Journal of Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature: Dynamics and Advances
Volume:6 Issue: 2, Summer-Autumn 2018

The decision by the Ministry of Higher Education in Iran to revise and update the subjects for the MA and PhD courses in TESOL should pave the way towards a more comprehensive understanding of teaching English to speakers of other languages. The Ministry’s revisions can be seen in line with the English language teacher’s awareness. Awareness of context in social sciences and humanities should have significant consequences for us in TESOL. One of the consequences, for instance, is our need for tracing the history of TESOL in Iran (or any area and country), and the building of an archive, without which TESOL in Iran maybe being trapped in the vicious circle of doing experiments that do not relate to our situation in a useful way. The Ministry’s new subjects should provide us with an invaluable opportunity to experience new horizons in researching TESOL. Scientific attitude we all have been brought up with has led to an epistemology that does not seem adequate in today’s world anymore. It is not adequate because it is reductionist in nature; it sees the social phenomena relating to one another solely on the basis of cause and effect relationship; it treats human beings as objects and it does not leave room for competing epistemologies. The new materials should be regarded as a platform to throw us into the unknown world of social world whose existence for us is a matter of interpretation rather than description. Science and critique in the sense we have learned and used them so far have turned into fixed standard curricula preventing us from experiencing an authentic life. All over the world, Englishes are learned by people wishing to communicate with one another for different reasons, and English teachers should see what they can do to help them in this regard.

Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics & Intercultural Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK where he directs PhD programs in Education and Applied Linguistics and has been the Head of The Graduate School between 2002 and 2017. Professor Holliday got his bachelors’ degree in Sociology from London University. He began his career in English Language Education in Iran in the early 1970’s at the British Council Centre in Tehran, and then managed a small British Council curriculum unit in Ahwaz. After completing his master’s degree in Applied Linguistics at Lancaster University, he set up educational projects in Syria and Egypt between 1980 and 1990, which provided the experience of the global politics of English and the ethnographic material that informed his PhD thesis at Lancaster University in 1991. Professor Holliday supervises PhD students in critical qualitative studies in the sociology and cultural politics of English language education and intercultural communication, where he has published widely including Understanding Intercultural Communication: Negotiating a Grammar of Culture (2nd Ed., 2018), Intercultural Communication: An Advanced Resource Book for Students (3rd Ed., 2016), Doing and Writing Qualitative Research (3rd Ed., 2016), (En)countering Native Speakerism: Global Perspectives (2015), Intercultural Communication and Ideology (2011) and The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language (2005). JALDA has hosted Professor Holliday in a scholarly conversation with Dr. Bahram Behin, who himself is a fanatic upholder of Holliday’s thoughts in conducting courses in the socio-culture of English language teaching.

The basic assumption in applied linguistics is that the expert disciplinary study of linguistics can yield insights which can be applied to an understanding of how language is actually experienced, and so provide a principled basis for intervention by proposing ways of resolving the problems that people’s experience in using and learning language gives rise to. But the validity of this assumption depends on how is expertise in linguistics to be defined, and how far, as it has been conventionally practiced, can it claim to account for the reality of how individuals experience language? What, for example, does it tell us, and not tell us, about how users and learners think and feel about their own and other peoples’ language, and what effect their attitude has on their using and learning? These are crucial questions about the scope of linguistics and its applied linguistic relevance since they have an immediate and urgent bearing on the problematic issues that applied linguistics would claim to address of how communication is enacted across different lingua-cultural and ideological borders in a globalized world. Since this global communication is predominantly mediated by the expedient use of English as a lingua franca, it raises the applied linguistic question that this talk will be centrally concerned with of what pedagogic implications this has for how English is conventionally taught as a foreign language subject.

Learning the third language is one of the issues that has attracted much attention in recent years. In this research the influence of Persian language as a mother tongue and English as a second language on the correct orthography of French as a third language is studied. This study investigates three hypotheses of transfer, L1 Transfer Hypothesis, L2 Status Factor, and Cumulative Enhancement Model. We examined the role of voice and text in correct orthography of the third language. This study accounts for the acquisition of coda consonant clusters of French by Persian EFL learners. Twenty-two participants of two levels of pre and upper-intermediate of English proficiency and beginner level French proficiency were selected. In this study, first we measured the level of learners' English knowledge by the Oxford Quick Placement Test and then we studied the effectiveness of the first and second languages on the third language learning by the Production test, and the Grammatically Judgment Test. Results of the transfer effect provided a major role for the ‘CEM’. The overall results of the two groups’ performance were not significant which in turn reflected the fact that L2 proficiency had no effect on the acquisition of French orthography.

By the force of our social constructivist gyrations, we have developed glimpses of a social, cultural and historical dimension in which the discourse of science operates. These glimpses indicate us how much the discourse of science is part of complex webs of human’s social interaction. Recognizing this social, cultural and historical nature, the present paper looks at the way informal elements are penetrating into the discourse of science. Working on a corpus of scientific journal articles, scientific magazine articles and scientific newspaper articles, the present article shows that regardless of their generic qualities, communicative purposes and the target audience, all scientific texts included in the three corpora are vulnerable to the penetration of informal elements. However, the differences in terms of communicative purposes and target audiences affect the way informal elements are distributed in the three corpora. Providing a deeper sociolinguistic explanation on the observed variations, the paper is concluded with some implications of the findings for ESP pedagogy.

The purpose of this study was to elicit lived images about English learning from male and female Iranian English language learners. Ninety male and 210 female language learners from Iranian universities and language institutes chose from an inventory of images and provided own images. The 781 valid responses by males and 1903 valid responses by females were listed as images. The researcher examined the images and slightly summarized them under more generic labels. The number and percentages of males and females who offered each image were tabulated. The images by each gender were also arranged in descending order and their rank differences were calculated. The examination of the types of images and the frequencies of participants who chose or provided them offer patterns which reveal their conceptual models and lessons which can be of value to language teaching practitioners. Some of these patterns and insights are briefly discussed but many are left to the judgment, deliberation, and reflection and practical wisdom of the readers.

In the field of multimedia translation, one of the trickiest challenges relates to translation of children’s cartoons. Animated cartoons may appear puerile but they can play an essential role in child’s mental and emotional development and education. Dubbing and subtitling are the main modes of animated cartoon translations. Each of them interferes into the original version to some extent in order to make it sound natural, educational and entertaining to the target audience. With the use of descriptive method, the present study investigates the translation of twelve animated cartoon titles from English into Persian in 1980s to early 2000s and compares them in terms of factual beliefs and evaluative beliefs which are proposed by van Dijk (1998). While the former refers to the shared knowledge of the society, the latter is concerned with judgments and values, which constitute ideologies. When a factual belief from source society is replaced by an evaluative belief or opinion in target society, it can be considered as a false factual belief. The results demonstrated that in translation of animated cartoons titles, Iranian translators frequently preferred free translation since they changed factual beliefs to false one or replaced them by evaluative ideologies. The effects of such changes on children are inevitable.

AbstractThe study of drama is one of the most interesting, thought- provoking and pleasing experiences in the field of English literature, but it seems there are some reasons why it may not look like to be so for some of the students of drama in the context of Iranian universities. It seems, first of all, there are some plays which appear baffling when students read them for the first time; secondly, some of expert university teachers follow their fixed sanctified method of drama teaching when they encounter so dissimilar plays. This paper explores innovative and resourceful teaching methods for teaching of drama in the context of Iranian universities. The purpose of this paper is to provide drama teachers with ideas and suggestions for responding to any classic, modern, and postmodern plays that they might encounter as part of the course at university. The present research paper gains significance as the findings may shed more light on groundbreaking and ingenious teaching methods for teaching of drama in the context of Iranian universities. Keywords: drama, drama teaching, ancient Greek drama, medieval drama, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, modern and postmodern drama

The present study investigated the effect of extensive and intensive listening on the accuracy of tense use among EFL learners in Iran. It was based on pre-test post-test with intact classes. According to the purpose of the study, a sample (n = 60) of homogeneous participants were selected. From among the 6 intact classes, one experimental group (n = 19, 9 male and 10 female participants) was identified to take intensive listening method as treatment, another experimental group (n = 20, 12 male and 8 female participants) was identified to take extensive listening as a treatment, and a control group (n = 21, 9 male and 12 female participants) was identified in order to not take intensive listening or extensive listening activities. All groups of the study were given pre-test of verb tense usage in order to measure their grammatical knowledge in verb tense prior to the treatments of the study. After finishing twenty five sessions of treatments for all groups, a post-test including verb tense was given to the participants. The data gathered from the study were compared through SPSS. It was found that extensive listening and intensive listening had positive effects on the accuracy of tense use among EFL learners in Iran. In addition it was found that none of intensive listening group and extensive listening group outperformed each other and there was not any significant difference between these two groups' performances.

Colonialism has been practiced by many countries in the last centuries or so. The kind of relationship between the colonizers and colonized has had mutual effects on the culture, identity, and many more aspects of the two countries. This paper deals with the concept of colonialism from both inner and outer views regarding Harold Pinter’s Caretaker and Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease with some references to Bhabhi's ideas respectively. Basing its method on content and text analysis, it reveals that the kind of colonialism going on regarding human attitudes, identity, and individual independence between Nigeria and England which is indicated by Achebe on the one hand as an example of outer colonialism, may be the inspiration for a paragon of inner colonialism in England portrayed in Pinter’s work on the other hand. The novelty of the paper’s illustration of the theme would be promising for further analysis and search.

Mindful learning seems to be a theory of learning with a number of applications and implications in the realm of methodology and second language acquisition. It stands against the mindless, or rote, learning which makes the students passive, parroting some cliché with no real use in real life. In essence, a mindful approach provides students with noble opportunities to overcome the learning obstacles through discovering new perspectives. Mindfulness requires the students rely on their own abilities and experiences, recognize the advantages and disadvantage of their skills, and find out how and what to use in any given situation. To Langer (2016), it is the key role in deciphering the latent talents of students in learning how to learn. In her book, “The Power of Mindful Learning”, Ellen J. Langer. professor of psychology at Harvard University, tackles the approaches taken for granted for years yet, to the great extent, useless in practice. She further scratches new dimensions of learning and delves into their characteristics.