Teaching English Language
Volume:1 Issue: 3, Summer 2007

The use of verbal humor in an L2 class has often been a great challenge to the teachers and materialsdevelopers, as it is felt to require great linguistic, social and cultural competence. This feeling has led the instructors to include as little verbal humor aspossible in EFL classrooms and textbooks. The present research was an attempt to help FL practitioners make out manageable ways of implementing verbal humor appropriate in an EFL curriculum. It aimed to examine the appropriacy and effectiveness of verbal humorinstances to be implemented in L2 classrooms. To this end 225 participants (56 male and 169 female) selected from undergraduate students of English Literature, English Translation and TEFL were given a questionnaire containing 40 short English humoroustexts which randomly enjoyed a violation of Gricean Maxims. The results of this study demonstrate that there is a relationship between the humorous language and proficiency (r=.21, n=225, p<.01). The results also suggest that humorous texts with the violation of Relevance maxim (and, to some extent, Quantity maxim) are appreciated more by the EFL learners. The findings also indicate that women enjoy humor as much as men do.

The current study aimed at constructing a test of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) as a substitution for the English proficiency test of Postgraduate TEFL Admission examination (PTA) of Islamic Azad University. To this end, the study was instigated with a thorough needs analysis, by means of questionnaires, interviews, and observations, to determine the requirements of the postgraduate TEFL course. Overall, 294 subjects participated in this study. Seventy four postgraduate TEFL students and twenty university professors participated in the needs analysis phase of the study. Subsequent to the analysis and interpretation of the obtained data, the Test of English for Specific Purposes (TESP) was constructed based on the requirements of the program. TESP was put into trial by 200 subjects in three different pilot studies, each of which led to modification of the form and the content of the test. The scores obtained on the final edition of TESP proved to be highly reliable and both a priori and a posteriori evidence were gathered regarding the validity of TESP in addition to the convergent and divergent validity evidence that were provided for the questionnaires of the needs analysis. Following this process of standardization, TESP was compared with the English proficiency test of PTA in predicting the Grade Point Average (GPA) scores of postgraduate TEFL students. Multiple regression models were drawn for the English proficiency test of PTA and TESP as the predictor variables and GPA as the predicted variable. The results indicated that TESP was a significant predictor of postgraduate TEFL students’ GPA scores, whereas PTA was excluded from the regression model.

This study attempted to capitalize on hedges in English academic abstracts written by three groups of researchers, namely native speakers of English, native speakers of Persian and native speakers of other languages. To this end, a corpus of 552 thesis and dissertation abstracts from nine disciplines was selected and their hedges were computed. The recorded hedges were then classified according to the established models, and the preferred hedging types in each rhetorical section were determined.Results of the analysis demonstrated that conventional hedges, hedges by passive voice and hedges by putting oneself at a distance from the data were the predominant types of hedges employed in the abstracts. The analysis could hardly show disciplinary and group variations in terms of the incorporation of hedging devices. The study suggests sufficient attention be paid to descriptions of linguistic and rhetorical devices in English if non-native speakers wish to publish their academic writings in scholarly journals.

This study investigates the relative effects of two types of input modification – linguistic and interactional – on Iranian EFL students'' reading comprehension. Eight English readingpassages were presented to 248 students in one of the three forms: unmodified (U), linguistically modified (LM), mostly in the direction of elaboration, and interactionally modified (IM). The students were also divided into two proficiencylevel groups, i.e. more proficient (MP) and less proficient (LP) groups. Students'' comprehension of the passages was measured through a 50-item multiple-choice test which was the same for all the six groups. The data were analyzed by a 2-by-3 analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results show that interactional modifications improve students'' reading comprehension scores better than linguistic modifications at both proficiency levels. This suggests that linguisticmodifications – even if they are made in the direction of elaboration as suggested by recent studies (Oh, 2001; Urano, 2002; Yano et al., 1994) – do not facilitate readingcomprehension as effectively as interactional modifications do. Therefore, it is recommended that instead of making texts comprehensible through commonly-practicedtechniques of simplification or elaboration, teachers employ authentic texts, but make them comprehensible through creating interactional modifications.

Reading specialists have already argued for the existence of content and formal schemata. Anderson (1980) defines schemata as ‘..., complex, units of knowledge that organize much of what we know about general categories of objects, classes of events,…’. Research has shown that stories have schematic structures and that readers employ them to both facilitate and enhance comprehension and recall. The most recent story schema model, proposed by Hatch (1992), includes ‘an abstract, an orientation, astory line, a resolution, and a coda’. In order to test the adequacy of Hatch''s model, seven popular American short stories were selected and the formal schema ofeach story was represented in the form of a tree diagram. Results demonstrated the inadequacy of Hatch''s Model for the natural, relatively long, short stories. As a result, two more elements were added to complement the model.

One of the characteristics of children’s literature is that the stories in this genre intensely involve the reader (the child), and the more they make her/him identify with the character(s), the more the reader enjoys the stories. One of the reasons for the popularity of Harry Potter stories lies in the fact that they evoke a psychological response in the readers by addressing their normal sense of fear and anxiety, hence creating a pleasurable tension while they are reading the book.The present study examines this pleasurable tension in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling from a psychological point of view. Although the study refers to the responses of some children to the book at some points, it is not based on Reader-Response Theory. To invite science to the realm of literature, the approach relies both on child psychiatry and human anxiety in general discussed by a few psychologists who are not of course literary scholars. The aim of this study is both to know our children better, especially their normal fears and the way their fears grow and give way from one form to another, and to evaluate Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone one more time, but from a new point of view.

One impression a reader may get after reading Conrad’s Lord Jim is that Jim is an abnormal kind in psychology. The most likely disorder seems to be narcissism; therefore, numerating the attributes of people with this disorder is helpful in verifying thisprobability. The most widely validated features among the patients with narcissism are as follow: sense of self-importance, sense of uniqueness not only about problems but also about friends, overestimation of one’s own achievements, need for constant attentionand admiration, fantasies of great success, having no enjoyment other than the received tributes and fancied attainments, lack of empathy, and fear of failure. The evidence drawn to attention from the text as well as those interpretations and examples used by other critics justify Jim’s conformity to these distinct characteristics. The outcome of these separate features would be an integrated picture of Jim as a narcissist regarding abnormal psychology.