Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice
Volume:5 Issue: 10, Spring - Summer 2012

As an integrative component of textual structure, formulaic expressions (FEs) play a key role in communicating the message and comprehending the text. Furthermore, interlingually contrastive features of FEs add to their both significance and complexity of their instruction. Given these facts, this study was an attempt to explore a sound mechanism on how to teach FEs; whether an explicit or CA-based approach to FEs instruction could entail various achievements among EFL learners’ reading ability. To this end, three groups of Iranian EFL learners, identified as homogeneous based on Nelson Proficiency Test, were classified into one control and two experimental (i.e. explicit and CA-based instruction) ones. They were exposed to conventional, explicit and CA-based instructions of a set of selected FEs developed into and presented in the form of an instructional handout. Their Knowledge of reading was also tested based on a researcher-made diagnostic test prior to the experiment. Both quantitative and qualitative paradigms were employed to measure both the achievements and the extent of contrast between Persian and English languages in terms of FEs. The former analysis revealed significance difference among the groups in terms of instruction type effectiveness; both explicit and CA-based instruction groups outperformed the control group; on the contrary, no statistically significant difference was revealed between the experimental groups. Additionally, the latter paradigm revealed differences and mismatches between Persian and English FEs in terms of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic parameters. The findings could be insightful for EFL instructors, learners, textbook writers, and syllabus designers to take into account issues like these in their pedagogical programs.

Task-based language teaching, which requires learners to transact tasks resembling their real life language needs, demands language learners to perform planning at different stages of their learning. Since various types of tasks can be used in task-based instruction, the present study examined the effect of task types and various participatory structures during pre-task planning on the quality of learners' writing performance, (i.e., accuracy). Towards this end, 120 intermediate EFL students were randomly assigned to 3 experimental groups and one control group. While the experimental groups were subjected to different pre-task planning conditions, (i.e., individual, pair, and group), the control group performed tasks without any planning. During the treatment, they experienced task modeling, presentation and completion. A factorial design was followed in the present study, and the collected data were analyzed through ANOVAs that revealed task type and pre-task planning condition influenced the writing accuracy of the participants in a way that resulted in greater accuracy in the decision-making task in the experimental groups, thereby ensuring the effectiveness of the treatment in mitigating the long-standing problem of EFL learners in achieving higher levels of accuracy when a specific task type is concerned.

Lewis (1993) recognized significance of word combinations including collocations by presenting lexical approach. Because of the crucial role of collocation in vocabulary acquisition, this research set out to evaluate the rate of collocations in Iranian EFL learners' writing production across L1 and L2. In addition, L1 interference with L2 collocational use in the learner' writing samples was studied. To achieve this goal, 200 Persian EFL learners at BA level were selected. These participants were taking paragraph writing and essay writing courses in two successive semesters. As for the data analysis, mid-term, final exam, and also the assignments of L2 learners were evaluated. Because of the nominal nature of the data, chi-square test was utilized for data analysis. Then, the rate of lexical and grammatical collocations was calculated. Results showed that the lexical collocations outnumbered the grammatical collocations. Different categories of lexical collocations were also compared with regard to their frequencies in EFL writing production. The rate of the verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations appeared to be the highest and noun-verb collocations the lowest. The results also showed that L1 had both positive and negative effect on the occurrence of both grammatical and lexical collocations.

Like conversation and other modes of communication, writing is a rich medium for gender performance. In fact, writing functions to construct the disciplines as well as the gender of its practitioners. Despite the significance of author gender, as one constitutive dimension of any writing, it has been relatively under-researched. One way, by means of which author gender is practiced, and revealed in written discourse, is the incorporation and use of metadiscoursal categories. Examining 20 applied linguistics research articles (10 written by native male English writers and 10 written by native female English writers), the present study sought to examine whether male and female native English writers differed in their use of metadiscoursal elements. For this purpose, Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse was employed as an analytical framework to identify the type of metadiscoursal elements. The results of Independent samples t-test showed that English male and female writers did not differ significantly in their overall use of metadiscourse; but, significant differences were observed in categorical distribution of metadiscoursal elements. The findings of the study can provide a sound basis for the development of pedagogical materials.

The present study set out to investigate the effect of teaching substitution as a kind of grammatical cohesion on the true identification of confusing substitution elements with cohesive or non-cohesive roles in different contexts and also the production of modal, reporting and conditional contexts through clausal substitution acquaintance. To this end, the following procedures were taken. First 120 male and female EFL students were selected from Iranshahr Azad University. Having administered the language proficiency test, researchers selected 80 students as intermediate subjects according to their TOEFL band scores. First, pretests of cohesion identification (substitution) and production of modal, reporting and conditional environments were administered to both control and experimental groups. Then, the experimental group was exposed to the teaching of the above-said above-mentioned cohesive device. Finally, post-tests of substitution elements’ identification and modal, reporting and conditional contexts’ production through clausal substitution familiarity were administered. The results showed that cohesive device treatment helped students on the true identification of substitution elements. Another finding proved that EFL students might have no difficulty in learning certain rules or classification of rules and application of their clausal substitution knowledge in creating modal, reporting and conditional contexts. Our findings can have implications for the field of language learning and teaching.

The original impetus for this cross-linguistic study came from a need to explore the effect of cultural factors and generic conventions on the use and distribution of metadiscourse within a single genre. To this end, the study as a contrastive rhetoric research, examined a corpus of 60 newspaper editorials (written in English and Persian) culled from 10 elite newspapers in America and Iran. Based on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, both interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources were analyzed. The results disclosed that genre conventions had a determining role in the writers’ choice of some metadiscourse resources that contributed to some similarities in the use and distribution of metadiscourse resources across English and Persian data. In addition, some differences were found between two sets of editorials which were attributed to cultural/linguistic backgrounds of both groups of editorialists. The interactional category and attitude markers proved to be the predominant metadiscourse category and subcategory in newspaper editorials genre. Overall, the findings suggested that metadiscourse has a decisive role in the construction of persuasion in newspaper editorials genre.

Media in general and news in particular constitute indispensable parts of modern life. TV news which contains visual elements in addition to the verbal aspects was used as the corpus of this study. In fact, this research culled out the ideologies of Iranian national television in presenting different issues. To be more precise, three internationally-significant pieces of news reports were chosen: one positive to “Us”, one hostile to “Others”, and one neutral. Then, these news reports were analyzed in detail and their lexical items, grammatical structures, and rhetorical figures were compared to find out about the differences. The results of the study showed that these three reports were presented to the audience via totally different strategies and ideologically-laden words were used to convey positive and negative meanings. In addition, the visual elements (angles, gaze, and distance) corroborated the findings of the verbal sections. The findings of this study show that lexical and grammatical choices are made purposefully in the media. So, it can be said that the results of this research contribute to the fields of linguistics, semiotics, and media.

Grammatical Metaphor (GM) is one of the fresh language phenomena introduced by Halliday (1985) in the framework of functional grammar. Thompson (2004) states that the salient source of GM would be ‘Nominalization’ where a noun form attempts to represent a verb form or in other words, a verb form with its different process is represented in a noun form. He continues that any wording is ought to be either metaphorical or congruent wording. In this study the story of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was explored in search of GMs deployed throughout the first two chapters.  This study tended to identify the instances of nominalization types of GM in the first two chapters of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and offer the congruent wording.  As the next step, the congruent wordings were compared with metaphorical wording in order to find out the lexical density of each wording. The lexical density was obtained by Concordance software. The result of study illustrated , in a very crystal-clear way, the advantage of GM in adult writing which is stated to be one of the noticeable points regarding GM by Halliday (1985).The result obtained statistically revealed that  the deployment of GM increases the lexical density, which again was claimed by Halliday (2004) as one of the other salient points about GM. Based on the findings of this study, some implications can be drawn for academic writing and reading as well as for teachers involved in writing and reading pedagogy.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of teaching communication strategies on students’ self-efficacy in speaking in content-based courses in Iranian EFL context. To this end, 30 students in two content-based classes, one as the experimental group and another as the control group, in SAMA private junior high school school in Tabriz, participated in this study. Communication strategy instruction was taught explicitly over a period of 16 one-hour sessions to the experimental group, while the control group didn’t receive any explicit communication strategy teaching. Data on the learners’ self-efficacy in speaking were collected through a researcher made questionnaire. The results of the data analysis using ANCOVA revealed the positive effect of teaching communication strategies (CSs) on students’ self efficacy in speaking in content-based courses in Iranian EFL context. The findings of this study have important implications for material developers for designing activities involving communication strategies and for teacher training programs for teaching communication strategies to improve learners’ self-efficacy regarding speaking skill.

Controversy has not been yet resolved among researchers in second language research over the pedagogical efficacy of feedback in enhancing various features of learners’ writing skill. Research findings highlighting the significance of interactive tasks and learners’ engagement in improving the learning process stimulated the present study, the purpose of which was to explore the effect of task-supported interactive feedback on the accuracy, fluency, and organization of seventy two Iranian English major sophomores at Islamic Azad University-Mashhad Branch. It was hypothesized that engaging learners in both tasks and providing feedback would enhance their writing performance. The participants in three intact classes were randomly assigned to three groups: a control group, with no task (NTG), and two experimental groups: the task-supported group (TG), and the task-supported group with interactive feedback (TFG). Four one way analyses of variance tests were run on the research data indicated that the apparent gain in the task-supported interactive group over the other groups did not reach significance level. However, the TG group outperformed the control group in all three aspects of writing. The findings have pedagogical implications and can be interpreted in terms of socio-cultural characteristics of Iranian students.