IRANIAN JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS (IJAL)
Year:2008 | Volume:11 | Issue:2|Papers Count:6

Electronic mail (e-mail) as a means of fast and effective communication which has removed the barriers of distance and time has become very commonplace and important in institutional environments. Speakers of English as a foreign language across different disciplines need to enhance their awareness of the generic and formal features of the e-mail genre in order to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of their correspondence. Following genre analysis studies such as Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993), Santos (2002), Vergaro (2004), and Samraj and Monk (2008), and in line with studies on electronic messages such as  Gains (1999), Gimenez (2000, 2006), and Jensen (2009), the present genre-based research was conducted to analyse e-mails exchanged between EFL teachers and biology professionals for the purposes of requesting and providing information at two criteria of the macro-textual and micro-levels of the two corpora to present a tentative model. The results revealed clear discrepancies between the parallel constitutive moves, strategies and formal features due to cross-disciplinary variations and the prevalence of intertextuality. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for devising courses, preparing teaching materials and raising ESP instructors' awareness of learners' problems. 

Task as a pedagogic and research tool has originally been used to elicit unscripted data to be used as evidence for interlanguage processes or as a basis for channelling the learners’ cognitive and linguistic resources to achieve desired learning outcomes. One of the central issues surrounding task-based instruction is the difference between what is planned as task pedagogic goals through manipulation of its design features and what ultimately emerges from the implementation process. The disparity has been attributed to the redefinition of the task by the learners to suit their learning goals (see Hosenfeld, 1976; Breen, 1989). Though this account can explain the gap from the learners’ perspective, it ignores the mediatory role of the teacher and his/her reinterpretation of the task to suit pedagogic goals which may not necessarily coincide with those of the task designer. This paper argues for a redefinition of the teacher’s role in task-based instruction using naturalistic data taken from a larger database of recorded and transcribed lessons. The paper concludes with the discussion of the implications of the suggested role redefinition for task-based syllabus design.

Scientific language, along with media and political discourse, has received adequate and ample attention in research on Grammatical Metaphor (GM) as it is a chief driving force in the discourse of those genres; Modern Prose Fiction (MPF) however has seen spotty and sketchy research at best. This study, thus, aims to bring out how GM is deployed in (MPF), as opposed to such a deployment in the language of science. Drawing mostly upon the conceptualization of GM by Thompson (2004) and Halliday & Matthiessen (1999, 2004), the study shifts the spotlight onto Harry Potter series, which is most representative of MPF discoursally and generically. The works placed under analysis for scientific discourse, selected based on clear and clarified criteria, are equally representative. This study is in a qualitative exploratory mould; it receives, in that spirit, three phases of compensatory sweeping analysis. The findings uncover six categories of GM in MPF and point to the category of Prepositional and Generic GM as the mainstays, underpinning all GM in the genre. The heart of the differential deployment of GM in MPF is found to lie in Semogenesis, the semiotic powerhouse of evolutionary meaning-making in language. The findings promise to broaden the understanding of GM and encourage undertaking analysis of GM in other prose genres, especially under-researched ones.

Research Article (RA), in particular, its structure, social construction and historical evolution, has been focused upon through a large number of studies on academic writing over the past 20 years. This paper reports an analysis of research article introductions from three related fields, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Psycholinguistics, and Sociolinguistics, using Swales’ CARS model. The corpus consisted of 90 RAs drawn from a wide range of refereed journals in the corresponding disciplines. The results of the analysis, although revealing marked differences across the disciplines regarding Move 2/step 1B, indicate no marked differences in research article introductions across the disciplines in terms of Move 1 and 3 along with their constituent steps. Furthermore, no marked differences are found in terms of the extent of concordance between the CARS model and the move structure of the RAs analyzed. The results also underline the need for further research into the CARS model and provision of a more flexible and open-ended structure, one which is pattern-seeking rather than pattern-imposing and provides the writer/researcher with the necessary options for the inclusion of further steps, one in which free-standing steps are not assigned rigid functions and positions in the overall structure but are multi-functional or multi-purpose and can be shuffled in the overall structure.

Cloze tests have been widely used for measuring reading comprehension, readability and language proficiency. There is still much controversy on what it really is that cloze measures. The result of much correlational research is contradictory and very unsatisfactory. Thus, with a qualitative orientation, this study attempts to look at the judgmental validity of cloze as a test of reading comprehension. To this end, a group of 32 native and non-native speakers of English sat a standard cloze test. The participants were expected to complete most of the blanks correctly if cloze measured reading comprehension properly, because the text had been intended for undergraduates while cloze-takers were all either PhD students or members of academic staff with a PhD. Surprisingly, the results indicated that none of the participants reached the minimum native speaker performance criterion of 70%. Invited to reflect on what they thought they were doing when reading the blanked text, most cloze-takers felt that the text they read was a puzzle or a guessing game. Provided with the deleted words and asked to re-read the text, they confessed that cloze reading was very different from the second reading. Further findings and implications for future research are discussed in the paper.

The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of computer-mediated interaction and face-to-face oral interaction on the recognition and production of vocabulary by Iranian learners of English. To this end, 128 male and female high and low proficiency level learners of English participated in the study. Recognition and production of target words were assessed by receptive and productive, oral and written measures. Four independent two-way ANOVA procedures were used to analyse the data. Results showed that the computer-mediated interaction group at both levels (advanced & elementary) outperformed the face-to-face oral interaction group on both written and oral vocabulary recognition and production tests.  It also turned out that although the low-proficiency level learners' written vocabulary recognition was affected by computer-mediated interaction more than that of the high-proficiency level learners, the latter experienced greater gains in written vocabulary production. The findings show that Computer-mediated interaction can be advantageous to vocabulary teaching and learning.