Teaching English as a Second Language Quarterly
Volume:5 Issue: 1, Spring 2013

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance and the ubiquity of metaphors in language. Their effect has been instrumental in making significant headway into the pedagogical practice and design of teaching materials. The current study was carried out to explore the efficacy of focus-on-form (FonF) and focus-on-forms (FonFs) instructions on learning metaphorical language by Iranian intermediate learners of English. First, 60 participants who were homogeneous in terms of language proficiency and metaphorical competence were assigned to 3 groups, 2 being the experimental groups and 1 the control group. One of the experimental groups was exposed to the explicit teaching of metaphors (i.e. FonFs) included in 20 reading passages. The second group was taught the target metaphorical expressions through implicit instruction (i.e. FonF). And, the control group went through the usual classroom instruction; they took the same pretest and posttest as the 2 experimental groups did. To analyze the data, a three-way ANOVA and analysis of covariance were utilized. The findings revealed that the FonFs-taught group gained better results on the posttest. The results seem to indicate a positive correlation between the FonFs and metaphorical competence. It could be claimed that it is possible to enhance L2 learners’ metaphorical competence through the FonFs instruction of metaphors.

The present study, on the one hand, attempted to investigate the strategies applied in dispreferred responses by Iranian university students of English and the extent to which pragmatic transfer could occur. On the other hand, the study aimed to probe into the association between dispreferred organization and turn-shape. To this end, 31 relevant naturally occurring conversations, totaling 120 min drawn from approximately 9 hr of audio-taped conversations from 40 voluntary students, were recorded from which the refusal strategies and complexity of turns were elicited. The findings suggested that a sizable number of the learners delivered responsibility to other sources using accounts and discourse markers. As for preference organization, the results showed that solidarity was the dominant aspect among the learners. Moreover, the study compared 2 measures of L2 competence: oral interaction and a discourse completion test (DCT). The results showed that the 2 methods induced somewhat different production samples from the learners in terms of frequency, type of refusal strategies, and turn shapes. These variations suggest that production through DCTs cannot depict the complexity of natural conversations in which the speakers find themselves free to control the conversation. Finally, it is important to consider cultural differences in language usage by emphasizing the significance of a curriculum that utilizes the act of refusal within its cultural contexts.

Fluency in a second language (L2) involves a quintessentially cognitive processing system that operates quickly and effectively. The perceived importance of researching fluency through a psycholinguistic lens has motivated the related L2 research to resort to current cognitive speaking-specific models. This study, drawing on Levelt’s (1999a) psycholinguistic model, probed the deficiency sources (DSs) (non)fluent L2 speakers encounter in L2 communication and then surveyed the problem-solving mechanisms (PSMs) they happen to engage in to circumvent or mitigate the bottle-neck effects of the deficiencies. First, an analytic fluency rating scale was developed to assess the audio-recorded (monologic and dialogic) speech samples of a large number of L2 speakers and identify the fluent and nonfluent speakers. Two questionnaires and output-related retrospective interviews were employed to explore the (non)fluent L2 speakers’ DSs and PSMs. The MANOVA results and the interpretative analysis of retrospective data revealed that the nonfluent participants mainly suffered from resource deficits, processing time pressure, and perceived deficiencies in the interlocutor’s performance. Specifically, they felt adversely pressured by an onrush of competing plans or the absence of any to chart their minds, floundered on feeling incapable of configuring a viable syntactic structure for their intended meanings, were restrained groping for the right lemma to fit their notions, or faltered due to a daunting uncertainty of the phonological accuracy. Meanwhile, they resorted to ineffective oral-production strategies such as message abandonment and reduction, which resulted in disfluent speech. The fluent participants, however, did not suffer from these DSs and employed PSMs more consistently. They were able to dynamically reformulate the notions or the preverbal message, apply a revitalized encoding mechanism, use various stalling mechanisms, and negotiate meaning in order to monitor the articulation. The findings suggest that any attempt intended to improve or assess L2 fluency pivot on a psycholinguistic approach to L2 oral production.

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of linguistic and intelligence factors in the Iranian IELTS candidates’ speaking performance. Linguistic factors include depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge as well as grammar knowledge. Narrative and verbal intelligences represent the non-linguistic factors. The participants included 329 learners who took 5 validated tests and also participated in a simulated IELTS interview session. Model 1 (excluding the intelligence factors) represents the conventional view, whereas Model 2 (including all factors) is proposed for the first time in this study. The Structure Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the data. Using the SEM, both proposed models were examined to see which one fits the data more. The results of the comparisons made between the parameter estimates and fit indices of the two models demonstrate that Model 2 outfits Model 1, implying that in contrast to the conventional view, intelligence factors do play a significant and undeniable role in developing the speaking construct. Finally, the applications of the findings to promote the construct validity of IELTS are discussed.

Research Article (RA) genre has been a significant area of research in academic writing over past decades. However, authors’ identity in RAs has not received much attention, especially in soft sciences like applied linguistics. This paper reports a corpus analysis of Iranian writers’ authorial presence markers in RAs in the field of applied linguistics. The corpus comprised 30 RAs (200,000 words) from three peer-reviewed journals published in Iran. This study was carried out in two phases. Initially, the corpus was content-analysed for exclusive instances of authorial presence markers and then, frequency of each authorial indicator was calculated. Content analysis revealed various authorial markers used by Iranian scholars to manifest themselves in their writings, for instance, personal pronouns, self-citations, and other self-mention terms. Authorial markers varied in terms of frequency in single-authored and multiple-authored articles. Personal pronouns were found to be the most salient authorial markers. Furthermore, authors in the corpus employed authorial markers for different promotional purposes such as pursuing uniqueness in their studies and regarding themselves as prominent figures in the field. The results of this study underline the need for further research into the identities adopted by writers in their works and the whys and wherefores behind using particular identity markers rather than others. This study would be of benefit to academic writers and teachers of writing courses since it helps them discern the linguistic choices available to non-native speakers of English to manifest themselves in their writings and to gain acceptance in the discipline community.

The present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at Zand Institute of Higher Education in Shiraz, Iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced TOEFL test constructed by Educational Testing Service (ETS, 1998). Forty participants were randomly assigned to the control group, while the other forty made the experimental group. Another instrument used in this study was a lexical collocation test containing two texts (as pre- and post-tests): A high and a low lexical collocational density tests designed by the researchers. A few paired/independent sample t-tests, and a two-way repeated measure were used to answer the five research questions. Results indicated that texts with high lexical collocational density influenced learners’ comprehension positively. Although the instruction of lexical collocation did not have any effects on answering the vocabulary items significantly, teaching lexical collocations affected learners’ reading skills positively. Finally, different proficiency levels of the participants did not affect their performance on lexical collocation test with different lexical collocational density significantly.