Journal of Modern Research in English Language Studies
Volume:2 Issue: 4, Autumn 2015

Markedness in linguistics is the state of being distinct, peculiar or complicated in comparison to a more usual or common form. Markedness has been widely studied in the literature. However, almost no study has ever explored the relationship between translators’ assertiveness and their preference of marked structures in translation. This article aims to investigate the relationship between the assertiveness level of Iranian undergraduate English students and their preference for using lexical and grammatical marked structures in their Persian translations. To this end, 60 undergraduate English students completed the Assertiveness Scale developed by Alberti & Emmons (1995), and rendered ten short statements taken from the story “Child by Tiger” into Persian. The translation test was scored by two raters, based on the use of marked lexical (e.g. wrong collocations, plurals) and grammatical (e.g. reduced clauses( structures in the students’ translation, and a high inter-rater reliability was achieved. Results revealed a significant positive relationship between the test-takers’ assertiveness and their preference to render English marked structures into Persian marked structures. The findings have implications for translation instructors.

The present study was an attempt to examine the effect of the degree of contextualization on reading and listening comprehension tests. In other words, it was intended to check the performance of the learners providing with high contextualized input compared to those who received low contextualized input. In doing so, 36 intermediate learners from an English Language Institute, participated in this study. Following that, two kinds of reading comprehension tests, more contextualized and less contextualized, and two kinds of listening comprehension tests, more contextualized and less contextualized, were designed. The data collected from the participants were analyzed by using t-test analysis. Findings revealed that there was a significant difference between the mean score of more contextualized input and less contextualized input in both reading and listening comprehension tests. However, the results of the present study showed that contextualization seemed not to have any significant effect on the reading and listening. It was concluded that both learner's proficiency level and degree of contextualization should be considered when designing listening and reading comprehension tests.

Degree of aptness of the nominal metaphor X is a Y or the extent to which the metaphorical statement expresses its specific non-literal meaning and the nature of relationship between aptness and semantic features of topic (X) and vehicle (Y) is the subject that is addressed in this study. Conducting an experiment in which 35 undergraduate students judged degree of relevancy of 10 semantic features of topic and vehicle of nominal metaphors, the researchers of this study sought to find how aptness of a metaphor is related to various meaning aspects of topic and vehicle. The instrument was a test including 20 nominal metaphors, each one followed by 10 semantic features of topic and vehicle. The participants were required to judge the degree of relevancy of each feature on the basis of a Likert scale ranging from 0 (irrelevant) to 3 (completely relevant). The obtained results suggested that several aspects of meaning might simultaneously be in operation throughout metaphor comprehension. However, these aspects are not at the same level; that is, one meaning aspect plays the dominant role, while others play a secondary role. Taking Glucksberg‟s class-inclusion view of metaphor comprehension and Gentner‟s structure-mapping view and based on the results obtained in the experiment, this article presents a model according to which degree of interpretability and aptness of a nominal metaphor is determined by degree of relevancy of a specific meaning aspect of vehicle.

Although many studies have focused on the language learners’ beliefs and attitudes regarding error correction, less has been done to investigate whether and how student characteristics influence their preferences. The present investigation explores how socio-economic status affects the error correction views of 140 upperintermediate/ advanced students, ranging from 23 to 31, in an EFL context. The participant's social class was determined by MacArthur scale of subjective socioeconomic status. A questionnaire and a follow-up interview were employed to obtain the student's overall preferences about different aspects of oral corrective feedback (OCF). The results showed that the students unanimously favored teachers as the best provider of feedback and highly expected both local and global errors to be treated; nevertheless, whereas middle-class students would rather their errors to be corrected at the end of the class while the teacher addressed the whole class, high-class students did not mind if teachers corrected them individually as soon as they finished speaking. Besides, although predominantly the students preferred direct error correction, highclass students had a more positive view toward elicitation and self-error correction in general. The findings of this study highlight the influence of language learner's ocioeconomic status on how they expect their teachers to treat their oral errors.

This study investigated Iranian EFL teachers‟ and learners‟ perceptions and attitudes towards integrating Internet in EFL instruction; and the congruence of their attitudes and perceptions. As a mixed-method research, the data was collected both through questionnaires and interviews. Chi-square test was run for quantitative data and the qualitative data were transcribed, coded and thematized. The findings gathered from both qualitative and quantitative methods showed that both teachers and learners had positive perceptions and attitudes towards integrating Internet in EFL instruction and indicated that the factors like lack of facilities and hardware equipment limit Internet integration in Iranian setting. Moreover, the groups indicated that using Internet in EFL instruction and teaching process could be facilitative because of more accessibility to authentic sources, possibility of teacher-student interaction out of the educational environment and improvement of acquiring English learning skills in a faster and efficient way.

Researchers have examined the process of learning a second language in adults and children who learn English as a second language. The results of the tudies indicate that second language learners generally pass through similar transitional stages which demonstrate systematic and nonsystematic variations, developmental sequences, and accuracy order. However, most of these studies have investigated L2 learning process in a natural setting. Therefore, the present study examines the process of learning English by adults as a foreign language in an EFL setting and attempts to find out the probable similarities or differences in language learning process. Data were collected from 200 adult students learning English interrogative structure. The results of this study indicated significant similarities between the learning process of the adults learning English as a foreign language and the adults and children learning English as a second language. These findings suggest that a second language is learned through similar processes. Consequently, there should be a kind of universal internal syllabus in the learning of a second language which controls the learning process independent of the environment and age of language learning.