Journal of Applied Linguistics Studies
Volume:1 Issue: 2, Summer and Autumn 2022

The selection of a course book is a crucial undertaking a teacher will consider in molding the contents and natures of teaching and learning. This undertaking engages in comparing and contrasting the materials with the context in which the materials are going to be employed, given the general aims of the teaching program and also the personal methodology a teacher has picked up. The present research study tried to shed light on the perception of general English books among Iranian university EFL instructors. To this end, the researchers evaluated a general English coursebook (Concepts and Comments, 2005) employing a validated coursebook evaluation checklist in some universities in Golestan province, Iran. The main objective of the EGP course was to develop the student's reading skills and strategies, the present coursebook was written to meet these goals. However, the results of the study depict that though it was an appropriate book to boost the reading skill and vocabulary scope of learners, mere emphasis on reading bores the students and they require more interactive communicative use of the language.

 The goal of this research was to find out more about the professional development needs of Iranian translation teachers, taking the role of gender and education degree into account. In line with the objectives of the study, a qualitative research method using content analysis was applied. To do this, 15 male and 15 female Iranian EFL teachers with MA and Ph.D. degrees in different branches of English field including translation and TEFL were selected as the contributors in the research through purposive sampling from teachers teaching translation courses in different universities including Islamic Azad University, Kerman branch, and Shiraz Branch. A semi-structured interview, designed in six open-ended questions by the researcher through consulting the previous studies, was used to collect the appropriate data. The method utilized for data analysis included qualitative content analysis. According to the results, some professional development needs were extracted from interviews as knowledge of teaching methods, affective factors, evaluation procedure, good class communication, critical thinking, etc. Moreover, it was found that gender does not play a significant role in the professional development needs of Iranian translation teachers. However, the results confirmed that educational level plays a significant role in the professional development needs of Iranian translation teachers.

The diversity among the languages and the variation in cultures throughout the world make the process of translating so difficult a task that there are a few successful translators in each country.Among the problematic factors concerning translation such as form, meaning, style, implicatures, proverbs, idioms, etc., this article will focus on the figurative language of hyperbole. Therefore, the present paper was conducted to explore 1) if hyperbolic expressions are similar in English and Persian i.e., if an equivalent can easily be found for them 2) if there is any semantic-oriented loss concerning hyperbole in translation. For this purpose, some excerpts of the English translation of Rustam and Sohrab were chosen to be compared with the original text abundant in hyperbolic expressions. The result obtained through comparative study are as follows: a) hyperbole may not be problematic in translation of Rustam and Sohrab into English, b) hyperbolic expressions may mostly translatable from Persian into English.

There is a type of discourse analytical research that dealing with the way social power misuse, dominance and imbalancement are approved, replicated and resisted via text and talk in the political and social context, this kind of research is called Critical Discourse Analysis. Analysts in the field of critical discourse aim to understand, expose and ultimately to resist social imbalancement. This study investigated gender representation in political sections of two Persian newspapers (Jame Jam and Hamshahri) and two English newspapers (Tehran Times and Iran Daily). To attain the purpose of the study, 20 articles (10 Persian and 10 English articles) were selected from the newspapers to be investigated Fairclough's (2001) three-dimensional model was selected and adopted as the model of study.Five factors were selected and art and culture sections of the newspapers were investigated using these factors, (i.e. characters of male and female), social roles of them, titles of male and female, order of appearance, and finally the pictorial representation of both genders. The results demonstrated that there are not any significant differences in gender representation in Persian and English newspapers. The findings also demonstrated that regarding all of these factors, males dominated females. In other words, the number and percent of males′ representation were more than females′.

This research aimed at comparing the peer tutoring strategies with teacher guiding strategies on the improvement of Iranian EFL vocabulary knowledge and their attitudes toward learning English vocabulary. The initial population of the study was 70 students. They were studying English at Shokooh English institute in Tehran. After administering TOEFL test as a proficiency test, 40 students (17 males and 23 females) were selected as the participants of the study. They were divided into two groups of experimental and control. The students assigned to the experimental group were involved in an active work with their classmates’ peers, and received instruction based on peer-tutoring. The control group received instruction based on normal syllabus of the class that is teacher guided instruction The findings showed that there is a statistically significant difference (α= 0.01) between the two adjusted means of the students’ scores due to the two different learning strategies in favor of the experimental group.

Linking critical thinking to translation training programs has not happened before. But as Rainbolt and Dwyer (2012) mention characteristics of a critical thinker, we find that translators should become good critical thinkers because they need to recognize bias and prejudice in the text, evaluate arguments, know the power of history, recognize their own ignorance, make precise distinctions and not jump to conclusions. This study measured the extent the translation programs train good critical thinkers. Three groups of males and females are participated in this study. The first group included 80 students of translation studies and architectures who just registered in the program and did not received the training. The second one included those at the end of the first year and the third one is the students of the second year. The results are presented and some suggestions are made. This study emphasizes that the environment should be organized in such a way that makes learners actively engaged in classroom learning and on the other hand curriculum and classroom teaching should include effective use of critical thinking activities.

 This study examined inter-relationship among willingness to communicate, intrinsic motivation, and level of depression has not been investigated. Through a quantitative and applied study 357 Iranian EFL learners from Khorasan Razavi were examined by three standard questionnaires: Willingness to Communicate in a Foreign Language Scale’ by Baghaei et al., (2012), intrinsic motivation inventory (IMI) Ryan and Deci (2000), and The Beck Depression Inventory (2015). Results of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test showed normal distribution of scores and non-parametrical pattern of the study in which required analysis using spearman test. Results of correlation coefficient for the research questions showed that there is a significant relationship between willingness to communicate, intrinsic motivation, and level of depression so that relationships among willingness to communicate and intrinsic motivation with depression level were bidirectional. It implies that to avoid students’ depression in language learning environments they should be encouraged into communicative activities and their intrinsic motivation needs reinforcement.