نشریه زبان پژوهی
پیاپی 33 (زمستان 1398)

Life of people is so interrelated with language that it is not imaginable without it. The effect of language on social, political and cultural life seems to be undeniable as it is observed in many daily events. Besides, translators and interpreters are surrounded with thoughts, beliefs and ideologies and do their task of changing a source language to a target one under their influence, consciously or unconsciously. This is evident in the performance of translators and interpreters who work in various media and must obey dominant ideologies of their workplaces and this can affect the macro/micro-strategies utilized by them in their jobs. Translation and interpretation as two processes that require rewriting have sufficient background for distancing themselves from reality and facts and guiding mindsets towards a specific direction. Indeed, translation is regarded as a mirror that does not reflect light, but produces it. This means that novel ideologies are produced in translation task. The fact that dominant ideology belongs to dominant classes in majority of societies causes us to seek ways and approaches that help to consolidate and reinforce this ideology. Each translator and interpreter tries to impose their ideology through some realities and facts, consciously or unconsciously. The imposed ideology may not work systematically and consistently in conducting personal translation projects, but when such projects are administered in the media that belong to dominant ideologies it seems that translators’ minds are consciously involved in stabilizing the prevailing hegemony. Ideology is a subject that requires particular attention paid by researchers of translation studies. Lots of theoreticians have even claimed that translation is a conflict point for ideologies and each translation is ideological. Ideology itself is a combination of action-oriented beliefs and regarding the relation between ideology and translation, it can be indicated at each level of translation process that if linguistic considerations come to conflict with ideological ones, the latter win.  Translation or interpretation is not just transferring meaning from a language to another and can have a considerable share among rival ideologies. Translation and interpretation are ideological-wise since they can import a collection of values and beliefs (relating to historical eras and social positions) to a target culture. In line with serving domestic interests of target languages, translation or interpretation chooses an ideological solution for linguistic and cultural differences of a source text. Even some theorists have discussed the interaction between ideology and translation and believe that ideology has an important role in translation act and due to the fact that translation and interpretation serve political aims, they affect the choice of texts for translation, translation strategies and propagation of some translated texts. Translation is also considered as the most influential form of rewriting because it can be an indicator of a writer’s image and their works in another culture and can move them beyond cultural borders. Therefore, translation can be utilized as a tool for expressing a translator’s approval or disapproval of any ideology. Indeed, translation means creating new readership for a source text. This article aimed to investigate the controversial and contentious relation between translation and ideology regarding simultaneous English interpretation of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s speech in the UN in 2017 conducted in Press TV channel of Iran and France 24 channel of France in order to clarify whether ideology of these interpreters affected the interpretations or not. This speech was aired in numerous international TV channels as it was considered as a response to American President, Donald Trump’s speech against Iran in the UN the earlier day and many channels interpreted Iranian president’s speech simultaneously due to its significance and sensitivity. To this end, their interpretations were compared to each other, utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis and Van Dijk’s theoretical background. The results of this study indicated that both interpretations carried out by these news channels were intentionally or unintentionally under the influence of their respective ideologies. Ideological differences of investigated interpretations prove the fact that France 24 interpreter has deleted or added some parts of Iranian president’s speech and it might be caused by increasing reinforcement of Iranphobia by Western news channels, while the interpreter of Press TV channel has tried his best to remain loyal to contents of the speech and highlight ideas and comments of Rouhani with possible minor alterations. Consequently, the results of this study can confirm the existence of ideological conflicts between Iran and Western countries and these differences might be caused by ideological backgrounds of these two interpreters. As Nord (2003) believes, any decision making in translation is consciously or unconsciously affected by ideological criteria.

In spite of the fact that the language learning strategy concept has been around for a long time, it is still appealing and vibrant as evidenced by its accumulated body of literature within the field. Research over the years has revealed that the employment of language learning strategies (LLSs) has a significant share of variance in language achievement and success and a number of studies have shown a significant positive correlation between strategy use and successful language learning. Therefore, many theorizers and practitioners in language teaching have embarked on Strategy-based instruction (SBI) approach which focuses on the training of strate gic learning by incorporating the strategy instruction into the regular language curriculum. The purpose of such SBI programs is to foster the use of LLSs by the second language learners and to help learners to employ more strategies and to apply them in a more appropriate way. Although many scholars have advocated the contribution of LLSs to developing second language skills and components, the empirical evidence supporting the role of SBI programs in enhancing particular skills in particular contexts through particular methodologies has not received adequate research interest in L2 research contexts. Self-regulation is another important variable which has been considered to be relevant to strategy use by a number of scholars (Oxford et al., 2014; Tseng et al., 2006). Educators have stressed the identification and instruction of learning strategies for self-regulation. According to Zimmerman (2000, 2008), self-regulation refers to planned self-generated thoughts, feelings, and activities resulting in the achievement of goals with the use of feedback from prior performance making the process cyclical. Because of the importance of the LLSs, and also given the significant moderating role of the context, as discussed above, in influencing the efficacy of SBI, and finally, considering the heightened significance of self-regulation as a viable construct in English Language Teaching (ELT), this study investigated the effects of strategy-based instruction (SBI) in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing course on enhancing self-regulated learning and writing performance. In so doing, a sample of 49 Iranian EFL students were recruited. The participants were the students of two intact classes doing their BA in the field of English Language Literature. They were randomly assigned to experimental group (n=26) and control group (n=23).  To ensure the homogeneity of the two groups, the Oxford Placement Test (OPT) (Allan, 2004) was administered to all the students of the two groups prior to the initiation of the treatment. In order to compare the mean scores on OPT, an independent samples T-test was run to examine the existing difference between groups. The result of the independent samples T-test indicated that the groups were not significantly different in terms of language proficiency before the experiment. For the purpose of the current study, a sixteen-week metacognition training program was integrated into the writing course of the experimental group. The SBI framework employed in the study was CALLA framework developed by Chamot et al. (1999) which constitutes five basic stages of preparation, presentation, practice, evalua tion, and expansion. The students in the control group received the regular, traditional writing instruction. The data were collected through administration of Timed-writing Essays and Self-Regulated Language Learning Questionnaire (SRLLQ). To analyze the data paired-samples t-tests and Analyses of Covariance (ANCOVA) were conducted. The findings indicated significant differences in favor of the experimental students in the writing performance and self-regulated learning. The participants of the current study became more autonomous and self-regulated after receiving instruction in metacognitive strategies. A likely justification for the improved writing performance of EFL learners in the present study might lie in the contribution of the learners’ academic self-efficacy which is the embedded in the belief system of self-regulated learners (Bandura & Locke, 2003). Those with high academic self-efficacy are confident that they will succeed; as a result, this sense of success and agency increases their academic motivation, thereby enhancing their academic performance (Zimmerman, & Schunk, 2008). The results of the current study also indicated that the experimental group students, who were taught the writing metacognitive strategies outperformed the students in the control group in self-regulation. The plausible justification is the fact that metacognitive strategy training has contributed to the development of self-regulation because metacognition has been considered as the chief element of self-regulation theory (Zimmerman, 1989). In other words, there is much overlap between the underlying nature of the two constructs in a sense that Zimmerman (1989) defines students’ self-regulation as “the degree that students are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process” (p. 329). Overall, this study provides strong empirical evidence in favor of SBI in enhancing learners’ writing ability and their self-regulation. The findings offer theoretical and pedagogical implications for both theorizers and practitioners. Given the nature of self-regulation and its contribution to language achievement, it is argued that strategy training should be more extensively integrated into the ELT curriculum. The empirical evidence obtained by this study might be an incentive for theoreticians, practitioners and teacher educators to pay more attention to SBI and take actions in explicit training of LLSs especially metacognitive ones with the aim of fostering their learners’ self-regulation.

Games have a variety of benefits for the all-inclusive development of children, such that some educators emphasize the use of educational games as the primary means of teaching children to learn. Many of the instructors suggest educational games as one of the most desirable educational tools. From the linguistic point of view, it should be noted that the enrichment and expansion of the vocabulary of the students depends on a variety of factors. In particular, language games have a special place because their main goal is to indirectly strengthen the infrastructural and superstructural structures of the language and facilitate the process of learning through its enjoyment. From the discursive point of view, researchers shifted their orientation from focusing solely on the psychological considerations of the language towards studies on context-foundation learning, meaning that the child’s discourse was perceived in natural environments, activities, and everyday situations. Classroom discourse is one of the most prominent examples in this regard. Given the above issues, the main problem of the research is to answer the question of whether language games based on classroom discourse interactions have a significant effect on the vocabulary size of elementary students.
The sample consisted of 44 elementary students in grade 2 who were studying in Qarchak city of Varamin in the educational year of 2016-2017. They were selected through available sampling method. The sample was divided into an experimental group (including 22 students) and a control group (including 22 students) by simple random method. To test the progress of the vocabulary size of students by classroom discourse-based games, a researcher-made test containing 35 questions was used as the pre- and post-test. The vocabulary used in this test was selected after a class discourse analysis over 10 sessions, so that the text of all class conversations was recorded and then written on paper. Then, the words that have a nominal, adverbial or adjectival role were classified and 40 words were randomly selected from these words. After this step, four options for each item were developed. After consulting with a linguist specialist and two primary school teachers, and through the item-objective congruence index, the validity of the questionnaire was confirmed. After deleting 5 items, 35 items were selected as the final test. In order to determine the reliability of this test, 20 primary school students were used. Using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, the internal consistency of the items was calculated to be 0.84, indicating a high reliability. In order to collect data, the pre-test was taken from both groups at first. Then, the experimental group was trained with language games for 6 months and 3 hours a week. The control group was trained regularly in the same period. At the end of the training period, the post-test of linguistic progression was performed for both groups and the results were compared by independent t-test. Given the fact that the language of the teacher is the main source of input in the classroom and that teachers control the classroom through linguistic methods, in the present study, the concept of classroom discourse was limited to the input presented or set by the teacher and the interaction and communication between the students through games.
The results showed that the difference between the two groups was significant in the post-test, and according to the mean difference, the vocabulary size of the experimental group, which used language games based on classroom discourse, had much more progress. As a result, it can be admitted that language games based on classroom discourse interactions have a significant and positive effect on vocabulary size of students.
Various reasons can be found for the effect of classroom discourse-based games on vocabulary size of elementary students. First, classroom discourse may have raised the level of learners’ attention to input. In other words, class discourse can increase the durability of words in long-term memory by highlighting the target vocabulary and creating a semantic network with classroom elements. Secondly, the interactive feature of language games, as well as the environment without anxious that these games create for learners, reduce stimulus filters and increase learning efficiency. It is very important for the teacher to organize the game for students. That is, the teacher should provide a model for children to play. It is better to design and apply this modeling to familiarize them with skills and methods. The findings and suggestions of this research can help teachers, planners and authors of textbooks in the educational system in order to increase the interest and willingness of students to learn by attention to daily discourse approaches and inclusion of related concepts of language games.

Relative chronology in historical linguistics refers to temporal order of sound changes affecting a language. Because a sound change is restricted to a particular period of time in the history of the language in which it takes place, this enables us to solve apparent problems with which we sometimes are confronted. This means that some sound changes may take place in the language at some earlier stage, whereas others may take place at some later stage in the history of that language. Often in the case of different changes from different times, evidence is left behind which provides us with the clues with which we determine their relative chronology, that is, the temporal order in which they took place. Therefore, part of working out the phonological history of a language is determining the relative chronology of the sound changes which have affected the language. In Iranian languages also, there are some cases where the different temporal order of sound changes has an important role in the process of sound changes. In cases where we find morphophonemic variation in development of words, the order may be affected by difference in temporal order of sound changes. In this paper, after an introduction to relative chronology and its special use in historical linguistics, by examining the chronological order of sound change in development of some words in Iranian languages, it will be shown that how and why relative chronology can solve some problems with which we sometimes are confronted in working out the sound changes of a language. In the history of Baxtiari, we find the change of Middle Persian āmad- “to go” to āveδ- (then aweδ-) in Kuhrang variety and ovay- in Iza variety. In this case, Baxtiari underwent two changes: A. ā → o / — m, and B. m → v / V —V. In Iza variety, the change took place in the order A→B, but in Kuhrang variety first the B change has been applied, and the use of B change has eliminated the phonetic environment for sound law A, since B had taken place first, then, there would have been no remaining m to condition change A. Another example of affecting relative chronology is seen in Middle Persian *mista to mīsa and mēsa “urine” in some varieties of Boirahmadi, where among the two change A: Vst  →  V̅s, and B: i →  e, the order B →A has resulted to mēsa, while mīsa is developed by only B, because change A has eliminated the condition for change B. The same thing has occurred for Middle Persian brūg “eyebrow” to Persian abrū/borū, where final postvocalic -g is deleted, while in Lori borg “eyebrow” by metathesis of r the word retained its g because it was not word-final. One more example is development of Old Iranian *wafra- to var “snow” in Tati and Semnani, where the f is deleted before r, but the metathesis of r with f in some Iranian languages such as Persian, Lori and Meymai have changed the condition for deletion of f, and we find this word as barf and warf in these varieties where the f is retained. Most Central dialects have pür “son” and sür “red” developed from Old Iranian *puθra- and *suxra-, respectively. The compensatory lengthening of u has resulted in *pūr and *sūr, then, through general change of Old Iranian ū to Central dialects ü, the forms pür and sür are developed. Here the compensatory lengthening of u, provides the necessary condition for fronting of ū to ü. The same change has occurred for development of næɁl “horseshoe” to nɑːl in Lori which deletion of Ɂ and compensatory lengthening of æ has resulted in the development of form næːl, then, by general rising of æː to ɑː, the form nɑːl is formed. Again, compensatory lengthening has provided the necessary condition for rising of the long vowel in this word. The words such as etmiːnɑːn “confidence” and iːmɑːn “faith” in Persian have been developed in the same way from their proto-forms itmiɁna:n and iɁma:n. All the examples show that determining the relative chronology of the sound changes has an important effect in process of words development, and considering it can solve some problems with which we sometimes are confronted. We see that applying a sound change can eliminate the condition for another sound change and prevent its occurrence. While some other changes may provide a condition for a secondary change that affected the word. Different chronological order of sound can also be a reason for developing different dialects of a language, where a particular sound change order may distinguish a variety from other dialects which underwent another order of sound changes.

A scientific narrative examines the narrative techniques and structures of a narrative, as a report of related events presented in artistic forms. Narration is a way to combine linguistic units into larger structures in the same way as to cover secondhand meanings. Thus, narration is a way of reasoning and one way of its representation and its purpose is to describe the system of rules governing the production and processing of narratives. The narrative of texts such as the “Persians” by Aeschylus, which has different historical, mythical, and religious aspects, creates a new horizons. As long as a person needs communication with others, the narrative is also present in their life; narrative is a way to combine language units into larger structures and almost all language uses. Narration is an inescapable and necessary condition of language, meaning and knowledge, and consists of a variety of genres, from myth and history to plays, and even news titles and conversations, and at any time there is a place and a community. Narrative is a linguistic action that translates meaning, and narration is the review of this transition.Barthes refers to the events of the story, which are logical and time-consuming, the “story” and the word or the text in which that story was formed, “text” or “subject”. Each story begins with an expression of an incident, and each narrator expresses his perception of the story in such a way that the audience can understand it. Narrative analysis explores cognitive, socio-interactive and symbolic environments, and the structures are meaningful. For Barthes, critique was a process of structuring a text, and in his analysis, narration was the product of the combination of functions and themes. He believes reading narratives in a structured way is to illustrate how the meaning of narration is relying on a complete process. Functions are joined to actions, and actions ultimately join narratives themselves. Based on this, in a charting of Barthes’ speech, there are three levels of functions, actions, and narration of the main elements. He divides functions into two sets of “special functions” that follow and give rise to complementary actions, and “profiles” that divide the broad and indistinct concepts which are necessary for the meaning of the story. In Barthes’ theory, a function called “distribution function” is also named, which Propp and Grimes termed “prophet”. Purification means the logical sequence of functions that are interconnected with the correlation and brings the reader to the final text commonly found in classical stories, the result of the story and the writer’s purpose of expressing it. At the level of actors, characters are narrated based on what they do, and they are usually formed with contrasts and contradictions. These dichotomies or bindings are an action structure that enables story analysis. At the level of narration, functions and actions find their integrity and discover the hidden meaning of the story. The narrative and structural analysis of various texts create a new horizon and decode the new meanings of the new window into the perception of the reader; therefore, the “Persians” by Aeschylus, embraces various historical, mythical, and religious aspects. The main focus of the research was to make the reader understand the apparent meaning  –a demonstration of the victory of the Greeks on the mighty Iranian army– which means that the authority of the Greek gods in the face of the Iranian God and the rule of law and democracy is attaining dictatorship and the kingdom. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to use the ideas of Roland Barthes to analyze the narrative structure of this play at three levels of functions, actions and narration, and also examine the functions of narrative, implications and hidden meanings of the narrative. The method of this study is descriptive-analytic with narrative cognitive approach. The research findings show: A) Barthes’ theory is also compatible with the texts and plays of the BC. B) The author at the level of the actions has been able to construct opposites of many human beings with each other and with the spirits of the dead, induce his religious concepts to readers, C) at the level of narration, dreams, horoscope, and peak news, suggests the humiliation of humankind against the virtues of the gods; D) following the narrative model of Barthes’ analysis reveals some of the hidden beauty of the story, a better understanding of the concept, the reason for writing, and the secret message of the text. The narrative narration of the Iranian play makes it clear that the structuralist theory of Roland Barthes can also be found in ancient texts. This will help to better understand the hidden concept and hidden creatures in ancient texts. In this play, there are many aspects of functionalism and narrative of story telling, as well as behavioral and psychological descriptions.

An M.A. M.S. or Ph.D. thesis is a written report of an organized research conducted by a post-graduate university student to receive an academic degree. In spite of the variation in structure and tone of theses, some sections of these reports are well-established and somehow fixed. One initial section of theses is the acknowledgement page, a usually short section where the student thanks his or her supervisor(s), advisor(s), family, friends, colleagues as well as institutions such as libraries, faculties, departments, and/or companies and non-academic centers. This section enjoys a double opposite nature. While it is included in an academic and thereby formal text, it usually violates the essential patterns of such texts as writers tend to be personal and emotional in rendering their gratitude. Academic disciplines are usually divided into hard and soft sciences. The differences between these two scientific endeavors are discussed by scholars of philosophy, sociology as well as linguistics. Discourse analysts have paid attention to these two paradigms through similarities and differences of texts written in hard and soft sciences. The acknowledgement section of theses in both hard and soft sciences has been investigated by scholars and Hyland’s (2004) model is regarded as the most cited theoretical framework. Following Hyland’s model, the present study addresses the following questions; (1) Do acknowledgement patterns in Iranian M.A., M.S. and Ph.D. theses support those reported in Hyland (2004)? (2)Are acknowledgement patterns in Iranian M.A. and M.S. theses different from those in Ph.D. theses?  (3)    Are acknowledgement patterns in Iranian post-graduate theses different in hard and soft sciences? To answer these questions, 240 acknowledgements have been collected from 120 M.A. dissertations and 120 Ph.D. theses from six hard sciences (computer science, electrical engineering, and biology) and soft sciences (management, accounting, and linguistics). The collected data were limited to postgraduate students and therefore reports prepared by undergraduate students in some universities were not included in the corpus of study. It should be mentioned that in selecting the thesis, features such as the number of pages, the grade of thesis, the level of advisor or reader were not taken into account. The acknowledgement sections have been extracted from theses presented in 16 universities from which Tabriz University (48 cases), Islamic Azad University of Ahar (47), Tehran University (40), Ferdowsi University in Mashad (16), Tarbiat Modares University (13), Shahid Beheshti University (13), Esfahan University (12), Islamic Azad University of Tabriz (12) have had larger shares. The whole corpus contained 29431 words and while the general linguistics acknowledgements topped with 6340 words, the lowest number of words was counted in accounting as 3804. The number of words could be evaluated with regard to other variables, too. For example, it was revealed that the acknowledgement section in soft sciences is longer than that of hard sciences. It was also noticed that the level of students was significant as compared with M.A. or M.S. students, Ph.D. candidates had written longer texts (2913 more words) in rendering their gratitude. The gender variable played no significant role here as female students used just 205 words more than their male peers. The longest acknowledgement (with 312 words) was written by a female Ph.D. candidate in general linguistics, and the shortest one was prepared by a male Ph.D. candidate in biology (with 13 words). Considering Hyland’s (2004) model which includes three moves, i.e. (1) reflecting, (2) thanking and (3) announcing, it was shown that the structure of Iranian students’ acknowledgments  is quite compatible with the Hyland model, with the significant difference that in 50 percent of the Persian acknowledgements, students have thanked God while no such move or step is considered in Hyland’s framework. From the disciplinary perspective, it was shown that there are no significant differences in hard and soft sciences as far as Move 1 (reflecting) and Step 2-2 (thanking advisors and readers) are concerned. The main difference was witnessed in Step 2-1 (presenting participants) and Step 2-4 (thanking for moral support) as in sub-corpus of humanities (soft sciences), writers have paid more attention to their family and friends. On the contrary, in Step 2-3 (thanking for resource) the situation is the opposite as hard science students have referred to and thanked factories, laboratories as well as manufacturing and financial institutions. The trend seems reasonable since most studies in hard sciences are typically conducted through close collaboration with non-academic centers.        Although this study has been a descriptive one, the findings could provide a framework for preparing a manual for writing dissertation acknowledgements. It is recommended that the specific guidelines of this genre are exposed to students.

This paper aims to examine the construction of the word-formation pattern [sar-X] (compounds of the body part “head”) in Persian and investigate its semantic variations, the most general schema and subschemas both synchronically and diachronically employing the Construction Morphology approach (Booij, 2010). To this end, firstly, a collection of 178 compound words consisting of “sar” as the first constituent were collected from Bijankhan Corpus, Comprehensive Sokhan Dictionary, Dehkhoda and Zansoo Dictionaries and also from a Google search. Secondly, the historical data were collected from a comprehensive search of Farhang-yar Corpus consisting of the historical information about the words, their origins, meanings and changes in time from the 4th century onwards in the library of Academy of Persian Language and Literature. Then, all collected words were assigned to different categories based on their semantic variations and the specified categories were closely studied as follows: 1-Feature consisting of a) agentive adjectives and in some cases, object-oriented adjectives; b) Simple (descriptive) adjectives, 2-Entity consisting of a) job names; and b) other names such as instruments and objects. It is worth mentioning that in addition to Booij’s Construction Morphology (2010) as the main theoretical framework of this research, we benefited from Rainer’s views (2005) on semantic changes in word-formation patterns so that we can capture all the semantic extensions and developments of the word-formation pattern [sar-X], and in line with Rainer (2005) we divided all semantic change mechanisms involved in the construction [sar-X] into two main categories namely 1-Semantic/conceptual mechanisms (cognitive factors) such as metaphor, metonymy, approximation, reanalysis, and analogy, and 2-Non-semantic factors such as (historical) ellipsis, homonymisation, borrowing and loan-translation.The results reveal that two general constructional schemas and several subschemas have command of this construction and the central meanings “an entity related to SEM sar and X” and “distinctive feature of an entity related to SEM sar and X” are the most abstract pairings of form-meaning inferred from the products of this word-formation pattern and some of these subschemas refer to the meanings such as “the above part of SEM X”, “head SEM X”, “main SEM X”, “the best in SEM X”, “the start point or the end of X” and “distinctive feature of sth/sb whose head is X (has got X). This implies that the [sar-X] pattern is basically a construction with multiple functionality. Furthermore, it was revealed that the polysemy we deal with here is not at the word level but it is at the construction level (a type of constructional polysemy with multi-levels of abstraction for the constructional idiom [sar-x]) and the meaning contribution of the mentioned compounds lies within the construction [sar-X] on the one hand, the meaning of the constituents, the operation of conceptual metaphor (metonymy) and the encyclopedic knowledge on the other. This implies that the constructional idiom [sar-X] is basically both an adjective-making and simultaneously a noun-making construction and the dual usage of some of its compounds is through conversion activated by metonymy at the lexicon level. That is why the conceptual metonymy and metaphor play a significant role in determining the meaning of the mentioned words. Also, it was revealed that there is no need to be a complete and one-to-one correspondence between a word and the word-formation pattern from which the word is derived, as Rainer (2005; pp. 430-431) points out, it is assumed that human communication, in order to be effective, does not require a 100% match between model and copy, pattern and neologism (Gloning 1996; p. 152). In other words, an approximation, in many cases, will suffice if the hearer is able to bridge by inference the distance between model and copy. This is especially the case if model and copy are linked by metaphor or metonymy. That is why, approximation will thus be defined as a process of word formation where the relation between a pattern of word formation and a neologism formed according to it is not one to one, but mediated by metaphor or metonymy. Among the products of this construction also there are few words that have some exceptional properties, although they are regular in most respects, and for these cases, we benefited from the crucial notion of default inheritance which means “the specification of a word for a particular property is inherited from the dominating node, unless the actual lexical entry has another specification for that property” and thus, these few cases were considered as some objective instantiations derived from the higher hierarchical and more general constructional schemas, such as [N-X]A, [N-N]N, or [N-V]A to generate different kinds of compound words which take their constructional licenses from these abstract schemas rather than from the word-formation pattern [sar-X].Finally, postulating a paradigmatic nature of word-formation and positing the concept of construction as a basis for argument, Construction Morphology can account for our data and necessitate reevaluation of the demarcation between derivation and compounding at least in compounds of the body part “head” in Persian.

Slang language is an informal language which has been used among different social groups and entered literature, too. Considering the linguistic and cultural limits in the process of slang translation, this study was done to examine the translation of slang language in two children and adult picture novels, The Diaries of a Wimpy Kid, and The Brilliant World of Tom Gates. The first novel written by Kinney exploded in popularity and was considered New York Times bestseller in 2007. It has won many national and international prizes including “Nickeldone” and “The children praised book”. The second novel, The Brilliant World of Tom Gates, was written by Pishon. It has won several prestigious awards, including Roald Dahl funny Prize and the Water Stones children’s Book Prize. It has also been translated into over 33 languages worldwide. This study was done to elaborate different types of slangs and translation strategies applied in the translation of slangs to show how much the translators were successful in translating slang words and how the introduced translation strategies were beneficial in translation of slang expressions. The data of this qualitative-descriptive study were collected by applying Partridge’s theory about types of slangs and Baker’s strategies for translation of slangs. Partridge distinguishes ten different kinds of slangs: a. Cockney: It is divided into two types used by educated and uneducated people; b. Public house: It refers to group words and phrases made up for the smallness of the recorded vocabulary by nature. It is the main, genial, cheery, materialistic, but not gross nor cynical one; c. Workmen’s: Linking up with the public house is workmen’s slang which is very closed to tradesman slang used to refer to family and financial matters in workmen’s lives; d. Tradesmen: They are used between tradesmen; e. Commerce: it refers to slangs used in trade between tradesmen and customers; f: Public schools and universities: in these type students become the main source, because they are fresh, full of spirit to move forward for their future; g: Society: it is concerned with the spirit of universe, the world life; h. Art: The words and phrases of art are quickly adopted by the society; however, only few words of them are known; I. Theatre: It came to existence in the nineteen century and is related to slangs in art; and J. Church: Slangs not only appear from people in the street or in their daily conversation, but also can be found from a holy place such as church. Baker provides 8 strategies for translation of slangs:1. Translation by a more general word: The translator uses a common word in the target language which expresses the same referential meaning and the same expressive meaning as those of the slangs in the source text; 2. Translation by a more neutral/less expressive word: It consists of data that are translated using common words or phrases of dissimilar meaning, both referential and expressive; 3. Translation by cultural substitution: This strategy involves replacing a culture-specific item with a target language item, which does not have some propositional meaning but is likely to have similar impact on the target reader; 4. Translation by loan or loan word plus explanation; 5. Translation by paraphrase using a related word: This strategy consists of data that are translated using words or phrases of similar referential meaning but dissimilar expressive meaning; 6. Translation by paraphrasing using an unrelated word: Means translation using words or phrases of similar expressive meaning but dissimilar referential meaning; 7. Translation by omission: The translator can omit one word or more to make the translation suitable to the target language structure, seems natural, and suitable for the target language’s culture, 8. Translation by illustration: This strategy enjoys illustrations or pictures to convey the idea from the source text to the target text. Pictures can be helpful to the translator for translating slangs appropriately. According to Partridge’s classification of slang types, there were three types of slangs of school and university (53.27%), social (44.26%) and workmen (24.45%) in the first novel. In the second novel, there were also three types of slangs, namely, social (72%), school and university (24%), and artistic slangs (4%). For translation of these slangs in the first novel, eight strategies of translation introduced by Baker were used. They were translation by more general words (62.22%), translation by more neutral/less expressive words (9.76%), cultural substitution (15.86%), translation using loan words and explanations (2.44%), paraphrasing using related words (20.44%), paraphrasing using unrelated words (18.3%), omission (9.76%) and translation by illustrations (6.1%). In the second novel, six strategies were applied. They were namely, translation by more general words (4%), translation by more neutral/less expressive words (0%), cultural substitution (30%), translation using loan words and explanations (6%), paraphrasing using related words (26%), paraphrasing using unrelated words (30%), omission (0%) and translation by illustrations (4%) were applied. In the first novel, translating by more general words was the most applied strategy and in the second novel, cultural substitution and translation by unrelated words were the most used ones. By applying translation by more general words strategy, the translator of the first novel made the meaning of slang words change and transferred them to common words, so he did not transfer the exact meaning of slangs and did not produce the same effect on the target language. On the other hand, the second translator applied the cultural substitution strategy to find proper equivalences for slangs in the target culture and in this way succeeded in transferring the exact meaning of slangs, and producing the same effect on the target language. Another finding of this study was that pictures are influential in transferring meaning of slang language to children and adult reader. According to results of this study, pictures can help the translator in conveying the meaning of slang words in children and young adult literature.

Discourse analysis originates from the ideas of linguists, hermeneutics analysts and researchers. This method explains the analysis by examining the textual context and situational context, the dominant discourse on society, and the dominant thought on it. The short story of Al-Changiya, written by Iraqi writer Xenon Ayub, is a representation of the realities and problems of the traditional Iraqi society, which provides a directional image of the ideological processes governing society; the significance of these illustrated images is that of cultural poverty in the society, and the characters depicted in these stories represent a the true personalities of the society and display behavior consistent with the false stereotypes in their society.  The present paper uses a descriptive-analytic method in the form of discourse analysis to answer the question of how the discourse-based system or systems governing the community have become a bedrock for the promotion and reproduction of cultural poverty in traditional Iraqi society. Zenon Ayoub (1908-1988) is a posthumous of short story in Iraq, with about fourteen short story collections. The dominant thought and theme behind his work is a reflection of a rebellious spirit and a realistic attitude influenced by French and Russian realists, a vision that directs his work to a new structure with a focus on human freedom, especially women’s freedom and defended of their rights. In his view, the greatest task that any literary writer, especially the storyteller, must fulfill is to expose the truth and criticize inaccurate political and social realities they see in society, without fear of its consequences or the hope of reward. “Zahaya” is the title of a series of short stories by Zenon, the subject of which is to criticize traditional society and to deal with characters who, with their traditionalism and false beliefs, are the ground of oppression and their surroundings, in a better sense, we come across characters who are each a victim of cultural poverty and false traditions. The collection consists of six short stories, titled: “Al-Saqetah”, “Man Vera al-Hijab”, “Al-Aatraq al-Khalas”, “Al-Sharif”, “Jonun” and “Al-Jarima and Al-Aqaba”, all of which are in the tradition index. Commonism and witness are the same, stories that all share the same traditionalism and bear witness to the same look, which gives insight into the attitudes of intellectual writers with deep human concerns. Discourse analysis came up with a term called discourse analysis. The term is originally a Greek word for dis which means different aspects and course means movement. A linguistic approach is to discover and analyze the way the speaker or audience thinks based on the existing text. Discourse analysis is one of the topics of modern linguistics in the field of contemporary literary criticism which has also been translated into spoken and word analysis in Persian. In discourse analysis, we do not merely deal with the lexical elements that constitute the sentence as the main basis of the description of meaning, that is, the context of the text, but beyond that we consider factors outside the context, namely situational, cultural, social, and so on. In other words, the followers of this school describe how the units of linguistics crystallize and form meaning and message in relation to intrinsic factors (text, syntactic and linguistic elements, etc.) and extrinsic factors (social, cultural, political, etc.).  The theme of the Al-Changiya story series provides an opportunity to enter the inner layers of the cultural problems of women and men in the traditional Iraqi society, and the author, by illustrating the routine social relations, a simple language and a thriller for complex issues in relationships of human; by analyzing the lives of the characters of these stories, will have some kind of critical and social perspective. In analyzing these stories, we will see that cultural poverty is a pervasive problem in the feminine and masculine discourses in the story, and it is not just for the lower classes of society. In this collection of stories, life is suppressed, suicidal characters prefer to survive, the personality is on his own suspicion to preserve dignity, and the other inevitably leads to a tidal vortex, but the common point of all these stories is a bitter and fatal fate, which is the result of incorrect and false cultural beliefs embodied in the minds of the patriarchal society. The most important cultural expressions that have meant the meaning of cultural poverty in the “Al-Changiya” collection are: superstition and the belief in magic, discrimination and adultery, and belief in the superiority of men over women, the masculinity of science, maternal look to woman, poverty and financial dependency of woman, forced marriage, violence and ultimately hot shame, all of which are traversed by traditional and patriarchal society, which incorporate gender stereotypes from the beginning in the minds of each man and woman. In other words, these discourses show the plurality of power relations in the context of the story and, consequently, in the society of the Xenon Age, which is inevitable due to the kind of education, low cultural level, social connection, etc. and even dominated by society in many cases. The dominant discourse on each of the stories of this set of poverty is social culture and false customs, which all take place on the basis of people’s words and sentiments, not through the use of reason. The review of Xenon’s stories in this collection illustrates the fact that his stance in his stories is neither patriarchal nor feminist, therefore, he did not have any effort to stabilize the stereotypes. Rather, it tries to inform the audience through narrative, to counteract cultural poverty and incorrect beliefs and traditions that have left women in the dark and kept them in shadow, and in many cases denied their social rights, and the negative consequences of some of the stereotypes that have mutually challenged man’s life.

The acquisition of first language is one of the most interesting and also most mysterious phenomena studied by linguists. This phenomenon is considered unique, because it involves various factors and variables in its formation process. In relation to the problem of language acquisition, several theories have been presented from a variety of perspectives that range from naturalism to theories with an emphasis on social aspects of language development as well as theories that address human cognitive abilities. According to one view, young children have unique tacit characteristic which prepares them for acquisition of the first language. The amazing ability to understand the principles and rules of language and the knowledge of the hierarchical nature of syntax is one of the most important of these features. The acquisition of lexical meanings of a language also forms an integral part of the process of acquisition of the first language. Clark (2009) recorded the very first words produced by her own child. By recording the first fifty words produced by her child. She pointed out that these words refer to various categories such as man, food, body, clothing, animals, vehicles, toys, objects in the home, daily activities, and states. A review of these categories shows that at least the initial words produced by children are more semantically reflected from the environment around them. Acquisition of the meaning of words, on the other hand, requires the establishment of a kind of conceptual relationship among the acquired terms. In the sense that children must learn knowledge of lexical relations among acquired terms like synonymy and antonymy and so on. The semantic relation of antonymy is one of the most interesting of these relationships. Whether children attain the ability to understand and produce the relation of antonymy or how to apply it in the development of their linguistic abilities, has given rise  to multiple questions, and different research programs. In linguistic and especially in the lexical semantic tradition, the study of the conceptual relationships between the vocabulary of each language and the way in which, those concepts are related to each other is called the semantic relations. The study of the semantic relations of antonymy in the process of acquisition of the first language can be considered in two general directions. First, studying the crucial role of this group of relationships in the formation of interlanguage meanings, and second, seeking to understand the role of this group of relationships in the process of developing the cognitive knowledge of the child from himself and his environment and its reflection in his language. On the other hand, due to the lack or even absence of a study in this language, the study is one of the first research activities which adds to the necessity of two more studies. The semantic relation of antonymy is one of the semantic relations which has been studied by many linguists. This group of linguists have mentioned various types of antonymy relations, such as gradable antonyms, complementary antonyms, and converse, directional and lexical antonyms. The order and process of acquiring antonym words in first language acquisition have been investigated in different fields of research during last decades and researchers have sought to explain this phenomenon using various techniques and methods. But the process of acquiring the antonym words in Persian language has not been given full consideration. The present research seeks to determine  in what age and what order Persian speaking children produce different types of antonym words (graded, complementary, reciprocal and inverse), and whether the gender in learning such antonyms plays a meaningful role. Working towards this goal, in the present study which is a descriptive-analytical and cross-sectional type within the theoretical framework introduced by Murphy (2003) and her metalinguistic approach, 64 children and five pairs of antonym words for each four antonym types called complementary, reciprocal, gradable and reverses were selected. Children, both male and female in equal number, were between 5 to 8 years old and in four subgroups of ages, from 4.5 to 5.5, 5.5 to 6.5, 6.5 to 7.5, and 7.5 to 8.5. The participants of this study were selected from three kindergartens and one English language institute. After completing three homogenization tests from the International Test of Language Development (TOLD-3) in various phonological, syntactic and semantic fields, using the method of word game, the antonym pairs produced by children were extracted. Then, the data were analyzed by SPSS software. The findings indicated that, apart from gradable antonyms, the semantic growth of children in the production of antonym pairs would increase with increasing age. The results showed that the best use was made from gradable antonyms and the least use belonged to reciprocal antonyms.

Each language uses different ways to create a new word. One of the ways is “Reduplication process”. It is a productive process in morphology. In this process, it is possible to repeat the whole or partial word (or base) and produce a new word with a different meaning. According to this method, the new part is added to the base which has the main role to determine its form and to repeat the whole or partial base in the left, right, and sometimes middle positions of the base. Also, this process can be divided into “Full/Total” and “Partial” reduplication in Persian. In partial reduplication, a part of the base not only does not possess phonological identity, but it also carries no meaning. It only adds concepts such as intensity, emphasis and categorization to the base meaning which is called “Reduplicant”. The partial reduplication per se is divided into “Prefixed and Suffixed reduplication”. With respect to the new definitions and studies in this field, “partial prefixed reduplication” is classified into three groups in Persian: In the first type, the last phoneme of the base is deleted and the modified form precedes the base, like: (nâ nâz) ,ناناز (gol goli) ,گل گلی (dæ dær) ددر In the second type, the base first consonant is reduplicated with the fixed half-syllable before the base, such as: (cæt-o coloft)، کت وکلفت (pæt-o pæhn)، پت و پهن (Ɂâl-o Ɂâdʒil) آل وآجیل In the third type, the base first consonant is reduplicated with a fixed part (together with a section which is constantly fixed, for example:(veleng-o vâz/bâz) ,ولنگ و واز/باز (∫ælæm ∫urvâ/∫urbâ),شلم شوروا/شوربا (zælæm zimbo) زلم زیمبو After introducing different kinds of reduplication process in Persian, this article studied the partial prefixed reduplication based on the standard version of “Optimality Theory” that is called “Correspondence Theory”. In fact, it aims at investigating this process towards incorporating Persian to the new theory in “Generative Grammar”. So, the main question targeted by the study is: - Can we describe the “Partial prefixed reduplication process” in Persian based on “Correspondence Theory” (the standard version of Optimality Theory)? To answer this question, first, we should be familiar with Optimality and Correspondence Theories. Optimality Theory which was first established through introducing “over application” by Wilbur (1973) in his studies, was later noticed by researchers through publishing Prince and Smolensky’s (1993, 2004) and McCarthy and Prince’s (1993) articles. McCarthy and Prince (1993a, 2001) investigated prosodic morphology within the framework of Optimality Theory and offered significant issues on morphology, tone, and especially reduplication process. In this theory, all of the fields (including phonology, syntax and morphology) are considered “constraint-based”. These constraints are universal and are common among languages, and various ranking among these constraints in diverse languages on the one hand and their violation on the other hand justify the difference and diversity among those languages. Therefore, each language can violate each constraint; but the ranking of constraints in each language determines which constraints in that language are non-violable and which are violable (Dabir-Moghadam, 2012, pp. 649-656). Also, we have two kinds of constraints in this theory: “Faithfulness constraints” and “Markedness constraints”. In fact, the competition between these two constraints determines the “optimal option”. Markedness constraints cause a kind of change in structures, whereas faithfulness constraints basically prevent numerous changes, such as deletion, insertion or changes in the features of segments. However, the part related to reduplication in morphology is the standard version of this theory termed “Correspondence theory” wherein faithfulness constraints are introduced as correspondence (Kager, 1999, p. 194). In this type of Optimality Theory which was first introduced by McCarthy and Prince (1995, p. 25), the “default” and “total” models are presented. This study has selected the default model to investigate partial prefixed reduplication in Persian. Correspondence Theory claims that the reduplication patterns are formed through the interaction of three constraints: “Markedness constraints or well-formedness” that code markedness constraints; “Faithfulness constraints” that guarantee the identity of deep structure and surface structure; “Identity constraints” (B-R) that guarantee the similarities of the reduplicant and the base. In fact, this theory, with a different ranking of these three types of constraints, tries to explain the differences and similarities between typology present in the reduplication pattern of the world languages and also tries to explain specific patterns in languages (Kager, 1999, p. 200). Then, for analyzing the data, we gathered several samples of partial prefixed reduplication in Persian through making use of library method and the use of “Sokhan Dictionary” as well as related sources and divided them into three groups. Based on this classification, the authors derived some samples of the aforementioned reduplications and investigated the words in the form of “optimality tableau” with respect to the ranking of constraints (correspondence and markedness). Finally, based on the analyses obtained, a specific ranking was gained for each type of partial prefixed reduplication. Therefore, it can be said that the Optimality Theory is useful in justifying one of the diverse types of lexicalization processes, namely partial prefixed reduplication in Persian and universality of this theory. Also, the constraints governing this theory are approved once again.

Reading comprehension is the process of reader’s interaction with a written language and making meaning from the text. Studies show that there is a great difference between skilled and poor readers in terms of using the fundamental strategies of reading comprehension, i.e., cognitive and metacognitive strategies. Due to the lack of appropriate tool for measuring adults’ reading comprehension level in Iran and the lack of appropriate criteria for selecting the texts for such a tool, the aim of this study was to make a placement tool for evaluating adult Persian speakers’ reading comprehension level. It was amixed methods study and the aim was to answer three main questions about finding a text selection criterion for reading comprehension tests, using the selected criteria for making reading comprehension placement test and studying the validity and reliability of the devised test. Findings showed that text selection criteria should be fitted with patterns of international tests and the linguistic principles of text. The content validity of the text was approved by experts, after implementing their comments on the texts and questions. To ensure the test reliability and to do item analysis, the test was distributed among a sample of 60 MA students of University of Guilan at two stages. The reliability of the test was computed and Cronbach’s alpha were 0.84 and 0.82 respectively, showing the appropriate reliability of the tool. After normalization, this tool can be used to evaluate adult reading comprehension and in educational planning, it can be used for selecting the educational content.
Reading comprehension is the process of reader’s interaction with a written language and drawing meaning from the text. Generally, reading comprehension is a complex and multidimensional process which is done through two core processes. The first is decoding the symbols and recognizing the words, and the second is integrating the meaning of words in the context of the text (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; in: Atkinson, 2014). Learning reading comprehension is a long-term process; so it is at the end of the learning process that the adult reader can easily read different texts and draw the meaning from them. Studies show that there is a great difference between skilled and poor readers in terms of using the fundamental strategies of reading comprehension, i.e., cognitive and metacognitive strategies (Cain, Oakhill & Bryant, 2000). Weakness in the prerequisites of reading comprehension and failure in selecting the appropriate comprehension strategies are some of the important problems of students at different educational levels when reading different types of texts. Some international studies have been done on the reading comprehension such as PIRLS[1] and PISA[2] tests. During the recent years, the number of such studies has increased in Iran. Perhaps it could be due to the Iranian students’ low performance in the PIRLS test at different time intervals which shows their weakness in reading comprehension. Despite such weak results in international tests, and doing some related research in Iran, still there is no appropriate tool for determining the reading comprehension of Iranian people, especially adults. Living in the modern society needs learning and reading various texts. Despite the importance of this issue and the quantitative progress in the number of graduate students, there is no specific criterion to determine the educated adults’ level of reading comprehension. The development of higher education is a great scientific evolution that despite its positive effects has some shortcomings as well. One of the most important shortcomings is the lack of an appropriate placement tool for evaluating students’ reading comprehension in order to prepare suitable educational material. The aim of this study was to develop a placement tool for evaluating adult Persian speakers’ reading comprehension. The study followed three main objectives, i.e. finding text selection criteria and the related questions for reading comprehension tests, using the selected criteria for developing reading comprehension placement test and finally determining the validity and reliability of the designed test.
Questions: There were three main questions in this study: 1. What are the text and question selection criteria for developing a reading comprehension placement test? 2. Which reading comprehension placement test could be designed for adults, implementing the above-mentioned criteria? 3. Does the designed test have validity and reliability?
It was amixed methods study.The qualitative part included finding the text and question selection criteria for developing the adult Persian speakers’ reading comprehension placement test and the steps of its development. Also, the quantitative part of the study included the pilot study of the mentioned test to determine its validity and reliability. The content validity of the test was checked by 5 experts. To examine its reliability, the test was distributed among two groups of MA students of the University of Guilan, who were selected using convenience sampling method (each group 30 students) with two months interval and the level of reliability was computed using Cronbach’s alpha. Along with calculation of the reliability of the test, the test items were analyzed in terms of item facility, item discrimination, and the distractors’ distribution.
To select the texts, a combination ofcriteria introduced by the International Institute for the study of Reading Literacy for PIRLS test and Educational Testing Service (ETS) has been used. It was tried to match the selected texts in accordance with patterns of international tests and linguistic characteristics of the texts. These criteria included lexical and grammatical cohesion and also coherence of the texts. Taking into account all of the strategies underlying reading comprehension (i.e., inference-making, comprehension monitoring, text structure, etc.) the test questions were designed at 6 levels. These levels were selected based on the integration of Day and Park (2005) model and the design of TOFEL tests for reading comprehension placement tests. The content validity of the test was approved by 5 linguists, English language teaching, and Persian language teaching experts, after implementing their comments on the texts and questions. To ensure the test reliability, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used. First, the test was distributed among a sample of 30 MA students of University of Guilan and the level of Cronbach’s alpha was 0.82. Also, different levels of item analysis were conducted, including item facility, item discrimination, and the distractors’ distribution. To make sure of the reliability of the test, after revising the items, and with two months interval, the test was distributed among a new sample of 30 MA students of the University of Guilan. Again, the reliability of the test was computed and Cronbach’s alpha was 0.84, showing the appropriate reliability of the tool.
This test could be used to assess adult Persian speakers’ level of reading comprehension and also its results could be used to select appropriate educational material. In the next step of this research, this tool should be distributed among a larger sample to determine its construct validity and also to compute its norms so that its results could be cited with more confidence.


[1] The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study


[2] The Program for International Student Assessment

This study was conducted to assess reading proficiency of first grade students at Turkish-Persian bilingual and Persian monolingual regions. The research design was survey-descriptive and the sample was selected through cluster sampling which emcompassed 20 classes including 300 first grade students. Shafiei et al.’s (1387) Inventory Reading Test (IRT), was employed to assess participants’ comprehension, accuracy and fluency; Soleimani and Dastjerdy’s (1389) phonological awareness test was employed to measure phonological awareness differences; and a research made questionnaire based on Nematzade et al.’s (1390) study was used to achieve participants’ vocabulary repertoire. The results through independent t test indicated significant differences in accuracy and fluency between bilingual and monolingual students. However, there were not significant differences among reading comprehension, phonological awareness, vocabulary repertoire of bilingual and monolingual students. To indicate the reading subcomponents relationships, Pearson correlation was done and the results showed significant relationships among reading five-subcomponents. Due to the effectiveness of bilingualism and the interconnection among reading sub-components, educational authorities should seriously support special intervening reading programs for bilingual students. It has been estimated that approximately two-third of the world’s population is either bilingual or multilingual; that is, more than half the people in the world routinely use two or more languages in their daily communication in different ways. Multilingualism and multiculturalism are social facts of this new century, which can be seen in most classrooms and playgrounds. Iran, a multicultural society, is home to a number of language communities speaking Azeri-Turkish, Kurdish, Baluch, and Arabic languages among others. In non-Persian regions children attending the first grade classes are not competent in Persian listening and speaking skills. These children should study all school curriculums in Persian along with Persian native-speaker students. It seems that bilingualism in Iran is a kind of subtractive bilingualism. Unlike additive bilingualism that both languages enrich each other, in subtractive bilingualism the second language is added at the expense of the first language. Consequently, bilingualism in Iran seems to have contributed to the high rate of retention and grade repetition. For instance, in both TIMSS and PIRLS international studies, Iranian students ranked almost last.  As a case in the international reading comprehension study of 1970, Iran ranked 14th among fifteen participating countries, and in PIRLS 2001, 32nd among the 35 participating countries. Part of this result is due to bilingualism issue in Iran. The related literature indicates that Iranian bilingual students got lower scores than monolingual in reading comprehension test. Curriculum planners always search for ways to remedy this problem. For example, they have designed a one-month preparatory course for the non-Persian speaking students or have employed some other extra courses. But none of these solutions are effective for improving the non-Persian students’ drop-out rate. In recent years, dynamic systems theory has attracted a great deal of attention which has had a great impact on recent research on language studies. The central idea in dynamic systems theory is that language development is a dynamic, interrelated and complex cognitive demand. In the case of reading skill, it is a complex construct composed of a set of interrelated components such as accuracy, fluency, phonological awareness, reading comprehension, and vocabulary repertoire. An overview on literature shows that the majority of reading comprehension studies have predominantly focused on one shot approach on reading development studying only one of reading sub-components. However, to analyze reading development, we should consider all five-subcomponents in developmental process and concentrate on the interaction components too. In sum, to our best knowledge, most of the studies in this realm of inquiry have employed a limited number of subcomponents to account for reading comprehension research. Therefore, the impetus that prompted us to undertake this study was to analyze first grade monolingual and bilingual students’ reading comprehension because identifying the amount of reading comprehension of bilingual students and comparing it with monolingual students is the first step in eliminating the problem of  the high rate of retention and grade repetition in bilingual areas. Therefore, the present inquiry set to investigate (a) to compare monolingual and bilingual students’ reading skill (b) and to find whether there are any significant relationships between the sub-components (accuracy, fluency, phonological awareness, reading comprehension, and vocabulary repertoire) of students’ reading skill. In this study, 20 classes including 300 first grade students selected from monolingual and bilingual regions chosen through cluster sampling and three reliable and valid questionnaires including Shafiei et al.’s (1387) Inventory Reading Test (IRT), Soleimani and Dastjerdy’s (1389) phonological awareness test, and a research made questionnaire based on Nematzade et al.’s (1390) study were employed to evaluate participants’ reading skill. Meanwhile, four examiners were selected to measure the students’ reading comprehension skill. Independent t test and Pearson correlation were considered to signify the findings. The results indicated significant differences in accuracy and fluency between bilingual and monolingual students. However, there were not significant differences among reading comprehension, phonological awareness, vocabulary repertoire of bilingual and monolingual students. Pearson correlation indicated that five-subcomponents of reading construct are highly interrelated. These results were generally in harmony with previous studies. However, these findings were inconsistent with a number of related researches. The possible explanation for significance and non-significance differences in reading sub-components of bilingual and monolingual could be discussed considering contrastive analysis and the method of bilingual education in Iran. Another point of our interpretation concerns interrelatedness of sub-components of reading skill. Under appropriate condition, development in one dimension of a skill may facilitate the emergence of other aspects of language output. Based on this issue, the possible justification for reading sub-components correlation may be the co-adaptation of reading sub-components to each other in a parallel form. Thus, these sub-components could have cross-fertilized one another.

The present study compared online teacher and peer feedback with respect to feedback type and the effect they have on EFL learners’ writing ability. As regards the feedback type, the study explored the focus of teacher and peer feedback (content/ form), the accuracy of the comments they provided, as well as the patterns of incorporating comments by the students. The participants of the present study were 60 students participating in three intact classes, majoring in English language Literature and TEFL. The students in one of the groups received online teacher feedback, while the other groups received peer feedback; in one of the peer response classes, the feedback was exchanged through the conventional paper- and-pencil format, while in the other class, the students swapped comments through a website. The required data was collected through the students’ essays, written during an academic semester, and a semi-structured interview. In the present study, seven queries were raised and attempted to be answered. At first, the study checked the effect of different online and conventional feedback methods on the students’ writing ability in the short and long run. The results indicated that the students in the experimental groups outperformed those in the conventional peer feedback group in the long run (in immediate and delayed post-tests), while no difference was observed between the two groups on their immediate posttests (in the short run). The findings of the study also indicated the superiority of the online courses in helping the students with lower levels of English proficiency to improve their writing ability. The results showed that the students in the online groups (both teacher and peer) used internet to increase their on-task interactions; they also took advantage of online resources, like dictionaries. The students in the online groups were found to use the resource texts found on the internet as models. They also reflected on their writings, and could check their progress more easily. They stated that they were less anxious while challenging the comments of their peer or the instructor. The third research question dealt with the type of feedback that students in online and conventional peer feedback groups provided. The results revealed that the online medium could affect the students’ patterns of giving feedback and directed the focus of the students from merely local aspects to global and suprasentential aspects. Although the students in both groups managed to give comments on both global and local aspects, the online group students gave significantly more global comments. The fourth research question tapped the accuracy of the students’ comments in the online and conventional groups. The findings showed that the online medium was successful in reducing the number of miscorrections. The students in the online peer feedback group gave significantly more sound comments, and significantly fewer inaccurate comments than their counterparts in the conventional group did. The present study also investigated the effect of online feedback medium on the students’ pattern of incorporating the peer comments. Although at the beginning of the experiment, the students incorporated just around thirty percent of the comments, this level increased two times in the conventional group, and more than three times in the online peer feedback group at the end of the semester. The results also revealed that the online group students became more successful in distinguishing the corrections and miscorrections and deciding upon the incorporation of them in the second drafts. The sixth research question investigated the students’ attitudes toward and perceptions about peer feedback. The students in both online and conventional peer feedback groups were interviewed. The findings showed that the students in both groups had positive attitude towards and perceptions of peer feedback. The students in the online group had significantly more positive attitude towards and perceptions of peer feedback. The students also enumerated time-independency, place-independency, use of online resources, and negotiation over the comments as the major advantages of the online peer feedback. The only disadvantage of this type of feedback, stated by the students, was the internet disconnections. With regard to their preference, none of the students disliked online peer feedback; the preferences were of two types: the first group favored just the online medium, and the other group preferred a combination of online and face-to-face peer feedback. In sum, the results of the study revealed that the students in online teacher and peer feedback groups significantly improved more than those in the conventional peer feedback group. Other factors like the accuracy of the comments, the focus of the comments, and the revision patterns, also, indicated the superiority of the online feedback. The higher levels of students’ attitudes towards and perceptions of peer feedback of the students in the online group showed the superiority of online peer feedback.

No information can be transmitted without familiarity with language words. Teaching vocabulary is one of the most important components of foreign language teaching that can affect all the four main language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing). The first step in teaching vocabulary is to access the list of basic words. According to the studies conducted in the related area, high-frequency words as well as the basic vocabularies are significant in language teaching since they are easy to learn and frequently used in everyday conversations. Frequently-used words list or frequency dictionary is a set of words that have more repetition in a collection of texts (corpus). Basic words are generally extracted from the architecture of the corpus-based researches, and the output of each linguistic corpus can be a basic words list (depending on the language and type of the corpus texts). From 1897 there are many lists of basic words in different languages ​​of the world. English language researches is more than any other researches in this field. Since the year 1971, researches have also been conducted in Persian to extract frequent words. Thorndike (1921) presented 30,000 basic English words. In 1923, Ogden and Richards listed 850 basic words of English. Dolch (1936) listed 220 and West (1953) presented 2,000 basic English words. Coxhead (2000) has derived basic words in four areas of art, commerce, law and science. In 2001, Verlinde and Selva provided a list of frequent words in French. Also, 100 and 1000 English basic words were extracted by Fry et al. (2000). Jones and Tschirner (2006) extracted 4,307 frequent German words. Davies and Gardner (2010) extracted 1,000 to 5,000 basic English words. The list of 100 frequent words of Oxford English dictionary and the 3,000 basic words of Langman’s dictionary are other instances. In Iran, Barahani (1975), Imen (1978), Safarpour (1991), Tahriryan (1994), Hasani (2005), Gharavi Qouchani (2006), Doroody et al. (2008), Alahmad et al. (2009), Bijankhan (2011), Nematzadeh et al. (2011) were among the scholars of studying basic words. This research has two main stages: a) extracting texts and registering in database: 8 persons within 100 working days, each day extracted 3 passages with an average of 500 words from three newspapers in one of the seven different areas (including culture, society, politics, sports, fiction, economics and science), resulting in a corpus with 1,203,589 words (2401 texts). The software used for this project was written specifically for this research using the PHP programming language and is a web-based software. Types of words in the software are “name”, “verb” (and in particular “compound verb”), “preposition”, “proper noun”, “adjective” and “adverb”. Also, in this corpus, each text has metadata of “type of text” (cultural, social, political, etc.), the name of the newspaper, the date of printing, the date of the text typing, the date of frequency extraction and the name of the researcher. A list of the collections was also made to identify broken plurals. For example, ."آثار: اثر" Also, a list of inflectional affix (prefixes and suffixes) and rules governing them was provided. This list specifies what suffixes or prefixes any type of word can take. For example, verb can start with the "می" prefix, the "ات" suffix can be added to the word "آیه" but before that, the letter "ه" should be deleted from the end of the word. Each word in the software also has attributes like prefix, suffix, word root, word category, text numbers, word frequency, and main word (the word used in the text). b) Labeling Words: Labeling involves specifying the word category (noun, adjective, verb or preposition), and the lemma. Words with derivational affixes and without inflectional affixes and clitics were recorded. The verbs were recorded as infinitive. Compound verbs were recorded in an infinitive form, and their nominal and verbal parts were not separated. After the end of the previous stage, the words of the texts (including 1,203,598 words) were obtained along lemma of each word. After corrections such as label correction and lemma correction, the “Basic words” table (including 2,150 words with a frequency of 50 and above) was obtained. In addition, the list of 50 most frequent names, prepositions, adjectives and 20 most frequent adverbs in Persian were also obtained. Then, the specific base words of each topic (including 500 specific words of each topic with a frequency of 12 and above) were obtained.