Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics
Volume:2 Issue: 2, Autumn 2011

Whereas globalization has wreaked havoc on many fields, it has largely been a positive force in the area of information dissemination and written communication. Inclusion of new writers and a better understanding of research writing have resulted. Many new members of academic discourse communities have turned to manuals of style for support and assistance. A thematic and corpus analysis was completed on the title composition sections of 15 manuals of style to determine the extent to which they have incorporated findings from genre analysis, English for specific purposes, and related fields. The findings suggest that manuals of style contain little discussion of the function and structure of titles, a dominant point in recent theory and research about titles. Terms such as nominal group and nominalization are unused. Instead manuals of style emphasize keywords, an older perspective on title composition. This finding suggests that manuals of style are not incorporating recent research on writing.

This study was an attempt to examine the relationship between L2 learners‘ reading comprehension and understanding 2 types of idioms: opaque and transparent. A TOEFL test was given to 49 senior B.A. students of English, the results of which divided them into 2 groups of proficient and less-proficient reading comprehenders. Then, they were asked to read 30 short texts, each ending with an idiom fragment (e.g., He gave it. .. for the idiom to give it a shot), and were requested to choose the proper option: the idiomatic, the literal, or the figurative. Subsequently, 185 freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors were presented with the same texts to compare their figurative competence. Results showed that the proficient comprehenders outperformed the less-proficient ones in comprehending both the transparent (F = 23.313, df = 48, α = 0.05, p = 0.00) and the opaque idioms (F = 25.107, df = 48, α = 0.05, p = 0.00). Also, the seniors overrode the other 3 levels who had roughly demonstrated an equal performance (F = 38.909, df = 184, α = 0.05, p = 0.00). Findings may bear a part in illuminating the process of idiom comprehension by the revelation of the relationship between idiom understanding and text comprehension.

This study focused on a corpus of 100 informal English text messages obtained from 2 nonnative male and female professional English speakers during 2 months. The main aim of this study was to analyze the language of this kind of newly born language to see how senders express their concepts within a tiny cell phone screen and how receivers interpret them. Our findings revealed that abbreviation was the main genre applied in this mode of creative writing. For the sake of brevity, speed and convenience, use of incorrect grammar, incorrect punctuation and incorrect spelling found to be widespread. Besides, there were further shortening strategies utilized to have the fewest numbers of characters in each message. Additionally, common background knowledge was considered essential for decoding this somewhat secret language.

This study sets out to identify the learning styles and listening comprehension strategies employed by Iranian intermediate EFL learners and to find out their relationship, if any. To this end, on the basis of a language proficiency test,64intermediate language learners were selected, classified as high and low proficient listeners, and asked to complete 2 questionnaires which were used to decide on the students‘ perceptual learning style preferences and their listening comprehension strategies. Think-aloud protocols were also held to determine the cognitive and metacognitive strategies students used while listening. The data analysis revealed that both high and low proficient listeners‘ selected visual and kinesthetic learning style as their major learning styles, whereas significant difference was found in the preference of group learning style. The results, also, indicated that cognitive and metacognitive strategies were favored the most by the 2 groups, and kinesthetic learning style had a significant relationship with memory and social strategies. Findings suggest that Iranian EFL learners prefer receiving information from visual channel, learning by working in group and getting involved in learning kinesthetically. The findings, also, suggest that listening strategy use seems to be related to learning styles as proficiency level increases.

The present study attempted to compare the students of bilingual schools and English language institutes in Iran in terms of their proficiency in receptive skills and language components, that is, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary. The data were collected from a convenient sample of 190 male students studying English in either language institutes or bilingual schools. The data were gathered through 3 instruments, namely, Preliminary English Test (PET), classroom observations coded through the Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) scheme, and semi-structured interviews. A number of independent samples t tests were run to analyse the data. The results indicated that the students of bilingual schools were more proficient in receptive skills and language components. Moreover, the results obtained from classroom observations indicated that the teaching procedures in bilingual schools and English language institutes differed greatly which could explain why the students from bilingual schools achieved a higher level of proficiency. Students of bilingual schools were found to be highly motivated and engaged in more group activities. The results from the interviews also indicated that students of bilingual schools had a positive attitude toward the teaching program used in such schools because of type of interactions, problem solving and autonomous learning, close rapport between the students and teachers, and absence of stress and pressure.

The use of movies, in which auditory and visual stimuli are combined, might be one of the ways of providing context for vocabulary learning, hence a source for incidental vocabulary learning. However, there is a debate on the role of subtitles and the best mode of subtitles in movies as a pedagogical tool in language learning. This study investigated the effect of watching movies with subtitles (bimodal and standard) and without subtitles on incidental learning of formal and informal vocabulary in the classroom. To this end, 90 Iranian advanced EFL participants, who were selected from a lager sample and were homogenized in terms of English proficiency and vocabulary size, were randomly assigned into three groups: (1) bimodal subtitling group (n = 30), who watched movies with English subtitles transcribed form English dialogues, (2) standard subtitling group (n = 30), who watched movies with Persian subtitles transcribed from English dialogues, and (3) no-subtitling group (n = 30), who watched movies without subtitles. To collect the data, a vocabulary test which consisted of 120 multiple-choice items, measuring the knowledge of formal (n = 60) and informal vocabulary (n = 60), was developed and administered to the participants. Three versions of 4 English movies (with bimodal, standard and no-subtitling) were made and each group of the study was exposed to one for 4 weeks. Then, the same vocabulary test was administered to the three groups as posttests. To analyze the data, a within-between subjects model of ANOVA was utilized. Data analysis showed that watching movies, regardless of the mode in which they were presented, improved the incidental learning of both formal and informal vocabulary. Besides, the results indicated the superiority of standard subtitled movies over bimodal and no-subtitled movies in enhancing the learners‘ incidental vocabulary learning. However, no significant difference between the performance of bimodal subtitling and no-subtitling groups was found even though the informal and formal vocabulary scores improved more in the former group.Effect of Watching Movies With Bimodal, Standard… | 101Finally, no interaction between the subtitling mode and type of vocabulary was found. This study can have implications for the teachers to incorporated subtitled movies, particularly the ones with L2 in the soundtrack and L1 in subtitles, into their syllabuses in the classroom.

This essay gives a brief account of the major representational issues involved in characterization in the African American novel from its early years of appearance in the pre-Civil War era until the last decades of the twentieth century. It specifically focuses on the correlation between the gradual progress in the African American sense of selfhood and the progressive changes in the types of characters black novelists create in each era. As black people‘s sense of selfhood is formed and strengthened in their acts of struggle and resistance against white people‘s dehumanizing treatment, their representations in different cultural products, including novels, reflect this progressive change minutely and fortify it.

The present study attempts to mark out postmodern schizoid tendencies in Beckett‘s Malone Dies. Beckett‘s groundbreaking novel with its eccentric character, Malone, has a schizoid quality in treating concepts like self, language, and society which resonate attitude of postmodern thinkers like Deleuze, Guattari, and Derrida toward abovementioned concepts. Beckett in Malone Dies, like postmodernists, deconstructs the previously held, clear-cut and epistemological concepts of self and its integrity, demystifies the notions of adequacy and the refrentiality of language, and calls into question the coded social and oedipal myth by creating his antisocial, anti-Oedipal Malone and the character that Malone creates. Instead of a modernist paranoid character, the hero-narrator gives us several evidences of a postmodern schizoid person.