Knowledge obtained in higher education through de-contextualised tasks and activities often remains "inert" and learners cannot readily transfer understanding to novel contexts. Nowhere is this more evident than in learning a foreign language. Typical language interaction exercises in class do not mirror real-life language use and such activities may have negative effects on students' development of robust knowledge. This article describes a design-based research study that investigated the use of an authentic e-learning environment in a course of English language at a university preparatory school. The findings suggest that the use of critical elements of authentic activities is the key to achieving authentic learning in these contexts. An important outcome of the research was the development of a framework for the design of authentic activities to be used in the teaching of foreign languages, in the form of 11 design principles. These principles contribute both theoretically and practically to understanding of how students learn languages in meaningful contexts.
The present article reports a comparative study of interactional metadiscourse markers in English and Persian research articles. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, this study investigates the employment of “hedges”, “boosters”, and “attitude markers” in a corpus composed of the post-method sections of 100 research articles (50 English and 50 Persian) in the field of architecture. Overall, it was found that there are statistically significant differences between the frequencies of hedges, boosters, and attitude markers used in English and Persian sub-corpora. Yet, the linguistic and functional analyses unveiled some basic similarities between the two languages in their epistemic metadiscourse strategies. The findings provide deep insights into the rhetorical conventions and norms in architectural articles and offer a broader perspective towards discoursing patterns and persuasion strategies of English and Iranian academic writers in this field.
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