Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice
Volume:6 Issue: 12, Spring - Summer 2013

It is generally recognized that many second language learners have difficulties with cohesion in academic texts.  Writing seems to be the most difficult subject for many students. To produce good writing, it is necessary to know how to organize Theme and Rheme in a text. Thematic structure as an important feature in textual metafunction plays a significant role in promoting the textual coherence. This research is concerned with the insights presenting the relationship between theme and rheme derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics. Halliday (1994) claimed that the structuring of language as a message is realized in the thematic structures of the constituent clauses of a text. To Halliday, the basic unit for thematic analysis is the clause. Thereby, this study was an attempt to compare different thematic types and thematic progression patterns in EFL students' academic writing texts. For this purpose, the researcher selected 30 MA students of English language teaching as the participants of the study after administering a TOEFL test and excluding the outliers. Each participant was required to write three different types of argumentative, process and cause & affect compositions. The collected data were analyzed according to the Thematization process from the textual metafunction aspects. The results showed some differences in the thematic structure of the different types of compositions. The findings of this study have some implications to the EFL students. They can learn to perform the same analysis in their own writings; thus improving cohesion in their own texts. Theme/rheme plays a major role in organizing the message and in enabling it to be communicated and understood clearly.

The ability to write effectively is becoming progressively important and instruction in writing is assuming an increasing role in second and foreign language education. Students’ writing abilities have been tested through various writing tasks. Independent tasks of writing or writing-only tasks have been utilized to test students’ writing ability; however, they have been criticized for their lack of authenticity and validity and integrated tasks of writing have been proposed as an alternative. In this regard, this study attempted to examine the impacts of reading-to-write and writing-only tasks on the writing ability of Iranian EFL learners. The main participants of the study were 68 intermediate-level EFL learners divided into two homogeneous groups: experimental and control. After the writing pretest, the experimental group was given reading-to-write tasks for 15 sessions, while the control group was provided with writing-only tasks. Eventually, a writing posttest was administered. The statistical analyses of the collected data revealed a statistically significant difference between the writing ability of the participants of the two groups. To be precise, reading-to-write tasks were found to be more effective than writing-only tasks. The data collected via the reading-to-write questionnaire was likewise analyzed with the results showing a unanimous preference for reading-to-write tasks.

Following Swales’s (1981) works on genre analysis, studies on different sections of research articles in different languages and fields abound. This paper compares Applied Linguistics  research article abstracts published in Oxford University and Islamic Azad University of Tabriz in English using Swales’s (1981-1990) move structure model and Halliday’s (1994) description of transitivity processes. One hundred and forty eight English research article abstracts were analyzed at macro and micro level based on the Swales’s model (IMRD) and transitivity system. The results demonstrated that the four structural moves of Swales and transitivity processes of Halliday were evident in both abstract sets but were differently distributed. The research suggests pedagogical implications for TEFL practitioners, especially for the writing skill and for the preparing research article abstracts (RAAs).

Second language (L2) communication strategies (CSs) have traditionally been dealt with through either interactional or psychological perspectives. However, this paper is a critical attempt to question the status of the particular kinds of psycholinguistic and interactional approaches that currently dominate the field of second language acquisition (SLA). In this way, it expands the significance of CSs by examining the other important dimensions of language within L2 contexts that affect/are affected by CSs. The new paths to dealing with CSs proposed in this paper rely on three aspects. First, the abundant use of CSs in non-native teacher talk within L2 classroom contexts is dealt with. Second, the neglected role of discourse-based CSs in previous studies is taken into account. Third, the particular relevance of CSs to noticing function of output hypothesis is considered. By challenging prevailing views and concepts, and by critically examining theoretical assumptions, the ultimate goal is to argue for a re-conceptualization of CSs within SLA research.

Emotional Intelligence is a challenging topic in the area of language research. Among other factors that might manipulate translators’ mind, their Emotional Intelligence level might be an influential element, too. The present research focused on examining the relationship between emotional intelligence and the students’ translation ability. It was carried out among 59 translation students in the Payam-Noor University in Iran, Mazandaran. After homogenizing the sample, the sample size was reduced to 32. The participants were required to translate some paragraphs of the short story 'A rose for Emily' and answer the Bar-On EQ-I questionnaire (1997). The results indicated that there was no relationship between EQ and the learners’ translation ability but some of the main subscales of emotional intelligence (i.e., problem solving, happiness, and flexibility) had statistically weak relationship with the learners’ translation ability. The results also showed that the combination of EQ and gender were positively correlated.

The focus of this study is to investigate the comparative effect of teaching grammar through interpretation tasks and pictorial clues on EFL learners’ writing accuracy. The participants were 60 female intermediate EFL learners with age range of 21-35 who were divided into two experimental groups after being homogenized by a piloted PET test. In the piloted researcher-made pre-test, the researcher required the participants to write a narration and also complete another narration with some blanks with provided words using grammatical points they were going to be taught. After the treatment phase, another researcher-made parallel form of the pre-test was administered as the post-tests. To investigate the research question of the study, an ANCOVA was conducted. The results revealed that there was not any significant difference between the performances of either group. In other words, the mentioned ways of teaching grammar had equal effect on the learners’ writing accuracy.

One of the main aims of the education agenda in the last decade has been to develop critical thinking and autonomy among children, in order to educate them to be activeand involved persons in society.  The present study sought to examine the relationship between Iranian male and female EFL learners’ autonomy and their critical thinking ability. To this aim, the researcher used a language proficiency test, a questionnaire of autonomy, and a questionnaire of critical thinking. The study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, 242 third-grade high school students of Urmia city were provided with a Key English Test (KET). Afterwards, 162 of them were selected as the homogenizedgroup and were given a questionnaire of autonomy and questionnaire of critical thinking. Finally, the results of 144(because some of participants did not complete their critical thinking questionnaire) participants were analyzed. The Pearson coefficient of correlation revealed that Iranian EFL learners’ autonomy and critical thinking were significantly related. The findings offered important pedagogical implications for teachers, learners, and syllabus designers.

Expressing doubt and certainty in academic writings requires a cautious use of hedges and boosters. Despite their importance in academic writing, little is known about how they are used in monolingual and bilingual male and female EFL learners’ academic writings. To shed some lights on the issue, the present study investigated the use of hedges and boosters in research articles written by monolingual and bilingual male and female EFL learners. Based on the collected corpus from twelve academic research articles, the overall rhetorical and categorical distribution of hedges and boosters were identified across four sections of these articles (Abstract, Introduction, Discussion, and Conclusion). The results evinced that the overall distribution of hedges and boosters in research articles written by bilinguals was higher than that of monolinguals. Moreover, there were significant differences between male and female EFL learners in the use of hedges and boosters in their academic research articles. These findings not only paved the way for further studies in the use of hedges and boosters but they also presented some beneficial implications for teaching of academic writing to EFL learners.

This qualitative study is conducted to answer four questions: First, whether there is a difference between the grammatical competence development of a group of children aged 2.6 (two years and six months) and a group of children aged 3.6 (three years and six months). Second, whether there is a significant difference between the two age groups concerning their Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). Third, whether there is a relationship between the children’s MLU and that of the caretakers. Fourth, whether the normal limit proposed by Brown (1973) is observed in the acquisition of Persian. To this end, language samples of six children and their caretakers’ were recorded during a six-week period and studied afterwards. The results indicated neither an unequivocal yes nor a definitive no answer to the question of age difference and grammatical competence development, that is to say, in some cases there was a difference whereas in some other cases there was no difference at all. As for the difference between the two age groups concerning their MLU, there was a significant difference between the two. However, no significant relationship was found between the children’s MLU and their caretakers’. Finally, the limit proposed by Brown (1973) was observed in the acquisition of Persian.

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic elements that index different relations and coherence between units of talk. Most research on the development of these forms has focused on conversations rather than narratives. This article examines age and medium effects on use of various discourse markers in pre-school children. Fifteen normal Iranian monolingual children, male and female, participated in this study. They were divided into three age groups (4-5, 5-6, 6-7). Two tests, story production and story re-production (retelling), based on two different story books were used to elicit the children's narratives.  This study shows that the functions of DMs within the oral narrative context follow neither from their usual meanings nor from their usual discourse functions in other contexts. These markers just help to continue the narrative procedure. Narrative experts illustrate how DMs initiate and conclude narrative action, how they guide listeners to follow their interruption and sequence of narrative elements. The results showed no specific difference on the kind of DM being used regarding the age of the participants; furthermore, in terms of the number of utterances and also DMs, children overall behaved differently when they were asked to retell a story, comparing to the time when they were asked to produce a story.