Listening comprehension is usually considered as one of the most difficult language skills to EFL learners due to the unavoidable presence of "reduced forms" in authentic speech. This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of explicit "reduced forms" instruction on Iranian EFL learners' overall listening comprehension and their ability to recognize and produce them in their daily conversations. The participants of this study were 50 intermediate English learners who were randomly assigned as the experimental and the control groups of the study. Three pre-tests were administered at the commencement of the study to see if the participants of both groups were at the same level of listening comprehension and "reduced forms" awareness. After the pre-tests, the participants in the experimental group received instruction on "reduced forms" while the control participants continued their regular classes. At the end of the 10-week instruction, the participants were given three post-tests to see if they have improved their listening comprehension ability and their ability to recognize and produce the "reduced forms" recurrently in their daily speech. Although the control participants have significantly improved their listening comprehension, the fact that the experimental participants had outperformed implied the efficacy of "reduced forms" training on the overall listening comprehension's betterment. The results also revealed that the experimental participants significantly improved their "reduced forms" awareness as well as their ability to produce "reduced forms" at the end of training course while the control participants didn't.
Selecting the most appropriate technique of literary criticism as decoding approach of meaning clarification which best match various types of literary pieces has occupied the minds of literary critics in recent decades. Stylistics as an instrument for analyzing literary texts seems to grasp the critics' attentions and has proven itself as a powerful linguistic means of implicature derivation. This article attempted to depict how the knowledge of linguistic intricacies can affect the reader's interpretation and help literary critics illuminate the unexplored literary corners of literary works. Furthermore, it is also claimed that attention to these underlying linguistic intricacies brings about a better understanding for the reader either consciously or unconsciously. Accordingly, three linguistically-inspired approaches (semantic technique linguistic technique and formal technique) for literary analysis are described and focused. Related concepts such as the role of context and literary intuition, "howness" of entering to the text and the boundary of literariness are discussed throughout the paper. Finally, in order to illustrate the fact that these linguistically-inspired techniques are not language or literature dependent, few practical examples of such analyses are presented for English and Persian literary pieces.
This study is one of the first attempts to investigate the effect of schema-based general English teaching and testing on English language learning in an Iranian academic context. A total of 90 undergraduate theology students studying general English at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM) were assigned to an experimental and a control group. For the same
As the need for appropriate alternative assessment techniques for general English students seems to be both obvious and critical, the researchers tried to put dynamic assessment (DA) theoretical principles into practice with Iranian medical students. The study"s initial subjects were 58 freshmen at Paramedical Faculty of Gerash one of the branches of Shiraz University of Medical Science (SUMS) who were at the second semester of their university education and asked to participate in a general English test based on their course books. Seventeen participants out of fifty eight received less than half of the total mark and became the real subjects of the study. Inspired by DA mediational techniques, they were interviewed individually and provided with some guidelines, advices, and test performing techniques by the teacher/researcher. As the interviews were finished the subjects were asked to take the previous exam again after fifty days (the optimal temporal distance in which the extraneous factors such as test witness, practice effect, and cognitive maturation affect the study"s performances minimally). With the aid of a paired-samples t-test it was revealed that subjects performed remarkably better on the second administration after being interviewed by the teacher/researcher about their performance problems. The study"s general findings implied that teacher"s mediation (derived from Vygotsky"s "dialogue of unequals") within students" zones of proximal development (ZPD) can miraculously pave the way for teachers, students, and material developers to reach to the ultimate "aim" of all instructional courses which is students "learning".
This study tried to investigate "gender representation" in two English newspapers of Los Angeles Times and Tehran Times focusing on the type of employed discourse strategies. For this to achieve, 7 articles were selected from each newspaper to be investigated using Van Dijk"s (2000) "socio-cognitive model" of text analysis. 286 discourse strategies were used in 7 articles of Los Angeles Times while it was just 149 for Tehran Times articles; it was demonstrated that the male-female representation is significantly different in Los Angeles Times compared with Tehran Times; genders were represented differently through employing diverse discourse strategies in these two newspapers. Los Angeles Times followed a nearly balanced way in depicting genders in terms of discourse strategies (i.e., the discourse strategies used for females are not significantly different from those which were used for males). On the contrary, Tehran Times was shown to represent two genders differently through employing different discourse strategies; hence, it had a sexist attitude for representing both genders.
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