Journal of Language and Translation
Volume:13 Issue: 3, Autumn 2023

Teachers' continuing professional development (CPD) is currently an engrossing area worldwide. Nevertheless, despite the growing range of literature concentrating on certain aspects of CPD, there is a paucity of literature addressing a measurement scale to know where teachers are standing and act as a motivating role. The purpose of this study was to construct and validate a new scale for measuring EFL Teachers' CPD. This scale is considered pristine because of the added characteristics of Dynamic Assessment (DA) as another aspect of improving teachers' CPD. The present study further sought to establish the validity and reliability of the questionnaire, as well as add more value and precision to the pre-existing inventories available. Moreover, in this study, the developed scale was validated through piloting the items, and the factor analysis confirmed the five-factor questionnaire. With reference to the final results, the questionnaire was found to be reliable, having internal consistency by performing Cronbach's Alpha analysis. Cronbach's alpha of .91 indicated a high internal consistency. The CPD questionnaire was validated via exploratory factor analysis to establish a new validated scale to evaluate teachers' current level of CPD. The results are discussed in the context of language teaching, and based on that, authorities and administrators should be attentive to the results. Future studies can use a mixed-method approach to evaluate teachers’ CPD by employing a questionnaire and interviews.

The current study was set to investigate whether there was any significant difference between the effects of non-integrated tasks and reading-writing integrated tasks on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ writing development in terms of content and organization of their writings. To this end, 60 male and female adult Iranian undergraduate EFL university students were selected through convenience sampling and divided into two equal experimental groups and one control group. In the first experimental group (integrated), the integrated reading-writing group was presented with a reading passage of approximately four paragraphs simultaneously with teaching writing. The second group (non-integrated) accomplished and submitted the tasks with reading and writing assignments separately within each session. In contrast, the control group received placebo instruction on writing and reading skills through the conventional methods of teaching writing. For the purpose of the study, writing tasks and a writing scoring rubric were utilized. The results revealed that there was no significant difference between the effects of non-integrated tasks and reading-writing integrated tasks on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ writing development in terms of content. However, the results showed that there was a significant difference between the effects of non-integrated tasks and reading-writing integrated tasks on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ writing development concerning the organization. The findings might have theoretical and pedagogical implications for EFL teachers, learners, and curriculum designers.

There is a close relationship between verb and semantics and the way verbs are used to induce concepts. Poets and writers inadvertently influence their emotions in choosing actions and use verbs whose semantic load reflects the emotions and feelings of the speaker. In other words, in addition to conveying meaning, time and place, verbs convey emotions and feelings. The phonetic structure of the verb, in addition to its semantic role, indirectly expresses the concept that passes in the poet's mind through a set of sounds. In this research, the emotional burden of verbs in Ferdowsi Shahnameh is examined. It can be said that in epic books, each sentence has an emotional burden that is full of meanings of "positive, negative, and neutral". The main purpose of this study is to investigate and determine the emotional load of verbs and what its components are and the relationship between collocational elements and verbs in terms of positive, neutral, and negative emotional load. In this study, examples of verbs are neither speaker-centered nor listener-centered. Discourse is also very important, that is, the relationship between people determines the emotional burden of the verb. It also defines semantic space according to linguists’ focus on semantic differentiation. At the same time, the study of semantics in emotional actions is most important. The term semantics is generally associated with describing the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences. In linguistic terms, semantics examines the relationships between signs and symbols with concepts; and the knowledge of knowing the meaning.

The current quasi-experimental quantitative study aimed to find out how interactive tasks could impact the Iranian EFL students’ self-monitoring, self-regulation, and willingness to communicate in a classroom setting. The study utilized there questionnaires, self-monitoring scale (SMS), self-regulated language learning scale (SRLLS), and willingness to communicate (WTC), to assess changes in interactive scores of 40 students in an experimental group with the interactive scores of 40 students in a control group. The results of this study, using the independent sample t-test, clearly revealed that the students with the interactive tasks mainly outperformed those with the regular instruction. In more, the study proposed that the interactive tasks were effective to improve the students’ achievement as well as alleviate and increase their performance through utilizing interactional competence. The findings of the research also indicated that the students were in an attempt to be the more adaptive and engaged learners which would be contributed to their learning. However, applying teaching methods should address interactive activities in an effective and meaningful way in a non-threatening environment in the classroom to increase engagement in the language classroom alongside the improvement of the students’ confidence and enhancing learning.

Writing always plays an essential part in learning languages, mostly due to close connections it bears to speaking and reading development. Nevertheless, next to speaking and reading, writing is comparatively less attended to. This paper is an attempt to look into the potential stylistic imitation holds in learning how to write as well as how this technic is perceived by the EFL teachers. Action research offers an invaluable chance to delve into the real-life issues teachers deal with on a daily basis. In-service teachers attending a writing course took part in this study to experience first-hand how it feels to use imitation in class to teach writing. They were first presented with a model paragraph and asked to imitate it, first closely sticking to the style of the writer, then freely making changes to the wording and structure as they see fit. Lastly, they were asked to reflect upon the experience. It was revealed that most teachers believed stylistic imitation can benefit learners and they intend to practice it in their classes. They seem to believe stylistic imitation can be of extraordinary help to novice learners in their classes in that it can alleviate the burden they feel trying to master writing. However, a few argued against it stating concerns for voices getting lost and styles getting killed.

Since requesting happens in a circumstance of imbalance, the speaker ought to continuously respect the principles of politeness without consideration to the question of their request. This study investigated the effect of strategy training of speech acts of asking and statements of regret on developing Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic performance and critical thinking. According to the nature of the treatment, it was decided to select the participants who had not had enough language exposure at the language institute before the study. For this, before conducting an Oxford English Test (OPT), it was expected to select those whose scores would fall between one standard deviation (+1SD) above the mean and one standard deviation (-1SD) below the mean as the cut-off criterion. Finally, 80 out of 114 Iranian EFL male and female learners from six language classes in intermediate level of proficiency were chosen. Next, they were divided randomly into two experimental and control groups (20 males and 20 females, for each group). A mixed-method design was utilized; the qualitative data collected via interview was used to triangulate the quantitative data collected. The data were investigated by two skilled raters, specified in applied linguistics to recognize the effectiveness of strategy training of request and apology speech acts. The data were keyed into the SPSS. 22. The finding showed that there was an important positive consequence of strategy training of speech act of request on developing Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic performance. A meaningful relationship was found between critical thinking and pragmatic performance.

This study sought to compare Iranian EFL teachers regarding their ethical beliefs at Iranian English language institutes and universities. To this end, first, the grounded theory method was used to conduct some interviews with 40 EFL teachers (20 male, 20 female). They were randomly selected from about 140 teachers working at institutes and universities in Fars province, Iran. After coding the obtained data, some categories were recognized, a model was designed, and exploratory factor analysis was conducted. The results confirmed the existence of social, collaborative, emotional, and managerial impacts. Then, a questionnaire was designed and developed based on grounded theory procedures, literature results, and the results of the qualitative studies. 140 EFL teachers filled it out and then the collected data underwent both descriptive and inferential statistics. The obtained results indicated that there was a significant difference between teachers regarding their ethical beliefs in universities and institutes. Moreover, it was revealed that the male and female teachers were significantly different. The mean scores of the female teachers and the male ones are 79.2500 and 75.2500 respectively. The findings of the current study can be useful for teachers, educators, teacher trainers, policymakers, and evaluators to make appropriate decisions and judgments.

The role of different critical thinking strategies in reading English texts has ignited remarkable research. In the very vein, the present mix-methods study aimed to explore the effects of analysis and conceptualization strategies of critical thinking proposed by Elder and Paul (2009), on the reading comprehension skills, and to probe the perception of Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners across gender. To this end, 60 male and female learners within the age range of 25 to 38 were selected from a total number of 120 learners via the Cambridge C2 Proficiency (CPE) test at the Pouyandegan institute of higher education in Chalous, Iran. Then, they were randomly assigned to two experimental groups for utilizing the conceptualization strategy, and two experimental groups for performing the analysis strategy. Next, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was administered as the pre-test before an eight-week instruction. After utilizing the treatments, the post-test was administered alongside a semi-structured interview for 12 selected learners. The obtained data were analyzed through one-way ANOVA and paired samples t-test. The results revealed that the treatments had significant effects on the improvement of reading comprehension. The qualitative results too revealed that the learners adopted positive views toward the critical thinking (CT) strategies instruction. However, gender did not play any significant role in using the CT strategies in reading comprehension. The implications of the study were discussed at the end of the paper.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and considerable reliance on virtual education and communication, the language acquisition contexts are focusing on the transformational shift in pedagogies applying multilingual communicative capacities like ‘translanguaging’. Perhaps the best academic resources to explore about the issue are translation-oriented courses taught through typical teaching strategies in academic English programs. The issue led to reinforcement of considering pedagogical translanguaging within English Language Teaching (ELT) context among EFL learners who attend the related courses of the ELT programs focusing on translation skills. Thus, a sequential explanatory mixed design was selected to study the possible transformation resulted by translanguaging among EFL learners and teachers in the current study. As the pedagogical implications of the study, it is possible to declare that translanguaging within EFL context is considered as an influential strategy in helping teachers and learners to benefit from bilingual capacities in providing and understanding the content of courses. The issue also emphasizes on the transformational shift among the scholars and experts of the EFL context to have a new look over the role of translation, as an interactive code-switching procedure between First Language (L1) and Second Language (L2), which is not banning the language learners’ linguistic repertoire application.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the impact of multimedia use in Class on EFL Learners’ educational motivation and academic performance. For this purpose, 80 EFL Learners were selected through cluster sampling method and randomly divided into two experimental groups and a control group, each with 40 students. Harter's (2005) academic achievement motivation questionnaire and researcher-made academic performance questionnaire were used. The research method was quasi-experimental and the data were analyzed using SPSS software version 23. In this study, the statistical method of analysis of covariance was used. The results of the ANCOVA analysis showed that the effect of multimedia teaching method on the academic motivation of learners in Ahvaz after removing the effect of the pre-test (F = 4.69) was significant. Also, the effect of multimedia teaching method on the academic performance of learners after removing the effect of the pre-test (F = 9.56) was significant. The findings of the present study provide some directions for the improvement of the EFL learners’ academic performance by utilizing the benefits of multimedia teaching instruction in a classroom setting.

The present study addresses Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves in the light of Patrick Colm Hogan’s affect notions of narrative concerning the emotional experiences of the subjects. This paper attempts to trace the concepts of affect, emotional narrative, attachment relations, emotional geography and emotional history in Erdrich’s novel in order to explore how emotions and relations are interrelated in the narrative of geography, history, and, particularly, in what affects the narrative and the subjects in fiction. The present paper, specifically, demonstrates how Erdrich’s mentioned novel acts as the affect study and narrative of emotion that vocalizes the history and geography of Native American people of the Ojibwa which have not been divulged due to social and ontological factors. The study thus investigates the ontological and epistemological paradigms in Native American life and history experienced by Ojibwa survivors. In addition, it argues how emotionology works for the minority subjects and how the notion of affect in terms of Hogan’s theory is traceable in Erdrich’s novel. In The Plague of Doves, the affected survivors are haunted with the emotional memory of their present as a consequence of which the subjects continuously shift from the present time to the past – whereby time loses its linearity in the narrative.

Considering the importance of identity construction in learning situations, the current study aimed at exploring how language teachers in Iranian EFL context construct their language identity in their learning situation. It also focused on finding whether gender could have significant role in the identity construction for language teachers. For this purpose, six EFL teachers at an English language institute, both male and female were invited to take part in the study. The researcher asked the participants to fill out Berzonsky’s (2010) identity construction questionnaire in order to descriptively analyze their answers. This questionnaire had 40 questions in a Likert-scale format. Analysis of the data showed that the participants had almost high perception for the informational style and commitment sections of the questionnaire but had an average perception for normative and diffuse-avoidant styles. The result of second research question showed that there was only a statistically significant difference between the male and female participants in their “informational style” components.

Impaired morpho-syntactic production is the hallmark of agrammatic aphasia. It has been shown across several languages that verb inflection is difficult for agrammatic aphasic speakers. Many studies have indicated that this deficit is selective. Agreement is relatively preserved, while tense is severely impaired. The present work is based on Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis (Fyndanis, 2012) which believes that categories with uninterpretable features (e.g. Agr) are better preserved than categories with interpretable features (e.g. Tense & Aspect). It is argued that the increased processing demands of Tense and Aspect, which carry interpretable features, render them more vulnerable compared to Agreement, which bears an uninterpretable feature and is a local, strictly grammatical operation. A sentence completion task tapping subject-verb agreement and tense and a picture description task were administered to two native speakers of Persian with agrammatic aphasia. The patients were classified as Broca's aphasics according to the Persian aphasia test, their MRI reports and CT Scans. They were asked to participate in a battery of tests designed to assess their abilities in production of inflectional morphology. Results showed that all the agrammatic speakers performed as hypothesized. Overall, the tense was significantly more impaired than agreement.

The present study attempted to investigate English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers and students’ perceptions of the possibility of teaching communication strategies (CSs) among pre-intermediate learners. A review of the related literature suggests that the teachability of CSs has been the source of controversy among different researchers. The participants of this study were 20 EFL teachers and their 110 students from three universities and a private Institute in Tabriz. In this mixed methods study, three research tools were used for gathering data: a language proficiency test, a modified questionnaire, and a structured interview. The quantitative phase included the administration of the CSs questionnaire at the beginning and end of the course and instructions on these strategies for 12 weeks. The qualitative phase included the analysis of the teachers’ responses to the interview and coding comments thematically by the researcher. After analyzing the quantitative data by running paired sample t-test, it was found that EFL students confirmed the possibility of teaching communication strategies and suggested that CSs are teachable and useful. The important implication of the study is that strategy training was the factor of progress and the teaching of communication strategies can be pedagogically possible and their instruction is beneficial to students.

The pattern dominating Classroom discourse is Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) and the initiation move normally takes the form of questions asked by teachers. The questions might be either referential or inferential and classroom research has accentuated the role these questions can play in eliciting learner output with the latter more likely conducive to meaning-focused output. However, what still awaits scrutiny is the extent to which teachers tend to activate learners’ semantic and syntactic processing by using appropriate questions and how their experience might mediate their choices at varying proficiency levels. Hence, the present descriptive study set out to compare the frequency of inferential and referential questions employed by novice and experienced teachers to initiate interaction at lower-intermediate (LI) and upper-intermediate (UI) levels. For the purpose of the study, a purposive sample of 20 English classrooms were selected at nine branches of an English institute in Tabriz, Iran. The classrooms were taught by five novice and five experienced teachers. Using a semi-structured researcher-made and piloted observation form, the classroom procedures were observed, recorded, and transcribed. The transcribed data were further analyzed employing the standardized coding system proposed by Long and Sato (1983) as a seven-category taxonomy of functions of teacher questions. The results revealed that experienced teachers used significantly more referential questions at both LI and UI levels. In contrast, novice teachers were found to use significantly more inferential questions at both LI and upper intermediate levels. Pedagogical implications of the findings will be discussed.

Language and culture are closely interrelated and besides linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge is crucial for a translator. Culture and linguistics specifically intertwine during poetry translation. To manifest this interconnectedness, the present study was focused on the poems of Parvin Etessami, a 20th</sup>-century Persian poetess, to determine the cultural elements in her poems and investigate their English translation. Eighteen couplets of Etessami’s poems were randomly selected to represent her poetry as a whole. The method was comparative-descriptive and the theoretical framework was based on Newmark’s (1988) strategies of translation. The concept of culture was studied within the paradigm of linguistics. The results of the analyses implied that in the majority of cases, Pazargadi resorted to two or more translation strategies for translating a cultural item simultaneously, indicating Newmark’s translation strategy of “couplets”. The second most frequent translation strategy was “modulation”. The translation strategies of “synonymy” and “reduction” were the least frequent ones. The strategies of “recognized translation”, “translation labels”, and “compensation” were not present in the selected samples. Hence, these strategies are not mentioned in the theoretical framework. The analyses indicated that the translator applied a literal translation besides different strategies to convey the intended meanings and preserve the style of the original poems.  

The present study was mainly concerned with investigating advanced L2 learners’ pragmatic knowledge and the challenges of teaching and learning it. To fulfill the objectives of this study, a convergent mixed-methods study was conducted, and 196 advanced L2 learners and 10 experienced Iranian EFL teachers took part in the study. The results of the quantitative study yielded that, on the whole, the pragmatic knowledge level of advanced EFL learners is not satisfactory. In fact, advanced EFL learners are more skilled at receptive, non-interactive productive, and then pragmalinguistic tasks than sociolinguistic ones. In other words, they are good at intrapersonal perception of pragmatic knowledge but weak at interpersonal and pragmatic social interaction and communication. Furthermore, the gender factor was found to be insignificant. Additionally, the results of the qualitative study revealed five main challenges for teaching and learning pragmatics i.e., inappropriate pedagogical material, improper pragmatic assessment, pragmatically incompetent teachers, unsuitable instructional context, and insufficient time and effort. Finally, both quantitative and qualitative results confirmed and completed each other. In light of the findings, the study provides some pedagogical implications for language teachers, supervisors, language institute managers, material developers, and curriculum designers.

The current paper analyzes Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015) from an eco-critical viewpoint. The main concern of eco-criticism is to make a close relationship between the language of nature and literary language. Likewise, Gregory Garrard explained new ways between humans and the environment in the area of cultural spheres in 2016, though there were three waves toward this approach in the 2000s. It is significant to get more information about the natural world not only for the current environmental crisis but also for possible disasters in the future. As such, people would dream of nature in many parts of their life that will be discussed in the novel. These dreams show inner desire of people for their environment as an inevitable part of life. Apart from that, separation from nature will lead to plausible disasters in human life. Meanwhile, Atwood has described nature as a concern for global ecological concerns. The role of the ecosphere aside from the usefulness of animals would be analyzed in this paper as well. Hence, considering the most influential factors of ecology will help readers better recognize the world and will likely attempt to put the theoretical approach into practice.

The significance of “being” has been an essential topic for theory. One of the main logicians of the 20th century Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), looks at this inquiry fundamentally in his Being and Time (1927). Heidegger applies what he calls phenomenological metaphysics as the methodological way to deal with the subject of being by which he examines Dasein as the site for the comprehension of being. As per Heidegger in Being and Time Dasein, individuals should make accessible the appropriate ground for the subject of being. This research study examined the medium of Dasein in George R. R. Throughout the story, and the characters confirmed their existence in the society, which is associated with power relations and death. Death is manifested metaphorically in each stage of life to depict their Dasein through their actions. Consequently, the researchers investigated Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and sows how death attempts to take over while the characters try for survival.

This study investigated the comparative effect of authoritative vs. facilitative virtual intervention models on the development of second language speaking components of Iranian EFL Learners. The study participants were 60 intermediate male and female EFL learners at Imam Reza University in Mashhad who were selected out of the total number of 80 participants taking a standard Preliminary English Test (PET) as a language proficiency test. Subsequently, the participants were randomly divided into two experimental groups and received a standard speaking pretest. Next, one experimental group received authoritative intervention and the other one received facilitative intervention. After ten sessions of treatment, the speaking section of another version of PET, as the posttests, was given to the participants. Finally, the learners took part in a semi-structured interview. The use of SPSS examined the quantitative data, and the outcomes were examined through a series of t-tests and MANOVA. The results of quantitative analyses revealed that Facilitative Intervention (FI) model was more effective than the Authoritative Intervention (AI) for the L2 speaking development of Iranian EFL learners. Another point of variance was concentrating on the grammatical accuracy in measuring L2 speaking. For the AI group, grammatical errors and pronunciation were more important, whereas for the FI group, pronunciation and lexical resources were more central, followed by discourse management and interactive communication.