Teaching English as a Second Language Quarterly
Volume:3 Issue: 3, Autumn 2011

This study examined the establishment of coherence relations by Persian EFL learners in their reading of stories. 201 undergraduate EFL learners read narrative passages and selected appropriate coherence elements of different types necessary for the proper construction of meaning. The results demonstrated a consistent pattern of a text-specific hierarchy for the comprehension of conjunctive relations across learners with different proficiency levels. More specifically, adversatives were found to be the easiest connectors by all the three groups followed by causals as the second easiest, then sequentials as the third and more difficult, and additives as the most difficult markers. The results have both theoretical and practical applications and implications for the ‘model building’ hypotheses on the one hand, and reading comprehension and instruction on the other.

The present study aimed to analyze reprint request e-mail messages written by postgraduates (MA students) of two fields of study, namely Physics and EFL, to realize the differences and similarities between the two email types. To investigate the purpose of the study, a sample of 100 e-mail messages, 50 Physics and 50 EFL, were analyzed according to Swales’ (1990) model for reprint requests and the modified moves, strategies and some microstructural features of the two corpora. The results showed that the two corpora were much alike at the level of move schemata while there were some differences concerning strategies and microstructural features. The e-mail writers within each discipline were affected by their previously learned texts and the Physics group was affected by conventions of Persian letter writing.

One tactful strategy in political rhetoric is hedging which is associated with vagueness and innuendos. Despite the studies that address hedging in academic discourse and conversation analysis, studies that investigate hedges in relation to political power, face, and politeness are tremendously few. To this aim, four political interviews were selected from CNN and BBC websites on the basis of the diversity of topics and the popularity of the interviewees and analyzed following a combination of the existing taxonomies of hedges. The results of this analysis revealed an inverse relationship between the frequency of downtoners and the degree of political power. The use of hedges in political interviews also contributes to the implementation of positive as well as negative politeness strategies.

The major argument of this essay is that Kipling treats the colonial subject as the "other," and Forster proves to be almost as pro-Empire as writers like Kipling. Nevertheless, A Passage to India is eloquent in rejecting British values and introducing Indian voices. This novel records a shift in attitude in terms of exposing the bitter realities about and attitudes of British imperialists. Despite Forster's rejection of the inhuman perspectives on the natives and his sympathy towards Indians, he remains mostly unrealistic in his characterization of Indians. The two novelists are similar in their political inclinations. Their difference lies in the strategies they adopt for their literary expression. The British Empire moved further towards its decline when Forster was writing and publishing A Passage to India. Saidian worldly reading of these two literary texts has facilitated the connection between text and politics in this study.

The study of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge base (PKB) to discover how teachers think and work is attracting increasing attention in ELT. Against this background, the present study aimed at probing the likely variations in EFL teachers’ pedagogical knowledge base as a function of their teaching license status. To this aim, six teachers (two standard-licensed, two alternatively-licensed, and two non-licensed teachers) were selected as the participants. Stimulated Recall Technique was used for the data collection purpose. Identification of the dominant thought categories of the three clusters of teachers was carried out by segmenting, coding and categorizing them. The analyses of the data revealed significant differences in the number and list of dominant pedagogical thought categories (PTC) across the three groups of teachers. Language Management, Procedure Check, Affective, Self-Reflection, Progress Review, and Beliefs formed the dominant list of PTCs by Standard Licensed (SL) teachers. Language Management, Procedure Check, Affective, and Progress Review comprised the dominant categories of Alternatively Licensed (AL) teachers, while Non-Licensed (NL) teacher's dominant PTCs included Language Management, Procedure Check, Progress Review, and Note Behaviour. Self-reflection and Beliefs were the thought categories absent in the AL and NL teachers’ list of dominant PTCs.

This study intended to develop a model describing speaking strategies for EFL learners by taking into account the effects of learners’ gender and proficiency on the application of strategies. Accordingly, this study was planned to have two main analyses, namely qualitative and quantitative. In this respect, 30 EFL learner's viewpoints were sought, and then, based on the elicited responses, a 21-item speaking strategy questionnaire was developed and given to 210 EFL learners. To select a subset of common responses and remove the redundant ones, factor analysis was applied, and then 7 components were extracted. These components, dichotomized on the basis of the offline/online notions or the time of speaking, comprised a model describing speaking strategies. Parenthetically, the study revealed that EFL learners’ gender and level of proficiency do not affect their speaking strategy use.

The present study examines the effect of gender ideology of the translators on two Persian translations of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The findings reveal that although both translations have many similar features in respect to some maxims of translation, in both of them gender ideology of the translator is a key figure in translating the gender related items/parts of the source text, as each translator uses his/her own gender ideology in the interpretation and transformation of the SL text into TL.