In spite of the crucial importance of textbooks, their increasing development day by day, and their significant effects on saving time, energy, and budgets, only few studies have been done on textbooks evaluation from a critical discourse analysis perspective. This study aimed to analyze and compare the gender representation in Top Notch and Summit series in order to find out if the gender representation is equally balanced in these two textbooks. The study, thus, analyzed the series in terms of nine major aspects of gender: female and male's characters, female and male's pictorial representations, female and male's titles, activities, and firstness of female and male in the mixed gender dialogues. To that end, Fairclough's (1989Fairclough's ( , 2001) models were adopted in order to detect the ideology behind these textbooks. The findings of study indicated that, in most cases, gender representation is more balanced in Top Notch series than in Summit series. The results of this comparative research would also help us gain a better understanding of textbooks currently used in Iranian language institutes.
The purpose of this study is to find out whether children learning English by music can improve their ability in segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation or not. In this regard, three hypotheses were proposed. A total of 30 female elementary students with the age between 9 to 12 years old were chosen. They were learning English in a private English school in Isfahan. According to the placement test of the institute, all of them were in the beginner level of pronunciation. They were assigned to two groups, that is, control group and experimental group. The selected material for both groups was Song Time book. The book was taught to the experimental group with music. The students listened to songs with music, repeated, and finally memorized them. Regarding the control group, the teacher read the songs and the students repeated after her and tried to memorize them. The results of comparing the pretest and the posttest showed that music had a better effect on pronunciation and intonation and stress pattern recognition; that is, the students in the experimental group had a better performance in these areas than the control group. Therefore, the three proposed hypotheses were safely rejected, and it was concluded that using music can push students to learn suprasegmentals better. The study has implication for teachers as well as material developers to include music in the teaching process.
Statement of the ProblemCommunication is the exchange of ideas and information between two or more people (Richards & Schmidt,
The purpose of the present study was to compare the speech act of offering advice as realized by Iranian EFL learners and English native speakers. The study, more specifically, attempted to find out whether there was any pragmatic transfer from Persian (L1) among Iranian EFL learners while offering advice in English. It also examined whether Iranian EFL learners' perception of directness/indirectness in the realization of offering advice develops as a result of proficiency development. In order to achieve the objectives, a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was used to collect the speech act of offering advice from among Iranian EFL learners and native English speakers. The findings indicated that Iranian EFL learners were not as balanced as native English speakers in the use of indirect use of offering advice. It was also observed that Iranian EFL learners had not acquired the pragmatic competence to offer native-like advice with regard to social power and social distance between interlocutors. The result also revealed that Iranian EFL learners and the native English speakers favored a number of similar strategies for the realization of offering advice, though there were differences in terms of frequency use of the speech acts of offering advice. Thus, this study showed evidence of pragmatics transfer.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.