JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES
Year:2005 | Volume:15 | Issue:54|Papers Count:11

Iran is the ancestral land of diverse multilingual and multicultural rthnic groups that speak in language like Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, and so on. But the official language of school is Farsi or in another words the mainstream language is Farsi and this has created many problems for children whose mother tongue differs. The rate of failures is more in the latter groups than the Farsi speaking group at the same can be claimed for the number of drop outs from school. To tackle this problem, the country's Ministry of Education has organized a series of one-month preparatory education for children whose mother tongue is not Farsi before they enter first grade of elementary school. Moreover, there are one-year pre-elementary school courses in which no special program is planned for non- Farsi speakers. The purpose of the present study is to deal with this problem and trace a logical approach to eliminate it in bilingual education. The number of these students and the possible consequences of such a problem for other language learners is yet another reason to address this sort of problems. Thus, the dialectic constructivism and bilingual research backgrounds are the framework for the present study. The collection of date was done by gathering information from student-based questionnaires in "the study of the literacy development" (PERLS) and analyzed by interdependence in reading miscues in correlation to Farsi language. This variety in reading miscues along with a low rank in this study shows that there is an urgent need for fundamental reform in Iran's educational system to trace new ways of dealing with the presented problems in bilingualism at home and school.      

The issue regarding the way proper nouns refer to their reference is related to the philosophy of language. But whether objects have individual essence or not is a dilemma in metaphysics. Kripkey, with a critical look at former theories, proposed a new hypothesis namely "theory of reference" and tries to say that proper nouns are rigid designators. This rigidity in proper nouns indicates that their references are fixed in the all possible worlds. This means that, there is an element in every reference that is fixed in different circumstances. This position is another interpretation of the individual essence in objects. In kripkey's theory, the correlation between the philosophy of language and metaphysics is vividly articulated.      

The present paper is an attempt to analyze and critique the ideas of language philosophers and logical semantic regarding, proper and common words. In order to achieve this goal, first of all the proper word is introduced and the analysis of such a word in logical semantics is presented. Then, in a similar way, the common word is introduced and analyzed. This is to realize the correct and inaccurate views of language philosophers and logical semanticists regarding the aforementioned issue.      

Observing the trend of change in composition education in German speaking areas, we came up with three general ways of education including imitation method, constructive method, and productive method. Imitation method was the dominant way in Latin school in the Middle Ages. In this method, there was no place for individual learners ideas and creativity. They simply rewrote from the written samples on different topics. From the seventeenth century onward, German language was gradually replaced with Latin in education centers. Along with this change, the imitation method was also substituted with a new method called constructive method. In this method, although the written composition was prepared with the student, the construction of the written text was quite fixed and the topics were rather cliché. Consequently, the construction method was not sufficient for the students needs particularly in the early years of education. Thus, another method known as the productive method was proposed and commonly used. However, many scholars believe that the latter method is complimentary of the two previous methods and does not entirely reject them. The present paper is an attempt to analyze the history of composition education and its socio-historical backgrounds from its beginning up to the present, at the same time making an attempt to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of each method.    

The present study was conducted to compare the Iranian EFL learners' writing performances when receiving two different feedback styles: Audio taped feedback (ATF) and minimal marking (MM). Eighty four male participants of this study were chosen from among 136 early intermediate EFL learners who were selected through the cluster sampling of students at Kish Language institute. The classes under study were randomly divided into two groups: the ATF Group and the MM Group, each with 42 eligible participants, who were again checked to be homogeneous through a homogeneity test. During the course of this study, i.e., 36 sessions, the participants were assigned to write expository paragraphs of about 150 words on eight writing topics. One of the groups received ATF on their scripts, and the other group received MM Two tests were used to compare the writing performances of the groups: a pre-test prior to the treatment and a post-test after the treatment, both in the form of in-class expository paragraphs of about 150 words under a time limit of 40 minutes. Data analyses and statistical calculations indicated that (a) the ATF Group performed better on the post-test, (b) the MM Group's performance on the post-test did not show any improvement over the pre-test, and, lastly, (c) the ATF Group performed better than the MM Group on the post-test.      

This paper reports on a study that explores the relationship between the beliefs about language learning, proficiency level and the use of language learning strategies. A number of 283 Iranian female universities students of English participated in the study. The primary goal of the study was to investigate: a) to what extent language learning beliefs and proficiency level would relate to the choice of language learning strategies, and b) how language proficiency would determine language learning beliefs. The instruments used in this study were Persian translations of Oxford's SILL (Strategy Inventory for Language Learning) and Horwitz's BALLI (Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory) as well as a placement test. The findings of the study revealed that learners' beliefs about the difficulty of language learning correlated with the use of all strategy categories. Furthermore, beliefs about motivation and expectations significantly correlated with the use of Affective and Metacognitive Strategies. Moreover, a significant relation was observed between the proficiency level and the use of Cognitive, Compensation, and Metacognitive Strategies. Besides, more proficient students expressed negative views about traditional ways of language learning like memorization and learning grammar rules.