Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies
Volume:5 Issue: 2, Winter and Spring 2013

The application of critical pedagogy in educational contexts has received adequate research attention over the last decades. The main focus of this strand of research has, however, been on raising awareness of the educators. Nevertheless, little is known about the consequences of the violation of critical pedagogy principles from EFL teacher trainers'' perspectives. To begin to address this gap in research, a qualitative (phenomenological) study was carried out to explore the main consequences of violating critical pedagogy in the higher education system of Iran. The participants were 15 faculty members of TEFL and English Literature at 10 Iranian state universities. The data were collected through in-depth semi-structured face-to-face interviews and analyzed according to Radnor’s (2001) model. The results indicated that the main consequences of the violation of critical pedagogy were educational (related to teaching, learning, and testing), psychological, social, and ideological. Therefore, it was concluded that educators must follow the principles of CP in order to avoid the negative consequences and foster the learning and teaching processes more effectively.

Test method facet is one the factors which can have an influence on the test takers’ performance. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of two different response types, multiple choice cloze and multiple choice test, on the pre intermediate and intermediate test takers’ reading comprehension performance. To this end, 40 pre intermediate and intermediate learners participated in the study. To counterbalance the practice effect, the participants of the study at both pre intermediate and intermediate levels were randomly assigned into two groups. Consequently, there were two groups in each of the pre intermediate and intermediate levels which were different on the basis of the order in which they were given the tests. For each level, there were two types of tests and two test administrations. Within each level, the two groups took these two tests in a different order. For all participants of the study there were two scores based on multiple choice cloze and multiple choice tests. Two Paired sample t tests were separately run to compare the pre intermediate and intermediate test takers’ performance on multiple choice cloze and multiple choice tests. Two independent samples t tests were run to compare the pre intermediate and intermediate test takers on these two tests. There was no significant difference between the pre intermediate test takers’ performance on these two types of tests. There was a significant difference between intermediate test takers’ performance on the tests. There was no significant difference between the pre intermediate and intermediate test takers’ performance on the multiple choice cloze tests. The intermediate test takers outperformed the pre intermediate test takers only on the multiple choice tests. Based on these results it can be concluded that test methods can have an influence on the test takers’ performance, especially at higher proficiency levels and learners may need to have reached a certain level of proficiency to be able to understand the text.

Politeness is a phenomenon which is common to all cultures. Each culture has a different perception of what is polite and each language has various devices for expressing politeness. One of the important aspects of politeness which is the central focus of many studies is the polite behavior of men and women. The focus of this study is on the politeness strategies of males and females from different aspect. The central aim of this paper is to examine the impact of gender on the politeness strategies of the speakers to see whether females speak more politely to females than to males or not. Therefore a questionnaire was designed based on Discourse Completion Test which is originally developed for comparing different speech act realization patterns. The questionnaire was distributed to 30 females and 30 males. The result indicated that generally women speak more politely to women than to men; however males speak more politely to females than to males. Therefore it can be concluded that the gender of the listener is an important factor on politeness behaviors of the speakers.

Naming as an inseparable sign of a country’s language has attracted the attention of many linguists to formulate and test hypotheses regarding the culture and language of the people of a certain area. Iran appears like a proper destination for conducting a research focusing on naming based on several factors such as geography or chronology. The present article aims to take a specific look at the impact of political era (sociopolitical factors) in addition to dialect over naming practices. Chronological data is gathered from 5 politically significant consecutive periods. Separately, 5 districtsare chosenspeaking4 different native dialects to examine the second hypothesis regarding the influence of dialect on naming. 50 most popular names were collected on the two aforementioned different bases and analysis was conducted by SPSS software. The results revealed that time with concentration on political spans did not form an influential factor except for minor fluctuations. The other hypothesis regarding the factor of dialect is rejected for male names while femalesdo confirm a limited amount consistency of dialect and name choice in most of the areas.

The present study aims at discussing whether the metaphors in the Qur’an, revealed more than 1400 years ago, are dead, moribund or live and how these three types of metaphors were translated in English and Persian versions of the Qur’an. The results reveal that among 70 metaphors examined, while only 32% are live metaphors, about 67% are moribund or inactive, and none of the cases are completely dead. Furthermore, based on Newmark’s procedures, only in 15.21% of the procedures used in both English and Persian translations of live metaphors there is no image while in 84.78% of them an image is present. On the other hand, 43.26% of the procedures used in translations of moribund metaphors transfer an image whereas 56.73% of them omit the image though they are not dead. Yet the point is that because the majority of Qur’anic metaphors are inactive, when treated by the translators as dead metaphors, the omission of image in this large number leads to diminishing the literary style of the target texts.

This study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between teachers’ personality type (feeling vs. thinking) and speaking skill of pre-intermediate EFL students in Iranian context. Twelve teachers and forty eight students from a local language institute participated in the study. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an instrument based on Jung’s personality theory, was taken from teachers and students were administered Preliminary English Test (PET) interview. SPSS was used to calculate the required analyses. The results showed a statistically significant positive relationship between teachers’ personality type and learners’ speaking skill. It was also indicated that there is a statistically significant difference between speaking skill of learners taught by feeling teachers vs. thinking teachers. In fact students in thefeeling group had higher speaking scores than their counterparts in the thinking group.

The study of lexical bundles, among types of text analysis, is gaining importance over the others in the last century. The present study employed a frequency-based analysis approach to the use of lexical bundles. The discussion section of 60 political science articles, with corpora around 253,063 words were investigated in three aspects of structure, form, and function of lexical bundles. The present study selected its data pool out of scholarly articles each one published qualified journals in the field of political sciences. One part of the data pool was made up of 30 articles written by American native speakers. The second half of the data comprised the 30 articles written by Iranian scholars in political sciences. The findings showed that native and Persian-speaking writers employed the same forms of lexical bundles, and there are significant differences concerning the nativeness and functions. Bearing in mind the findings of the present study, material developers would think of the possibility of the addition of lexical clusters into the materials. It can similarly be valuable for the development of the second language writing strategies, for those who need to write in academic contexts especially political contexts.

From sociolinguistics perspective, the concept of ‘community of practice’ is considered as a theory of learning as well as a theory of identity. It means that the community of practice may shape and reshape the identity of members of the community through providing them with situated learning or learning environment. This study, therefore, is to clarify the salient learning-based features of the language teaching community of practice that might formulate the identity of language teachers. To this end, the study examined how learning situations in two communities of practice i.e., English and Arabic developed the professional identity of language teachers. The results of the semi-structure interview with 5 language teachers (3 English and 2 Arabic) showed that there were some significant differences between English and Arabic language teaching community of practice in terms of the situated learning activities they provide for language teachers to develop their professional identity. As a result, since the community of practice can be considered as a potential curriculum in the broadest sense that which may be learned by newcomers with legitimate peripheral access, it can be considered as a main source of identity formation of language teachers. The findings of the study can be used to better understand the nature of being a professional language teacher in non-native contexts and has implications, on the one hand, for novice and experienced language teachers to open their perceptions to the ideas from non-language centers (e.g., EIL, critical pedagogy, and globalization) and, on the other hand, for teacher educators to review the content of the teacher training courses.