نشریه پژوهش های زبانشناختی در زبان های خارجی
سال دهم شماره 2 (تابستان 1399)

Listening instruction has always encountered various approaches, leading to learners’ success or failure in listening comprehension. Framed in Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1995), the present study attempts to investigate the effect of raising the learners’ awareness of prosodic features (stress, intonation, and rhythm) in the pronunciation of words on their listening comprehension. In doing so, 70 intermediate EFL learners from Kish Air Language Institute were selected. They were divided into one experimental group (n=35) and one control group (n=35). Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was administered to ensure the homogeneity of participants’ level of proficiency. The listening pre- and post-tests were also taken by the participants. Results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group, implying that when learners were aware of prosodic features (stress, intonation, and rhythm) in the pronunciation of words, they could significantly improve their listening comprehension. It seems that teaching prosodic features can raise the learners’ pronunciation awareness, which can then improve the learners’ listening comprehension as learners can be familiarized with the structural and semantic categories of target words and activate their content knowledge of the key words in doing the listening tasks. Awareness raising of prosodic features can be in alignment with metacognitive instruction - while the former can be more productive - in order to help foreign language learners develop their listening comprehension in stress-free learning environment. Finally, it is noteworthy that learners’ awareness demands teachers’ awareness of how to teach, which can be fulfilled by purposeful teacher education programs.

Professor Indushushikhar, a well-known Indian linguist, cites the Sanskrit language guide: Despite the great changes that have taken place in the current Persian language, it is still close to thirty-five percent of its words can be measured by the words syncretic, vowel, and classical. Since linguistics was introduced in Europe about a hundred years ago, according to the theories of linguists, the science of linguistics, known as linguistics, comes from the blessing of reading the language of Sanskrit and Avesta in this land. And it deals with the similarities and changes of language in different times and places. Since then, the study of Sanskrit language has been considered necessary for any research in linguistics, history, civilization, thought, religion, and human traditions, and such extensive research has been done on Indo-European languages ​​that has been done on other linguistic groups. does not have . . If the new Iranian languages ​​are similar to the two-thousand-year-old traditions of the Indo-European languages, they have similarities with the Sanskrit language. In this study, in addition to emphasizing the study of Sanskrit language for comparative linguistic studies, it examines the common points in Hindi Persian and Urdu with Sanskrit. This study will play an important role in the teaching and learning of the common Urdu-Indian language and vocabulary with Sanskrit.

In today's educational world, assessment is not used as an instrument for assessing students' learning at the end of a course, but as an instrument used for orienting teaching and learning during a course. Self-assessment is an assessment technique that encourages students to reflect on their learning, develop practical learning strategies, and discover ways of compensating their learning problems. This study focuses on the social representations of the implementation of self-assessment in masters’ level French Language-Teaching seminars to investigate whether it promotes improvements in students’ learning and skills. Two groups of master’s students,, each composed of 12 students were selected. The first group (the control group) was assessed by the instructor, whereas in the second group (the experimental group), students were responsible for assessing their learning. Students’ overall performance in the two seminars was compared and analyzed at the end of each semester, along with a questionnaire distributed among the experimental group students to examine whether self-assessment enhanced students’ learning, helped develop self-reflection and critical thinking regarding their learning and learning strategies. Results indicated improvements in the experimental group students’ performance, made students more responsible about their learning, improved self-regulation and made them more independent and autonomous in their educational career.

The English language has been increasingly embraced worldwide as a global means of communication and, apart from the instrumental applications of English as a communicative tool, the sociocultural aspects of (teaching and learning) English has also been increasingly debated. Within these debates, the awareness of language leaerners about the cultural functioning of English is a significant concern. Therefore, this study is an attept to examine the awareness of university students in Tehran about the specific policies of English-speaking countries in this regard. The analysis of the responses of 656 male and female studnets in different fields of study at five major universities in Tehran to a questionnaire, along with interviews with 28 of these studetns, indicates meager awareness on the part of these studetns about the transnational plans for the spread of English as a means of cultural influence. Some aspects of the sociocultural implications of this condition for the language education discourse community and for the wider society are discussed. The analysis of the responses of 656 male and female students in different fields of study at five major universities in Tehran to a questionnaire, along with interviews with 28 of these studetns, indicates meager awareness on the part of these studetns about the transnational plans for the spread of English as a means of cultural influence. Some aspects of the sociocultural implications of this condition for the language education discourse community and for the wider society are discussed.

This study examined Iranian EFL university instructors’ perceptions and practices of learning-oriented assessment of reading comprehension. In this sequential-explanatory mixed methods study, the quantitative data were gathered from a sample of 180 instructors. The participants were selected through stratified purposive sampling. Then, to probe the quantitative data in more depth, the researchers conducted interviews with 15 instructors. To maximize the data variation in qualitative phase, the maximum variation sampling was utilized. The quantitative findings revealed that in their reading comprehension assessment, teachers made use of both traditional and alternative assessment techniques. Furthermore, almost half of the teachers stated that they encourage students to engage in self-assessment and peer-assessment. In addition, teachers believed that appropriate feedback is one that encourage students to improve their learning. Finally, the qualitative findings shed additional lights on the quantitative ones. Key words: Assessment, Learning-oriented assessment, Reading comprehension, a Mixed Methods study, sequential-explanatory mixed methods study

Nowadays, technology has become an inseparable part of everyday life. Since the introduction of the internet and prevalence of computers, more and more people have been using electronic media to cover hosts of purposes such as interpersonal communication, sending-receiving information, educational and language perspectives, and so forth. One new form of pedagogy, known as the flipped classroom, extends and enhances learning and accommodates different learning styles. This study was an attempt to investigate the impact of the flipped classroom approach on Iranian EFL learners’ autonomy and anxiety. To this end, 29 students were selected from Gilan Payam-e-Nour University, Roudsar, Iran and divided into the control and experimental groups. They were asked to fill in two questionnaires, namely the English versions of the Zhang and Li's Learner Autonomy Questionnaire, and Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale. The research method employed in this research was a quasi-experimental study with pretest and posttest with a control group. Data was analyzed using ANCOVA. The results of this study revealed that the flipped classroom had a significant effect on the improvement of learner autonomy and it also showed that flipped classroom had a significant effect on suppressing language anxiety. The findings of this study carry important implications for foreign language syllabus designers, curriculum planners and language instructors.

In translating of non-simple Russian words it is, of course, important to pay attention to the parts of each word. But what is observed in translation courses, in some of the published translations from Russian, in Russian to Persian and Persian to Russian dictionaries or in translating of specialized terminology, is a kind of pure morphological approach. It means that in such cases main attention is paid to morphological segmentation, finding equivalent for each segment (morpheme) and then summarizing the meanings of them is introduced as the only correct method for translating such words. This method is called "pure morphological approach". In the article at first non-simple Russian words are introduced and on the basis of the opinions of more famous Russian grammarians these words have been divided into derived, complex and compound complex groups. Then by giving examples for the words of each group along with their communicative meanings in Persian we tried to show that the pure morphological approach in translating of such words is not effective.

Over the past few decades, the use of the corpus-based approaches in second language (L2) teaching has received considerable attention among teachers and researchers. Drawing upon a corpus-based approach, this study aims to investigate the differential effects of the deductive and inductive cognitive approaches on the improvement of verb-adverb collocational knowledge in the context of classroom concordancing. Seventy-six participants were randomly assigned to deductive, inductive, and control groups. During two intensive 90-minute sessions, the experimental groups were given some receptive and productive tasks to do using the concordancer as a reference tool. While the collocational patterns for accomplishing the tasks were explicitly presented to the deductive group, the inductive group was required to work out the underlying patterns using concordance lines. The analysis of the data gathered from receptive (multiple-choice) and productive (sentence-completion and sentence writing) collocation pretest and post-test revealed that concordancing had significant effects on the improvement of L2 collocational knowledge. While both the deductive and inductive groups showed similar gains in receptive knowledge of collocations, the inductive approach was found to be more effective in developing productive knowledge. Overall, the students had positive views of concordancing. The findings have pedagogical implications for L2 teachers and curriculum designers

Flipped learning is a relatively new approach in teaching in which the place of teacher's lecture in the classroom and the students’ assignments are exchanged to enhance active learning, engement and achievement. Flipped learning can be applied for the professional development of pre-service and in-service teachers as well. This study investigated the effect of flipped professional development on the achievement of novice EFL teachers. For this purpose, 150 teachers were selected through purposive sampling from different language institutes and non-profit complexes such as Roshangar and Tazkieh in Tehran, district 2. The teachers were divided into experimental and control groups. The experimental group was supposed to attend the flipped classroom whereas the control group attended traditional lecture-based classroom (equal N=75). Based on the teachers’ needs the course of "Classroom Management" was selected. “Farhangyada” which is a learning management system was employed to load content of the course for the experimental group. An instructor taught the content of the course for the control group in the traditional way for 6 weeks. To collect data, pre-test and post-test were conducted. Results achieved from the pre-test and post-test indicated that teachers in flipped professional development performed better than teachers in traditional professional development class

Idioms, commonly considered to be a figure of informal, colorful, and entertaining language, are supposed not to lend themselves to formal discourses. However, idioms have been recently found to be employed in formal communications and academic discourse. This study strives to identify idioms in a corpus of 409122 words of 50 randomly selected Applied Linguistics papers. Moreover, the study aims to analyze different aspects of English idiom usage along with the pragmatic functions they perform in Applied Linguistics research articles. Furthermore, a comparison was made between the employment of English idioms and their functions in the articles written by native English-speaking and those of native Persian-speaking authors. Results of descriptive statistics indicated that English –speaking writers significantly used more idiomatic expressions in their research articles. Six pragmatic functions fulfilled by idioms in research articles were also extracted. Two lists of the most frequently used idioms in research articles were compiled. The six pragmatic functions include evaluative, informational, modalizing, emphatic, organizational, and cross-functioning. By studying and providing the most frequent academic idioms in Applied Linguistics research articles, the findings of this study can be useful for the EFL writing instructors, Applied Linguistics graduate and post graduate students, and teaching materials developers.

As a cumulative and elaborative discourse marker, and is the most frequent, crucial, creative, effective, and complex discourse monitoring element. This explorative investigation enjoys two scientific and research informing resources: analysis of key authors studies and interpretation of creative corpuses in Persian and German poetry. Applying Schiffrin’s (2006) model of discourse planes of talk to discover its patterns of use and functions, this article analyzed ‘and’ in Hafiz and Goethe poems. The results revealed that this marker had uses both in primary and secondary planes of discourse. The primary planes consisted of functions in ideational structure and plane of discourse establishing temporal, cause and effect, and topic relations. And the secondary planes included functions in the action and information structure of discourse dealing with command, narration, purpose, inference, justification, emphasis, balance, expansion, contradiction, and expectations. Unfortunately, these discoursal strategies and functions are not analyzed in grammar books and dictionaries. Moreover, as the results showed because of its pragmatic and indexical properties, this marker combined ideational, action, and information planes of discourse. The combination of and with other markers was another discoursal outcome of this study. Due to the exploration of new, different, and unique functions for this marker, some pedagogical and research implications in teaching languages, classroom strategies and its management, material development, and lexicography are discussed.

One of the factors that hinder the process of second language acquisition is the linguistic errors. Indeed, making errors in the process of language learning is a normal and predictable matter. However, the importance lies in being aware of these errors and finding strategies to rectify them. Analyzing the error in order to find its sources is considered as one of the essential parts of language teaching. During the process of teaching the Japanese language, students with different levels of proficiency commit errors in the use of passive sentences. Considering the frequent use of passive sentences in the Japanese language, the correct usage of it is of high importance. As the first step of our study, an overview of the structures and properties of passive sentences in the Japanese language is carried out, followed by field research for an investigation into the most common errors made by Iranian language learners when using these sentences. The results of the research revealed that the language learned have committed two types of errors: Interlingual errors and intralingual errors. Examining intrerlingual errors revealed that the Persian language is the main cause of errors such as substituting objects for subjects, the omission of the doer of the action and errors in the use of syntactic structures due to overgeneralization of grammar rules between Persian and Japanese languages. Examples of intralingual errors include failure in differentiating between passive sentences and similar grammatical forms, misuse of postpositions and errors in the making of three-component part passive sentences.

The current study is aimed at analyzing and comparing augmentation processes in Persian and Japanese languages based on the theory of evaluative morphology. According to evaluative morphology, a linguistic construction is evaluative if it conveys (consciously or subconsciously) a type of value of the referents or audience, according to the speaker’s judgment. Morphology provides the speakers of a language with different means and ways for expression of evaluation in language and plays a dominant role in the formation of evaluatives. Diminutives and augmentatives are two main forms of evaluation in languages. As diminutives are much more common in languages and are generally formed by affixes specifically developed for this function, they are also investigated more pervasively than augmentatives. This is also true for Persian and Japanese linguistics where augmentatives, at least in the case of Persian, have so far been neglected or have only been sporadically touched upon in grammar books. The findings of this study showed that although Persian and Japanese belong to two different language families and are typologically placed in two different language types, both use compounding and reduplication as two dominant mechanisms for producing augmentatives. The present study aims to provide a detailed examination and comparison of these two mechanisms for the formation of augmentatives in two languages.

This paper reports the findings of a study which sought to investigate the probable differences between frequency and forms of hedging devices as well as their functions in the ‘Results & Discussion’ subgenre of research articles (RAs) written by Iranian writers (non-native speakers of English) versus their native English counterparts (native speakers of English). A corpus of sixty (N=60) ‘Results & Discussion’ sections taken from four journals, namely IJLLALW, IJALEL, TQ, and AL, written in English by Iranian nonnative and native English writers were randomly selected. The AntCnoc software as well as two human coders identified and coded the hedging devices found in the corpus according to the theoretical framework proposed by Varttala’s (2001) taxonomy of hedging devices and Hyland’s (1998) polypragmatic model of hedging functions. Results indicated statistically significant differences in the frequency, forms, and functions of hedging devices in the ‘Results & Discussion’ subgenres written by the two academic writer groups.