International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Research
Volume:3 Issue: 10, Summer 2015

The study of linguistic devices variously referred to as stance expressions is one of the best means by which the relationship between the writer, the reader, and propositional meaning could be examined. This paper looks at a particular structural group of lexical bundles encoding stance expressions. These are bundles starting with an anticipatory it followed by is, a predicative adjective and finally ending with infinitival to or complementizer that (e.g. it is important to, it is possible that). The use of these bundles is compared in three corpora of research articles, doctoral dissertations, and master theses in the discipline of applied linguistics to explore possible generic variations and identify possible differences between published students writing. Using Hewings and Hewings's functional typology of interpersonal roles of it clauses (2002), this group of bundles is found to have three stance expressions of hedging, marking attitude, and stressing emphasis. The major difference is discovered to be between student's genres and research articles, with the former drawing less in their expression of interpersonal meanings. The differences are accounted for by referring to generic expectations, and student's growing disciplinary identity. The findings of the study have some implications for academic writing.

This study investigates ‘repetition’ in the English translation of the Arabic Novel, Adrift on the Nile (1993). It aims to explore the communicative functions of ‘repetition’ and to see if these functions have been maintained or lost in the process of translating the Novel. In addition, it seeks to find the translation strategies used in rendering ‘repetition’. To achieve this aim, a deep analysis of the functions of lexical items, phrase and root ‘repetitions’ was carried on the basis of the typology of ‘repetition’ proposed by Dickins et al. (2002). The results of the study show that the ‘repetitions’ examined have been used rhetorically for confirmation, assurance, and warning in terms of function. They have also been used as text-building devices. Regarding the maintenance or loss of the functions, it was found that they were both lost and gained in the translation. The translation strategies applied in the process of translation were found to be synonym, near-synonym, deletion, pronominalisation, and paraphrase. An important point found is that the translator has preferred to use ‘variation’ in his translation rather than ‘repetition’.

Listening plays a significant role in daily communication and educational processes. In spite of its importance, listening has long been the neglected skill in second and foreign language acquisition, research, teaching, and assessment. However, on account of the entire challenges EFL learners encounter in classrooms due to the listening complexity, some pre-listening activities as supports in the procedure of teaching listening are proposed by experts in the field. This research investigated 80 male and female learners in 2 groups of 40, who were selected randomly, to determine whether pre-listening activities have a significant effect on listening comprehension of English texts. It also investigated whether there was a significant difference between male and female learners on pre-listening activities in terms of their effects on the comprehension of English texts. To do this, subjects first took a TOFEL test, which served as a pre-test, to make it possible to have homogeneous learners in a control group and an experimental group. In the experimental group, some pre-listening tasks, through which the learners received general prior information about the content of the listening texts, were performed. Then, they listened to and answered some multiple-choice comprehension questions which asked for the specific information in the listening texts. However, the control group’s listening comprehension tasks were destitute of pre-listening activities. The results of the analysis of the data obtained at the end of the experiment revealed that the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group. It also showed that females outperformed the male group. In other words, the treatments appeared to have a significant effect on the performance of the experimental group (and especially female learners therein) in listening comprehension.

This study aimed to shed light on young Iranian EFL students’ oral proficiency improvement through explicit instruction of formulaic sequences (FSs). This pretest-posttest quasi experimental study was conducted in a bilingual school in Shahrekord, Iran. Accordingly, based on ACTFL OPI test, two groups of low intermediate students with age range of 11 to 12 were chosen to be assigned as control and experimental groups. The control group with 20 participants continued its regular instruction focusing on analytic grammar rules and discrete vocabulary, while the experimental group with 40 participants received explicit FSs-based instruction through readings, by adopting a teaching procedure inspired by Lewis’ prescribed strategies for lexicon instruction. After 24 sessions of instruction, the participants were interviewed again, and their oral performance was recorded and transcribed to be scored by two experienced judges. Subsequently, ANOVA results revealed the significant oral proficiency improvement of experimental group in comparison to the control group, pointing to the effectiveness of FSs instruction.

The present study explores the impact of corpus-based collocation instruction on intermediate Iranian EFL learner's writing ability. For this study, 84 Iranian learners, studying English as a foreign language in Bayan Institute, Iran, were selected and were randomly divided into two groups, experimental and control. Conventional methods of writing instruction were taught to the control group while the experimental group received corpus-based collocation instruction in writing essays for 15 sessions. The design of the research was based on pre- and posttest method. The tests were employed to measure the writing fluency of the two groups. Test results were scrutinized to answer a major question for correlation between the participants’ variety of corpus-based collocations and their writing. The results illustrated that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of control and experimental groups in writing elements (p

This study focused mainly on the shifts of the grammatical cohesion in texts translated from English into Persian. It aimed to identify the grammatical cohesive devices (GCDs) in ST and TT separately, based on Halliday and Hassn's Model (1976), determine the number of occurrences of GCDs in two texts and finally, illustrate types of shifts of grammatical cohesion and strategies used in TT. To achieve these aims, a mixed-method (comparative and descriptive model) research design was used to spot cohesive shifts in TT due to translation, together with the employed strategies. To this purpose, the book, Oral Reproduction of Stories was investigated, with its translation. 39 different stories by different writers were selected as the sample of analysis. The results showed that the TT adopted all the three types of GCDs except verbal and casual substitution, with verbal substitution in Persian being carried down by reference, ellipsis and lexical cohesion. The occurrence of GCDs in the TT was more frequent than that of ST. Regarding the general analysis of the cohesion shifts, the study showed that three types of shifts (i.e. establishment of new cohesion, elimination of cohesion and change of type of cohesive features) occur in translation. Finally it was revealed that the translation strategies undertaken by the various translators are motivated and influenced by three factors (i. e. systemic language differences Baker (1992), stylistic preferences and the translation process itself (Blum- Kulka, 1986).

This study investigated the effect of digital games on vocabulary acquisition of low-proficiency Iranian male and female EFL learners. In order to select homogeneous learners in terms of their English language proficiency, the standard Nelson Proficiency Test was administered, and based on the obtained results, 60 low-proficiency EFL learners were selected (31 females and 29 males). They were studying English for an average of two years, with their age ranging from 8 to 12. Afterwards, considering the purpose of this research, the participants were randomly assigned into four groups: Female Experimental Group (FEG), Male Experimental Group (MEG), Female Control Group (FCG), and Male Control Group (MCG). A vocabulary pretest was taken by the learners to help the researcher know the learners’ level of vocabulary knowledge before the treatment. To achieve the aims of this quasi-experimental research, the polyglot and the speedy games were played in the experimental groups’ classes. In the meantime, the CG learners, who did not receive such a treatment, attended their regular classes without playing vocabulary games of any type. A vocabulary posttest was then administered, and upon conducting statistical analyses, the following results were obtained: (a) the application of digital games in young EFL learners’ classes led to vocabulary enhancement of low-level L2 learners, and (b) gender had a significant effect on vocabulary development of young EFL learners being exposed to digital games, with boys outperforming the girls in this respect. Thus, the findings of this research revealed that utilizing digital games can be influential for vocabulary learning of both male and female low-proficiency EFL learners, but the results were found to be more fruitful for male learners.