فصلنامه متن پژوهی ادبی
پیاپی 22 (زمستان 1383)

Sociologists and Psychologist have long been striving to provide behavioural patterns of human beings within social frameworks. Leaning on the direct relationship between Language and the mental structures of the society, the present paper intends to deal with the social changes, whether minor or major, and their obvious impact on the Language ofthe society as well as the conduct of translators and interpretors .

The objective of the present paper is to introduce founder of modern Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, and his Viewpoints. To achieve this, a short biography of this genius will be presented, and then, his doctorine on the stody of Language, which has been the cornerstone of modern Linguistics will be provided.

Linguistic translation refers to a theory according to which the translator finds equivalents in the target language for all the linguistic elements of the source text without any radical change or additional explanation. This strategy of translation is usually used to translate those texts in which the style, in addition to the meaning, is also of special importance and plays a significant role in conveying the exact meaning. Some theorists regard this translation a kind or form-based translation which may sometimes, especially in complex sentences, result in obscurity, awkwardness, and unintelligibility. In cultural adaptation, used in finding cultural equivalence , the purpose is not translating the individual words, as cultural equivalence is different from lexical equivalence. What is lost from the meaning in adaptation is usually more than that which is either "lost" or remains awkward and unitelligible in linguistic translation. Therefore, linguistic translation, when observes the norms and standards of the target language in communicating the meaning in a clear and natural way, can be a better strategy for translating religious, literary, and technical texts.

The present paper is intended to introduce the school of Romanticism in Italy, which focuses on spirituality, individuality, and freedom of speech.

In this article the debate in the literature on the role of internal and external forces in shaping the typological features of a language is evaluated in the light of the evidence from Iranian languages. In this study the Greenbergian word order correlations as presented in Dryer ( 1992, in Press) are adopted as the theoretical and statistical framework. On that basis the common typological parameters of the languages studied are identified and the variations in them are also specified. Then the potential and actual areas of convergence/ interference of these languages as substrata with Modern Persian as the superstratum are discussed. Despite instances of convergence/ interference, the findings reveal the strength of the parameters of variation at the present time. However, the situation in regard to some of these languages is such that instances of even language shift in near future is not unexpected. Hence, it appears that in the Iranian languages studied the impacts of the internal and external forces in typology are potential and relativistic'.

This study investigates the relative effects of two types of lexical modification (i.e., lexical simplification and elaboration) of text type passages on Iranian EFL student's reading comprehension with reference to language proficiency. To this end six English reading text type passages in one of three forms(a) baseline, (b) lexically simplified, or ( c )lexically elaborated; were presented to 250 students, who were divided into two proficiency levels (i.e., advanced and intermediate ) on the basis of their scores 111 TOEFL test. Comprehension was assessed by a 30-item multiple-choice test, which included items for assessmg (a) general, (b) specific and (c) inferential comprehension. In order to probe the hypotheses formulated in the study, the data gathered were analyzed by a two way ANOV A and Sheffe test that was used in post hoc analyses. The obtained results support the suggestion that lexical modification had a significant effect on student's reading comprehension. There was also a significant interaction between learner's proficiency and modification type. Considering their proficiency level, the advanced students in reading lexically elaborated passages performed significantly better than lexically simplified passages and intermediate students who read lexically simplified passages outperformed readers of lexically elaborated and baseline passages.

Research has shown that all students can benefit from instruction in learning strategies regardless of the field of education (Danserea, 1985; Weinstein et al., 1997; Kuiper, 2002). Also, within the field of language, it has been shown that language learning strategies have a significant role in making language learning more efficient and in producing a positive effect on the learner's language use (Wenden and Rubin, 1987; OMalley and Chamot, 1990; Chamot and OMalley, 1994; Oxford, 1996; Cohen, 1990). Accordingly, many researchers have tried to present a comprehensible classification or model for strategy training, and "many language textbooks have begun to embed strategies into their curricula" (Cohen, 1998 ). The aim of this article, however, is not to investigate or advocate any specific model of strategy training, but rather to highlight the significance of metacognitive strategies as language learning strategies which help the language learner become more independent, or in other words, help the learner learn how to learn. Thus, in order to achieve the above mentioned objective, this article begins by distinguishing between 'learning style's and 'learning strategies'; then there is a general overview of learning strategies, and finally, the significant role of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies in language learning is di cussed.

The I inearity adopted in traditional approaches to teaching grammar results in decontextualization of structures presented 111 text books. Learners are given isolated sentences, which they are expected to internalize through exercises involving repetition, manipulation, and grammatical transformation. These exercises are designed to provide learners with formal, declarative mastery, but they often dont provide opportunities for learners to explore grammatical structures in context; hence, they make the task of developing procedural skill- being able to use the language for communication- more difficult than it needs to be, because learners arc denied the opportunity of seeing the systematic relationships that exist between form, meaning, and use. In this study, a procedural way of teaching grammar has been compared with the traditional method of teaching grammar in terms of their effect on two groups of university student's writing ability. The results showed that students who were taught grammar in accordance with a processing input-based approach gained a considerably higher level of writing ability .

The purpose of this study was to investigate two different techniques for testing reading comprehension questions. Differences are measured by two different types of questions including inferential and referential questions. To answer the referential questions, the reader is required to move beyond the level of sentence comprehension and understand the relationship among the sentences. While, Inferential questions arc designed to check the student's ability to make logical conclusions, or inferences from the information provided in the text.400 senior students participated in the study. TOEFL (1991) was used as the main instrument in the study. 314 undergraduate English as a Foreign Language(EFL)students whose scores were between one standard deviation (SD) below and above the mean were selected for the final analyses .The reading comprehension items were classified into Referential (R) and Inferential (I) questions and their related subcategories based on Barrett's Taxonomy ( 1968) by IO MA teachers majonng 111 TEfL. Several statistical procedures (correlation coefficent, post-hoc cheffe's tests and factor analyses) were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that there was no significant difference between the means of referential and inferential reading comprehension questions and student's performance and they have the same underlying construct, but there was a significant difference between the mean scores of subjects in structure/vocabulary and referential/inferential questions. The finding will have some implications for curriculum developers, course material developers , language teachers and learners .In this research, different views towards teaching and testing reading comprehension, techniques and factors have been meticulously studied. Then based on these features, some suggestions have been made for an effective reading comprehension classroom. This study suggests language tester to provide a better device to test subskills in reading comprehension.