TOEFL: 271 participants scored between 477 and 510, the scores of 164 of them fell between ±1SD, and 66 of them agreed to participate in the study who were asked to deliver a 200-word composition. Their compositions were analyzed based on CAF (complexity, accuracy, and fluency). They were then divided into two groups; one group underwent a treatment of 10 sessions of online chatting (1 hour each session), and the other group was asked to deliver 10 writing tasks. Afterward, all participants were asked to deliver another 200-word writing task. These tasks were analyzed based on the CAF criteria. The obtained results proved a significant difference between the writing ability of the participants receiving CF through online sessions and that of those receiving CF in traditional mode. The findings implicate that EFL teachers could be encouraged and allowed to use up-to-date ways of providing CF if more development in the teaching and learning of English as a second language is anticipated.

Adopting a qualitative design, the present study investigated Iranian EFL teachers’ attitudes toward critical thinking as well as its role in language teaching. To meet these objectives, 36 EFL teachers were selected through purposeful sampling as the participants of the study. For the purpose of the data collection, in-depth interviews, focus group interviews, and teachers’ narratives were utilized. To assure the trustworthiness of the data, several measures have been taken. The lead author conducted the in-depth as well as focus group interviews and elicited teachers’ narratives. The interviews were conducted in Persian language and the whole procedures were audiotaped. The data were transcribed verbatim and after member checking the data with the participants, they were translated into English. The data were analyzed through thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). To assure inter coder reliability, coding the data was done by the second and third authors independently. The third and fourth authors were involved in finding the potential themes and sub-themes. Finally, five themes of efficiency, intelligence, change, success and initiation were generated as a result of the data analysis. The present study revealed that the participants emphasized some fundamental building blocks of critical thinking. The participant teachers also advocated critical thinking - focused programs in teacher education as well as its application in language teaching. The study has a number of implications for language pedagogy, teacher education and policy makers.

Giving corrective feedback (CF) is an essential part of the teaching and learning process, and the way it should beneficially be done has been the focus of attention for numerous researchers especially when traditional ways of CF provision are not possible, particularly in rare situations such as outbreaks of diseases. This study investigated how different ways of giving feedback; namely, through online chats and class discussions can help language learners in benefitting from their instructors’ CF provision. To this purpose, the effects of two ways of feedback provision were tested on the participants writing quality. Three hundred and seventeen Iranian EFL learners took a TOEFL test, 132 of them (53 males and 79 females) scoring between 477 and 510 were asked to deliver a 200-word writing task. Then, they were randomly put into 4 experimental and control groups to undergo different treatments, i.e. receiving CF through online chats and class discussions for 10 one-hour sessions. After the treatment, they were required to deliver another 200-word piece of writing. The results of statistical data analysis showed that the writing quality of the participants receiving CF through online chats was significantly higher than that of those who received CF through class discussions. The findings of this research have practical implications for Iranian educational system to update its instructional methods and for the nature of teaching and learning processes and practices.

JALDA has been officially recognized as a Scientific Grade B Journal by Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology recently. A main interest of the Journal lies in the contextualized sense of science; the studies should take place in real world contexts and they should be intended to help solve everyday problems.The fields of applied linguistics and applied literature create the scope of the Journal for the purpose of coming into close encounter with the problems researchers may experience in their everyday lives both within and without school; they are encouraged to use their expertise, even in an interdisciplinary mode, to tackle issues that hinder their subjects and people on their way to success and improvement. From such a perspective, the decontextuzlized selection and reading of a literary text, for instance, may not be regarded as fruitful. There are stories by both teachers and researchers about how the “literary taste” of students at rural areas of our country differ radically from the taste of those from urbanized areas. Should the students be introduced to the same material in their English language and literature courses? JALDA prefers to consider the diversity in the world and it intends to publish the findings that help show how new ways are sought for improvements in the fields. This results from a sense of protecting the world and its diversity we experience in our everyday lives while, thanks to access to the technology, complicated (conspiracy) theories spread faster than any biological virus could to keep us far from one another and from the real world.

Most of the models accounting for L2 oral production have deemed a significant role for vocabulary knowledge in this process. Previous studies have demonstrated a positive relationship between different aspects of lexical knowledge and performance or proficiency of second language skills including the speaking performance. Meanwhile, the findings have suggested a determining role for the task type used for measuring speaking performance when one or more aspects of lexical knowledge are in focus. This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between the EFL Learners’ deep vocabulary knowledge (DVK) and speaking performance by scrutinizing the mediating role of task type. To this end, 102 bachelor ELT students were given Word Associate Test to measure their DVK, and a planned presentation task and unplanned tasks of description, narration and reasoning to elicit speaking performance. The elicited samples of speaking performance were transcribed and analyzed in terms of fluency, accuracy, lexical complexity and grammatical complexity. Structural equation modeling indicated a lack of causal relationship between DVK and aspects of speaking performance as measured with both planned and unplanned tasks. However, mixed results were obtained in the case of the correlations of fluency, accuracy, grammatical complexity and lexical complexity with DVK across different tasks. Although the findings do not provide evidence for a strong relationship between DVK and speaking performance when DVK is analyzed in isolation from other aspects of vocabulary knowledge, the variation witnessed in findings provide further proof for the importance of task effectiveness in the study of lexical access.

The promotion of language assessment literacy (LAL) among teachers and assessment developers has been deadly called and emphasized by professionals and scholars in the field of language assessment. In line with this urgent call for research, the present study sets out to investigate the EFL teachers’ literacy assessment with the aim of bringing modifications for teacher education reforms. To meet the objectives of the study, a total of 200 EFL teachers (N=88, with a TEFL background and N=112, with a non-TEFL background) with B.A. (N=125) and M.A. (N= 75) degrees were selected through stratified random sampling at high schools of West Azerbaijan Province, Iran. The required data were gathered using Plake, Impara, and Fager’s (1993) Teacher Assessment Literacy Scale (TALS). Hence, the participants’ knowledge concerning components of assessment literacy (AL) was sought for. A multivariate analysis of variances (MANOVA) was run and the results, in general, revealed that the participants were not significantly familiar with assessment literacy principles and procedures. Specifically, the results indicated that EFL teachers with a TEFL background and those with a non-TEFL background differed in terms of their assessment literacy competence, especially in terms of their perceptions of AL components. The implications of the findings for teacher education programs, teacher educators and EFL teachers are discussed and some suggestions for further research are offered.

A new vocabulary item has been added to English dictionaries: Covid-19. For linguists, the addition of a meaningful linguistic element to any language should change the whole language as, for T. S. Eliot, a new poem changes the whole literature of a nation. But let us see how seriously the addition of the vocabulary item Covid-19 might change the English language. According to Cambridge online dictionary, Covid-19 is “an infectious disease caused by a coronavirus (= a type of virus), that usually causes fever, tiredness, and a cough, and can also cause breathing problems. I do not think that the change brought about by the item is a radical one especially when the definition claims that most often the disease caused by the virus is not serious! (I wonder whether there is a Newspeak type conspiracy going on!) But when one turns to the “real world,” the situation turns out to be extremely serious: Not only has Covid-19 brought the whole world almost to a total stop, but it has also been the cause of many deaths all over the world. People have died, families have lost their breadwinners, doctors and nurses have been affected and died while on duty and we are still on the verge of being affected by the virus everyday if the necessary safety measures are not taken. Millions have lost their jobs and economies are on the verge of collapse. Governments are keen to see their state enemies crush under the heavy burdens by Covid-19 upon their economies and medical systems! Schools are shut down and much more other factual events can be added to these, all of which lead many to claim that in the post-Covid-19 era peoples’ behaviours should change.

According to Patrick Colm Hogan, in the US academic context, few people in literary theory or comparative literature have much familiarity with non-Western literary theories, and fewer still have research expertise in the field. While working on a project in non-Western literary theory, he was surprised to find that many of his friends and colleagues found it difficult to understand what non-Western literary theory might be. And when he explained that by non-Western theory he meant theory before European colonialism, he was, more often than not, faced with looks of blank incomprehension. Hogan blames ethnocentrism for this blank incomprehension because “it is at least in part a matter of assuming that theoretical reasoning is somehow peculiarly Western, that abstract reflection must have its source and impetus west of the Black Sea and north of the Mediterranean. It is closely related to the blank incomprehension which greets such phrases as ‘Classical Indian logic,’ ‘Medieval Arabic mathematics,’ and ‘Ancient Chinese empirical science and technology.’”

Nigel Lowther Love is associate professor of linguistics at University of Cape Town. He was born in 1950 in the U.K. He received his B.A. (1973), M.A. (1976) and D. Phil. (1976) from Oxford University. His Ph.D. thesis title was: The generative phonological analysis of non-vocalic alternations in Modern French. Nigel Love has been the invited lecturer or conference speaker at universities in: Athens, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cambridge, Cape Town, Chicago, Copenhagen, Durban, Edinburgh, Grahamstown, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Jyväskylä, Kirksville, Montpellier, Mumbai, New Orleans, Nottingham, Odense, Oxford, Paris, Pittsburgh, Quebec, Seville, Stellenbosch, Tambov, Warsaw and Williamsburg. He was the head of Linguistics Department at University of Cape Town (1995-1998). He has been the editorial board member (since 1992) and associate editor (since 2019) of journal of Language and Communication. He was the editor of the journal of Language Sciences (1997-2014). Among his authored and coauthored publications are Generative Phonology: A Case-Study from French (1981), The Foundations of Linguistic Theory: Selected Writings of Roy Harris (1990), Linguistics Inside Out: Roy Harris and His Critics (1997), and Language and History: Integrationist Perspectives (2006). JALDA’s editor-in-chief, Dr. Bahram Behin had the following short communication with Nigel Love.

Farshid Sadatsharifi has been visiting scholar at the Institute of Islamic Studies in McGill University, Montreal, Canada since 2016. He received his PhD and MA in Persian Language and Literature from Shiraz University, Iran. He also completed his post-doc fellowship in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature at the same university. Dr. Sadatsharifi is the co-founder and director of Samaak Institution, the center for Persian Language and Literature in applied approach. He is the affiliated researcher of Hafez Studies Center, and a permanent member of Iranian Society of Persian Humor (ISPH). Dr. Sadatsharifi has spent ten years celebrating literary theories, the meaning of life, existentialism, and other subjects related to studying and teaching Persian Language and Literature in a multidisciplinary and applied approach. He hopes to have the chance to establish “applied literature” as a well-recognized part of literary studies. He believes that an applied approach is unavoidable for any form of art, humanities and literature nowadays. In pursuit of JALDA’s fundamental goal of spotlighting the nature of applied literature, the journal’s editor-in-chief, Dr. Bahram Behin, had a short conversation with Dr. Sadatsharifi.

JALDA, therefore, would like to show inclination towards the view that the reality of the world is not a fixed entity standing out there to be measured by our pre-fabricated ‘scientific’ instruments. In line with Haghshenas’ argumentation, not only can theories and instruments shrink to ornamental entities but also they can turn into what Karl Popper calls pseudo-science, knowledge of an ‘ideological’ rather than of a ‘scientific’ nature (see Fuller, 1996). The knowledge based on positivism is prone to shrink to pseudo-science, for instance, because it is knowledge based solely on natural phenomena and their properties and relations that are accounted for according to man-made networks of laws. Any biased insistence upon such knowledge and hostility towards what lies outside the network, the darkness of the world, an experience of the recent politico-scientific history of the world, should push what was expected to be ‘scientific’ towards ‘pseudo-science.’ JALDA’s policy is to see its pages colourfully arrayed with findings and views from even the darkest corners of the world, where things are seen in ways quite different from the ways we are used to seeing them.

Applied literature is a term that is the outcome of a need to put literature to tangible uses in the “real” world. A medical practitioner looking for a definition of life, for instance, finds literature a useful source for the answer. With paradigm shifts in scientific studies, interdisciplinarity has been a method to overcome the alienations that resulted from the isolation of disciplines from one another. Some would go even further to problematize the concept of being solely confined to the limits of disciplines or the textuality of literature because they are still hindrances to coming into direct contact with the “real” world. Arguing that tangible real world should lie at the core of applied literary studies, this paper is an attempt to show how a path may be opened up towards the diverse nature of reality in literary studies through a critical review of relevant aspects of literary theory and by drawing upon studies of cultures.

Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics & Intercultural Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK where he directs PhD programs in Education and Applied Linguistics and has been the Head of The Graduate School between 2002 and 2017. Professor Holliday got his bachelors’ degree in Sociology from London University. He began his career in English Language Education in Iran in the early 1970’s at the British Council Centre in Tehran, and then managed a small British Council curriculum unit in Ahwaz. After completing his master’s degree in Applied Linguistics at Lancaster University, he set up educational projects in Syria and Egypt between 1980 and 1990, which provided the experience of the global politics of English and the ethnographic material that informed his PhD thesis at Lancaster University in 1991. Professor Holliday supervises PhD students in critical qualitative studies in the sociology and cultural politics of English language education and intercultural communication, where he has published widely including Understanding Intercultural Communication: Negotiating a Grammar of Culture (2nd Ed., 2018), Intercultural Communication: An Advanced Resource Book for Students (3rd Ed., 2016), Doing and Writing Qualitative Research (3rd Ed., 2016), (En)countering Native Speakerism: Global Perspectives (2015), Intercultural Communication and Ideology (2011) and The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language (2005). JALDA has hosted Professor Holliday in a scholarly conversation with Dr. Bahram Behin, who himself is a fanatic upholder of Holliday’s thoughts in conducting courses in the socio-culture of English language teaching.

The decision by the Ministry of Higher Education in Iran to revise and update the subjects for the MA and PhD courses in TESOL should pave the way towards a more comprehensive understanding of teaching English to speakers of other languages. The Ministry’s revisions can be seen in line with the English language teacher’s awareness. Awareness of context in social sciences and humanities should have significant consequences for us in TESOL. One of the consequences, for instance, is our need for tracing the history of TESOL in Iran (or any area and country), and the building of an archive, without which TESOL in Iran maybe being trapped in the vicious circle of doing experiments that do not relate to our situation in a useful way. The Ministry’s new subjects should provide us with an invaluable opportunity to experience new horizons in researching TESOL. Scientific attitude we all have been brought up with has led to an epistemology that does not seem adequate in today’s world anymore. It is not adequate because it is reductionist in nature; it sees the social phenomena relating to one another solely on the basis of cause and effect relationship; it treats human beings as objects and it does not leave room for competing epistemologies. The new materials should be regarded as a platform to throw us into the unknown world of social world whose existence for us is a matter of interpretation rather than description. Science and critique in the sense we have learned and used them so far have turned into fixed standard curricula preventing us from experiencing an authentic life. All over the world, Englishes are learned by people wishing to communicate with one another for different reasons, and English teachers should see what they can do to help them in this regard.

Glenn Fulcher is the Professor of Applied Linguistics and Language Assessment in the English Department at the University of Leicester, UK. He got his PhD in Applied Linguistics and Language Testing from Lancaster University (1993) and his MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham (1987). Professor Fulcher has been the editor of Sage's Language Testing (2006-2015) and an influential member of the Executive Board of The International Language Testing Association (ILTA) for many years. He has extensive experience and expertise in the philosophy of assessment, test design, the development of data-based rating scales as well as teaching language assessment. Professor Fulcher's book Language Testing and Assessment co-authored by Davidson (2007) has been the main resource for the ELT masters' courses in language testing in Iran for many years. Among his other publications are Re-examining Language Testing: A Philosophical and Social Inquiry (2015, the winner of the 2016 SAGE/LTA Book Award), The Rutledge Handbook of Language Testing (2012), Practical Language Testing (2010), Testing Second Language Speaking (2003) , and Writing in the English Language Classroom (1997). In an online interview, Professor Glenn Fulcher has joined Dr. Bahram Behin who is a zealous adherent of Fulcher's philosophy of assessment and has presented language testing courses based on his books.

The editor’s notes in our Journal have been so far a site for the clarification of the Journal’s policy and the task still continues. With an inclination towards solving our real world problems in language teaching (and literary studies, which I will discuss in the next issue of the Journal), we would like to take that the introduction of the concept of “life-world” to Social Sciences can be a ground-breaking movement to open up new horizons for researchers. I will further illustrate JALDA's position and policy here. The current issue of JALDA features an interview, seven research papers of national and international scope and a book review. The interview is with Professor Glenn Fulcher, the distinguished British applied linguist working in the field of language testing and assessment. The first paper by Behrooz Azabdaftari is a tribute to Professor Henry Widdowson on his visit to Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University in 2018. Cosmas Rai Amenorvi draws on the theory of cohesion to show how both linguistic and aesthetic effects are achieved in Malcolm X’s ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’. The paper by Sarvandy and Ekstam focuses on English as Lingua Franca with attention to Iranian context. The paper by Karimnia and Sabbaghi is a study of Ta’ziyeh and its discourse with an emphasis on how language varieties help frame a culturee’s perception of religion. Ameri's contibution is an example of applied literature. She applies New Jungian findings to the reading of Sweetness in the Belly. The paper by Abbasi and Khosrowshahi explores the role of experience in EFL teachers’ satisfaction of the in-service teacher education programs in Iran, and Ashrafi and Ajideh explore culture-related content in the advanced series of Iran Language Institute. And, finally, Jane Ekstam has reviewed Loving Literature: A Cultural History, by Deirde Shauna Lynch for us.

Peter Mühlhäusler is the Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Adelaide, and Supernumerary Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He has taught at the Technical University of Berlin and in the University of Oxford. He is an active researcher in several areas of linguistics, including ecolinguistics, language planning, and language policy and language contact in the Australian-Pacific area. His current research focuses on the Pitkern-Norf'k language of Norfolk Island and Aboriginal languages of the West Coast of South Australia. His recent book publications are Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Language of Environment-Environment of Language, Early Forms of Aboriginal English in South Australia (with Foster and Monaghan), and Herrmann Koeler's Adelaide-Observations on Language and Culture of South Australia. He continues to publish on theoretical and applied ecolinguistics. JALDA's Editor in Chief, Dr. Bahram Behin has sat, in an online chat, with professor Mühlhäusler on the issue of ecolinguistics and its relevence to the studies of language and language teaching.

Our Journal's tendency towards the real world in applied linguistics and literary studies should have significant epistemological and methodological consequences in researching the fields. The interest in the real world makes the problems we may have in our everyday lives our 'points of departure' in research. According to my experience of research in our universities throughout their history, researchers in both applied linguistics and literary studies have attributed great significance to ‘learning’ theories giant scholars have formulated and their main job has been to put the theories to use in the Iranian context for the purpose of teaching English language and literature. The assumption that researchers should confine themselves to theories, frameworks, methodologies and the use of instruments that are of positivistic nature is a dominant characteristic in the Iran context. The paradigm shift, as I understand it, is required firstly as a turning away from linguistics as a science and the unlearning of linguistic theories because no linguistic theory is comprehensive enough to provide us with a real world description of language; new ways of analyzing and understanding language are needed. According to this view, applied linguistics should not be confined to ‘language teaching.’ Its function should be ‘language teaching in the context of the real world,’ although, according to Rajagopalan (2004, p. 415), “There is still a long way to go and many stubborn resistances … to be overcome.”