Journal of new advances in English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Winter 2019

Writing academic research article is one of the most important endeavors through which the writer can contribute his own knowledge and create a voice among the members of disciplinary community. Exploring the linguistic features which are used to identify the rhetorical structures of academic research articles is of value to have a clearer view of this widely practiced genre. The present research investigates the use of formulaic clusters as a type of linguistic feature in writing research article conclusions by non-native writers. A corpus of 200 research article conclusions written by Iranian L2 users in the field of applied linguistics was compiled and the most frequent four-word formulaic clusters were identified and categorized structurally in the corpus. Then, the identified bundles were classified based on the communicative purpose they serve in each move and step of the conclusions following Yang and Allison’s (2003) move organization of research article conclusions. Findings demonstrated that L2 writers relied heavily on the use of specific formulaic bundles to perform the communicative functions associated with the moves and steps. The largest number of clusters was used to show Move 1, Summarizing the study and the least bundles occurred in Move 2, Evaluating the study.

Being a successful L2 learner/communicator involves the ability to apply not only linguistic and communicative competences, but also metaphorical competence and fundamental cognitive abilities like emotional intelligence (EI). In fact, EI can act as a predictor of one's success in life. Furthermore, because metaphors are the main means of helping to understand abstract concepts and to act upon abstract interpretations, L2 teachers, being aware of their learners’ EI profiles, should make them aware of their L2 metaphorical competence of the conceptual world. In spite of the importance given to L2 learners’ metaphorical comprehension/usage and their individual differences, almost no systematic attempt investigated the issue. This study scrutinized L2 learners’ EI profiles to underline the leading and the least common type of EI among 126 upper-intermediate L2 learners (51 males and 75 females). First, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was computed to investigate the relationship between the participants’ metaphorical competence and their EI. Second, standard multiple regression analysis was run to see the best predictors of the participants’ metaphorical competence level. The results demonstrated that, first, there was a medium positive correlation between the participants’ metaphorical competence and their EI. Second, the participants’ EI and gender were the 2 predictors of their metaphorical competence level, but EI was a stronger predictor than gender. The findings have implications for L2 pedagogy, suggesting the incorporation of an account of L2 learners’ metaphorical competence development and a report of their individual differences such as a profile consisting of their EI into L2 teachers’ class agendas.

This article reports an analysis of the authorial identity presence in the academic papers written by Iranian EFL speakers of Farsi. To this end, a corpus of papers was gathered from different journals and websites. Out of the gathered papers, the ones which were appropriate for the purpose of the study were selected as the sample, i.e. 20 papers written by Iranian EFL speakers of Farsi. To this end, Hyland’s (2004) identity categorization was chosen as the model of analysis which considers five types of stance for representing identity, namely, hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mention markers. The content of the corpus was analyzed for instances of authorial markers Iranian writers utilized to manifest themselves in their works. It is worth mentioning that the Iranians’ tendency was toward using attitude markers as a representation of authorial identity in their academic papers while engagement markers were the most salient authorial identity markers.

Nowadays, there are a large number of teaching and learning techniques and programs designed in order to improve EFL learners’ vocabulary competence. 90% of the people on earth have mobile phone network, and 41% of users have more than one mobile device. Moreover, these electronic devices play an increasing role in educational programs. This study was intended to examine the impact of using short message service (SMS) on Iranian EFL learners’ incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition. In order to fulfill the intended objectives, 40 intermediate learners studying English in an Institute were chosen. The participants were divided into incidental and intentional groups. The participants were presented with a pre-test one week prior to the provision of SMS trend and a post-test after that. Interpreting the obtained results, it was concluded that the intentional group could learn more vocabulary than the incidental group. In addition, a questionnaire was provided to the participants to check their satisfaction with the trend. It was revealed that the students were highly motivated learning the second language using Mobile-Assisted language Learning (MALL).

Abstract This article scrutinizes a schematic analysis of integrated Literature Review (LR) sections drawn from Research Articles (RAs) across two disciplines. The analysis mainly focuses on the schematic structure, namely the constituent moves and steps. The structure of LR in these articles is explored via coding and genre analysis. Manual move analysis is used to identify similarities and differences between these two groups of articles. To this end, 30 published integrated LRs from two disciplines of Neuroscience and Neurology (all published in high indexed journals) are selected randomly. Manual coding procedures are accomplished through two different move models proposed by Fryer (2012) and Nwogu (1997). Both models are composed of 3 Moves with several sub-moves. The results compare and contrast the prototypical move patterns of each discipline. A new model is proposed in this study and the significance of integrated LRs is discussed. This study discusses pedagogical implications for the practitioners in ESP and EAP fields. The move structures proposed in this study may help students and novice writers be better able to deal with the structuring difficulties they face in writing LRs. Furthermore, the findings of this article may assist novice researchers and article writers to cope with the hardships of high indexed journal submission.

This study empirically investigated translation procedures employed by M.A. translation students for translating culture-specific items from English into Persian. To do so, fifty M.A. translation students were randomly selected and equally divided into the freshmen and senior students. They were asked to translate 20 statements collected from the Gypsy and the Virgin. The statements contained CSIs and classified based on Newmark’s (1988) categorization of cultural items. Moreover, his taxonomy of translation procedures was adopted as a valuable criterion for data analysis. The findings showed that among all translation procedures presented by Newmark, the senior M.A. translation students employed literal translation, transference, descriptive equivalent, functional equivalent, cultural equivalent, and compensation of which literal translation was used more and cultural equivalent was employed less than others. By contrast, the freshmen M.A. translation students applied only 5 translation procedures out of 17, including literal translation, transference, descriptive equivalent, functional equivalent, and cultural equivalent. Literal translation and cultural equivalent were the most/least used translation procedures by the freshmen students. Furthermore, the Independent Sample t test was performed to find out which group was more successful in transferring the same meaning of cultural items to the target text. The findings of the analysis indicated that the senior students had better performance and produced higher quality translations. In conclusion, the results of the study showed the influence of the level of study of the M.A. translation students on the translation qualities they produced, whereas it had no effect on the types of translation strategies they employed.