فهرست مطالب hamid dowlatabadi

Intercultural communication is a hot topic in today’s world which focuses on the relationships among people all around the world. Finding the role of linguistic, affective, and cultural components in intercultural communication has been a big problem in foreign language situations. Thus, this study aims to investigate the role of linguistic, affective, and cultural components concurrently in Minoodasht, Iran. One hundred language teachers were selected through a convenience sampling procedure and then an Oxford placement test was run to check the homogeneity of the participants. An intercultural questionnaire also checked the intercultural communication level of teachers. In addition, 20 participants took part in the interview session willingly. To analyze the data, various quantitative and qualitative measures such as descriptive statistics, the Wilcoxon signed ranks test, and inductive content analyses were run. It was found that the linguistic component is the most vital macro-need in intercultural communication and the cultural and affective components were put in second and third place. It was also revealed that the affective component acts as a mediator between linguistic and cultural components. This study can be pedagogically important for language teachers and materials developers to include intercultural topics in their teaching sessions and textbooks respectively

This study aimed to illuminate the diagnostic potential of the interactionist dynamic assessment (DA) to identify the candidates’ academic reading difficulties on the IELTS Reading test. Furthermore, DA and its interactive environment seem to provide an opportunity to diagnose the possible linguistic and cognitive roots of the academic second language (SL) reading difficulties that the modest user IELTS candidates faced. In so doing, three participants whose scores in the academic IELTS reading sub-score were 5/5on a scale of 1-9 were recruited to participate in this study. The data were collected through observation and interaction based on DA principals through 36 individualized sessions (12 sessions for each participant). In each session, they were assigned to answer 13-14 academic reading comprehension questions independently and then the mediator and the learners collaboratively reviewed the questions answered in the first stage. The feedback types offered deliberately ranged from very implicit to very explicit. The interactions were video recorded, transcribed word-by-word, and investigated. The findings indicated participants' difficulties in locating specific information, interpretation of words or phrases in the text, understanding the key ideas in a paragraph level, inference making, and interpretation of the writer's intention and viewpoint. From diagnostic standpoint, it is recommended that the interactionist DA be used as an independent or complementary diagnostic tool in order to diagnose academic reading difficulties and their linguistic and cognitive roots.