Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Spring - Summer 2008

Learning a foreign language offers a great challenge to students since it involves learning different skills and subskills. Quite a few number of researches have been done so far on the relationship between gender and learning a foreign language. On the other hand, two major approaches in teaching grammar have been offered by language experts, inductive and deductive. The present study examines which method of teaching grammar is more fruitful for Iranian male and female students. For this purpose, 150 freshman students, 110 females and 40 males, majoring in English were selected from all available students at Abadeh and Shiraz Azad universities. All the subjects took the NTC's grammar test prior to the instruction as pre-test. Then, they were divided into two groups and were taught grammar inductively and deductively in each group for one semester. At the end of the instruction, the same test was taken as post-test. The comparison between the students' pre and post-test indicated that there was a significant improvement in their knowledge of grammar. By the way, through a two-way ANOVA, it was found out that males learned grammar better when they were taught inductively and females showed a better performance when they were taught deductively.

This study explored how political elites can contribute to power enactment through using language. It started with a theoretical overview of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and then presented a corpus consisting of speeches of eight political elites, namely, Malcolm X, Noam Chomsky, Martin Luther King, Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Winston Churchill, J.F. Kennedy and Adolph Hitler. This study analyzed speeches in terms of figures of' speech, and interpreted them from the point of view of CDA using the framework introduced by Fairclough (1989) as a three-dimensional approach to the study of discourse (Description, Interpretation, Explanation) and van Dijk (2004) as the theory of critical context analysis.. Speech figures are classified in this study into six main categories as Comparison, Grammar, Meaning, Parenthesis, Repetition and Rhetoric. The result of analyses reveals that while there are differences in the type and degree of speech figures employed by our selected individual political elites, there is one striking pattern which is common among all speeches: the frequent use of figures of Grammar, Repetition and Rhetoric

Despite the role writing plays in learning a foreign language, many students do not show much interest in taking an active part in writing classes (Myint, 1997). Thus different activities have been proposed to motivate students to write one of which is dialogue journal writing, and the present work tries to investigate the possible effect(s) of such activity on writing ability of a group of English students at Islamic Azad University- Hamedan branch. To do this, 50 students obtaining 1 and 2 on the TWE scale on the structure section of a TOEFL test were selected and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. After some introductory sessions, the students were asked to write paragraphs on a weekly schedule and hand them in to be corrected. In the experimental group the students were, furthermore, asked to keep journals and hand them in. After 4 months, the students in both groups took part in a writing exam in which they had to write two paragraphs on the topics given. The comparison of the means at p.

To investigate the effect of quiz frequency on the course performance of Iranian university students of English, the mean scores of five groups of subjects were compared using a balanced one-way ANOVA procedure. Analyses revealed that quizzes significantly improve course performance. With some exceptions, it was also found that the more frequently the subjects were quizzed, the better their course performance became. To study the relationship between quizzes and class attendance, the absences of the same five groups of subjects were regularly checked and compared using the Chi-square procedure. Results showed that there is an inverse relationship between quiz frequency and the number of absences from class.