نشریه پژوهش های زبانشناختی در زبان های خارجی
سال پنجم شماره 2 (پاییز و زمستان 1394)

The vital role of philosophy in all fields of study is quite clear. The philosophical schools in the course of history have emerged to uncover the vague dimensions of human knowledge. In education, different philosophical schools including idealism, realism, and so on have presented their insights in relation to education in general and any aspects pertinent to it. Theoretical foundation of English language teaching has undoubtedly been under the influence of philosophical thoughts stemmed in these schools. Regarding the importance of philosophy of education and its pivotal role in curriculum development, methodology, roles of teacher and learner and other relevant aspects in education process, the current study using a library research method deals with the connection between philosophical schools of education and English language teaching. The findings of this investigation shows the influence of philosophical foundations of each of the aforementioned schools in different methods and approaches of language teaching within past century and presently can be observed and discussed.

This paper reports on a study which explored importance marking in English academic lectures by male and female faculty members. The purpose of study was to investigate importance marking across gender. The method of study was corpus-driven, mixed-methods, and discourse analytic. Importance marking was investigated in the 160 English academic lectures of the BASE corpus. The results of the study showed that, regardless of the gender of the lecturer, importance marking takes place through (1) organizing the lecture into points and non-points, (2) using evaluative adjectives and adverbs such as important and more importantly, (3) indicating the extended coverage of topics, (4) relating the content of the lecture to exam and assessment, and (5) interaction with the audience. Additionally, it was found that importance marking does not necessarily involve using evaluative adjectives and adverbs. It can be done both explicitly and implicitly. Moreover, it was observed that orientation of the importance marker depends on its function. Finally, female lecturers were found to involve the audience more frequently than male lecturers.

The aim of present study is to investigate the roleof metaphor in the polysemy of visual verb /görmǝk/ (seeing) in Azerbaijani Turkish within the framework of cognitive semantics. This study is a descriptive - documentary and has been tried to present the various meanings based on cognitive semantics approach. To achieve this goal, the linguistic corpus used in this study is comprised of Azerbaijani Turkish language databases, including dictionaries, books, magazines, newspapers, and author's linguistic intuition. The findings indicate that for visual verb /görmǝk/ (seeing) 24 senses was extracted after the classification and abstracting away of contextual variations. They also show that the polysemy is a systematic phenomenon and factors such as metaphor and metonymy are crucially involved in the formation and description of polysemy. In this way, semantic extensive network of verb is formed and on the other hand, it is claimed that metaphor has stronger role than metonymy in the formation of polysemy and usage of verb in the different context.

The aim of this descriptive-analytic article is to investigate the relations between images and their related texts in American English File and Cutting edge ELT textbook series based on the frameworks of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen’s semiotics. These theories offer a way to understand meaning in multimodal English teaching textbooks by defining the relationships between images and their related texts. This article suggests four points through investigating three meanings (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) in the images and texts. Firstly, the investigation of the ideational meaning suggests that the relationships between images and texts are summarized in two groups including expansion and projection. Secondly, the analysis of the interpersonal meaning indicates that these relationships are summarized in two kinds of meanings, including interactive and evaluative. Thirdly, the analysis of the textual meaning shows that these relations are divided in new/given information and real/ideal information. Finally, this study highlights the importance of these semantic relations to understand multimodal texts and their impacts on the readers.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the attitude and practice of French language teachers in a heterogeneous classroom, where the students have significant differences in terms of language level, life conditions and sociocultural attitude. In this article we tried to study the role of French teachers and their practice in managing heterogeneity of students in French classrooms in Tehran language institutes. Therefore, in the present article, differentiated teaching is introduced which could be a solution for leading students in a heterogeneous classroom. For this purpose, we conducted semi-direct interviews with French teachers of language institutes in Tehran to evaluate the attitude and practice in respect to differentiated education. The results showed that the teachers had no clear attitude towards this kind of education. It means that despite the fact that the concept of differentiated education was not incorporated in their training, they utilized this method in their classroom unconsciously.

Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL) is defined as the search for and study of the applications of the computer to language teaching and learning. During the first phase of the study, the researchers found out the most commonalities emerged from the interviews with 12 experts and university teachers. During the second phase, the reliability and validity of the questionnaire were determined by means of FA and SEM and the validated questionnaire was named EFL learners’ CALL Knowledge. 256 students participated in this phase. During the third phase, the results of Pearson Correlation confirmed that there was a medium, positive correlation between EFL learners’ CALL knowledge (N=122) and their writing performance on IBT TOEFL Examination [r=.34, n=122, p

Cultural differences and diversity of linguistic concepts normally force interpreters to change the sentence structure in the sake of safeguarding its main purpose and meaning. In fact, they recreate the texts either in a new grammatical structure or through the selection of words with a rather different meaning of their normal use. The question is to what extent the translator is allowed to sacrifice the form and structure of sentences for keeping the soul of the original text? Is this problem linked by the proximity of the two cultures and languages? Apart from literal translation of words, is an interpreter obliged to a cultural intermediation as well? And finally, is it possible in principle to learn the language of a country independently from its society and culture? We are of opinion that apart from learning the language, an interpreter should also know and understand the cultural concepts of that country, since in the absence of a general dominance of different dimensions of a culture, one might fall in multiple ambiguities

The purpose of the present study is evaluating English for tourism program in Iranian universities using Kirkpatrick model. The program is evaluated taking into consideration four levels of reaction, learning, behavior, and results. The data were collected from 50 lecturers currently teaching English for tourism in Iranian universities, 200 tourism graduates, and 30 employers of these graduate students in tourism industry using three instruments: a survey, semi-structured interviews and program-related document analysis. Results of the study indicate that graduates were not good at productive skills though they were good at vocabulary and reading comprehension, and the program objectives defined by the Supreme Council of Programming in the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technologies of Iran are not met. Finally, researchers have made some suggestions for better implementation of the program, such as decreasing the number of students in classes, providing enough equipment, dedicating enough time for practicing speaking, improving students’ motivation, and having more practical views to develop competent graduates for real life tourism businesses in Iran.