Journal of new advances in English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics
Volume:2 Issue: 1, Winter and Spring 2020

Investigating the lack of ultimate native-like attainment in L2 acquisition is among the concerns of psycholinguistic research. Processing differences have been argued to be among the underlying factors influencing the lack of native-like attainment. This study is an attempt to investigate how Persian learners of English resolve ambiguity in processing sentences containing two noun phrases and a relative clause that can be attached either high to NP1or low to NP2. To this end, 30 advanced Persian learners of English participated in two experiments, both on-line and off-line tasks. The results showed that L2 learners exhibit different attachment preferences compared to the native speakers of English. Moreover, the L2 learners do not exhibit L1-based preferences in L2 English in the on-line task, which indicates they are not directly influenced by attachment preferences from their L1. But transfer had an effect in the off-line task as the L2 learners may resort to some metacognitive knowledge. The results of the current study suggest that L2 learners integrate information relevant for parsing differently from native speakers, with the L2 learners relying more on lexical-semantic cues than native speakers and less on phrase-structure rules.

This study aimed to investigate gender differences in L2 reading accuracy and fluency among Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Initially, Oxford Quick Placement Test was administered to the 70 participants to assure homogeneity in terms of overall language proficiency and accordingly, 28 male and 28 female learners were identified as the legitimate participants who had been interviewed on 8 reading passages taken from Active Skills for Reading, Book 1 by Anderson (2008), and Top Notch, level 1 A by Saslow and Ascher (2007). The reading of the participants was recorded and subsequently analyzed by two raters based on the fluency and accuracy measurement criteria (Jenkins, Fuchs, Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2015). Inter-rater reliability was established for both the fluency and accuracy (.896 and .908, respectively). Having finished the analysis of the participants’ performance, the findings showed that female participants outperformed the males in terms of fluency while males were superior in terms of accuracy. Finally, implications arising from the findings and suggestions for further research were explained.

The aim of present study was investigating effect of semantic modification over time on the choice of Persian lexical equivalences of two Iranian translations of ‘taming of shrew’. In doing so, two translations of the English novel ‘taming of shrew’ into Persian were compared, namely "به تربیت در آوردن دختر سرکش" and " رام کردن زن سرکش ". First translation was done in 1945 by Hossein-qoli Salvar (Emado saltane) and the second one was published in 2017 by Mohsen Qasemi; with a time interval of 72 years. The present research compared these two translations to see to what semantic modifications affect Persian translators' choice in finding lexical equivalences in their translation of English novels over time. The framework adopted by the present study was Fromkin's categorizations and definitions (2003). In this sense, the required data were collected according to elements provided by classification and definitions proposed by this framework. Dada classification were analyzed based on three factors of spelling, semantic and syntactic modification. Semantic modification divided into meaninglessness, meaning modification and stylistic modification. At last, stylistic modification was found to be the most frequent modifications, within this period of time, which make the text non-sense for reader.

Academic phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It makes explicit the more common phraseological ‘nuts and bolts’ of academic writing. One of academic phrasebanks is developed by the University of Manchester. A section in this academic phrasebank is devoted to “Explaining Causality”. Thus, this study intends to see how ELT writers explain causality in research articles published in international and Iranian local journals. To meet this end, 100 research articles (50 research articles from the international journal of “ELT” published by Oxford University Press and 50 research articles from “Journal of Teaching Language Skills” published by Shiraz University Press) were selected. The research articles were analyzed for the linguistic features or structures suggested by the academic phrasebank for the sake of explaining causality. The results suggested that ELT writers of research articles use some of the suggested linguistic features and structures to explain causality in their research articles. The results also suggested that there are some variations in the frequencies of the used linguistic features and structures across two groups of research articles. The results of this study could act as a guide for ELT research articles’ writers in using such linguistic features and structures to explain causality in research articles.