فصلنامه ادبیات و علوم انسانی
پیاپی 28-29 (بهار و تابستان 1392)

This article aims at applying Derrida’s idea I on the Sam Shepard’s play, Buried Child. Derrida’s notion of I, consisting of the words to defer and to differ, disturbs the presence of any stable meaning so that meaning becomes a signifier which never reaches a signified. It is forever fallen into the trap of I, causing the meaning to defer. Moreover, signified is always deferred, and we are just dealing with play of signifiers. This is actually, what happens in Shepard’s Buried Child. Identity, characters, and significant concepts (Buried Child) for them find an unstable and changing nature. Nothing is determinate about them.

This study investigated the use of purposive storytelling aloud as a creative teaching technique to address preintermediate Iranian EFL learners’ difficulty in producing grammatically correct utterances. Three groups of 15 language learners were randomly assigned to two experimental and one control groups. While the control group just received common traditional method of grammar teaching, one of the two experimental groups were exposed to teacher’s storytelling aloud and the second one received both teacher’s and students’ storytelling aloud. Data were gathered from two structured interviews, one as a pretest and the other as a posttest, two raters rated each participant’s recorded interviews. While no difference was observed in the performance of the participants on the pretest, one-way ANOVA, paired sample t-test, and multiple comparisonson the posttest scores showed overwhelming support for the inclusion of storytelling in the accuracy of speaking. The results also revealed that the second experimental group outperformed the first experimental group. This confirmed the efficacy of storytelling aloud on improving the accuracy of preintermediate Iranian language learners’ oral production.

This study investigated the effect of narrativity on the immediate and delayed retention of abstract words by learners of English as a foreign language. Forty female EFL learners, who enjoyed acceptable homogeneity in the target area according to a test of reading and vocabulary, were randomly assigned to two groups_ a control group and an experimental one with 20 members each. They participated in two sessions of instruction taught by one of the researchers. During the two sessions, the narrative group studied forty-seven abstract words in the context of two short stories, while the expository group studied the same words in two non-narrative passages which matched the stories in difficulty. Achievement tests, administered immediately after each session and after a one-week delay, showed that the narrative group outperformed those who had studied the target vocabulary in non-narrative texts both for immediate (means, 20.55 and 10.87, respectively) and delayed (means, 19.07 and 9.25, respectively) recall. Multiple t-tests showed that the narrative group maintained a significant advantage in recalling abstract words over control students on each occasion.

The present study focuses on 3 “collocational problems” as suggested by Mona Baker (1993, pp. 56-61), namely “culture-specific collocations, marked collocations and unmarked collocations where there is a tension between accuracy and naturalness”, as well as on the way they are treated by two different groups of translators, namely “national translators” and “foreign translators” (Nida, 1975, p. 97). It studies, analyzes and discusses how the two groups of translators differ from each other in treating the collocational pitfalls, and whether their treatments are in line with the solutions suggested by Baker, or they opt for remedies beyond her defined boundaries.

The study examined the frequency of social and discourse deictic expressions in a teacher’s discourse. To this aim, the whole process of teaching was tape-recorded to reflect what actually happened in the classroom. Actually, five periods of the classroom talk were recorded and transcribed. After the class, a detailed transcription of the recording was worked out to be analyzed statistically. The results displayed that the use of these expressions was frequent. Knowing the fact would help the teachers to produce more coherent speech to improve language proficiency of EFL learners

This study sought to investigate how different types of in-text glosses (i.e. synonym, translation, and definition glosses) affect reading comprehension of Iranian high school students. For this purpose, seventy-eight students from a high school in Isfahan were randomly chosen to serve as the participants of the study. They were then randomly divided into four groups –three experimental groups and one control group. To ascertain the homogeneity of the groups in terms of reading comprehension ability, a general reading comprehension test was administered prior to the administration of the actual tests of gloss type. No meaningful difference was spotted between them. The participants subsequently sat for the tests of gloss type, the results of which made it possible to reach the following different types of glosses brought about considerable changes in the students’ reading comprehension scores. More precisely, the students in synonym gloss group outperformed, although not significantly, those in translation gloss group who, in turn, substantially surpassed those in definition gloss group. Unsurprisingly, these three experimental groups had a better than did the control group, i.e. the no-gloss group

Researchers and teachers are provided with a large pool of literature concerning textbooks evaluation in EFL contexts such as Iran, but there is still a gap regarding the evaluation of textbooks prepared by the Ministry of Education since teachers seem to be under duress to use the textbooks in their classes with no chance to adapt their materials. Considering the widespread use of images in instructional materials, it is important to scrutinize their effects on language learner's understanding. Due to paucity of the studies on evaluating visual materials (i.e., images) in English textbooks in Iran, the current researchers attempted to evaluate the visual materials included in the junior high school English textbooks to see if they were effective to meet the Iranian learner's needs and English language teaching objectives. The findings obtained from two semi-structured interviews with 35 Iranian English teachers and 49 English students indicated that the teacher participants had positive views towards the connectivity of the visual materials in the textbooks and the objectives of the course. Also, they believed that providing the visual materials which are culturally and religiously appropriate could facilitate the process of teaching. In contrast, the student participants did not demonstrate such positive views towards the visual materials.

Reading is the fundamental skill upon which all formal education depends. Nowadays, more and more university students throughout the world are required to learn EFL in order to read textbooks and professional journals which are written in English. On the other hand, efficient reading is not only a hard work; it is an extremely complex and challenging mental task. Hence, in order to provide support to readers to handle this task, it is necessary to identify their specific areas of difficulty and their strength and weaknesses. Therefore, based on the metacognition and self- assessment conceptualizations, this research was conducted to further our understanding of the Iranian student's self-reported reading difficulties. The data were collected by asking 20 M.A English teaching students from a university in Kermanshah city to have a self- reflection and write about their difficulties in English reading skill. The reported statements were codified and analyzed, and the frequency of each reported difficulty was calculated accordingly. Results, at the word level, indicated that students mostly mentioned limited vocabulary knowledge and difficulty in retrieving a word that they have already stored in memory (dysnomia) as their topmost reading difficulties. At the text level, lack of fluency in reading, lack of familiarity with the subject matter, difficulty level of the text (readability) and lack of use of proper reading strategies were mentioned as topmost reading difficulties.