Journal of new advances in English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics
Volume:5 Issue: 1, Winter and Spring 2023

Translating poetry has been subject to debates for centuries and is still causing a lot of controversies. Many scholars claimed that poetry is untranslatable and it is needless for the translator to try because when poetry is translated, it may lose its aesthetics (Amirshojai & Khalilizadeh, 2015). In this connection, the present work considered the English translation of Sohrab-e-Sepehri's poems in terms of "Simplicity and Simple Living". More specifically, it investigated the strategies applied in translation of Sepehri' poems regarding Lefevere's model. Also, the extent of "simplicity and simple living" notion was analyzed in English translation of poems. For these objectives, a set of Sepehri's poems have been selected and analyzed in order to find out the strategies used by translator. The data were collected and evaluated based on Lefevere's model including eight strategies. Apart from the strategies as "material translation", "poetry into prose", and "rhymed translation" which have not been used at all by translator, the least frequent strategies were "phonemic translation" and "blank verse translation". However, the most frequent strategy in translating the mentioned poems was "simplicity" strategy. Therefore, it can be concluded that the notion of "simplicity" was presented in a high degree by the translators. Recognizing the most appropriate and correct equivalences for these terms is one of the noticeable tasks of the translator. It can be said that the translated poems may not create the same response and effect as evoked by the original text in the audience and the translated version leads to vagueness.

The triangle of sender-media-receiver is the necessary chain for any human interaction. In language learning field, learners are always focused as the decisive elements in communications; hence, the importance of the adversities to be confronted and the unpredicted resilience learners might show are affected by many factors, importance of which spotlighted as responsibility index in the present paper. Implementing quantitative data collection method in a quasi experimental mode research, the present study aimed at highlighting responsibility index of EFL learners through comparing two groups of 25 intermediate EFL learners in Iran in the first semester of academic year 2019-2020. The researchers utilized the instruments of accredited test and questionnaire. The fifty successful participants aging within 20 and 32 were chosen from the subject pool of 113 intermediate EFL university students with intermediate level of English language proficiency. The experimental group was assigned to put on the responsibility of assisting their peers with their linguistic problems. An accredited responsibility questionnaire was administered to both experimental and control groups before and after the treatment. The results of the data analysis and one way ANOVA revealed that the responsibility of the experimental group has affected and enhanced their own academic performance and uptake. The results would be interesting for teachers, syllabus designers and stakeholders as turning others into significant others might enhance the uptakes of learners as shifting from pushed input towards pulled output would occur.

One of the most important features that teachers need in order to play an effective role in the teaching process and communication is emotional awareness. Emotional awareness influences teacher-student interactions and shapes the classroom atmosphere and language-teaching context. This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between teachers’ age, gender, and years of experience and their level of emotional awareness based on a developed and validated scale for language teachers. To do so, 264 EFL language teachers and lecturers completed the demographic data section as well as the validated emotional awareness section of the self-report questionnaire. The analysis of the data revealed that there is a significant relationship between age and emotional awareness. Also, there is a significant difference among the mean scores of emotional awareness for different years of experience. An independent-samples t-test was run to compare the scores of male and female students in emotional awareness, which showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the mean scores of males’ and females’ emotional awareness. The findings of the study can have implications for scholars in the field of language education by highlighting the importance of considering both age and gender factors in understanding emotional awareness.

Gamification is becoming an attractive concept for teachers and researchers in education as it appears to be an increasingly popular method to motivate learners. This study aims to examine the existing evidence of gamification on the impact of educational gamification on EFL learners’ self-efficacy to analyze the advantages of its implementation in English language classrooms. For this, a total of 40 Iranian female intermediate EFL learners were selected through convenience sampling and categorized into two groups (experimental and control groups). The learners of both groups were asked to answer a questionnaire as a pretest and posttest. Flippity and Wordwall websites were applied in the experimental group as the treatment, and the traditional method was used for the control group. The classes were held online. The results demonstrated that gamification as a treatment in the experimental group was effective in the post-test and applying gamified activities had a significant effect on the learners’ self-efficacy. However, there was not any significant difference between the pretest results of both groups. The results of this study will help the instructors, syllabus designers, curriculum developers, and learners to provide modern and up-to-date teaching materials to better involve learners in classroom activities.

High learning and student achievement are dependent on the skills teachers use and the existence of professional expertise such as teacher reflectivity. This paper examines the relationship between EFL teachers' reflectivity and teacher autonomy and resilience. Totally, 123 EFL teachers were selected through convenience sampling. This quantitative research used three questionnaires as research instruments to gather the data: English Language Teacher Reflectivity Inventory (ELTRI);(developed by Akbary. et al,2010), the Teaching Autonomy Scale (TAS), presented by Pearson and Moomaw (2005), and Teacher Resilience Scale (TRS) by (Daniilidou & Plasidou, 2018). The data were gathered from different online platforms. Data analysis by SPSS software through the Spearman correlation coefficient revealed a significant relationship between reflectivity and resilience among Iranian EFL teachers. The results also demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between EFL teachers' reflectivity and resilience components. However, the findings of this study showed no relationships between resilience and autonomy and between reflectivity and autonomy. The results of this study may be useful for EFL teachers, educators, material developers, and educational authorities.

The ability to realize sound discrimination can be the basis of productive language skills like speaking and writing. This study examines the role of reformulation techniques including interpreting, oral summarizing, and retelling tasks in relation to the development of sound discrimination boosting learners' writing skills. English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The participants (N=93) were selected from students majoring in English translation at Abadan Azad University. They were then divided into three equal experimental groups that received three types of reformulation tasks. But the control group received traditional instructions for text-based exercises. The tasks were used as interpreting, oral summarizing, and retelling. Participants took a pre-test of their ability to distinguish sounds, assessing their ability to distinguish sounds. Finally, the groups took a one-paragraph essay. A rubric developed by Robinson and Howell (2008) was used to score essays. ANOVA was used to estimate the significant differences between the groups. Findings indicated retelling was more effective than the oral summary and interpreting techniques in sound discrimination and writing accuracy. Implications suggest that retelling tasks improve a learner’s ability to distinguish sounds and develop writing skills.

The current study aims to assess the comparison attitudes toward language learning among Iranian and Iraqi EFL learners. This study involved 60 EFL students from Iran and Iraq who were between the ages of 20 and 25. They were selected randomly from two different universities Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran, and Public University, Diyala, Iraq. Most of them were studying the English language at the BA level. For data collection, Demographic Information of Sample and 5-point Likert scale of 30 items Attitudes towards English Language Learning Questionnaire were used. This study's design was quantitative and included both descriptive and inferential statistics. The data analysis encompasses means, standard deviations, frequency, and an independent t-test. This number indicated that although EFL students in Iran had higher positive attitudes toward language learning, those in Iraq had less positive attitudes. Regarding the three aspects of attitude i.e., cognitive, behavioral, and emotional, there was statistically significant difference between Iranian and Iraqi EFL learners' attitudes toward language learning. In fact, the level of cognitive and behavioral difference among Iranian EFL learners was more than among Iraqi EFL learners, but the level of emotional difference among Iraqi EFL learners was more than among Iranian EFL learners. The findings of this study have led to a number of recommendations regarding teaching strategies, curricula, instructional resources, and the state of English in Iran and Iraq from this perspective.

Learning writing could be based on learners’ domain of vocabulary as a major component affecting writing skills. In the present study, the focus is put on vocabulary gain that is affected by two techniques of map concepts and wordlists in developing vocabulary among Iranian EFL learners. A quasi-experimental study with pre and post-test procedures was applied and 75 participants were recruited in three equal groups including map concepts (MC), wordlist (WL), and a control group (CG). They received three types of instructions. There were two experimental groups including map concepts and wordlists who received treatment and a control group who received some placeboes and received traditional vocabulary instruction on writing such as brainstorming, pre-writing activities, and designing the sentences and paragraphs. Treatment lasted 12 sessions and each session took 45 minutes in which they were given the topics to write 150-word essays. Before starting the treatment, a pre-test on a one-paragraph essay was taken from the three groups to evaluate their writing skills before the treatment. The topics were selected based on the learners' writing course book. The three groups worked on the same topics on the pre and post-tests. The writing checklist was used to score the essays. Finally, a post-test was conducted to measure the effect of instructions on the learners' writing skills among the groups. Findings revealed CM was the most effective strategy to enhance learners’ writing accuracy.

Delexical collocations are of the most error-prone types of collocations. Regarding the importance of these tiny words in L2 competency, the present study investigates the importance of proficiency level in detecting and producing delexical collocations Do, Make, and Get. To elicit the data, ninety male and female subjects were selected from among BA students of Arak and Shushtar Payam Noor University, Iran, majoring in translation English at 3 proficiency levels that is, low, intermediate, and high. The selection of the participants was based on their scores on a proficiency test (Nelson, general proficiency tests (Fowler & Coe, 1976). Participants’ knowledge of delexical collocation was examined through a conceptually judgment task (to detect their receptive knowledge) and a translation test (to estimate their productive knowledge). The results reveal that Persian L2 learners have been much better in receptive than productive tasks at all three levels. Analyzing the test items also revealed that delexical collocations of Do and Make were more salient to detect than delexical collocation Get, however, these collocations (Do and Make) were highly problematic in translation tests, especially for lower level learners. Accordingly, language proficiency plays a major role in receiving and producing delexical collocations of Do, Make, and Get.

The significance of cognitive processes in language learning, such as the mental processes learners bring to task learning, has been accepted by psycholinguistics and linguistics (Zhang, 2012). The presence of conscious and unconscious processes is of the essence in cognitive psychology. More specifically, whether learning takes place consciously or unconsciously is an important discussion for second language researchers. On the one hand, scholars such as Schmidt (1990) acknowledged that attention to input is a conscious process and is a necessary process to convert input to intake. Another cogent argument he put forward was that no matter whether a learner attends deliberately to a linguistic form in the input or it is noticed unintentionally, once it is noticed, it becomes intake. On the other hand, Krashen's (1982)- Input Hypothesis- explicitly rejected a role for consciousness language acquisition and believed that acquisition occurs once learners have access to an optimal amount of appropriate input, which in turn leads acquisition to happening naturally. Having said that the existence of unconscious learning cannot be denied completely, conscious learning is assumed to have an important role in L2 learning. In this paper, we will elaborate noticing hypothesis from both cognitive and ecological perspectives.