Journal of Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature: Dynamics and Advances
Volume:8 Issue: 1, Winter-Spring 2020

A new vocabulary item has been added to English dictionaries: Covid-19. For linguists, the addition of a meaningful linguistic element to any language should change the whole language as, for T. S. Eliot, a new poem changes the whole literature of a nation. But let us see how seriously the addition of the vocabulary item Covid-19 might change the English language. According to Cambridge online dictionary, Covid-19 is “an infectious disease caused by a coronavirus (= a type of virus), that usually causes fever, tiredness, and a cough, and can also cause breathing problems. I do not think that the change brought about by the item is a radical one especially when the definition claims that most often the disease caused by the virus is not serious! (I wonder whether there is a Newspeak type conspiracy going on!) But when one turns to the “real world,” the situation turns out to be extremely serious: Not only has Covid-19 brought the whole world almost to a total stop, but it has also been the cause of many deaths all over the world. People have died, families have lost their breadwinners, doctors and nurses have been affected and died while on duty and we are still on the verge of being affected by the virus everyday if the necessary safety measures are not taken. Millions have lost their jobs and economies are on the verge of collapse. Governments are keen to see their state enemies crush under the heavy burdens by Covid-19 upon their economies and medical systems! Schools are shut down and much more other factual events can be added to these, all of which lead many to claim that in the post-Covid-19 era peoples’ behaviours should change.

Luise von Flotow is a Professor of Translation Studies at the School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa, Canada. She got her BA in German and French from the University of London (1974) and her MA in French from the University of Windsor (1985) and her Ph.D. in French from the University of Michigan (1991). Professor von Flotow was the director of the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa in 2006-2016. Her areas of academic interest include political and ideological influences on translation, specifically translation and gender; audiovisual translation, dubbing and subtitling, and literary translation as public diplomacy. Besides numerous journal articles, professor von Flotow has published the following books: Translation and Gender: Translation in the Era of Feminism (1997), The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2001), Translating Women (2011). She has also co-edited with professor Farzaneh Farahzad Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons. Dr. Reza Yalsharzeh, assistant professor of Translation Studies at Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University and a former student of professor von Flotow has arranged this interview with her.

In the last 2 decades, studies on conceptual metaphors have profoundly increased. The development in this field was followed by Lakoff and Johnson's (1980b) work on describing the conceptual role played by metaphors and their correspondence with language and thought. This study aimed to compare conceptual metaphors in Persian and English through a corpus-based approach as well as examining both the universality and culture-specificity of conceptual metaphors within Persian/English and describe in detail the Persian conception of some metaphorical concepts from the cognitive perspective. The cognitive theory of metaphor was resorted to and applied to a cross-cultural analysis of a randomly selected set of conceptual metaphors in English and Persian. To analyze the data, 12 conceptual metaphors introduced by Wright (1999) were investigated and gathered. Then, the metaphorical expressions in the 2 languages were grouped under their source and target domains. Results pointed to the fact that whereas there is a certain degree of universality in terms of the predominant conceptual metaphors, there are also variations between the 2 languages for cultural and linguistic reasons.

The present study investigated the effects of cognitive complexity of pedagogical tasks on the learners’ uptake of salient features in the input. For the purpose of data collection, three versions of a decision-making task (simple, mid, and complex) were employed. Three intact classes (each 20 language learners) were randomly assigned to three groups.  Each group transacted a version of a decision-making task in dyadic condition. The results of the statistical analysis (one-way ANOVA) revealed significant differences among the groups. The participants in complex group tended to produce more uptakes. The results of the present study revealed that manipulating cognitive complexity of pedagogical tasks led to more uptake of the linguistic items made salient by the teacher and triggered much interaction between the participants.  The study, also, has a number of theoretical and pedagogical implications for SLA researchers and syllabus designers.

The term metadiscourse rarely appears in translation studies despite the continuously growing body of research on discourse markers in different genres and through various perspectives. Translation as a product that needs to observe such markers for their communicative power and contribution to the overall coherence of a text within a context has not been satisfactorily studied. Motivated by such an ambition, this study focused on the third American presidential debate of 2016 and its two online translations by IRIB (The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) and BBC News (The British Broadcasting Corporation). This research aimed to investigate similarities and differences between the use of interpersonal metadiscourse markers in the American presidential debate and its two online translations. Overall, the findings revealed a statistically significant difference in the amount of metadiscourse items employed in English original text and its Persian translations. Translated texts into Persian employed fewer metadiscourse markers than the English text. The findings identified several pedagogical challenges that need to be addressed in translator training, including trainee translators’ familiarity with the social and discursive practices of the academic community, and their awareness of rhetorical elements used in academic texts.

This paper tries to examine literature as history, with an emphasis on the crucial role of fiction in narrating the marginalized events of history. Some fictions are actual accounts of events in history, and some are reflection of events. Actually, literature and history are integrated to each other, in a way that, pure history which shows us the reality and truth is just a myth. The pens writing history are subjective, and subject to power. During the history power has been a factor to control many things, among them discourse and history. On the other hand, literature is not independent either, and it reflects the hue and colure of its era and history in more than one way. Notwithstanding the genre, the writers who produce literary texts are living in a determined history, in which some events are dominant. In other words, literary texts were written in a context that definitely affected writers’ mind. Twelve Years a Slave is a clear example of literature as a tantamount to history, since it seeks to express the ignored angles of history in literary language. This article examines the inseparability and complementarity of literature and history in Twelve Years of Slave and its film adaptation.

In every mythological story, a quest for immortality and eternality depicts man’s inner fervor for unity with gods and the supreme power. Man seeks full immersion in life and longs for immortality at the same time. In other words, he wants to live both in time and in eternity. The desire for eternity in man shows his ceaseless struggle with time, and even more so an intense fight with death to conquer eternal life.Thisarticle studies religious and mythological figures who have either been immortal or sought to be so. Jesus Christ, Idris (Enoch), Khidr, and Elias (Elijah) from religious schools of thought;Peshotanu, Giv, Tous, Kay Khosrow, Garshasp, and Zahhak from Persian myths; and Utnapishtim in Mesopotamia are immortals. Some mythological figures such as Gilgamesh and Alexander also sought deathlessness, yet failed to find it.Most mythological and even religious schools of thought have dealt with immortality. Anyone who has set out to find eternality has returned empty-handed, losing their life during the quest: Gilgamesh and Alexander sought immortality and the structures of their journey and quest are similar in many ways. However, they both failed. Those who received immortality from God, on the other hand, remain eternal, as immortality belongs to the realm of God’s grace, not man’s struggle.

This study investigated the intervention of Zimmerman & Hutchins (2003) Information Synthesization vs. Visualization on Iranian Undergraduate ESP (Accounting) learners’ reading comprehension achievement across gender. 120 ESP University students majoring in Accounting in Iran participated in this study and were assigned to 4 homogeneous groups, 30 male and 30 female students in experimental groups, 30 male and 30 female students in comparison groups. An ESP reading comprehension administered to all participants as a pre-test showed that 4 groups were not significantly different in ESP reading comprehension ability. For treatment, Accounting reading comprehension passages were taught through focusing on Information Synthesization strategy in the experimental group and in the comparison groups it was taught through focusing on Visualization strategy. At the end of the treatment, the post-test was administered. The results revealed that Information Synthesization had more effect on improving the students’ ESP reading comprehension ability than Visualization, and also gender does not interact with ESP reading comprehension ability of the participants.

This study aimed to discover the effect of mobile-assisted teaching of collocations on Iranian EFL learners’ reading achievement. For this purpose, a PET test was given to 85 intermediate EFL learners as the proficiency test. After homogenization, 30 female and male students within the age range of 16 to 30 years old from an institute in Alborz Province were selected as the participants in the experimental group and 30 female and male students within the age range of 14 to 25 years old from another institute in Alborz province were selected as the participants in the control group, as well. A reading test was utilized as the pre-test to measure the participants’ reading achievement. The participants in the experimental group received mobile-assisted teaching of collocations through Flax Completing Collocation game while the participants in the control group received teacher instruction of the collocations existing in the game inside the classroom. To discover the effect of mobile-assisted teaching of collocations, a post-test, the same as the pre-test was given to the participants after the treatment. An independent t-test was run to compare the experimental and control groups’ means on the pre and posttest of reading achievement. The results indicated that the experimental group, after receiving mobile-assisted teaching of collocations, significantly outperformed the control group on the posttest of reading achievement. Regarding the findings of the study, the achieved results would help EFL teachers, learners, and material developers to be informed about the effect of mobile-assisted teaching of collocations on reading ability. Furthermore, this study presents some recommendations in future studies.

The present paper studies Kitchen Sink Drama and Naturalism to investigate how a cultural movement through which artists like Arnold Wesker, John Osborne, and Shelagh Delaney express their disillusionment during the post-war period representing the reality of their lives via theatre. The period of 1956–1965 can be considered as a period of time identifying post-war British theatre which is related to post-war cultural, social, and political developments. In this period, playwrights take a social stance which reflects daily experiences of workingclass undergoing social and political changes in that time. Following the destructive consequences of the First and Second World Wars social, religious, and political alterations resulted in unemployment, insecurity, and frustration in society, especially among young educated people who returned from the war.The Kitchen Sink Drama is a peculiar type of drama for plays written within the mode of the new wave of British Realism in which plays are staged in domestic settings with a Naturalistic representation of ordinary life.

“Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics, has been under consideration in investigations related to bilingual and multilingual societies. First proposed by Haugen (1956) and later developed byGrosjean (1982), the termcode-switching refers to language alternation during communication. Although code-switching is unavoidable in bilingual and multilingual contexts, its role and motivational determinants in language classes are sometimes ignored. The goal of the present article was to investigate the motivational determinants of classroom code-switching in EFL classrooms. The research was conducted with 400 participants, including 374 students and 26 teachers. The data collection techniques included questionnairesand observation checklist, all of which were designed based on Hymes’ (1962) framework and Poplack’s (1980), Myers-Scotton’s (1989), Blom and Gumperz’s (1972), and Gumperz’s (1982) categorizations. The data were analyzed through the software SPSS (Version 20). The results revealedthat providing the listener with better understanding, clarification, and checking comprehension are the most important motivational determinants for codeswitching.

Conrad’s acclaimed works from his middle period have been thoroughly studied from several perspectives including postcolonialism whereas the novels from his early period were overlooked due to their so-called“uneven” quality. The most notable works among Conrad’s early novels are hisLingard Trilogy- three of his early novels which are based on the recurring presence of the Captain Tom Lingard, the protagonist, and therelationship between Westerners and non-Westerners in a contact zone where both cultures meet. A postcolonial study of these novels can reveal Conrad’s attempt to change the binary logic of his time which put the West in a position of power. Postcolonial elements in this trilogy can be studied by using Homi Bhabha’s theories of stereotype, ambivalence, mimicry, hybridity, and othering to substantiate our claim that in Lingard Trilogy, Conrad’s discourse was anti-racist and against the imperial logic of the nineteenth century, since he tried to change it in the Trilogy.

Genre analysis as an area of great concern in recent decades, involves the observation of linguistic features used by a determined discourse community. The research article (RA) is one of the most widely researched genres in academic writing which is realized through some rhetorical moves and discursive steps to achieve a communicative purpose. This study aimed at proposing a model of generic patterns competence applicable in writing RAs in different English for Academic Purposes (EAP) disciplines. In so doing, a “qualitative meta-synthesis” (Walsh &Downe, 2005) approach was adopted as the research method. A meta-synthesis exercise was framed and the currently available literature on various models of generic moves suggested for the different sections of RAs was investigated. 391 relevant abstracts and 354 full papers were selected and screened and a number of 26 studies were appraised for final inclusion. Afterwards, a reciprocal translation was conducted to generate the latent themes and concepts in the general model. More specifically, a thematic coding strategy was applied for synthesizing the selected qualitative evidence. Then, different obtained themes and categories were synthesized to extract the major dimensionsof the model of RA generic competence. Finally, four super themes of generic competences were emerged including: RA abstract generic competence, RA introduction generic competence, RA methodology generic competence, and RA discussion generic competence. The new model can be a common frame of reference to guide the EAP researchers in understanding and following the appropriate generic structuresin producing an acceptable body of academic discourse to be published in highly prestigious journals.

In this article, researchers set out to discover the metadiscourse markers in research articles written by both native and non-native English speakers. To this end, a total number of twenty research articles published by Iranian and native English speakers in highly reputed journals on Arts and Humanities domains were randomly selected from major databases including Science Direct, Noormagz, and Magiran. Through Hylands’ Metadiscoursal model (2005), appraisals were accomplished on two main metadiscoursal aspects including interactive vs. interactional resources. The results revealed that interactive resources had the highest proportion in comparison with interactional resources with transitions being in the top list in both native and non-native articles considering different parts of the articles from abstract up to the conclusion part. From among interactional resources, in articles written by native English speakers, attitude markers and for the non-native ones, engagement markers had the least rates. In addition, Iranian scholars had used some markers e.g. ‘attitude markers’, and ‘hedges’ more than native English speakers. It can be included that students should be informed about a balanced use of the frequency and the percentage of different metadiscourse markers in English as a part of teaching writing or grammar in their research writing modules.

Literature and Language Learning in the EFL Classroomconsists of nineteenchapters. The chapters of the book have been arranged into two parts: Part I, current issues and suggestions for new approaches (Chapters 1-6) and Part II, empirical and case studies (Chapters 7-19). The book takes multiple approaches to examine how literary texts can be incorporated into teaching practices inan EFLclassroom including 1) the use of extensive and close reading 2) narrative inquiry 3) translation and pedagogical stylistics, and 4)the evaluation of successful foreign language learners. It is worth mentioning that the increasing role of non-canonical English literary textssuch as post-modernist texts, simplified texts and pop song lyrics isthe focus of several chapters.The collection may be considered as unique in the sense that many chapters, either directly or indirectly, target the Japanese EFL classroom. In fact, 14 chapters out of 19 have been written by Japanese authors.This review provides a chapter-by-chapter account of the book.