The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between multiple intelligenc... more The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between multiple intelligences (MI) and foreign language (L2) reading skill among Iranian EFL sophomores. Multiple intelligences and L2 reading measurements of participants-29 males and 69 females who were selected from four intact classes-were obtained through McKenzie's (1999) Multiple Intelligences Inventory and reading part of a Preliminary English Test PET, respectively, and then Pearson's correlation analysis was run to determine the degree of the relationship between each component of multiple intelligences and L2 reading skill. Afterwards, through a multiple regression analysis those components of multiple intelligences which acted as the predictors of L2 reading skill were identified and the power of each predictor was calculated. The results of the correlation analyses revealed that linguistic-verbal, logical-mathematical, spatial, and interpersonal intelligences were significantly correlated with...
Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the hu... more Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the humanities are increasingly apprehending dialogism; however, few studies have applied it in the realm of critical discourse analysis. The present study presupposes that a fundamental similarity exists between dialogism and critical discourse analysis in their respect for different human voices to be heard. To present a study embracing dialogism in the given field, this research analyzed Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" and Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet", as two leading political speeches in the history, using two master concepts of dialogism, self and other, in line with utterance, polyphony, centripetal and centrifugal forces and architectonics. The results showed that the explored political utterances were the locus of struggle between centrifugal and centripetal forces through which self-other architectonics in "The Ballot or the Bullet"...
This study is a corpus-based study of interactional metadiscourse in natural and social science m... more This study is a corpus-based study of interactional metadiscourse in natural and social science master theses. For this purpose, 30 natural and social science master theses in six disciplines were randomly selected out of the library of five universities. Five master theses were selected in each discipline, in a period of six years (2010-2016).This study analyzed only the discussion and conclusion sections of master theses. To investigate interactional metadiscourse, Hyland’s (2005) classification was used. The results of this study demonstrated that the percentile proportion of total interactional metadiscourse markers in social science master theses was more than natural science master theses. Among the analyzed resources, hedges was the most frequent role in both corpora while attitude markers in social science and self-mention in natural science was the least favored role. The results of the present study suggested that being aware of interactional metadiscourse markers can shed...
The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as ... more The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as well as in the field of ESP/EAP course design. The present paper has attempted to use genre analysis to account for the rhetorical features of research article introductions written by Iranian academics in two disciplinary fields of Education and Economics. The corpus comprised 40 research article introductions (20 from Education, 20 from Economics fields). Applying John Swales’ (1990) CARS model and based on the notions of generic move, and step, our analysis showed a high degree of compatibility between our data and Swales’ model. The only marked difference was that the frequencies of occurrence of moves 1 and 2 were significantly higher than that of move 3. Some minor differences were also identified and discussed. The findings may be of some value both to contrastive rhetorical studies and genre analytic studies. They may also be practically useful for EAP syllabus designers in devel...
In the present study, the effects of presenting new L2 vocabulary in semantic and thematic sets o... more In the present study, the effects of presenting new L2 vocabulary in semantic and thematic sets on vocabulary learning of Persian learners of English were investigated. There were 80 participants: 40 elementary and 40 intermediate levels. Four types of vocabulary sets (i.e., semantically related sets, semantically unrelated sets, thematically associated sets and thematically unassociated sets) were presented through reading passages. For each set, two passages were selected including six words in each reading passage. Consequently, there were eight reading passages with 48 new words at each level, which were presented to the participants to learn. The participants at each level took a placement test, a proficiency test, a pretest and a posttest. The statistical analyses showed that participants recalled more words from the thematic sets, while the semantic sets were the least to recall at each level. These differences were more apparent at the elementary level than in the intermedia...
Representation in discourse is a constructed practice; that is, it is not neutral. Events and ide... more Representation in discourse is a constructed practice; that is, it is not neutral. Events and ideas are not transmitted neutrally as they were, because they have to pass through a medium with its own ideological filters. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. Edward Said's book Orientalism (1976) focuses on how the East is represented by the West. He believes that during the process of representation, the Orient is also remade. He mentions a number of writers who he believes depict distorted images of the East in order to satiate their colonizing ends among whom is Kingslake and his travel narrative Eothen (1844). Twenty seven pages from this travelogue have been taken as the data of this research. The purpose was to reveal how the writer has tried to create a biased image of...
“Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics... more “Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics, has been under consideration in investigations related to bilingual and multilingual societies. First proposed by Haugen (1956) and later developed byGrosjean (1982), the termcode-switching refers to language alternation during communication. Although code-switching is unavoidable in bilingual and multilingual contexts, its role and motivational determinants in language classes are sometimes ignored. The goal of the present article was to investigate the motivational determinants of classroom code-switching in EFL classrooms. The research was conducted with 400 participants, including 374 students and 26 teachers. The data collection techniques included questionnairesand observation checklist, all of which were designed based on Hymes’ (1962) framework and Poplack’s (1980), Myers-Scotton’s (1989), Blom and Gumperz’s (1972), and Gumperz’s (1982) categorizations. The data were analyzed through the software SPSS (Version 20). The results revealedthat providing the listener with better understanding, clarification, and checking comprehension are the most important motivational determinants for codeswitching.
The power of media lies in its persuasive function, which gives media a potential to maneuver on ... more The power of media lies in its persuasive function, which gives media a potential to maneuver on the mind of audience (van Dijk 1996). This potential is realized via different linguistic resources, one important group of which is metadiscoursal resources. The major aim of this study was to explore how and in what distribution these resources are employed by writers with different cultural backgrounds to fulfill persuasive objectives in the genre of newspaper editorials. Based on Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal taxonomy, a total of eighty newspaper editorials from four elite newspapers (two Iranian and two American) were analyzed and compared. The results revealed some differences between the two groups of editors (Iranian group and American group) in terms of the number of metadiscoursal elements used in their editorials. For instance, the native speaker group proved to be more confident in using interactional and interpersonal metadiscourse markers more frequently than the non-native...
Workplace stress among employees has been known to impede work efficacy, a phenomenon usually ref... more Workplace stress among employees has been known to impede work efficacy, a phenomenon usually referred to as burnout. Recently, there has been a growing research on this issue in educational contexts, particularly at pre-tertiary levels, giving rise to a need to do this kind of investigation at higher education level as well. As a response to this need, the present paper is a report of a case study aimed at examining the causes of burnout experienced by two Iranian EFL academics. The results of the thematic analysis of the interviews with the participants indicated five main conceptual categories associated with the subjects’ burnout experiences: Institutional demands, interpersonal problems, discordant outlooks, lack of student motivation, and lack of institutional supports. The discussion on each of these categories shed light on how these categories may contribute, in varying degrees of course, to the burnout among academics.
Communication strategies (CSs) are systematic attempts by language learners to encode or decode m... more Communication strategies (CSs) are systematic attempts by language learners to encode or decode meaning in a target language in situations where the appropriate target language rules have not been formed. Based on this view, communication strategies can be seen as compensatory means for making up for linguistic deficiencies of second or foreign language learners. Within the conceptual framework outlined, this paper is a report on a research conducted at Azarbaijan Teachers Education University on the students majoring in English Language and Literature. The main aim was to seek a relationship between the subjects’ use of communication strategies in solving communication problems and their proficiency levels in English as a foreign language. The data was collected by means of one-to-one interviews with the participants, and were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results indicated that the frequency of communication strategies applied by the participants varied accor...
The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as ... more The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as well as in the field of ESP/EAP course design. The present paper has attempted to use genre analysis to account for the rhetorical features of research article introductions written by Iranian academics in two disciplinary fields of Education and Economics. The corpus comprised 40 research article introductions (20 from Education, 20 from Economics fields). Applying John Swales’ (1990) CARS model and based on the notions of generic move, and step, our analysis showed a high degree of compatibility between our data and Swales’ model. The only marked difference was that the frequencies of occurrence of moves 1 and 2 were significantly higher than that of move 3. Some minor differences were also identified and discussed. The findings may be of some value both to contrastive rhetorical studies and genre analytic studies. They may also be practically useful for EAP syllabus designers in developing genre-oriented EAP material, and EAP teachers in postgraduate courses aiming at developing academic writing skills.
This study is a corpus-based study of interactional metadiscourse in natural and social science m... more This study is a corpus-based study of interactional metadiscourse in natural and social science master theses. For this purpose, 30 natural and social science master theses in six disciplines were randomly selected out of the library of five universities. Five master theses were selected in each discipline, in a period of six years (2010-2016). This study analyzed only the discussion and conclusion sections of master theses. To investigate interactional metadiscourse, Hyland's (2005) classification was used. The results of this study demonstrated that the percentile proportion of total interactional metadiscourse markers in social science master theses was more than natural science master theses. Among the analyzed resources, hedges were the most frequent role in both corpora while attitude markers in social science and self-mention in natural science were the least favored role. The results of the present study suggested that being aware of interactional metadiscourse markers c...
Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the hu... more Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the humanities are increasingly apprehending dialogism; however, few studies have applied it in the realm of critical discourse analysis. The present study presupposes that a fundamental similarity exists between dialogism and critical discourse analysis in their respect for different human voices to be heard. To present a study embracing dialogism in the given field, this research analyzed Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" and Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet", as two leading political speeches in the history, using two master concepts of dialogism, self and other, in line with utterance, polyphony, centripetal and centrifugal forces and architectonics. The results showed that the explored political utterances were the locus of struggle between centrifugal and centripetal forces through which self-other architectonics in "The Ballot or the Bullet" appeared primarily in the form of binary opposition and relative dominance of one voice; in contrast, the architectonics in "I Have a Dream" showed various examples of polyphony and reconciliation of the voices. The domination of a single voice in the former and plurality of the voices in the latter yielded the speech utterances respectively as the monologic and dialogic utterances where covert maintenance of power in monologism, in contrast to dialogism, can serve the aim of critical discourse analysis to study the relation between discourse and power.
“Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics... more “Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics, has been under consideration in investigations related to bilingual and multilingual societies. First proposed by Haugen (1956) and later developed byGrosjean (1982), the termcode-switching refers to language alternation during communication. Although code-switching is unavoidable in bilingual and multilingual contexts, its role and motivational determinants in language classes are sometimes ignored. The goal of the present article was to investigate the motivational determinants of classroom code-switching in EFL classrooms. The research was conducted with 400 participants, including 374 students and 26 teachers. The data collection techniques included questionnairesand observation checklist, all of which were designed based on Hymes’ (1962) framework and Poplack’s (1980), Myers-Scotton’s (1989), Blom and Gumperz’s (1972), and Gumperz’s (1982) categorizations. The data were analyzed through the software SPSS (Version 20). The results revealedthat providing the listener with better understanding, clarification, and checking comprehension are the most important motivational determinants for codeswitching.
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between multiple intelligenc... more The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between multiple intelligences (MI) and foreign language (L2) reading skill among Iranian EFL sophomores. Multiple intelligences and L2 reading measurements of participants-29 males and 69 females who were selected from four intact classes-were obtained through McKenzie's (1999) Multiple Intelligences Inventory and reading part of a Preliminary English Test PET, respectively, and then Pearson's correlation analysis was run to determine the degree of the relationship between each component of multiple intelligences and L2 reading skill. Afterwards, through a multiple regression analysis those components of multiple intelligences which acted as the predictors of L2 reading skill were identified and the power of each predictor was calculated. The results of the correlation analyses revealed that linguistic-verbal, logical-mathematical, spatial, and interpersonal intelligences were significantly correlated with...
Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the hu... more Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the humanities are increasingly apprehending dialogism; however, few studies have applied it in the realm of critical discourse analysis. The present study presupposes that a fundamental similarity exists between dialogism and critical discourse analysis in their respect for different human voices to be heard. To present a study embracing dialogism in the given field, this research analyzed Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" and Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet", as two leading political speeches in the history, using two master concepts of dialogism, self and other, in line with utterance, polyphony, centripetal and centrifugal forces and architectonics. The results showed that the explored political utterances were the locus of struggle between centrifugal and centripetal forces through which self-other architectonics in "The Ballot or the Bullet"...
This study is a corpus-based study of interactional metadiscourse in natural and social science m... more This study is a corpus-based study of interactional metadiscourse in natural and social science master theses. For this purpose, 30 natural and social science master theses in six disciplines were randomly selected out of the library of five universities. Five master theses were selected in each discipline, in a period of six years (2010-2016).This study analyzed only the discussion and conclusion sections of master theses. To investigate interactional metadiscourse, Hyland’s (2005) classification was used. The results of this study demonstrated that the percentile proportion of total interactional metadiscourse markers in social science master theses was more than natural science master theses. Among the analyzed resources, hedges was the most frequent role in both corpora while attitude markers in social science and self-mention in natural science was the least favored role. The results of the present study suggested that being aware of interactional metadiscourse markers can shed...
The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as ... more The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as well as in the field of ESP/EAP course design. The present paper has attempted to use genre analysis to account for the rhetorical features of research article introductions written by Iranian academics in two disciplinary fields of Education and Economics. The corpus comprised 40 research article introductions (20 from Education, 20 from Economics fields). Applying John Swales’ (1990) CARS model and based on the notions of generic move, and step, our analysis showed a high degree of compatibility between our data and Swales’ model. The only marked difference was that the frequencies of occurrence of moves 1 and 2 were significantly higher than that of move 3. Some minor differences were also identified and discussed. The findings may be of some value both to contrastive rhetorical studies and genre analytic studies. They may also be practically useful for EAP syllabus designers in devel...
In the present study, the effects of presenting new L2 vocabulary in semantic and thematic sets o... more In the present study, the effects of presenting new L2 vocabulary in semantic and thematic sets on vocabulary learning of Persian learners of English were investigated. There were 80 participants: 40 elementary and 40 intermediate levels. Four types of vocabulary sets (i.e., semantically related sets, semantically unrelated sets, thematically associated sets and thematically unassociated sets) were presented through reading passages. For each set, two passages were selected including six words in each reading passage. Consequently, there were eight reading passages with 48 new words at each level, which were presented to the participants to learn. The participants at each level took a placement test, a proficiency test, a pretest and a posttest. The statistical analyses showed that participants recalled more words from the thematic sets, while the semantic sets were the least to recall at each level. These differences were more apparent at the elementary level than in the intermedia...
Representation in discourse is a constructed practice; that is, it is not neutral. Events and ide... more Representation in discourse is a constructed practice; that is, it is not neutral. Events and ideas are not transmitted neutrally as they were, because they have to pass through a medium with its own ideological filters. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. Edward Said's book Orientalism (1976) focuses on how the East is represented by the West. He believes that during the process of representation, the Orient is also remade. He mentions a number of writers who he believes depict distorted images of the East in order to satiate their colonizing ends among whom is Kingslake and his travel narrative Eothen (1844). Twenty seven pages from this travelogue have been taken as the data of this research. The purpose was to reveal how the writer has tried to create a biased image of...
“Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics... more “Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics, has been under consideration in investigations related to bilingual and multilingual societies. First proposed by Haugen (1956) and later developed byGrosjean (1982), the termcode-switching refers to language alternation during communication. Although code-switching is unavoidable in bilingual and multilingual contexts, its role and motivational determinants in language classes are sometimes ignored. The goal of the present article was to investigate the motivational determinants of classroom code-switching in EFL classrooms. The research was conducted with 400 participants, including 374 students and 26 teachers. The data collection techniques included questionnairesand observation checklist, all of which were designed based on Hymes’ (1962) framework and Poplack’s (1980), Myers-Scotton’s (1989), Blom and Gumperz’s (1972), and Gumperz’s (1982) categorizations. The data were analyzed through the software SPSS (Version 20). The results revealedthat providing the listener with better understanding, clarification, and checking comprehension are the most important motivational determinants for codeswitching.
The power of media lies in its persuasive function, which gives media a potential to maneuver on ... more The power of media lies in its persuasive function, which gives media a potential to maneuver on the mind of audience (van Dijk 1996). This potential is realized via different linguistic resources, one important group of which is metadiscoursal resources. The major aim of this study was to explore how and in what distribution these resources are employed by writers with different cultural backgrounds to fulfill persuasive objectives in the genre of newspaper editorials. Based on Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal taxonomy, a total of eighty newspaper editorials from four elite newspapers (two Iranian and two American) were analyzed and compared. The results revealed some differences between the two groups of editors (Iranian group and American group) in terms of the number of metadiscoursal elements used in their editorials. For instance, the native speaker group proved to be more confident in using interactional and interpersonal metadiscourse markers more frequently than the non-native...
Workplace stress among employees has been known to impede work efficacy, a phenomenon usually ref... more Workplace stress among employees has been known to impede work efficacy, a phenomenon usually referred to as burnout. Recently, there has been a growing research on this issue in educational contexts, particularly at pre-tertiary levels, giving rise to a need to do this kind of investigation at higher education level as well. As a response to this need, the present paper is a report of a case study aimed at examining the causes of burnout experienced by two Iranian EFL academics. The results of the thematic analysis of the interviews with the participants indicated five main conceptual categories associated with the subjects’ burnout experiences: Institutional demands, interpersonal problems, discordant outlooks, lack of student motivation, and lack of institutional supports. The discussion on each of these categories shed light on how these categories may contribute, in varying degrees of course, to the burnout among academics.
Communication strategies (CSs) are systematic attempts by language learners to encode or decode m... more Communication strategies (CSs) are systematic attempts by language learners to encode or decode meaning in a target language in situations where the appropriate target language rules have not been formed. Based on this view, communication strategies can be seen as compensatory means for making up for linguistic deficiencies of second or foreign language learners. Within the conceptual framework outlined, this paper is a report on a research conducted at Azarbaijan Teachers Education University on the students majoring in English Language and Literature. The main aim was to seek a relationship between the subjects’ use of communication strategies in solving communication problems and their proficiency levels in English as a foreign language. The data was collected by means of one-to-one interviews with the participants, and were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results indicated that the frequency of communication strategies applied by the participants varied accor...
The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as ... more The notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as well as in the field of ESP/EAP course design. The present paper has attempted to use genre analysis to account for the rhetorical features of research article introductions written by Iranian academics in two disciplinary fields of Education and Economics. The corpus comprised 40 research article introductions (20 from Education, 20 from Economics fields). Applying John Swales’ (1990) CARS model and based on the notions of generic move, and step, our analysis showed a high degree of compatibility between our data and Swales’ model. The only marked difference was that the frequencies of occurrence of moves 1 and 2 were significantly higher than that of move 3. Some minor differences were also identified and discussed. The findings may be of some value both to contrastive rhetorical studies and genre analytic studies. They may also be practically useful for EAP syllabus designers in developing genre-oriented EAP material, and EAP teachers in postgraduate courses aiming at developing academic writing skills.
This study is a corpus-based study of interactional metadiscourse in natural and social science m... more This study is a corpus-based study of interactional metadiscourse in natural and social science master theses. For this purpose, 30 natural and social science master theses in six disciplines were randomly selected out of the library of five universities. Five master theses were selected in each discipline, in a period of six years (2010-2016). This study analyzed only the discussion and conclusion sections of master theses. To investigate interactional metadiscourse, Hyland's (2005) classification was used. The results of this study demonstrated that the percentile proportion of total interactional metadiscourse markers in social science master theses was more than natural science master theses. Among the analyzed resources, hedges were the most frequent role in both corpora while attitude markers in social science and self-mention in natural science were the least favored role. The results of the present study suggested that being aware of interactional metadiscourse markers c...
Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the hu... more Bakhtin's dialogism respects differences and appreciates dialogue. Different fields of the humanities are increasingly apprehending dialogism; however, few studies have applied it in the realm of critical discourse analysis. The present study presupposes that a fundamental similarity exists between dialogism and critical discourse analysis in their respect for different human voices to be heard. To present a study embracing dialogism in the given field, this research analyzed Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" and Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet", as two leading political speeches in the history, using two master concepts of dialogism, self and other, in line with utterance, polyphony, centripetal and centrifugal forces and architectonics. The results showed that the explored political utterances were the locus of struggle between centrifugal and centripetal forces through which self-other architectonics in "The Ballot or the Bullet" appeared primarily in the form of binary opposition and relative dominance of one voice; in contrast, the architectonics in "I Have a Dream" showed various examples of polyphony and reconciliation of the voices. The domination of a single voice in the former and plurality of the voices in the latter yielded the speech utterances respectively as the monologic and dialogic utterances where covert maintenance of power in monologism, in contrast to dialogism, can serve the aim of critical discourse analysis to study the relation between discourse and power.
“Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics... more “Code-Switching”, an important issue in the field of both language classroom and sociolinguistics, has been under consideration in investigations related to bilingual and multilingual societies. First proposed by Haugen (1956) and later developed byGrosjean (1982), the termcode-switching refers to language alternation during communication. Although code-switching is unavoidable in bilingual and multilingual contexts, its role and motivational determinants in language classes are sometimes ignored. The goal of the present article was to investigate the motivational determinants of classroom code-switching in EFL classrooms. The research was conducted with 400 participants, including 374 students and 26 teachers. The data collection techniques included questionnairesand observation checklist, all of which were designed based on Hymes’ (1962) framework and Poplack’s (1980), Myers-Scotton’s (1989), Blom and Gumperz’s (1972), and Gumperz’s (1982) categorizations. The data were analyzed through the software SPSS (Version 20). The results revealedthat providing the listener with better understanding, clarification, and checking comprehension are the most important motivational determinants for codeswitching.
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