Journal of Language Horizons
Volume:6 Issue: 4, Winter 2023

This article applies Joseph Campbell’s mythological perspective to discuss Black’s character as a redeemer in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red (2002). This is done through discussing him as a lover whose dialogic interaction with the outside world helps him restore peace and order in an exemplary multicultural Ottoman society of the sixteenth century that is suffering gradual disappearance under the pressure of monologic strategies of communication. The strategies include Eastern and Western traditions of painting and a religious anti-painting one which refutes the other two as blasphemous. This investigation challenges the dominant reviews of MNR as a pessimistic political allegory that regrets the disappearance of traditional Turkish cultural identity, and argues that MNR develops an optimistic stand toward cultural formation through detailing Black’s practice of self-understanding and adaptability. Highlighting the notion of life-and-death struggle, this article introduces Black as a reviver whose success is signified through his marital reunion.

Genre analysis studies have refined our understanding of the rhetorical organization of scientific articles. The present paper reports on a study which investigated the rhetorical organization of the conclusion section of English conceptual review articles in linguistics and applied linguistics fields. Drawing on a move-based genre analysis approach, the study was based on a corpus of more than 500 English conceptual review articles. The analysis involved detecting the generic moves and sub-moves that writers use to achieve communicative purposes. The results showed that first, conclusions in English conceptual review articles differ from conclusions in research papers in terms of primary communicative purposes. Second, conclusions of review articles contain a set five moves, including 1) territory, 2) purpose, 3) structure, 4) conclusion, and 5) suggestion. Third, conclusions of review articles feature a cyclic pattern in the last two moves, as the writer reports main findings of prior research, interprets them, relates them to educational practice, and recommends further research based on what is felt most necessary. Last but not least, unlike research papers conclusions, review articles conclusions contain ‘suggestion’ as a core feature of their rhetorical organization. The results of the study benefit both theoreticians and practitioners.

There are contradicting views about the place of L1 and code-switching (as a common phenomenon) in language classrooms. Despite the plethora of studies investigating classroom code-switching, there is a lack of research comparing trans-languaging practices of university instructors across different contexts particularly in Iranian EFL undergraduate classrooms. The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the actual practices and perceived justifications and functions of code-switching in university level language and content classes. To do so, two groups of Iranian instructors (2 males and 4 females) teaching English major content classes (i.e., Principals of Translation, Translating Journalistic Texts, and Research Methodology) and language courses (i.e., Speaking and Listening, Reading Comprehension, and Writing) were observed, their classes were recorded, and they were interviewed through the stimulated recall technique. The switches’ professed functions were qualitatively analyzed and then were categorized into three broad pedagogical functions (curriculum access, classroom management, and interpersonal relations along with their sub-functions), and, ultimately, they were counted and compared quantitatively. The findings revealed that code-switching was perceived as a goal-directed strategy which was considerably more prevalent (especially intersentential type) in content classes. The findings in this study can make contributions to the work of university instructors, language teachers, and  other educational skateholders.The purposeful and fruitful practice of judicious code-switching as a communicative teaching strategy canhelp teachers reduce students’ cognitive and affective burden while improving their comprehension and learning.

Although grammatical range and accuracy have been widely explored in EFL learners’ expository essays, texture, which is realized through linguistic resources related to cohesion, has remained relatively unexplored. Guided by Halliday and Hassan’s (1976) model, this study aimed at exploring the frequency and use of these resources by analyzing a random sample of essays written by MA TEFL students at Shahrood University of Technology. Analyses revealed that the participants overused common forms of lexical cohesion, such as repetition and synonymy, but rarely did they use grammatical cohesive ties such as ellipsis and comparative references; hence, the analyzed essays were found to be underdeveloped as far as texture is concerned. The findings of this study have clear implications for materials developers, language teachers, and educators who are involved in second language writing instruction.

Based on Vygotsky's concept of Zone of Proximal Development, dynamic assessment (DA) has at its core the integration of assessment and instruction through mediation. DA is practiced either individually or collectively. In group-dynamic assessment (G-DA), as Poehner (2009) introduced, learners are simultaneously exposed to mediation.  The problem which has been ignored in G-DA is the homogeneity and heterogeneity of EFL leaners while being mediated. This study tried to investigate the effect of group-dynamic assessment on homogeneous and heterogeneous EFL learners' ability in listening comprehension. It also intended to find out if expert-novice and peer-to-peer mediation types in G-DA differed in their effects on homogeneous and heterogeneous EFL learners' command of listening comprehension. To this end, eighty intermediate EFL learners were chosen to be the participants. According to their language proficiency, they were assigned to two groups of forty homogeneous and forty heterogeneous learners. Then, each group was divided into two experimental groups. The participants in all groups attended three listening sessions. For the mediation, the participants were assisted through novice-expert and peer-to-peer mediation types. To find out the main and interaction effect of group type and mediation type in G-DA, the post-test scores were analysed through running a two-way ANOVA.  The results indicated that both group type and mediation type had significant main and interaction effect on learners' listening comprehension. A post hoc test was also utilized to compare the mean differences between the groups.

The present research investigated the impact of task demands manipulation on what learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) exactly focus on while producing speech. In the same vein, task performance conditions with varying degrees of complexity were operationally defined along the variables of structure and immediacy (±Here/Now). The study involved sixty Iranian EFL learners who were asked to carry out a narrative task under four conditions: narrating an unstructured picture-based story using the present tense with contextual support; performing a structured picture story in the present tense with contextual support; narrating an unstructured picture story in the past tense without contextual support; narrating a structured picture story in the past tense without contextual support. Following their task performance, participants attended a round of retrospective interviews where they verbalized the causes for their dysfluency as indicated by pauses. Results pointed to differential effects of task complexity on learners’ attention allocation. Specifically, it was shown that performing the more difficult unstructured narrative makes for more pauses stemming from attention to conceptualization. Besides, using past tense to recount the stories without looking at the pictures resulted in more pauses due to attention to form. More importantly, it was found out that recounting a structured narrative in the past tense without contextual support, substantially enhanced attention to form which was evident in the significantly greater number of pauses owing to focus on lexical, syntactic, and phonological encodings. The implications of the outcomes are discussed in relation to relevant theoretical and practical issues.