Journal of Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature: Dynamics and Advances
Volume:11 Issue: 1, Winter-Spring 2023

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.

Behrooz Azabdaftari is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at University of Tabriz. Born in 1938 in Tabriz, Iran, he received his BA in Language Education from Tehran Higher Education Institute in 1963 and his MA in English from University of Beirut in 1970. He was granted a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics by the University of Illinois, USA in 1980. During nearly 50 years of academic work, professor Azabdaftari has taught graduate courses at University of Tabriz, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University and Islamic Azad University. With an interdisciplinary approach to language studies, Dr. Azabdaftari has regularly published on the cross lines of Applied Linguistics, Translation and Literature. By translating a few key works on Vygotsky’s thought, he has had a significant role in introducing Sociocultural Theory to Iranian community of language teaching researchers.  He has also translated selected poetry from well-known Persian contemporary poets, including an excellent translation of Shahraiar’s masterpiece of “Hayder Babaya Selam”. He has joined an interview with Davoud Amini.

Given the long-lasting debates over L1 use in language teaching and learning, this study adopted a mixed methods design to investigate the role of Iranian EFL learners’ L2 proficiency in their attitudes toward using L1. A questionnaire originally developed by Scheffler et al. (2017) was modified and distributed among 180 elementary, intermediate, and advanced learners in four private language institutes in Karaj, Iran. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with 18 participants to support and supplement the findings of the quantitative phase. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS and the interviews were transcribed to find common themes. Quantitative data showed that the elementary learners held positive attitudes toward L1 use, while the intermediate and advanced learners held negative attitudes. It was also revealed that the elementary learners held positive attitudes toward all functions of L1 use. The intermediate learners held positive attitudes toward using L1 only for vocabulary and grammar points, while advanced learners held negative attitudes toward all dimensions of L1 use. The findings are likely to help EFL teachers to hear learners’ voices and decide when and at which level it is appropriate to use or limit L1.

This study explored the styles and strategies used by online MA students of TEFL and investigated the relationship among their learning styles, learning strategies, and learning achievement. The participants were 87 online graduate students of TEFL at Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST). The instruments consisted of questionnaires on learning styles and strategies and average scores of online students. The results showed that the most learning style preferences were obtained by synthesizing, field-independent, closure-oriented, random-intuitive, and visual, while the lowest ones were related to field-dependent, auditory, tactile / kinesthetic, and open styles. Online students’ highest tendency was related to handling possibilities, while their lowest tendency was concerned with using physical senses. With regard to learning strategies, goal setting strategies received the highest mean, whereas task-strategies received the lowest mean. The results of binary logistic regression also revealed that high achievers were mostly grouped into visual, tactile, inclusive, closure, and open learning styles. However, there was no difference between high and low achieving students in learning strategy use. Online instructors are recommended to consider styles and strategies of online students and choose appropriate materials and methods based on their styles and strategies.

Pedagogical beliefs as an important concept in psychology are one of the most influential and decisive factors in learners’ success. Recently, teacher beliefs have attracted the attention of many researchers in English language teaching contexts; therefore, the current study investigated non-native novice English Language Teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and the extent to which their pedagogical beliefs modified in the first year of their teaching experience in comparison to pre-service teachers. The required data were collected through a belief questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. Although the results of the questionnaire demonstrated that there were statistically significant differences between pre-service and novice teachers, the findings of qualitative data illustrated that the majority of pedagogical beliefs were reformed. The findings indicated that several factors stimulated reformation in teachers’ beliefs; the overlooked importance of teachers’ role in materials development; lack of teaching practices in teacher education programs; cultural and contextual factors; and assessment procedure. Therefore, teachers need authority and power in educational contexts; teacher educators should specify a specific time to teaching practices to pre-determine the possible problems of the actual teaching practices in the classrooms; and a strong need for assessment practices in teacher education programs is required.

Since English didactics has a relatively short history in Norway, exploring its nature, scope, academic identity, definition, status, and raison d'être is an ineluctable necessity. This article sets out to answer a simple yet fundamental question about English didactics: Is English didactics a propaedeutic discipline or a parasitic discipline? We argue that English didactics is warranted to address three interrelated issues if it purports to establish itself as a propaedeutic discipline. First, English didactics needs to demarcate and delimit its disciplinary boundaries with other adjacent disciplines which feed into it. Second, delineating the ontological axioms and epistemological underpinnings as well as the methodological apparatus which distinguish English didactics from other closely related disciplines is warranted. Third, through invoking intellectual capital and scientific findings of other disciplines, English didactics must aim to generate its own novel theoretical and practical knowledge. This article calls for more attention to expounding and theorizing English didactics than currently conceptualized.

Fundamental changes and novel ideas have been brought into the field of English Language Teaching through introduction of postmethod and critical pedagogy. Postmethod as an alternative to methods aimed at fulfilling its triple principles of particularity, practicality, and possibility. The well-known sub-branch of postmethod, critical pedagogy, aimed at empowerment of instructors and learners, and establishment of social justice through education. Unlike theoretical aspects of these movements, practical dimensions have not received due attention, especially in eastern contexts. This qualitative investigation sought the extent EFL instructors practically adhere to the principles of these inherently western concepts in Iran, as a sample of eastern context with its own social, cultural, and academic norms. Qualitative data collection techniques were used to obtain data from the intended instructors. Qualitative data analysis laid bare the findings that postmethod and critical pedagogy are practically adopted, to a great extent, by the Iranian EFL instructors, and the pertinent principles are being put into practice enthusiastically. Powerful communication with western communities blurring cultural boundaries was deemed to be the chief reason of such strong adoption. Ironically enough, it was revealed that in general, the Iranian EFL instructors’ theoretical knowledge suffered greatly concerning postmethod and critical pedagogy. In other words, although haziness of cultural boundaries has made the room for smoothened practical realization of these trends, due attention should be paid to development of theoretical knowledge in these regards in Iranian EFL teacher training courses so as to take the utmost advantages from postmethod and critical pedagogy.

Understanding the role of positive emotions and their contributions to the learners’ overall academic success and well-being is of utmost importance. To this end, by following positive psychology and control-value theory, the researchers explored the relationship between two under-researched factors dwelling within the realm of L2 emotions and goal achievement, i.e., L2 grit and academic buoyancy.  To this end, 263 junior high school students were surveyed via L2 grit and academic buoyancy scales. The results of the analyses of correlation, regression, and MANOVA revealed that L2 grit is significantly correlated with L2 buoyancy with the strong predictive power of its underlying components. Analyses also indicated that males and females significantly differ in their level of grit. The findings imply that acknowledging the presence of grit and academic buoyancy in language learners would possibly lead to positive outcomes.

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of TBLT-synthesized collaborative dialogue in teaching writing skills to Iranian EFL learners and also to explore their teachers’ attitudes towards such an approach. Regarding the essence of the questions of the study, an explanatory sequential mixed-methods research design was employed. To this end, 100 conveniently sampled Iranian B.A. TEFL and Translation Studies students were identified as relatively homogeneous in terms of their language proficiency through administering Oxford Placement Test (OPT), and ten Iranian EFL teachers attended as the participants. The experimental group students were exposed to the synthetic approach of teaching writing. In contrast, the control group experienced conventional mainstream in the quantitative phase of the study lasting for 16-session treatments. As to the qualitative phase, a semi-structured individual interview was conducted with the participant teachers. The quantitative phase revealed that the synthetic initiative had comparatively significant impacts on the EFL students’ writing performance, and the qualitative phase showed that the teachers adopted some positive views toward the implementation of the applied synthetic approach to TBLT and CD in writing instruction. The findings offer some pedagogical implications for the stakeholders, including syllabus designers, EFL learners, and teachers, to include task-based collaborative dialogues in EFL instruction.

Despite the abundance of research on language teacher education, there is a dearth of ecologically informed instruments for measuring teacher agency. To this end, this study aims to fill this gap by designing and validating a questionnaire for assessing the agency of student teachers. Thirteen facets were identified and developed, including instructional beliefs, supportive beliefs, collaborative learning, and competence, which represent an iterational dimension. The practical-evaluative dimension is represented by opportunity to make choice, opportunity to influence, support, equality, trust, institutional context, and professional community. Long- and short-term purposes manifest projective dimension. A 22-item questionnaire on a 7-point Likert scale was developed and administered.  Altogether, 210 EFL student teachers from four branches of Farhangian University through convenience sampling participated in the survey research design study. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis was employed through AMOS 22 to examine the validity of the theoretical model. In doing so, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were administered, and the ecological framework of student teacher agency was confirmed. The results revealed that the questionnaire had an acceptable fit with the empirical set of data, suggesting that this scale has the potential to be useful in assessing student teachers’ agency and raising their awareness of the agency construct. The study has implications for policymakers regarding how the ecology of professional education may influence teachers’ practices, actions, and decision-making processes.

The current dynamic, rapidly changing labour market is influenced by the constant development of new technologies, globalisation, the changing nature of the economy, and changed demands on employees. In this context, university graduates are expected to be flexible, dynamic, and able to adapt effectively to new, rapidly changing conditions in the labour market, changes in individual job positions, and the changes and challenges that 21st-century society is undergoing. These circumstances force universities to respond to the situation as employers point to the disconnect between students’ university training and practice. According to them, students come unprepared to a contemporary working environment, their skills and knowledge not corresponding with the needs of practice. The field of study of philology is no exception in this regard. The position of the translator (in the near future) will be different, their tasks will be more diverse, and they will be required to have different competencies and skills. The translator will have to interact with other experts or participants in the translation process and will have to be a team player who is proficient in using IT. This paper focuses on the role of interpersonal skills in the development of translation competence. The first part defines key terms: knowledge, skills, and interpersonal skills; in the second one, a teaching model for specialised translation is introduced. This model also enables the monitoring of the development of interpersonal skills in the process of acquiring translation competence, while also revealing a change in the paradigm of teacher–student interaction.

The main objective of this paper is to incorporate the three Lacanian orders in Søren Brier’s cybersemiotic theory in the context Lewis Carroll’s Alice texts. As an interdisciplinary framework that emphasizes the role of the observer and its symbolically-generated hieroglyph-like universe of “signification sphere” in which any attempt at accessing the objective world of information seems nonsensical, cybersemiotic is an invaluable tool for re-visiting the three orders by which, according to Lacan, we develop our sense of self and the world. Certain elements such as dream-like states, impossible word plays, paradoxes, and nonsense in the Alice books, which follow the titular character into the fantastic realms of Wonderland and the Looking Glass World, can allow for registering the Real by disclosing the self-referential nature of language and debunking the seemingly integrated façade of an imaginary and metaphoric reality founded upon the Symbolic and the Imaginary. For an in-depth analysis of how a creatively self-reflexive handling of language can evoke a space where the three Lacanian orders emerge simultaneously as one collapses onto the other, a cybersemiotic formulation of nonsense in the Alice books is introduced as the linguistic moment in which signifier-in-isolation (the Real) and signifier-in-relation paradoxically appear on the same cognitive horizon, revealing the underlying dynamics of the signification process which involves an arbitrary development of differentiated signs rendered meaningful due to a tacit consensus agreed upon over the temporal axis.

The transitional period of the 1970s Britain being fictionalized in Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Ice Age (1977), provides the ground for theoretical discussion of the present paper that is based on the insights of Giorgio Agamben. It will inspect the way Drabble interprets socio-political issues dominant in the 1970s and the way these issues affect her outlook. In this paper, considering the figure of an excluded existence in The Ice Age, Agamben’s biopolitical insights are examined to see how they may contribute to understanding of the dark side of sovereignty and the potentiality to transform democracies into totalitarian states. Taking the precariousness of the emotional, political and, ontological faculties of “love”, “homo sacer”, and “bare life” allocated to human being by sovereignty, it offers a different view of Drabble’s subjects on love and socio-political problems, maintaining that Agamben’s account of these issues supplies an underlying structure of the form-of-life. The paper also, through the striking features of Agamben’s discourse, approaches the concept of bare life and knits it to the concepts of instrumentalism, labor, slavery, and life, and fundamentally presents the awareness of self in political view. The characters examine some potentialities that may help them to break away from the prevailing deadlocks of the era. It is eventually shown that these practices, which according to Agamben may lead to a form-of-life that is called a happy life, conclude in the exclusion and spiritual void of the individuals.

Shakespeare’s eponymous character’s movement in Richard III towards the peak of power passes through his art of simulation which is induced by seduction and annihilation. Richard’s playacting skills in feigning innocence and brotherhood while hiding villainy along with his persuasive oratory in dismantling others’ suspicions, ultimately leading to numerous murders on his behalf, entangle him in a labyrinth of a hyperreal state of being, in a Baudrillardian sense, from which no escape is possible. Richard III is seduced into a vertiginous power struggle which is but an essential form of reversibility that leads him to his own ruin. In this regard, this paper tries to study Richard III, as a character, in light of the concept of “simulacrum” in Baudrillard’s philosophy to show how he becomes the victim of a self-made loop which leads to his downfall. This study encourages similar investigations to discover hidden layers of meaning in Shakespeare's tragedies, the ones including villains as their protagonists.

This paper assumes that developing strong models of academic discourse analysis would not by itself guarantee researchers’ access to the realities of academic communication and that any development in the theory of academic discourse analysis should also be informed and equipped with developments in wider applied linguistics research methodology. The current paper proposes that the departure point of this dialogue between academic discourse theory and research methodology should be the concept of “triangulation”. While in applied linguistics research context, the concept has been defined as a research strategy aiming at developing diverse dimensions to approach the phenomena under investigation, I have argued that triangulation should be redefined and further operationalized in light of the realities of academic discourses and the very demands and desires of academic discourse researchers. To do so, a set of options including genre-based triangulation, culture-based triangulation, discipline-based triangulation, language-based triangulation, mode-based triangulation, time-based triangulation, expertise-based triangulation, analyst-based triangulation, corpus-based triangulation, and audience-based triangulation has been proposed.

Varieties of Qualitative Research Methods Selected Contextual Perspectives is a book that compiles various concepts related to qualitative research. The book has 75 chapters written by 53 authors from different parts of the world, and it is edited by three Canadian editors: Janet Mola Okoko, Scott Tunison, and Keith D. Walker, who are all associated with the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan. The editors noted that as the world becomes more interconnected, there is a need for qualitative research to become more diverse and inclusive of different ways of knowing and inquiry. The field of qualitative research has become much larger, with many nuances, varieties, complementary ways of knowing, and new methods to explore. To cover such a wide range of topics, the editors have identified the best authors who can provide reputable practice and scholarly experience on each concept or method which have been discussed in the book.