LANGUAGE RELATED RESEARCH (COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE RESEARCH)
Year:2019 | Volume:10 | Issue:2 (50) |Papers Count:13

The usefulness of error correction in improving students’ grammatical accuracy has been the focus of attention in the past decades, and hot debates have raged on over this issue. There is yet no clear answer, to date, as to the efficacy of feedback and its various types. The aim of this study is, thus, to shed more light on the relative effectiveness of feedback per se and also the efficiency of some types of grammatical feedback, delivered electronically through MS Word software, over the others in improving students’ written accuracy. Research questions Is there any effect, whatsoever, for different types of feedback (i. e. direct, indication only & indication plus location) when delivered electronically in improving students’ level of grammatical accuracy? Is there any priority for each of the above feedback types over the others? Method Participants The participants of this study included 85 Iranian English majors. Of the total participants, 53 were female and 32 were male. The number of females and males were 15 and 11, 13 and 6, 12 and 8 and, 13 and 7 for control group, direct feedback group, indication group and indication and location group respectively. Design and procedure This study employed a pretest-treatment-posttest format. Of the four groups involved in the study, three were treatment groups and one was the control group. In the first treatment group, direct feedback group, the correct form of the students’ grammatical errors was provided. The two other treatment groups were, however, both provided with indirect feedback. In one of them, the indication-only group, the students were provided with an indication in the margin of the line in which the error was committed to show that an error or errors have occurred. The indication and location group was provided with feedback as to the exact word or phrase in the text that included a grammatical error. Analysis To answer the first research question (i. e. its three sub-questions), three paired sample T-test were used. The second research question (i. e. its three sub-questions) was answered using one-way ANOVA. Results Significant difference was found between the pretest and the posttest of the direct feedback group in the mean rate of errors (t=3. 475; p‹ . 05). It means that the provision of direct written corrective feedback has been effective in improving students’ level of accuracy to a statistically significant level. However, the second group of the study, the indication only group, did not show any significant improvement in accuracy from the pretest to the posttest (t=1. 627; p› . 05). No significant improvement in grammatical accuracy was also observed for the indication and location group. The primary result of the analysis indicated that there was a significant difference between the four groups with respect to their improvement from the pretest to the posttest (F=6. 771; p‹ . 001). To further investigate the details of this comparison Tukey’ s post hoc measure was used. Tukey’ s index indicated that there were significant differences between direct feedback group on the one hand and control group (p‹ . 001), indication only group (p‹ . 05) and indication and location group (p‹ . 05). It was, in fact, the direct corrective feedback group whose improvement in accuracy was statistically significantly higher than the other groups. No other significant difference was found between other pairs of the groups with respect to accuracy improvement. Conclusion An explanation for the findings of the first question can be offered with regard to Schmidt (1990) noticing hypothesis. Among the three types of feedback offered to the groups of the study, direct feedback is apparently the most noticeable. This characteristic may lend this type of feedback to longer retention and quicker internalization. Comparison of the means of improvement for the three treatment groups clearly indicates that the direct group made the most substantial improvement of all. The second substantial improvement is made by indication and location group and the lowest improvement was made by the indication only group. This ranking of improvement is in other words a ranking of noticeability of feedback, and although not consistent with many parts of the literature, is totally consistent with some others especially Schmidt’ s noticing hypothesis. The findings of the second research question can also be interpreted and justified in light of the noticing hypothesis. This point that the direct feedback turned out to make a significant difference and is significantly different from other types of feedback can be justified in light of the fact that the participants of this study were roughly (and not definitely) of the intermediate level of proficiency. For these students, getting involved in problem solving (as the indirect types of feedback requires) while at the same time involved in the quite demanding task of following the ideas might be rather over-demanding, hence distracting their attention. Also, there are many grammatical points which are yet totally unknown to intermediate students and therefore any involvement in problem solving will lead nowhere, no matter how much effort the student makes. This point is also well recognized by Ferris and Roberts (2001) who suggest that direct feedback is perhaps more efficient than indirect corrective feedback with writers of low levels of proficiency.

Learning collocations has been regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of language learning which has grabbed much attention in the teaching and learning processes. Therefore, the main purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of intentional and incidental instruction of English collocations on Iranian advanced EFL learners’ noticing. To this purpose, of 65 participants, 40 (13 male and 27 female) of them who aged between 18 and 32 were chosen based on Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) from Golestan University engineering students. Being homogenized based on OQPT, the participants firstly took a pre-test to check their prior knowledge. They were then divided into three groups, namely intentional (N: 13), incidental (N: 14), and control (N: 13). Then, the participants in the intentional group received explicit instruction on English collocations, while the participants in the incidental group received implicit instruction. The participants took a post-test immediately after five treatment sessions. Stimulated recall sessions were also held to check their noticing of the collocations. After a two-week interval, the participants took a delayed post-test and stimulated recall sessions again to check their noticing. The results of One-way ANOVA and a post hoc test of Tukey (HSD) indicated that there was a significant difference between the intentional group and incidental group in the post-test and delayed posttest. Moreover, the intentional group outperformed both the incidental and control groups. Besides, there was a significant difference between the incidental group and the control group in the post-test and delayed post-test. It is hoped that the findings can be fruitful for language learners, teachers, and syllabus designers.

German language has a subject– verb– object (SVO) word order in independent clauses and a subject– object– verb (SOV) order in dependent clauses. Despite this feature, which is totally different from Farsi and English (these two languages both use the same word in dependent and independent clauses), German has a flexible word order. That is to say each of the syntactic functions (e. g. subject, direct object, indirect object, and adverb) can occur before the conjugated verb (referred to as Vorfeld), between the conjugated verb and the second verb (known as Mittelfeld, in sentences with a modal or linking verb), or after the second verb or the infinitive (called Nachfeld position in German grammar). The present study focuses on the arrangement of elements in the Mittelfeld position according to the information structure rules and other factors, such as definiteness, animacy, and pronoun placement. The significance of the study comes from the fact that there is no limitation on the places words can take in the middle of the sentence, as opposed to the Vorfeld position in which only one element can be placed. A question that is often raised here and that many German learners struggle to answer is: What are the rules underlying placement of elements in different positions? The answer to this question lies in that feature of the German language pointed to earlier in the abstract, i. e. the flexible word order in German. Referring to the rules of information structure and introducing other factors affecting word order in the middle of the sentence, the present paper (through a descriptive-analytical approach) shows that in addition to the relative freedom in the arrangement of grammatical words, semantic and pragmatic factors can also influence Words’ order. The results indicate that a number of these factors are sometimes in contradiction to one another. After scrutinizing a few example sentences, some decisive examples are presented.

The Arab tribes inhabited throughout the Arabian Peninsula and had a sedentary life. Some of them were sedentary tribes while others were nomadic tribes seeking for water and food in the desert. Undoubtedly, the nomadic tribes who lived in the desert had their own way of pronouncing words, which were different from the way of sedentary tribes and had a great effect on the variety of Arabic accents and the characteristics of each one. Some pronunciations were included in the elements of the language of the tribe and in the lexical domain of the Holy Qur'an, and in a region the pronunciation of a word was with a letter which was other than the letter used in another region. In the framework of historical linguistics and in order to determine the role of culture and region in the phonemes of the Arabic language the goal of this study is to scrutinize the phonetic changes of Arabic language in the context of the Holy Qur'an according to Ibdā l which is a phonological process. Research methodology is descriptive. First, we peruse the Arab motives to pronounce a letter in a different way. Then by assessing the human geography and Arabic language Tajweed, we try to find the origin of the phenomenon of Ibdā l, and thereafter, examine the phonetic system of Arabic language vowels that have same place of pronunciation or common characteristics. Then, we will study the phenomenon with regard to the former and latter letter. By giving examples of Ibdā l, we will understand the role and contribution of the tribes in such processes.

When a form is more complex or more marked, the meaning will be more complex consequently. A sentence could be said to be marked if it does not follow the conventional or unmarked word order pattern of a language. Changing word order is done by the syntactic processes which make a sentence marked. The typical function of an unmarked sentence is to show focus on some elements. Markedness can be represented as binary or as a cline which begins with unmarked, and it ends in the most marked one. For markedness, what is mainly considered is that complex or marked form has more morphemes than the unmarked form. Moreover, the occurrence frequency of the unmarked form is much higher than its marked counterpart. Therefore there is a direct relation between the markedness of a form and its semantic variety and complexity. Different syntactic processes in a language can change an unmarked sentence to a marked one mostly to represent more focus on one of the elements of the sentence. Among others also we find that serial verb construction(SVC) is an unmarked sentence. Serial verb construction or verb serialization is defined as a string of verbs or verb phrases that are not separated by a connector and the verbs in this construction share the same grammatical information and sometimes the same arguments, and finally this construction describes a single event. This paper will analyze some samples of the unmarked sentences of the standard modern Persian which are the result of the syntactic processes and, it could be seen in topicalized, clefting, scrambled and SVC sentences among others. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the standard word order change of Persian sentences which are the result of the syntactic processes is related to the concept of markedness. A different type of markedness will be introduced in this paper. In Persian we mostly find this new recognized type of markedness which is movement markedness. Beside movement markedness, the formal markedness is also seen in the syntactic structures of Persian among others. Movement markedness is found in syntactic structures and specifically word order because movement is a key issue in syntax. The function of this markedness is to focus the moved element. Markedness is not a process but it is an abstract phenomenon which is revealed by syntactic movements but it is not a process by itself. When a syntactic process like passivization works in a language, the state of sentence changes from unmarked to marked. This formal markedness beside the distributional markedness are often at work when there is movement markedness in the structure. This paper will show that this type of markedness is very frequent in creating new syntactic structures. It is predictable that the movement markedness is a universal concept and it works in other languages too, since there is no language without syntax. The movement markedness shows how syntax with syntactic processes employs markedness to create diversity and different functions.

Any literary work is a suitable platform for conveying the author's inner concepts and feelings through the words available in the text. Guy de Maupassant in the story of Horla narrates the life of a man who is grappling with a crisis of alienation under the influence of the anonymous creature called Horla. Using the concepts and words intertwined with the unconscious and the repeated use of the word "Horla" and the verb "failure" in the story, the author promotes an excitement in the reader to these words, which, based on the constant action and reaction of the mind and language, makes the reader more aware of intriguing indications like the shadow of alienation on a narrator's life. What can be contemplated is the relationship of these words with the concept of alienation. The relationship that can be analyzed through the psychology of language. In the language psychology, a model called the Emotioncy Model was designed by Pishghadam et al. (2013). "Emotioncy", a combination of the two words "emotion" and "frequency, " is based on the principle that the words in each text have varying amounts of emotion for different individuals, which are referred to as "Emotioncy" of the words. Emotioncy includes emotions that are formed as a result of using different senses and can make relative recognition of individuals under the influence of frequency factor. Considering the Emotioncy Model, the present study seeks to answer the following fundamental question: How does the author in the story of Horla reveal the crisis of the narrator's alienation by increasing the emotioncy level of the words "Horla" and "failure" in the reader? The concept of alienation has an inverse relationship with freedom. In the existentialism philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, human freedom has the responsibility for everything that he is seeking. The lack of this freedom causes the alienation of individuals. In the story of Horla, the transfer of this concept (alienation) to the reader is carried out through the frequency of words Horla and failure. The narrator who considers the presence of Horla as the reason for his lack of freedom, conveys his alienation crisis to the reader by repeating the word Horla as another interpretation that his freedom prevents the freedom of the narrator and the verb failure, which is itself a kind of confession of his lack of freedom. Moreover, the author describes the presence of Horla using the senses of touch, hearing sense, and above all sense of seeing. This is while, another presence is felt with his looking in the philosophy of existentialism. Through describing his sensory experiences of Horla, the writer engages the reader's senses and raises his excitement. In this regard, the author in the story of Horla describes the narrator's fear of Horla, as well as freedom, to create an excitement of fear in the reader (due to his having responsibility to life). To do this, by proving the presence of unknown creatures in the world and the human inability in their discovery, he denies the freedom of human, and provokes the excitement of fear in the reader. Therefore, the author shows crisis of the narrator's alienation with the emotionalization of words Horla and failure. The crisis of alienation represents the truth of the existence of the author and his feelings. Hence, the author has a high to this concept. This inner emotioncy, created at the level of his involvement, shapes his world view, and it is induced to the reader in the story of Horla through the emotionalization of the mentioned words. Many studies have been yet conducted in relation to the Emotioncy Model, but the use of this Model in literature has not been addressed in none of these studies. According to the findings of this study, it can be argued that the Emotioncy Model in the field of literature can be a suitable ground for the exploration of the feelings, inner emotions and worldview of the authors through the words and concepts used in literary.

In this paper, the movement of constituents of sentences in the old and middle Persian is studied based on the theoretical foundations of the Minimalist Programme (Chomsky 1995). According to the Copy Theory of Movement, the moved element leaves a copy and moves to the new location in the sentence and the moved element and its copy form a chain. The formed chain has only one element to be pronounced in the PF. The deletion of all elements in the formed chain except the head of chain based on the Chain Reduction Principle proposed by Nunes (1995) prepares the appropriate condition for realization of Linearization Principle. The selection of elements for deletion is done by the Economy Principle. By considering the fact that in the formed chain, the head of the chain has less formal features compared to the other elements (copies), so the deletion of the copies is more economical. The main purpose of doing this diachronic research is to study the feasibility of applying the principles of the Copy Theory of Movement and the Chain Reduction Principle for explaining the movement of the constituents in the Old and Middle Persian sentences. Studying of the word order and the moved constituents and also their pronunciations in the sentences of the Old and Middle Persian by considering the foundation of the Minimalist programme (Chomsky 1995 and Nunes 1995) shows that these notions are capable to explain the movement of constituents. The Persian language has free word order and the constituents can move to other locations in the sentences based on topicalization or focus movement. Having uninterpretable features of [uTpoic] or [uFocus], the moved elements can have their features checked and deleted under sisterhood by moving to the topic or focus phrase in the sentence but the remained copies have their [uTpoic] or [uFocus] features unchecked. According to the Economy Principle in Language derivation and the Chain Reduction Principlesuggested by Nunes (1995), the remained copy of the moved constituent in the sentencethe Old and Middle Persian should be deleted in the PF since it has more features than the moved element. The results of this study show that the explanations provided by the Linear Axiom Principle, Copy Theory of Movement, and the notion of Chain Reduction Principle help us to explain the syntactic phenomenon of movement and linearization and phonetic realization of constituents in the sentences of Old and Middle Persian appropriately.

Teaching/learning the intercultural skill is an important part of teaching French as a foreign language. The intercultural skill as a life skill, is an ability to think about own and foreign culture, having an objective look and an open attitude toward the situations including cultural differences. Because of its subjective nature, teaching these skills is not possible only by transferring the teacher’ s knowledge to a learner. It is necessary for students to be involved in the exchange of information in order to internalize these skills. In the case of Iranian learners who are studying French in a non-French country, arranging such opportunities in the classroom is one of the most important challenges with them any teacher should be faced. Considering the fact that writing,-especially its creative and subjective forms– plays an important role in the personality’ s development, the purpose of this study is to verify the efficacy of an intercultural approach in an FFL Iranian class and see which obstacles should be avoided in the identity formation process in order to help Iranian language teachers to transform their writing class to an excellent place for improving the intercultural competence. Achieving this goal, we tried to answer the following questions: How writing can contribute to the development of intercultural competence? How the intercultural approach will influence the intercultural identity formation in the writing class? So we attempt to design an educational scenario, based on Kolletta's intercultural approach, which gives students the opportunity to develop their intercultural identity in a creative writing workshop and we noted student’ s reactions to this approach. Students writings were scored for cognitive, emotional and imaginative functions and the comparison between experimental and a control group, performed by the independent T-test showed that although both groups had succeeded as intercultural mediators, the experimental group members wrote relatively longer and more creative texts.

In this paper, we aim to analyze the difference between classical Persian and new Persian poems using the current cognitive linguistics theories. The study aims to recognize the differences and similarities of the image schemas of two styles of poetry; namely, classical and modern poem. The research question is that what kinds of different image schemas are used in classical and modern poems. The hypothesis is that there are different kinds of image schemas in classical and modern poem. To this end, we analyze the image schemas of Hafiz's poems as sample of classical poetry and Sohrab Sepehri's poems as modern one. We have chosen 13 poems of Hafiz Divan as classical poems and 8 poems of Sohrab Sepehri's Hasht Ketab as modern Persian poems. We have identified the image schemas of the poems based on cognitive linguistics theoretical framework. In the review of literature, there were some researches which focused on the comparison of the poetry of classical poets or comparison of the poetry of contemporary poets, but there was no research which compares image schemas of classical poetry with modern poem. Thus, the present study focuses on a new aspect. In conclusion, we noticed similarities and differences in the usage of image schemas of two styles of poems. The similarity is that in both styles containment and locomotion schemas are most used. But the difference is that in Hafiz's poems there was no significant difference between the number of locomotion and the number of containment schemas. However, there is significant difference between the number of containment schemas and all other schemas including locomotion schema in Sepehri's poems. It indicates the difference between a sample of classical poem and a sample of modern poem along with the usage of image schemas. Due to their mystic worldview both of poets have used containment and locomotion schemas.

Spoonerism is a particular type of unintentional slippage. In other words, Spoonerisms are defined as involuntary reversals in the serial order of speech as in [1] and [2]. sons of toil → tons of soil (1) pus pocket→ pos pucket (2) Curiously enough the Spoonerism is named after a man who rarely made Spoonerisms as dictionaries define them. William Archibald Spooner (22 July 1844 – 29 August 1930) was a long-serving Oxford don, notable for absent-mindedness, and supposedly liable to mix up the syllables in a spoken phrase, with unintentionally comic effect. Such phrases became known as Spoonerisms, and are often used humorously. Many Spoonerisms have been invented and attributed to Spooner. The aim of current study is to analyze the structure of produced spoonerism by children in the natural speech of Persian language in order to determine the ruling regularity of such slippage in predicting the performance of the child's mental system through its production process. Research method is descriptive-analytic. Samples consist of 33 cases of spoonerism which were gathered by available non-random sampling of common speech of 4-6 years Old Persian language children from 4 kindergartens in Tehran. It’ s worth noting that the language status of all children who produced spoonerism were evaluated by Newsha Developmental Scale and just the Spoonerisms were evaluated in which the child had normal language growth. As a result, 33 samples of all 40 collected Spoonerisms were investigated. Binomial test was used to examine the data. The results show that the initial syllable in speech of children is more vulnerable. Also error percentage of sound planning in brain of Persian language children is higher than error percentage in word planning.

Using visual-memory to memorize Quran's quotes is accepted as one of the best ways of doing so. Working memory is related to visual information, so, in this paper, Quran's text is analyzed by concepts such as word length effect and list length effect to answer the following question: is there any special discipline in visual structure of Quran quotes in a way that it leads to a better, quicker and easier quote memorizing? To collect data, in this research, The Quranic Arabic Corpus was selected as database and proposed methods in text-data-mining (PHP software, strlen function) and statistical methods were used for data analyzing. The results of each section were compared with word length effect and list length effect criteria and finally Quran readability was determined based on Flesch– Kincaid readability formula (1948). Results show that: 1) the verses length ranges from 1 to 129 words. In this case, the frequency of verses in the range of 2 to 20 words shows a significant difference with other verses. In this range, verses with 4 words are the most frequent ones. In general, by increasing the number of words in each verse, its frequency of repetition decreases, and a general degradation trend is observed, which is consistent with the criterion of list length effect, because as the number of words in one verse increases, its level of difficulty also increases. The average length of the verses is 12. 47, which is considered to be the same as the simple level in terms of the text difficulty level; 2) the number of letters of the Quran's words varies between one and maximum eleven letters. By increasing the length of words (from one to four letters), the frequency of words increases and after four-letter words, and the frequency declines sharply. The most frequent are four-letter words, and words shorter or longer than four letters are less abundant. This implies that throughout the Qur'an the effect of the word length is clearly evident. In other words, it contributes to visual memory and facilitates the learning and memorizing of verses; 3) The study of the relationship between the length of the verses with the length of the words used in them suggests that, although the length of verses increases significantly, the length of the words with an average of 4. 25 does not show a significant difference; 4) As the number of surah increases, the amount of its content decreases, this means that the very pith of information is in the initial chapters, and thus the ordering of the surahs is not one to be expected in a text that is from simple to the difficult one. Overall, findings support the idea of visual structure, such as words and quotes' length is in line with word length effect and list length effect and text difficulty is in its simplest levels which makes visual-memorizing simpler.

Among the various types of rhetorical figures applied in Shahnameh, metaphor is one of the most effective examples of rhetorical devices. Ferdowsi has been able to imagine, exaggerate, move and depict it at the same time by using it as a means to create discursive space and dialogic atmosphere. Since we encounter with the text of discourse in the Shahnameh, we find that every word is a way toward the perception of the former and a way to perceive the word of the future. Each word treats another word or it targets the belief system of the target audience. So, braggadocio is a dialogic-discursive system in which metaphore plays a key role. According to Bakhtin's theory, there is a close relationship between dialogue and polyphony, and language is also "dialogic" in its nature, regardless of what the answer will actually be. Polyphony is also a dialogic feature, and Shahnameh is also a Polyphonic-dialogic text. The purpose of the present research is to investigate the relationship between the braggadocio of Shahnameh with making narration by relying on Bakhtin's dialogic theory and its relationship with metaphor, and to show how this feature interferes with the restoration of action, suspension, and delay. It can lead to a dialogic atmosphere and extend it to transfer actions.