Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Volume:4 Issue: 1, Winter 2017

One of the most significant and controversial issues in the contemporary world of politics is the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the last twelve years, the Iranian nuclear program has turned into an international issue. The world and the Iranian media, especially newspapers and magazines systematically covered the proceedings of the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the group of 5, and offered a full converge of the negotiations. Therefore, there is a huge corpus of editorials in newspapers that can tell us about biases and hidden ideologies affiliated to the owner of media and those in power in relation to Iran‘s nuclear program. In order to have a better picture of the newspaper texts used for reporting the Iranian nuclear program with regard to language and contextual factors, the present study was conducted adopting a critical discourse analysis approach. Twenty five newspaper editorials published immediately after the negotiations within the time frame of April and July 2015were extracted from The New York Times, China Daily, Moscow Times and Tehran Times. These editorials were analyzed adopting Fairclough‘s (2001) critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework as well as Huckin‘s (2002) and Long et al.‘s (2005) linguistic sub-categories. The frequency of each category was calculated and the data were analyzed through Kruskal Wallis test and the Mann-Whitney U post-hoc test. The findings pointed to differences among the political discourse of newspapers with respect to attitude and lexical, syntactic and propositional choices. Analysis of newspaper selections from the official expert reports also shows a strong journalistic preference for selecting and emphasizing information relevant to contemporary political discourses.

Integrating the triplex notion of evidentiality into its theoretical framework, this study aimed at contrastively scrutinizing the ELT academic papers authored by non-native Iranian and native English researchers in terms of the utilization of evidentiality, focusing on the adverbial and epistemic-modality types. To this end, the discussion sections of 20 online papers were randomly selected from both groups. Then, postulating Ifantidou’s model (2001) as its analytical framework, this investigation identified the other evidentiality types in the collected corpora, and then classified them into appropriate subtypes based on the subcategories of the model. Furthermore, the frequency and the rate of evidentials in each group were compared and contrasted to see their rate differences. The findings indicated that the “adverbial” type of evidentiality enjoyed the first-ranked frequency, and the “epistemic modality” was the fourth frequently-used type of evidentiality in both native and non-native ELT papers. The other frequent types of evidentiality in these papers included “inferring,” “reported,” “memory,” and “propositional attitude,” respectively, which were not the types this study concentrated on. Finally, it was observed that there were subtle differences in both the degree and the way these authors draw evidentiality in their papers.

Since needs analysis firstly introduced by the publication of Munby's communicative syllabus design in 1978, many researchers carried out on the needs analysis of university students majoring different courses in order to prepare for their target language needs. The purpose of this study was to identify the English language needs of the Persian literature university students. To this effect, five female and five male specialist English teachers in three universities in Tehran and two universities in Zanjan were picked by purposive sampling to be data sources of the study. All the teachers had the Ph.D. level of education, teaching M.A. students of Persian literature. The data were collected using a five-point Likert scale English Language needs questionnaire (Chan, 2001), answered by specialist English teachers. The study was experimental and quantitative in nature. In order to analyze the data, mean and Chi- Square test were attained using SPSS, version 16. As the results had shown, reading skill was the most important skill in academic studies of the Persian literature university students, speaking skill was the most essential skill in their future profession, and writing skill was the main skill that would be important in their private/social life. Furthermore, the female specialist English teachers’ perspective was different from male ones regarding Persian literature university students’ learning needs and target needs. In conclusion, the implications of the findings of the study can be presented for language researchers, specialist English teachers, test designers, and materials developers.

A challenge for many postgraduate students is to move from the state of novice observers to those of professional contributors of a particular discourse community. They need to develop certain skills, practices, and competences, the demonstration of which is mostly through writing, called disciplinary writing expertise (DWE). DWE can be examined from two aspects of nature and development. This study aims at proposing a model of disciplinary writing expertise including both the competencies of DWE and factors developing these components. In-depth interviews with 28 postgraduate students of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) were collected and research papers written by these students were used to collect data. Based on substantive considerations and the results of the content analysis, five subcomponents of DWE were identified including strategic, genre, rhetorical, subject matter and discourse community knowledge components. Meanwhile, writing strategies and goal orientations were identified as two important factors influencing the development of disciplinary writing proficiency in a foreign language context. Two questionnaires were made and piloted to endorse these two factors among 538 postgraduate TEFL students. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we proposed a model to show the relationship among these two factors and the components of DWE. The results showed that those who followed mastery goals used all types of writing strategies to develop different subcomponents of DWE. On the other hand, those who followed context and career-directed goals used strategies to develop rhetorical knowledge mostly.

Meta-discourse as a self-reflective linguistic tool has received considerable attention in recent years. Besides, it plays a leading role in exploring variations in the way authors pen a manuscript. The present study aims at investigating variations in the use of both interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers among ISI and non-ISI articles written by Iranian authors in the field of Applied Linguistics. The corpora in the present study comprised a total of 8 Research Articles (RAs) in ISI and non-ISI journals published in 2016 and 2017. We described the distribution of interactive and interactional markers in Method sections using Hyland’s (2005) model as a framework. The results of the quantitative analysis disclosed that genre expectations of journals had a determining role in the writers’ choice of some meta-discourse markers. Owing to this fact, similarities were found in the use and distribution of meta-discourse markers across ISI and non-ISI data. In addition, a significant difference was found between the types of interactive meta-discourse markers as used in ISI and non-ISI journals. Moreover, the findings revealed similarities in employing the type of interactional metadiscourse markers in our corpora. Our study may promise some pedagogical implications for material development and English for Specific Purposes (ESP).

The current study intended to investigate the attitudes of Iranian intermediate EFL learners toward using British Council video clips and podcasts for listening comprehension. The participants were selected from among 132 intermediate learners based on their performance on an English proficiency test. 90 female EFL learners were selected and divided into three groups of 30 participants (i.e., one control group and two experimental groups). One of the experimental groups practiced British Council video clips while the other experimental group was instructed through British Council podcasts. The control group went through the same lesson plan without any video clips and podcasts. Once the treatment was over, the attitude questionnaire was administered to all groups. Based on the results of ANOVA and Scheffe test, it could be concluded that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of the three groups on the attitude questionnaire. More specifically, the video clips had the most statistically significant effect on the positive attitude of intermediate learners in comparison with the other groups.