JOURNAL OF FACULTY OF LETTERS AND HUMANITIES (TABRIZ)
Year:2005 | Volume:48 | Issue:195|Papers Count:13

The Victorian Age is Paradoxical in England. On the one hand, it is the age of skepticism and pessimism. On the other hand, it is the period of rosperity and optimism. The philosophy of utilitarianism makes a good manifestation of this paradox. And Charles Dickens is pessimistic about utilitarianism, for he believes it is abused in the Victorian England.To see how Dickens illustrates abused utilitarianism, this article examines Hard Times (1989), a novel that is, as Ronald Carter and John Mcrae (2004) assert, "in many fields the most accessible critique of the society he [Dickens] lived in (253). It will discuss the educational, social, and economic aspects of utilitarianism as exemplified in the novel. For each aspect it will deliver some manifestations. Regarding the educational system, the focus is on the ideas that Dickens' society is deeply negligent of the logic of the heart, and that the people are denied individuality. Regarding the social aspect the focus is on the ideas of law corruption and individual alienation. And regarding the economic aspect, the ideas of widespread poverty and irresponsibility of the rich to the poor are highlighted.

Critical discourse analysis is an approach toward textual commentary that equips the members of the society with the efficient capacities and understandings fundamental for an effective citizenship in the domain of language. CDA tries to depict those aspects of discourse which are heavily rooted in ideology and their relations with hidden power which the majority of people are not aware of. In contrast with the linguistic realization of a text, the sociosemantic realization presents a more comprehensive representation of a text. As such, this study aimed at the principles of representing and depicting the social actors in Persian discourse based on Van Leeuwen’s (1996) model. For this purpose, a text titled “The Iranian kids and the Afghan kids: Where are these kids’ hometowns?” and taken from Iran newspaper, was analyzed to depict the sociosemantic features in the text benefiting from. CDA tenets. The analysis indicated that sociosemantic features such as exclusion (suppression and backgrounding) and inclusion (passivation and activation, determination and indetermination) are utilized to a great extent in the Persian text and they provide the readers with a more crystal-clear picture.

In creating a literary work, particularly novels, method of writing a story and type of imagination incorporated within it, are of considerable significance. A careful analysis and exploration of literary works of some contemporary French writers revealed that they have been able to successfully create valuable works through playing with pronouns within the pre-specified frames of imagination, having recourse to techniques of rapprochement, alignment and dispersion of pronouns. Their methods of writing and their approach towards using pronouns appear to lead to some literary techniques which are of considerable novelty and attraction. Due to these techniques, readers get involved in the imaginative adventures and can follow them in parallel with the writer. Sometimes, readers might use their own subjective views to complement them. This article has also focused on the fundamental differences among form, content and imagination in these works and other novels, particularly in traditional novels.

In Hemingway's fiction, death becomes a significant issue which contrastively pairs off with life. His works attest to the fact that life receives its real meaning when pitted against death. Therefore, the most recurrent motif in all of Hemingway's works has been the subject of death and violence, only to intensify human life and consciousness. In Hemingway's works, for life to continue to have meaning, the death experience must be repeated again and again. The tension must be maintained or the protagonist ceases to be an individual, and becomes part of the mass. One may conclude that the consciousness of death shatters the banality of everyday existence, and liberates man from the petty mentality of the ordinary life. Moreover, by interiorizing and humanizing death, man can apparently deprive it of its character as restriction upon his freedom.

This article reports on an empirical investigation of the teachers’ correction of students’ spoken errors of linguistic forms in EFL classes, aiming at exploring the existing controversy in the literature regarding the ambiguity of recasts - a form of corrective feedback. More specifically, the focus of this study is to investigate why recasts might be taken simply as confirmation of meaning and non-corrective repetition rather than as a corrective reformulation. The database is drawn from transcripts of audio-recordings of 25 lessons from five teachers (five lessons from each teacher) totaling 31 hours and including 752 error correction exchanges. Analysis of the data suggested that ignoring the structural differences between various types of recasts and taking them as one single corrective feedback type might have given rise to two different views of recasts as to the extent to which recasts might be taken as feedback on form. Hence, recasts were divided into two distinct types of marked and unmarked ones. Uptake was taken as the criterion for measuring the effectiveness of recasts and the extent to which learners might ‘notice’ different types of recasts, though only at an observable verbal level. Findings indicate that the rate of uptake move following marked recasts is considerably higher than that of unmarked ones. The article concludes by arguing that marked recasts are less likely to be taken as confirmation of meaning rather than feedback on form. However, this possibility is much higher in unmarked recasts in which there is no added focus on the corrective reformulation to help the students recognise it as feedback on form.

This paper is a cross-sectional study of the acquisition of English inflections using retelling and interview tasks. For this purpose 99 subjects were selected. The research was focused on beginners; however, mid and higher level learners were tested to check the developmental stages of English inflections. It also compares and contrasts the structure of Persian and English and finds out whether Universal Grammar (UG) could account for the acquisition of English inflections. The analysis of data indicated that UG could account for the acquisition of English inflections by Persian learners of English.

One question always engages the mind of those who are concerned with teaching and learning language in general and learning English language by Iranian students in particular. In case of Iranian students, teachers and researchers are interested to find out why graduate students from university fail to master English language after many years of study. An error analysis of Iranian students traces the influence of different elements within L1 on the final production of their L2. The corpus was examined from two aspects: Sentence-level errors and paragraph level errors. The findings of this study reveal that the differences between sentence patterns in English and Persian force students to employ structures in positions quite alien to English language sentence pattern. Students' word choice affected by the style of word choice in Persian constitutes another area responsible for the production of unnatural English sentences. Having knowledge about the problems of the students will help both teachers and students to use their effort and knowledge more fruitfully in the process of language teaching and learning.