Journal of Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature: Dynamics and Advances
Volume:8 Issue: 2, Summer-Autumn 2020

JALDA has been officially recognized as a Scientific Grade B Journal by Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology recently. A main interest of the Journal lies in the contextualized sense of science; the studies should take place in real world contexts and they should be intended to help solve everyday problems.The fields of applied linguistics and applied literature create the scope of the Journal for the purpose of coming into close encounter with the problems researchers may experience in their everyday lives both within and without school; they are encouraged to use their expertise, even in an interdisciplinary mode, to tackle issues that hinder their subjects and people on their way to success and improvement. From such a perspective, the decontextuzlized selection and reading of a literary text, for instance, may not be regarded as fruitful. There are stories by both teachers and researchers about how the “literary taste” of students at rural areas of our country differ radically from the taste of those from urbanized areas. Should the students be introduced to the same material in their English language and literature courses? JALDA prefers to consider the diversity in the world and it intends to publish the findings that help show how new ways are sought for improvements in the fields. This results from a sense of protecting the world and its diversity we experience in our everyday lives while, thanks to access to the technology, complicated (conspiracy) theories spread faster than any biological virus could to keep us far from one another and from the real world.

James P. Lantolf is George and Jane Greer Professor Emeritus of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics and former director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics in the same academic unit at Xi’an Jiaotong University. He is founder of the Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning research group,which has been holding an annual meeting to discuss research in progress on second language acquisition from the perspective of sociocultural theory since 1993.He is founding editor of Language and Sociocultural Theory (Equinox Press, 2013 to present) and was co-editor of Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press,1993–1998).He served as President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in 2004 and was recipient of the AAAL Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award in 2016. He has co-authored or co-edited nine books and has published more than 140 articles and book chapters. His seminal book entitled Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development (2006, coauthored with Steven L. Thorne) published by Oxford University Press coupled with a co-edited volume Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Research (1994, coedited with Gabriela Appel) ushered in a new upswing of research on language development and teaching from the sociocultural theory vantage point. His latest co-edited book The Routledge Handbook of Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Development was published in 2018. The following is a written interview with James P. Lantolf conducted by Saeed Karimi-Aghdam. Dr. Karimi Aghdam is Associate Professor of English Language and Didactics in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Nord University, Norway. He is a member of the editorial board of Language and Sociocultural Theory and serves on the advisory board of the Journal of Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature: Dynamics and Advances.

Since its introduction to EAP theory in the 1980s, the concept of genre has proven to be a rigorous theoretical construct for a deeperunderstanding of the nature of academic discourse. However, the inherent potential of this concept as a means of classifying and categorizing academic texts has also given rise to what we have called “the misconception of homogeneity”. Criticizing this misconception and drawing on the concept of hybridity/heterogeneity of scientific/academic genres, the present paper explores some of the major implications of this view for EAP research and pedagogy. It is argued that the recognition of the concept of hybridity of academic genres would result in redefining the corpus design issues, focusing on genre networks instead of single genres, trying further possibilities of triangulation, redefining the criteria for the selection of formal/functional properties in analytic projects and development of thicker explanatory frameworks. The paper also looks at possibilities of operationalizing this concept within what is called “a hybridity-sensitive EAP pedagogy” and suggests intertextuality/interdiscursivity tracing tasks and discursive conversion tasks as means of raising EAP learners awareness.

Immoderate smart phone usage usually makes the students addicted to it and spends less time reading lecture notes and textbooks. This study aims to determine university students' usage of smart phones and perceived rejection of paper books in an EFL context. The study collected data through a 20-item structured questionnaire consisting of the general characteristics, the number and hours of general smart phone usage, the daily usage of textbooks or paper books, and via the online short version of Smart phone Addiction Scale (Kwon, Kim, et al., 2013) administered to200 Iranian EFL participants aged ≥ 18 years and recruited from the Department of Humanities and Biological Sciences in Rabe Rashid Higher Education Institute (RRHEI), Tabriz, Iran. Results of the online SAS showed that the participants had a mean SAS-SV score of 47.02 (SD = 4.235), so theywereregardedasexcessivesmartphoneusers.Also,resultsofquestionnaireindicatedthatthe majority of participants were more inclined to spend an alarming amount of time on their smart phones rather than on their lecture notes and textbooks. The author concludes that students inRRHEIarestronglyaddictedtosmartphonesandthisaddictivebehaviormakesthemspendless time reading textbooks and using university library. The author ultimately gives some useful tips onhowtomitigatethenegativeeffectsofsmartphones.Theresultsofthisstudypromisepractical implications for policy-makers, parents, and academics and their students.

This study draws on a comparative framework to evaluate the translation of political implications in three Persian translations of the novellaAnimal Farm (by George Orwell), using  Fairclough’scritical discourse analysis (CDA) model. The study regards political implications and ideologies as a mode of background knowledge shared by writers and audiences in the source language. Fairclough’s model involves three qualitative stages (interpretation, explanation, reproduction) and takes into account ideological stances. Political allusions in novels, if not sufficiently translated, could downgrade the implicit purposes and even the meaningfulness of the text. Given this significant function, the study specifically focuses on linguistic items that play an extra-textual role in meaning formation and the way they are translated into Persian. Hidden ideologies may appear in the form of assumptions, presuppositions, interactional history, or cultural references. This study emphasizes that translators must not take at face value what Fairclough calls “members resources” and must examine their choices against other sources.

The present study sets out to investigate whether the position of literary works in the English literary polysystem influences the Iranian translators’ translational behavior at the textual level. Given the prominent position of canon and bestseller novels in English literary polysystem, the study intends to find out whether the translators of canon and bestseller novels are faithful to theirsource texts, and whether the translators of peripheral novels tend to adopt target language norms and translate much more freely than the translators of canon and bestsellers novels. To this end, based on a descriptive-comparative method, nine English novels comprising three canons, three bestsellers, and three peripherals were selected and compared with their Persian translations using Berman’s (1985) deforming tendencies. The comparison showed that the position of literary works in English literary polysystem does not have a considerable role in the Iranian translators’ translational behavior at the textual level, and the translators attempt to produce a target language-oriented translation to suit the needs of target readers.

Different aspects of identity have been investigated across various educational fields. Although many studies have been done to investigate different aspects of EFL teachers’ identity development, there is a paucity of research on identity-oriented EFL teacher education programs. Hence, the purpose of the current study was to investigate EFL teacher educators’ and EFL teachers’ perspectives about identity-oriented EFL teacher education programs to probe where the commonality of perspectives lies between the two groups in order to see how to run identity-oriented teacher education programs. To that end, three EFL teacher educators and five EFL teachers who were recruited based on convenience sampling were interviewed. Each participant was interviewed two times. The interviews were analyzed using grounded theory. The findings revealed that both EFL teacher educators and EFL teachers believed that an EFL teacher education program would be an identity-oriented one when 1) addressing reflective pedagogy, 2) bridging the gap between theory and practice, 3) involving EFL teachers in action research, 4) emphasizing sociocultural aspects of EFL teacher education, and 5) developing EFL teacher awareness about the varieties. Thus, it can be concluded that through including the mentioned features in the teacher education program, teacher educators can achieve identity-oriented teacher education programs.

Despite the fact that there are a wide range of strategies used to foster interactions in EFL conversation classrooms, many novice teachers are not aware of them. In view of this problem, the current study aimed to identify such strategies commonly used by EFL teachers in conversation classrooms. To this end, fifty sessions of college level conversation classrooms were observed andtheir teacher-student interactions were audio recorded. The class recordings were, then, transcribed by means of transcription symbols proposed by Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008), and were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively based on the taxonomy of foreign language interaction analysis system proposed by Walsh (2006). The findings revealed that teacher echo and asking questions were among the most frequent strategies teachers use to foster teacher-student interactions; however, asking questions and agreement strategies were used to foster student-student interactions.The findings have implications for teaching conversations in EFL classrooms which were discussed in the article.

The present study investigates the potential impact of inspirational quotes on improving English abstract vocabulary recall. To achieve this, a multiple-choice Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) of 60 items including vocabulary and grammar component was administered as the proficiency test to a sample of 63 second-semester male and female students aged 18 to 22, studying English Translation in Semnan University, Iran. The 40 upper-level language students were selected and randomly assigned into two groups of 20 as an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group was exposed to inspirational quotes for one month and the control group was instructed abstract vocabularies through plain sentences. At the end of the treatment, a cued recall achievement test was used to measure the participants' immediate recall of the target words. Two weeks after the treatment, the same test was administered to explore the delayed recall of participants and to estimate the effect of inspirational quotes on long term recall of abstract vocabulary by the experimental group compared with that of the control group. Analysis of immediate and delayed cued recall achievement tests confirmed the hypotheses that inspirational quotes had a significant effect on both immediate and delayed recall of abstract vocabulary. Based on these findings it is concluded that inspirational quotes can be utilized not only as a supportive context for teaching and learning of abstract vocabulary but also as motivational, emotional, and meaningful pedagogical sources.

This paper investigates how the theme of uprising is conveyed in Bob Marley’s final music album by the name “Uprising”. Through the methodological lenses of multimodality, attention is focused on how the album cover design, lexical items, literary devices, and other aesthetic ways such as the titles of the ten songs of the album and their order of arrangement contribute to the overall theme of uprising of the album. Findings reveal that the album cover design is loaded with meaning in support of the theme of uprising. Moreover, Marley relies on content-lexical items, namely, nouns, verb, adjectives, and adverbs to project the uprising theme. Marley also employs figures of speech such as allusion parallelism, repetition, rhetorical questions, and rhythm to project the theme of uprising. Finally, the song titles and their order of arrangement tell a single well-linked story in conveying theme of uprising in Marley’s “Uprising” album.

Different types of reading strategies pose challenges to instructors and learners in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. This study aimed at identifying and comparing reading strategies used by instructors and students in dealing with literal comprehension, reorganization, and inferential comprehension questions. The participants werefive EFL instructors and 27 students from the English Language Proficiency Programme (ELPP) at the University of Malaya, Malaysia selected through purposive sampling. Thisqualitative study involved in-class observations and interviews with instructors, and questionnaires administered to students.The analysis of the data revealed that both instructors and students practice various reading strategies when dealing with comprehension questions, and some strategies used by the instructors are never or seldom used by the students. Strategies such as “reading questions before reading the passage”, “skimming and scanning”, “connecting prior knowledge”, and “finding context clues” were found to be used by both instructors and students. The findings indicated that instructors’ implementation of a variety of reading strategies affects students’ comprehension level over the reading materials. Therefore, the study can provide clear guidelines for the EFL instructors to seek for their students’ advancement of reading proficiency. This could ultimately result in students’ better academic achievement and learning motivation.

The development of sociological approach to the study of translation makes it possible for the researchers to adopt different methodology to develop new theoretical formulations and concepts. These formulations are arrived at through the interaction with those being studied through the interpretation of real social world and meanings of the participants involved in the translation/social event. Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) is ideally suited to areas of research where there should be an understanding of the social processes at work. However, the adoption of Grounded Theory (GT) approach in translation studies and translation education is rare if not inapplicable. The debates and suspicions for using GT in terms of its rigor are continuously confusing those who are relatively new to qualitative inductive research. The data collection and sampling anddata analysis in this methodology require high levels of rigor and reflection on the part of the researchers whose previous experience, assumptions, and the manner of transcription and data elicitation are very important, but   are often neglected by some researchers.That is why the present paper tends to discuss some key arguable issues of undertaking and applying GT research for qualitative researchers in the area of translation. The paper provides a comprehensive review of GTM and its feasibility by demonstrating examples from a research project on constructing a model for developing translator competence. The project is part of the author’s doctoral study into conceptualizing the experience of the university students’ learning translation and their developing the translator competence. The present paper, however, intends to focus on the application and documentation of GTM in translation education.  A review of literature on GT and the author’s practical experience of undertaking an empirical study into discipline form the approach to addressing the issue.

Finding more effective ways of teaching second language idioms has been a long standing concern of many teaching practitioners and researchers. This study was an endeavorto explore the effects of three linguistic mnemonic devices (etymological elaboration, keyword method, and translation) on EFL learners’ recognition and recall of English idioms. To achieve the purpose of the study, ninety male and female EFL learnersat intermediate level of language proficiency who were preparing themselves for IELTS were selected. They were in three groups of thirty members each. Each groupwas randomly assigned to one of the treatment conditions and was taught idioms using one of the above-mentioned linguistic mnemonic devices. The one-way ANOVA procedurewas used to analyze the data. The results showed statistically significant differences between these techniques, with the etymological elaboration method being the most effective of all, on both recognition and recall of idioms. The findings of the study can have implications for textbook designers, curriculum developers, teachers, and learners.

Using Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness” and Fanon’s “Colonized Intellectual”, we contend that Borges’s essay “The Nothingness of Personality” can be deemed postcolonial. Our study turns to the postcolonial world of Latin America, with a special focus on Buenos Aires, addressing the alienation, hybridity, “two-ness”, and the othered state of Borges as an immigrant to Latin America after the World War I. “Double Consciousness” is arguably central to the analysis of Borges’s sense of duality in a newly adapted culture with the dilemma whether to behave in accordance with his previously adopted cultural identity, or with a new self in a new culture. Many studies have signified Borges’s attempt to establish the foundation of true Argentinean literature and a revival of cultural heritageک however, there ceases to be a significant study to encompass that Borges is like a “colonized intellectual” who talked back to the center through using the colonizer’s ideology.

One of the parts and parcels of postcolonial literature is to deconstruct the history written by imperialism and to present the one as experienced by the colonized. As victims of British colonialism, Australian Aborigines have always mirrored the historical religious and territorial subjugation of their land in their writings, especially in their dramatic literature because of its high popularity and social impact. Robert Merritt’s The Cake Man is an important dramatic text in Aboriginal literature which explores forced conversion and resistance to it. The play’s reexamination of history as experienced by the colonized makes it a suitable target to study the application of Althusserian philosophy to postcolonial literature. Because of the recurrent exposure of colonial ideology and “ideological state apparatuses” in The Cake Man, it can be concluded that Althusserian theory can be an illuminating background to investigate historical concerns of postcolonial literature.

Language learning strategies, “the techniques or devices which a learner may use to acquire knowledge” (Rubin, 1975, p. 43) or more pertinently “complex, dynamic thoughts and actions, selected and used by learners with some degree of consciousness in specific contexts” (Oxford, 2017, p. 48), have been widely researched and discussed for more than forty years since the mid-1970s. Shifting the focus to language learner from language teacher, from language teaching methodology to language learning styles, and from transfer of information to construction of knowledge as the fulcra of language learning process are qualities which brought language learning strategies into high vogue. The language learner no longer was viewed as an inert and passive meaning-apprehending receptacle devoid of creative agency; rather, language learner was viewed as an active and meaning-giving individual who is endowed with creative agency for envisioning and generating a course of actions to achieve his/her language using and learning objectives. Thus, language learner’s capacity to perform intentional and goal-oriented actions regarding how to initiate, guide, and sustain language learning process and how to attain high language proficiency received considerable attention in the extant research literature. The great swell of academic interest in language learning strategies reached its sharp crescendo in the 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Cohen, 1998).