Argumentation is a core of article writing. Despite its importance, no English as a foreign language (EFL) research has examined how Iranian researchers set their argumentations based upon a well-established theoretical model of argumentation. This qualitative study intends to bridge this gap by building upon Toulmin's ( 2003) model of argumentation to analyze the use of argumentation in EFL articles rhetorically. To this end, 90 articles from the reliable EFL journals in English and Persian were randomly selected with the purpose of discovering underlying conventions which lay behind their argumentations in discussion section of each. Articles in Persian corpus were written by native Persian writers, articles in English corpus were written by native English writers and English articles in inter-language corpus were written by native Persian speakers. This study pointed the differences among the three groups of articles. It was thus indicated that Iranians transfer their first language argumentation rhetorical patterns to their writing in a foreign language, i.e. English. This illustrates that culture may count for the argumentation elements presented in Iranian EFL articles. Other influential factors were also discussed. Finally, pedagogical implications were suggested in the context of second language learning.
Abstract-Individuals attend language classrooms with miscellaneous personal attributes which are going to influence learners' test performance. Therefore, individual differences play an important role in sources of variance in test scores. This paper aims at investigating the effect of problem solving on the language ability obtained through C-tests. To this end, 70 EFL learners were randomly chosen and they were required to fill Parker's Problem-Solving Style Questionnaire (PSSQ). Simultaneously, they were given three C-tests to complete. The PSSQ measures four functions of problem solving: Sensing, Intuitive, Feeling, and Thinking. These four functions are the independent variables of this research. The Multiple Regression showed that there is a high positive correlation between C-test and intuitive (.844) and thinking (.838) functions. The results also point out a large effect size (R 2 = .786) for correlations which in turn describes how much of the variance in dependent variable is accounted for by the four functions of problem solving. To link theory into practice, the pedagogical implications in the EFL context are discussed.
Despite much research done on language learning textbooks, there still exist several questions unanswered about what these textbooks’ contents are about. This study is thus an attempt to investigate the 15 reading passages of Ready for First Certificate of English (FCE) in the light of schema theory. In doing so, the microstructural approach to schema theory was taken into the account which led to the classification of 8617 schema tokens into the three main categories of syntactic, semantic, and parasyntactic domains. Running the chi-square test revealed that the domains differ significantly from each other regarding both their types (X2= 2869.9, p< 0.05) and tokens (X2= 1704, p< 0.05) which lent support to their psychological reality. In addition, the descriptive analysis of the schemata demonstrated that reading passages are heavily outweighed by semantic types (80.7%), whereas syntactic ad parasyntactic types were only about 6% and 12.4 % respectively. The pedagogical implication of the study is discussed and further suggestions are put forward.
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