نشریه زبان پژوهی
پیاپی 44 (پاییز 1401)

The expansion of Persian language teaching in various institutes and universities in Iran and the demand of Persian students outside Iran to participate in these courses for various reasons led the authorities to establish a method for measuring the proficiency level of Persian language learners. This resulted in the design of SAMFA and AMFA tests as the first Persian proficiency tests. To respond to the needs of one of the Persian language training centers, Al-Zahra University Persian Language Center designed a proficiency test called Aspa. This study examined the different dimensions and structure of this test and measured its reliability and validity. The research participants of this study were 41 learners, studying Persian language courses in Mashhad. After estimating its reliability using Cronbach’s alpha, 20 experts in the field of Teaching Persian to Non-Persian Speakers were asked to examine the content validity of the test.

During the last months, side by side of COVID-19, fake news has been spread along with the outbreak of the virus, depending on its importance and fear and its effects on various fields. Rumors or fake news are social phenomena and are often condemned, especially by those who fall victim to it. All human beings are often, each in a way, sometimes not obvious, at home, at work, while sitting in a public vehicle, in times of economic and social crisis, etc., exposed to fake news, hearing rumors, gossips, and so on. The initial perception of the word is that a piece of "news" whose validity and accuracy cannot be easily verified is published and is often associated with irresponsibility and immorality. What has created the context for the globalization of production and the spread of rumors is media technology and cyberspace. Rumors, like fraud and forgery, manipulate the system of fact-finding and cause the material content of truth to be replaced by the material of false content in the semantic process. The main function of the rumor in this text is to discredit and disregard the truth (replacing a lie with a valid word). Rumors and false news are phenomena that have always been produced in societies, but these phenomena are more pronounced at times when horrific events occur. With the occurrence of COVID-19 in the world since late 2019, rumors have also intensified. Some people consider the destructive effect of rumors on the escalation of the crisis to be even more important and effective than the Corona. Countries like China immediately devised a planning system to manage the news of the corona, thus limiting the spread of conflicting news and scattered statistics, yet some other countries not only did not seem to take measures to address the information crisis, their own institutions have become a source of fake news and rumors. Rumors can be studied from different perspectives, but in this research, rumors and false news are related to Corona in terms of their linguistic nature and are observed in the context of discursive systems.

For spoken information transfer to be successful, the listener needs to understand the meaning of the spoken utterance, thus, the message. The message a listener receives is encoded in an acoustic signal, which results from the physiological movements involved in speech production. The process of listening begins once this signal reaches the ear. After the initial psychoacoustic processing of the input, the listener separates speech from other sensory input that might reach the ear (see Bregman: 1990, for a review). The acoustic signal is sent to the auditory cortex via the auditory nerves and is then converted into an abstract representation used to access the mental lexicon, the stored representations of words. The next processing stage is called word recognition. At this stage, the listener has to segment the signal into meaningful discrete units. Once the words are recognized, the following processing stages are concerned with integration: listeners determine the syntactic and semantic properties of individual words and the syntactic and semantic relationships among them, and use this knowledge as well as pragmatic and world knowledge to understand and interpret the utterance.As such, listeners employ a variety of linguistic patterns, including phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic ones to identify word boundaries in speech recognition. Based on the Metrical Segmentation Hypothesis, when linguistic information is not available, listeners use patterns of prosodic variation to identify word boundaries.

Metacognition, the ability of learners to control their thoughts and regulate their own learning, plays an important role in learning to listen (Wenden, 1998). Motivation, a crucial dimension of sustained learning activities (Dörnyei, 2018), has long been argued not only as one of the most significant variables contributing to the process of L2 acquisition but also as one of the most vital predictors of success in foreign language learning (Dörnyei, 1998). The use of L1 in an EFL classroom is inevitable. However, most teachers are in doubt to use it or not, and if yes, when, why and for what purposes it should be used (De la Campa & Nassaji, 2009).

The main purpose of the present study was to find out the possible effects of multimedia teaching on the three writing qualities of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of the learners when writing individually or in collaboration with others. According to Cohen (2003), the way through which a learner does the task of writing is an essential factor in successful use of the cognitive and metacognitive processes associated with writing tasks, and this is, in fact, the reason why the researchers of the current inquiry focused on multimedia teaching, which means using videos, clips, movies, etc. in teaching, in carrying out this research. A further point is that as Wigglesworth and Storch (2012) asserted, students are frequently asked to work in pairs or groups to fulfill written assignments and this permits them to pool their linguistic resources since they have the opportunity to consult each other about different ideas, ways of providing the ideas, and even grammatical problems they may have in expressing the ideas.

Media is one of the most influential institutions in a society. Although visual media may have a wider audience, factors such as being widely accessible, for example to travelers, and being received via smaller and cheaper receivers are among the advantages of audio media. News has always been one of the most popular sections of the national media. In this regard, a lot of factors are involved in attracting the audience: the content of the news (in terms of honesty in expression to gain the audience's trust); the time of casting the news (announcing the news before other media); the method of expression (maintaining fluency and accuracy while presenting the news); newscasters’ appearance, voice, etc.The present paper aims at designing a framework for analyzing linguistic errors in the national-media news and examining methods of treatment. The focus was on the morning, noon and evening news of Radio Javan and Radio Iran between December 2020 and August 2021.The findings of this study can (a) help to improve the quality of radio news programs in Iran; (b) help researchers explore deeply the errors identified in the current paper and investigate ways to overcome the challenges; and (c) assist trainers and curriculum designers in developing specific courses to enhance essential skills of newscasters.The first step in solving problems is to identify its various dimensions. Research questions include: 1) What are the types and frequency of errors observed in the news of Radio Iran and Radio Javan? In other words, where are the weaknesses and strengths of the newscasters and in which area did they make the most mistakes? 2) Has the gender of the newscaster influenced the "number" and "type" of errors? What were the errors of the newscasters on the two radio networks in terms of their gender? 3) What is the distribution of errors in different news sections? What was the biggest challenge for the newscasters of each section? Has the expertise of the newscasters of certain news sections been effective in reducing the number of errors?  4) In which radio network did the most number of errors occur? How was the distribution of errors on each radio network? 5) Has the time of news broadcast been a significant factor in the frequency of errors? In other words, in which news section most of the errors were occurred: morning, noon or afternoon? 6) Has the total time of news been effective in increasing newscasters’ fatigue, and consequently increasing the number of errors? 7) How did the newscasters react to various kinds of errors? 8) To what extent has the type of newscasters’ reaction to the errors been different? How were the policies of the two radios different? 9) Was the gender of the newscaster an effective factor in the type of reaction to various errors?

The NasirKhusraw Travelogue as the very first Farsi travelogue remaining from 5th century (more than 1000 years ago) has been subject of many studies in a variety of fields including literature, historical and social studies, or even historical architect studies. Yet few studies have been carried out from linguistic viewpoint to show its capacities as a linguistic data source. The current study probes on relative clause extraposition and its motivations as a non-obligatory movement mostly based on functional and discourse criteria. In many languages relative clause is mostly a clause that acts as a modifier for a head Np located in main clause. This modifier clause can appear right after (or based on the language word order before ) the NP that is defined by the clause and in this case it is named canonical relative clause. Or it can be dislocated and be moved to the end of the sentence (named extraposed relative clause) Since there is no syntactic need to force this movement, the motivations of relative clause extraposition were explained to be discourse factors (Francis,2010) such as Grammatical weight of clause (Hawkins,1990 &2004), verb information Structure (Sheykho’l Eslami, 2008) and a combination of some different factors together (Rasekh-Mahand et.al, 2012). Current study aimed to analyze the motivations of extrapositon relative clauses in historical proses. The NasirKhusraw Travelogue was studied and about 230 relative clauses were extracted based on systematic sampling which cover nearly more than half of the book.

Causality, supposedly available in any languages in the world, has been studied not only in linguistics but also in psychology, logic and philosophy. In other words, those sciences which target language and its various linguistic functions in different situations constantly have paid due attention to the conception of causality. The present descriptive-analytical study used Bondarkov’s theory of applied grammar to investigate causality in the Persian language. To this end, causality conception was addressed in the dependent complex sentences. More specifically, the presence of causality in causal /conditional/targeting and concessional complex sentences was probed. To describe causality in these complex sentences, the author utilized Bondarkov’s functional- semantic fields. Functional grammar and functional linguistics are special areas in modern language science, the special subject of study of which has become the functions and functioning of linguistic units and the linguistic system in speech. The functional-semantic field is a two-sided (content-formal) unity formed by the grammatical (morphological and syntactic) means of a given language together with lexical, lexical-grammatical and word-formation elements related to the same semantic zone interacting with them. In functional- semantic fields, the core and sub-components are distinguished. At the core are linguistic phenomena such as grammatical categories and all its grammatical expressions. In other words, the meaning of a category is clearly seen in the structure of the nucleus. In subcomponents, not all grammatical signs are fully displayed. Therefore, the meaning of the category is many times weaker in them. In addition to the category meaning, the sub-components also have the meanings of other grammatical categories.

Learning a foreign language is a very complex process that depends on various elements such as student, teacher, teaching method, etc. Among these elements, however, the element of teaching method plays a decisive role in the state of education, and it influences the other elements as well.  Therefore, it is very important to use a practical and effective teaching method.One of the methods that has been proposed in recent decades and has received much attention in foreign language teaching is the task-based teaching approach. This approach, as a new approach that stems from the communicative approach in language teaching, is based on tasks/ a task. In defining a task, Ellis (Ellis. 2004. P.9-10) refers to a set of essential features and believes that; a task is a workplan (1); the main focus is on meaning; has real processes in the use of language; can include any of the four language skills; involves cognitive processes; and it has a very clear communicative result.Therefore, it can be said that the main purpose of this teaching method is to increase language learners’ communicative ability through tasks that are based on meaning and reality. This method teaches language in three stages of pre-task, during task and post-task

Stress deafness is the difficulty in the perception of stress in the speakers of a language which does not deal with its contrastive function (Peperkamp et al., 2010). According to stress deafness typology proposed by Dupoux & Peperkamp (2002), diverse patterns of stress deafness can be related to different phases in which infants make decisions regarding the role stress plays in their ambient language. Within the first two years of life and based on the limited amount of linguistic information, infants are required to evaluate the role of stress to set the stress parameter of their native language (Peperkamp & Dupoux, 2002). If infants discover the regular stress pattern of their ambient language, this will lead to the negative value of this parameter. In contrast, in case of no regular stress pattern, the positive value will be selected, and stress will be regarded as an essential part of the phonological representation of words in the lexicon.Comparing stress deafness in Persian speakers with that of the speakers of Dutch, Japanese, French and Indonesian, Rahmani et al. (2015) have shown that Persian participants performed as poorly as French participants. It seems that in languages such as Persian and French the phonological representation of words is provided with their accent location within the first stages of language acquisition which serves to detect word boundaries. But at later stages, this type of information would not survive in the grammar of the adult speakers, and they are not able to perceive stress.The purpose of the present paper was to replicate the perceptual study conducted by Rahmani et al. (2015) on stress deafness for the Tehrani variety of Persian, which shows the characteristics of a syllable-timed language and compare the results with those obtained from the hearers of the Kermani variety which is known as a stress-timed language.