فهرست مطالب

Journal of Language Horizons
Volume:3 Issue: 2, Autumn and Winter 2019

  • تاریخ انتشار: 1398/10/11
  • تعداد عناوین: 12
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  • Hoda Estefaei, Alireza Amjadiparvar * Pages 9-27
    The current study aimed at probing the impact of using enhanced and unenhanced corpus-based material on non-congruent idiom learning by Iranian female intermediate EFL learners. Initially, via adopting a quasi-experimental design, 120 participants from an English institute in Sanandaj were chosen conveniently from among different classes. They were given a Nelson Proficiency Test, the results of which were used to select 90 participants based on the standard deviation and the mean of the scores. These participants were then divided into three groups each consisting of 30. Prior to the treatment, the participants were given a researcher-made non-congruent idiom test. As for the treatment, the first experimental group received enhanced corpus-based materials while the second experimental group received unenhanced corpus-based materials. The control group received no treatment in terms of enhanced and unenhanced corpus-based materials and followed the regular syllabus of the institute. At the end of the treatment, the same pretest of non-congruent idioms was administered to the participants in the three groups as the posttest. The results of ANCOVA indicated that both enhanced and unenhanced corpus-based instruction had significant effects on learning non-congruent idioms. However, there was a significant difference between the effects of unenhanced and enhanced corpus-based instruction on learning non-congruent idioms, in favor of the second. Based on the findings of the present study, EFL teachers are encouraged to employ corpus-based materials in teaching L2 in general and in particular when it comes to teaching non-congruent idioms.
    Keywords: Non-congruent idioms, corpus-based materials, input enhancement, enhanced corpus-based materials, unenhanced corpus-based materials
  • Khadijeh Karimi Alavijeh *, Susan Marandi Pages 29-55
    Recent years have witnessed drastic enhancements in English language teaching (ELT) especially due to the Internet. Although the literature is well-documented with regard to the positive effects of Internet application in English education, the critical investigation of Internet-mediated ELT sources has rarely been dealt with. In this study, one of the four most favorite Internet-based English programs in Iran and throughout the world (Karimi Alavijeh, 2014), namely, the BBC Leaning English, was investigated in terms of the way it represented Iran. For this purpose, qualitative content analysis was used to extract the main themes of this program and an adapted version of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Network was utilized for the critical discourse analysis of the resulted corpus. The extracted themes, the recognized social actors, and the way different discursive mechanisms and hypertextual techniques had been used to represent them in unfavorable manners unfolded the presence of hidden agenda in a supposedly English learning program.
    Keywords: Hidden Curriculum, adapted version of Van Leeuwen’s Scial Actor Network, Iran, BBC Learning English, Internet-enhanced English language teaching
  • Mohamad Reza Mollahosseiny, Davood Mashhadi Heidar * Pages 57-78
    Although the role of task planning conditions affecting EFL learners’ oral performance has been of investigators’ enduring concern, to the best of our knowledge, no study so far has investigated the influence of planning time in combination with a cocktail of questioning instruction on the oral performance in EFL settings. The present study thus examined the combined impact of pre-task planning and questioning instruction on the accuracy and complexity of Iranian EFL learners' oral presentation of intermediate learners of English at a private language institute in Mazandaran. Drawing on Bloom's taxonomy of higher order questions (HOQs), a pretest posttest quasi-experimental design was utilized. Initially, three groups including a control and two experimental groups engaged in pre-intervention oral tasks and performed the post-intervention oral tasks ensuing rehearsal planning plus HOQs (EX1), strategic planning in addition to HOQs (EX2), and no planning condition along with HOQs (CG) instructions. Results pointed to the positive impact of pre-task planning integrated with HOQs on the complexity as well as accuracy of oral narrative tasks. More specifically, engaging in rehearsal planning condition plus HOQs proved to be optimal for inducing better results in EFL learners’ oral production in terms of all three measures of performance. Accordingly, the findings rejected a conflict between complexity and accuracy in that both of them were found to have increased simultaneously. Finally, drawing on the outcomes of the investigation, it is proposed that in order for task-based instruction to more beneficially contribute to EFL learners' task performance, a more flexible view of implementing TBLT needs to be merged with other influential educational factors including thinking skills which have proved to be fruitful in the present study.
    Keywords: Rehearsal Planning, Strategic Planning, Speaking, Accuracy, Complexity
  • Haaq Akbarian *, Mohammad Afzali Shahri, Javad Ghasemi Rezveh, Mahmood Salimi Pages 79-103

    Learners differ in the manner of understanding, organizing, and retaining information or experience. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between perceptual learning style preferences and depth of vocabulary knowledge of 235 tertiary EFL learners (male = 89, female = 146) from two Iranian universities. The learners’ responses on Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire (Reid, 1984) showed that kinesthetic, auditory, visual, and tactile modalities were found to be the major categories while individual and group styles appeared to be minor. Furthermore, the data from the Word Associates Test (WAT, Read, 2000) revealed that the participants’ mean scores on tactile style significantly correlated with WAT and its constituent parts (synonym and collocation). Despite the negative tendency towards group activities, the high-group learners had more major preferences than the low-group learners. Moreover, the mean scores of males’ auditory style was under the cut-off point for a major learning style and lower than that of females. However, males outscored females on WAT, synonym, and collocation. Yet, tactile modality significantly correlated with WAT, synonym, and collocation for females. Group learning was the least preferred style by the participants. Thus, in teaching vocabulary, especially depth dimension, different teaching techniques and materials should be provided selectively to attend to the learners’ diverse learning styles.

    Keywords: Learning styles, Perceptual Learning Style Preferences, Vocabulary knowledge, Vocabulary Depth, Gender
  • Saman Jamshidi, Saeed Rezaei * Pages 105-124
    The current study aimed at investigating the authorial identity of Iranian academic writers, who came from three different fields of English, Biology, and Engineering, plus examining the influence of disciplinary conventions on their stance taking in research articles. The main objectives of this study were achieved by going through two main phases, viz. survey administration and corpus study. First, the authorial identity questionnaire was administered to 150 academic writers, 50 from each of the selected fields. Following that, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) was run to locate the difference between authorial identities of academic writers among these groups. Second, as a complementary phase to survey administration, NVivo was utilized to conduct the corpus study phase. In so doing, Hyland’s (2005) model of interaction in academic discourse was applied to analyze academic writers’ stance taking in a corpus comprising 90 articles from the three selected fields. Triangulating the findings, we concluded that academic writers in the field of English rely more on authority, self-representation, and personal projection, while those in the fields of biology and engineering try to take less stance markers and portray their findings more impersonally.
    Keywords: Authorial Identity, Authorial Stance, academic writing, corpus, Questionnaire, NVivo
  • Mansooreh Hosseinnia, Hamid Ashraf *, Hossein Khodabakhshzadeh, Gholam Hassan Khajavi Pages 125-146
    The major purpose of the present study was to examine the differences between professional competencies of Iranian EFL Teachers at Public and private sectors and the role of gender, field of study, educational status, and years of teaching experience in Iranian EFL teachers’ competencies. A sample of 300 EFL Iranian teachers were chosen based on convenience sampling and were assessed through the EFL Teachers’ Professional Competencies scale. After gathering the questionnaires, data was analysed by SPSS. According to the results, 1. There were significant differences between Iranian EFL teachers at public and private sectors with respect to their level of competencies, and teachers at private sectors had higher levels of competencies, 2. There were significant differences between male and female EFL teachers with respect to their competencies, 3. There were positive significant relationships between the four sub-constructs of teachers’ competencies and experience, 4. There was a significant difference betweenfour types of field of study (teaching English, English literature, English translation and others) with respect to their competencies, and those majoring in teaching English had the highest level of competencies, and 5. There were significant differences among three educational levels (BA, MA, and PhD) with respect to their competencies, with PhD and BA holders having the highest and lowest levels of competencies, respectively. This study may be the only piece of research that has increased EFL professionals’, including EFL teachers’, knowledge regarding factors affecting their competencies. Also, the results of this study can be used by teacher employment institutes such as language institutes, and education and training organizations to employ the most competent EFL teachers.
    Keywords: Professional competencies, private sector, Public Sector, Gender, years of experience
  • Reza Bagheri Nevisi *, Maryam Afsooshin Pages 147-164
    Despite the well-established importance and effectiveness of pragmatic instruction in expediting ESL and EFL learners’ pragmatic development as frequently corroborated by many scholars, the cognitive and psychological dimensions of learners in pragmatic learning and the way those might impact their pragmatic learning has so far received insufficient attention.  Therefore, the present study has made every possible effort to delve into the possible impact of ideal L2 self, and ought-to L2 self on EFL Learners’ L2 functional use. Fifty-two Iranian English students took part in this research project. First, the two questionnaires (i.e. ideal L2 self and ought-to L2 self) adopted from Dörnyei and Taguchi (2010) were distributed among the participants. Moreover, the participants went through a six-week instructional period and received pragmatic instruction at the end of their regular class hour for thirty minutes. Finally, all the participants were required to complete two discourse completion tests containing eight scenarios borrowed from both Schauer’s (2009), and Jalilifar’s (2009) as pretest and posttest. This would enable the researchers to assess the participants’ pre- and post-instructional pragmatic knowledge. Descriptive statistics and independent samples t-tests were run to analyze the data. The findings indicate that high ideal L2 self group significantly outperformed the high ought-to L2 self group with regard to their pragmatic performances on discourse completion tests. The study further implies that factors such as the individuals’ ideal L2 self can be regarded as determining and pivotal when it comes to the amount of learning that takes place in learners with either high ideal L2 self or those with high ought-to L2 self.
    Keywords: EFL learners, Ideal L2 self, L2 functional use, Ought-to L2 self, Pragmatic instruction
  • Mahin Sadat Tabatabaee, Keyvan Mahmoodi *, Abbas Bayat Pages 165-184
    Processability Theory (PT) is a second language acquisition (SLA) theory developed to explain developmental sequences in SLA as well as some other phenomena (Pienemann, 1998a).Processability has been a main concern in SLA research since 1990s. Following the agenda of Processability Theory and through analyzing the written performance of Iranian EFL learners’ writing performances, the present research studied the acquisition of “3 sg-s” and “cancel aux-second or cancel inversion” across five proficiency levels, from elementary to advanced, and compared it with the stage-like development model of morpho-syntactic structures proposed by Pienemann (1998a). The study followed a descriptive method of research, and the data was collected from 350 participants in five different proficiency levels from elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced. The participants were asked to provide samples of their written performance on different tasks including an introduction task, a habitual action task, a story retelling task, a picture description task, and a composition and communication task. The data in this research was analyzed both qualitatively, in order to recognize and classify the type and order of the morpho-syntactic structures, and quantitatively, by calculating means. The results of Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that both “3 sg-s” and “cancel aux-second,” as two morpho-syntactic features, emerge very early in the language learners’ performance. Very similarly, the competence of the learner grows stronger in concern with these variables through the higher proficiency levels. These findings imply that PT is valid to a considerable extent for Iranian EFL learners, as well.
    Keywords: Cancel Aux-second, Processability Theory, second language learning, Stage-like Development, Third Person Singular-s (3sg-s)
  • Leila Erfaniyan Qonsuli *, Shahla Sharifi Pages 185-198
    This study is going to consider the factors vital for comprehension. The Graded Salience Hypothesis is the framework for this study. Persian indirect requests will be tested and the relation between different contexts, familiarity level and reading times will be studied. At first, figurative and literal contexts were prepared. A software for measuring reading time in self-paced reading experiments was designed. In the first pretest, participants defined the familiarity of expressions. The second pretest aimed to confirm the sameness of context bias. In the first part of the main test, participants read each indirect request in a figurative context and reading times were recorded. In the second part, participants read each indirect request in a literal context and reading times were recorded. After comparing the reading times, it was concluded that Graded Salience Hypothesis predictions were not confirmed and sometimes, context was a more important factor than salience. Therefore, instead of a parallel process, a semi-serial process was witnessed. Therefore, among Persian Indirect requests, salient meaning in familiar and less familiar figurative expressions was figurative meaning. In unfamiliar indirect requests, the salient meaning was figurative and literal meaning. Therefore, literal meaning was not salient meaning and this finding challenges the modular-based views.
    Keywords: figurative language, Graded Salience Hypothesis, indirect request, cognitive linguistics, Giora
  • Seyyed Ali Ostovar-Namaghi, Mohammad Maleki, Fatemeh Mozaffari * Pages 199-214
    The theory and practice of language teacher autonomy seems to be contradictory in terms. While, in theory, language teaching is conceptualized as a reflective process wherein teachers exercise their professional expertise, in many contexts including some private language schools of Shahrood and Semnan, teaching performance is tightly monitored through closed-circuit cameras. This study attempts to explore language teachers’ perceptions of teaching under video surveillance through elicitation data gathered and analyzed based on grounded theory. Iterative data collection and analysis and the constant comparative techniques revealed that video surveillance negatively affects language teaching since the participants believed it violates their rights to privacy, induces artificial practice, suppresses teacher initiatives, and deskills teachers by inducing disused atrophy. Through the counter-evidence presented by the language teachers, it was also found that the rationales for using video surveillance are unjustified. The findings of this study have clear implications for managers, supervisors and language teachers teaching in private language schools in the context of this study and other similar contexts.
    Keywords: classroom video surveillance, EFL teachers’ perceptions, Grounded Theory, monitoring practice, ELT
  • Mostafa Shahiditabar, Mohammad Dabir-Moghaddam * Pages 215-233
    This study aims to apply Halliday’s (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) concept of cohesion using Dooley and Levinsohn’s (2001) model of morphosyntactic pattern to Azeri Turkish narratives in an attempt to uncover narrative and morphosyntactic pattern relation. The corpus contains eleven short stories in Azeri Turkish. Findings of the study revealed that echoic utterance as a subtype of the morphosyntactic pattern may be used to mark the narrative peak. Also, there is a violation of morphosyntactic pattern in the corpus. This violation uses the historical present to draw the audience into a climatic situation. The study shows that echoic utterances can be regarded as links in a chain, functioning like cohesive ties in the text. The pragmatic notion, dramatic development, narrative peak, meaning construction, and implicature are also expressed by echoic utterances. Moreover, these discourse-pragmatic structuring constituents have been found to appear at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of narratives to provide a basis for relating a sentence to its context or mental representation, make the hearer accompany the narrator during the whole story and maintain the unity of the narrative.
    Keywords: Discourse, Azeri Turkish language, Narrative, cohesion, functional linguistics, morphosyntactic pattern
  • Narges Rahmani, Behzad Rahbar *, Mohammad Reza Oroji Pages 235-249
    The present study explored the linguistic taboos in the Iranian cinema. Twenty Iranian movies in a period of twenty years—1998 to 2018—comprised the main corpus of this study. The descriptive method was used in this sociolinguistic study to describe the conditions in the Iranian movies. To answer the research questions and analyze the data obtained on the types of taboo words, the framework provided by Andersson and Trudgill (1990) was first modified slightly and then applied to this research. All the three types of categories presented by Andersson and Trudgill, i.e., sex and bodily functions, sanctity, and animals with the absence of sex type were used in this research. Besides, the traces of five other types of death, morality, physical/mental problems, relatives, and unpleasant concepts were also found in the Iranian cinema. Moreover, in order to study the functions of the taboo words, a revised classification developed by Wardhaugh (2006) was utilized. Based on thei findings, among the components of Wardhaugh’s classification, attention and provocation were observed in the Iranian cinema as well. A total number of 1262 taboos were detected in the data collected for this research. According to the findings, unpleasant concepts with the frequency of 49.45% proved to be the most commonly uttered type of taboo terms. Regarding the function of taboos, providing catharsis, with a frequency of 48.73%, was placed in the first rank. The findings lent us a helping hand in better understanding the spoken aspects in the informal usage of Persian; they also revealed the explicit and implicit reflections of emotions indialogical contexts.
    Keywords: Sociolinguistics, taboo, Persian Movies, Function of Taboo, Type of Taboo