Davood Taghipour Bazargani

Critical cultural awareness as a component of intercultural competence (Byram, 1997, 2012) has received the extensive attention of scholars in the fields of language teaching, cultural studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, communication studies, etc. in the recent decades. However, no instrument has ever been developed to assess this construct among Iranian EFL teachers. To fill this gap, in the first phase of the present study a theoretical framework for critical cultural awareness and its components was developed through reviewing the literature and conducting interviews with ELT experts. In the second phase, a questionnaire was developed and piloted with 370 participants who were available and willing to participate in the study. More specifically, the 37 items of the newly-developed ‘CCA' scale were subjected to principal component analysis which revealed the presence of three components. These phases led to the development of a questionnaire with three components and 37 ...

1.IntroductionReading as an active receptive language skill is one of the most complex cognitive activities (Pour-Mohammadi & Abidin, 2011a). Most of the studies on second language reading indicated that second language learners use a set of competencies for reading effectively (e.g., Brantmeier, 2002; Shrum & Glisan, 2000; Singhal, 2001). Grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence are the four basic competences which help second language learners in order to achieve plenty of reading tasks.According to Renandya and Richards (2002), strategic competence, which is the way learners manipulate language in order to meet communicative goals, is perhaps the most important of all the communicative competence elements. It is the ability to compensate for imperfect knowledge of linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse rules. Bachman and Palmer (2010) describe strategic competence as a set of metacognitive components functioning in highe...

The notion of metadiscourse firstly was introduced by Harris (1959; 1970) and then developed by other scholars. Hyland (2005) defined metadiscourse as "the cover term for the self-reflective expression used to negotiate interactional meaning in a text, assisting the writer (to speak) to express a view point and engage with readers as members of a particular community".According to Crismore (1983), metadiscourse is a level of discourse where the author or speaker intrudes into the ongoing discourse to direct rather than inform the reader or listener. Metadiscourse is generally divided into two types, informational and attitudinal. Informational direct readers and listeners how to understand the primary message by referring to its content and structure or author or speakers purpose or goal. Attitudinal metadiscourse direct readers or speakers how to understand the author or speaker perspectives or stance towards the content or structure of primary discourse.The use of an int...

1.IntroductionTranslation is the process in which a word, segment, or text is conveyed from one language into another, going beyond sheer words. It includes inter-lingual relationships, cultural differences - and when spoken, gesture - in order to ultimately transfer the source text's message in the target language (Sewell, 1996).The world today is getting smaller and smaller as communication and information systems are developing and becoming more and more complex. In the process of such a rapid exchange of information and for the purpose of improving cultural contacts, translating becomes inescapable. One- time, translation was undertaken by individuals for individuals. However, increasing universal demands prompted businesses seek markets worldwide, which generated further needs for translation of all types. Some researchers like Catford (1965), Savory (1968), Nida (1984), and Bell (1991) put emphasis on equivalence in translation, but others like Al-Qinai (2000), stated that...

1.IntroductionIn many second or foreign language teaching situations, reading receives a special focus. It is the most important skill. It is highly valued by EFL students as well as teachers. Richards and Renandya (2002) claimed that reading receives special focus in foreign language teaching. There are two reasons for considering reading as the most important skill in language learning: First, reading comprehension is one of the most important goals in most foreign language settings. Second, reading texts helps learners to accomplish various pedagogical purposes.One of the main aims of language teaching and language learning programs in secondary and tertiary levels of education is reading (Birjandi & Noroozi, 2008). Reading as a form of language input has been considered as one of the most important skills in the area of language learning and teaching (Negari & Rouhi, 2012). Chastian (1988, p. 218) claimed that "all reading activities serve to facilitate communication fluenc...

1.IntroductionThere has currently been a high emphasis on the practice of Communicative Approach in language teaching. This English teaching approach highlights the importance of Learner - Centered classrooms where teachers' talking time is minimized and students' talking time is increased to the utmost (Richards & Renandya, 2002, p.49). Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), as a sub-branch of Communicative approach in language teaching, has also taken the attention of a lot of scholars in recent years. This approach bases itself on the implementation of a great variety of tasks and procedures to produce effective results in L2 acquisition (Ellis, 2003; Richards, 2001). Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) refers to "an approach/method based on the use of tasks a s the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching, as a logical development of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)" (Richards & Rodgers, 2001, p.223). In current pedagogical discussions, the...

1.IntroductionWriting is a highly complex process. For a text to be coherent it should also make sense, and there should be a consistent development of ideas of the writer, concepts, or arguments (Almaden, 2006). According to Khoii and Arabsarhangi (2011), writing as a productive skill is more complicated and often seems to be the hardest of the skills, since it involves not just a graphic representation of speech, but the development of thoughts in a structured way .Writing is especially important for the instruction of second language learners for three reasons: first, writing well is a necessary skill for academic or occupational success ,but one that is especially difficult for second language learners to master this skill well. Second, writing can be an effective tool for the development of academic language proficiency as learners more readily explore advanced lexical or syntactic expressions in their written work. Third, writing across the curriculum can be invaluable for mas...

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1.IntroductionAlmost all English language teachers get students to study grammar and vocabulary, practise functional dialogues, take part in productive skill activities and try to become competent in listening and reading. Yet some of these same teachers make little attempt to teach pronunciation in any overt way and only give attention to it in passing. According to previous studies (Fatemi & Pishghadam, 2015), teaching pronunciation is ignored within the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom context, teacher training programs, course materials, and applied linguistics studies. However, English sounds instruction is regarded as extremely beneficial from learners' perspective (Barrera, 2004). Pronunciation teaching not only makes students be aware of different sounds and sound features (and what these mean), but can also improve their speaking, specially their accent; besides, it helps them achieve the goal of improved comprehension and intelligibility of other skills such as listening, reading and writing (Harmer, 2013, p. 248). So in this regards, knowledge of sounds (i.e., phonemic and phonological awareness) is in the essential parts of learning English. Unawareness of them acts as an obstacle for actual perception and comprehension of the meaning of the words in the sentences effectively.Although there are 26 letters in the English language, but there are approximately 40 phonemes or sound units, these sounds are represented in 250 different spellings such as /f/ as in ph, gh, ff, which are not inherently obvious and must be taught (Center on Teaching and Learning, 2015). One of the main problems of the students in Iran is reading difficulties that they are commonly caused by weaknesses in the ability to process the phonological features of language because spelling words in English is challenging work and one of the main reasons for this is that many English words are NOT spelled as they are spoken, and causes a lot of confusion for learners to learn English. So, most of students from elementary level even to advanced level in Iran have basically phonemic and phonological problems to distinguish some sounds with different written forms which sometimes belongs to phonological exceptions like "sh ///" sound in the word Persian, ocean, sure, nation, fish. Very often, Iranian students' reading difficulty is due to epenthesis as [estri:t] in street, and silent letters like "gh" or "k" in the word "knight" and also, as a result of letters combining that makes different sounds like "ph/gh= /f/" as in cough and photo " tu= /t// as in culture" or "ch= /tj / as in church and /k/ as in stomach".The aim of the current study is to explore the effect of phonemic awareness in two areas; perception of phonological rules and application of phonemic awareness and sound exceptions for first-grade students' reading activity towards reading improvement (so far, little attention has been paid to knowledge of sound exceptions). It was proposed that the learner's awareness on the phonology of a new language would greatly influence early reading success. The present study attempts to show that an understanding of phonemic relationships enables the beginning reader of English to make a contact with English alphabetic writing system at the phonetic level. Phonemic instruction at the appropriate age level would facilitate and pave the way of this understanding; consequently, reading abilities will cognitively and intellectually be improved.One of the most significant current discussions in phonemic awareness is "teaching phonemic awareness in public schools of Iran" at the level of first-grade (JSP) students. The teaching of phonemic awareness is important because it will not be developed spontaneously as a natural phenomenon as the other levels of phonological awareness (Frost, Peterson & Lundberg, 1988). According to them, phonemic awareness instruction as a language skill is required to ensure that it is mastered. …

Teachers’ quality of work life (QWL) is an umbrella concept that refers to the degree of satisfaction a teacher experiences with respect to his or her job and the overall work situations which are influenced by three factors of organizational support including participation in decision making, fairness of rewards, and growth opportunity. The present study examined the relationship between perceived organizational support (POS) and QWL among secondary school teachers of English as a foreign language. To this end, employing a descriptive correlational method, the researchers selected a number of 173 male and female teachers who were selected via probability multistage cluster sampling from among a population which consisted of EFL teachers at secondary schools in Tehran (N=1826), Iran. Data collection instruments included an attitude survey based on Allen, Armstrong, Reid, and Riemenschneider (2008) model of POS as well as Walton’s (1973) QWL questionnaire. Pearson correlation and mul...

This study was designed to investigate the effectiveness of applying individualized homework assignments on Iranian intermediate level EFL learners’ motivation. To achieve this objective, 60 learners in the 16-21 age range who were studying at two private language institutes in Rasht, Iran, were selected from 122 participants based on their performance on QPT. The participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. A pretest piloted before with an accepted reliability index was administered to both groups. Next, the experimental group received the treatment for 20 sessions (doing homework materials specifically designed based on each learner’s interests and preferred learning style). Meanwhile, the control group received a placebo which was the use of exercises in the workbook of the coursebook American English File 3 (Second Edition) as homework assignments. The posttest of motivation was then administered to both groups. The results showed significantly higher ...

1.IntroductionLanguage teachers are eager to teach the learners, and they expect from learners to get properly what they try to teach, but this goal is not always easy to reach. Different elements can cause mismatches between teachers and learners' conceptions of what has been taught and what has been learned. To avoid these mismatches the goals of language teaching should be clear and teachers should try to prevent any mismatches in different fields of study because any types of mismatches can cause the learning process become inefficient. Accordingly, in the literature on perceptual mismatches, we encounter a lot of warnings (e.g., Horowitz, 1990) that the discrepancies between teachers' and learners' views can have negative effects on instructional outcomes. In his 'macrostrategic framework', Kumaravadivelu (2006) warns teachers, curriculum developers, and policy makers about perceptual mismatches between teachers and learners. In one of the macrostrategies of...

The use of technology has had great impacts on different aspects of our lives. Educational settings, in this regard, have been no exception, and technology is changing and affecting the way students learn and present academic endeavors. Among these is the use of computer assisted presentation of materials (PowerPoint in particular) that has received special attention when it comes to presenting the results of research such as students’ theses. This study investigates the moves and steps M.A. students of TEFL use in the introduction and review of literature sections while presenting their M.A. theses through PowerPoint. The findings showed that five basic units of M.A. theses (Introduction, Literature review, Method, Results and Discussion) are present as the rhetorical structuring of PowerPoint presentations. The findings of this study can have implications for students, teachers, material developers, curriculum designers and all those who wish to benefit from the genre theory and m...

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is an instructional approach that aims to develop learners’ communicative competence and focuses on the use of tasks as the main unit of instruction. The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of strong and weak versions of TBLT approach over more traditional approaches in improving reading comprehension of Iranian elementary-level EFL learners. Moreover, the distinction between the strong and weak versions of this approach is taken into account in order to investigate which version is more beneficial over the other version. To achieve the objective, 90 male learners in the 15-17 age range who were studying in an institute in Rasht were selected. The findings showed that utilizing both versions of TBLT approach can provide tremendous opportunities for learners to enhance their reading comprehension compared to traditional language teaching methods. More specifically, the results of this study revealed that the use of the weak versio...

The present study, working within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), aimed to compare two translations of the holy Qur'an (i.e. the 1955 translation of Arthur Arberry and the 2001 translation of Tahereh Saffarzadeh). Therefore, the researcher, using the three-dimensional analytical framework of Fairclough (1989, 2001) (i.e. description of text, interpretation of the relationship between text and interaction, and explanation of the relationship between interaction and social context) sought to have a critical discourse analysis of these two translations to see whether any difference can be found in them because of some significant parameters such as gender, time, place, ideological beliefs and presuppositions of translators, and …etc. Based on the findings of this study, the researcher came to the conclusion that these two translations are different, and, more importantly, that this difference is not just a linguistic difference, but rather an ideological one. Data analysis indicated that Saffarzadeh's translation is as interpretive and ideological as possible. Her translation is full of interpretive lexical choices (equivalents) as well as discursive structures (e.g. overcompleteness, euphemism, nominalization, passivization, addition, and…etc.) which are ideology-laden and can indicate ideological implications. Arberry's neutral lexical choices and his attempts to keep the grammatical structure of the signs of the Holy Qur'an, nevertheless, has created a translation which is less interpretive and less ideological.

The present study probes into the controversial issue of postmodernism. More specifically, it is an attempt to answer the question of whether our era has enough distinctive features to be described as ‘postmodern’. According to some commentators, the postmodern era is characterized by three features that distinguish it from the modern era: the failure of the Enlightenment project, the growth of intracommunal ethnic diversity and the ever-growing pace of social, economic and technological change. By a closer inspection of the contemporary state of affairs, especially from an educational point of view, the researchers tried to answer the above-mentioned question. At the end of the study, some educational implications and criticisms of postmodernism have been provided.

This study was an attempt to carefully analyze the subject of test bias. Different sources of bias have been mentioned by different scholars, to be taken into consideration while constructing and administering a test. The most comprehensive account of these sources has been given by Bachman (1990:pp.271-278).He considers cultural background, background knowledge, cognitive characteristics, native language, ethnicity, sex, and age as different sources of bias. In this study , the researcher went through two of these sources of bias namely the impulsivity –reflectivity cognitive styles and sex , and by providing two null hypotheses attempted to find out the effect of these sources of bias on the test takers' performance on a multiple – choice test . After collecting data by the use of a TOEFL test and Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire, two t-tests were run to confirm whether the difference between the means of different groups (i.e. male, female, on the one hand, and impulsive / reflective, on the other hand) is statistically significant or not? The statistics and results showed the rejection of the first null hypothesis and the acceptance of the second one. The first null hypothesis being rejected indicates that the impulsivity -reflectivity cognitive styles of test takers influence on their performance on multiple – choice items test. The second null hypothesis, being accepted, indicates that test takers' sex does not affect their performance on multiple-choice items test.