UNIVERSITY TEXTBOOKS, RESEARCH AND WRITING
Year:2022 | Volume:26 | Issue:50|Papers Count:10

Examining English for Academic Purposes (EAP) textbooks has gained momentum in recent years. On the other hand, due to the large number of vocabulary items in English, utilizing consciousness-raising activities in textbooks would facilitate vocabulary learning. Therefore, the present study aims at investigating vocabulary exercises incorporated in EAP textbooks using the consciousness-raising framework proposed by Willis and Willis (1996). In so doing, three textbooks namely English for the Students of Humanities (Literature and Languages, Arts, Architecture) (Farjami, 2018), English for the Students of Psychology (Pishghadam & Boori, 2017), English for the Students of Sociology (Keshavarz & Nushi Kochaksaraei, 2016), which were published by SAMT publishing house, were examined. The results indicated that in the books mentioned, non-consciousness raising exercises outnumbered consciousness-raising ones and among the categories of consciousness-raising activities, exercises on reference training enjoyed the highest frequency and cross-language exploration exercises were not identified in any of the three books. Given the fact that consciousness-raising exercises lead to facilitated learning, increased level of motivation, and learners' aggregated attention, it's recommended that authors of these books and as well as other authors publishing SAMT books take necessary actions to revise and include consciousness-raising activities in EAP books.

Author of the School Book in the Process of Evolution, based on its own environment and intellectual space and under the influence of the principles and methods of modern historiography, has begun to rewrite Shiite history, in which the presence of sacred matters and superhuman figures is less seen. Based on his confession in this book that he wanted to be a free historian, without theological preconceptions, he intends to write the history of Shiite thought in order to show the strong Shiite school has undergone an ideological transformation in the course of political and social changes, and in this book, it has portrayed a life of humiliation for the pure Imams (a.s.) and their Shiites. In this research descriptive-analytical method has been used by examining the text; it intends to express with rational and narrative arguments, the basis on which the author believes and the foundations of his theory are based, is distorted and such historiography has a deep distance and gap with the theoretical foundations of Shiite Islam, and this kind of attitude, willingly or unwillingly, has somehow approached secularist historiography.

The inefficiencies of Grammar Translation Method in meeting the needs of language learners whose aim was learning living languages and being able to establish real communication led to the emergence of communicative methods and, consequently, the roots of all inefficiencies were attributed to translation and the use of mother tongue. However, since the last decade of the twentieth century, some scholars in the field have turned attention to the functions of translation in language teaching in general and in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in particular. Although many publications have acknowledged the effectiveness of translation exercises, in each study one or a limited number of features for translation exercises have been referred to, and some studies have sufficed to make general claims regarding their effectiveness. In this interdisciplinary study, after extracting the standards counted for translation exercises in the literature, they were blended, expanded on and completed to form a flexible framework for the design of exercises using mother tongue and translation. Afterward, using the framework, one sample exercise was designed and its mechanism was elaborated on to serve as a practical example. Considering that the majority of translation exercises of specialized English books in Iran are presented using the repetitious instruction “Translate the following text”, the full potential of translation exercises in teaching/learning genre conventions, improving language skills, consolidating the knowledge of subject matter, and (self)assessing skills has not been actualized. Therefore, this study can be helpful for materials developers in the design of translation exercises.

Reverse teaching as an educational strategy and a kind of blended learning plays an important role in deepening and facilitating learning and attractiveness and dynamism of education. Arabic syntax education has long faced problems such as traditional teaching methods and content tailored to the student level, which in addition to the students' reluctance to learn, does not fulfill its teaching objectives. Since the effectiveness of reverse teaching in different fields of education, especially foreign language teaching, has been proved, the present study is an attempt to use this new approach to propose reverse teaching to improve the purposeful and qualitative of advanced Arabic learners and investigate its effect in comparison with traditional methods. For this purpose, qualitative data (in cognitive step for one semester) and quantitative data (in experimental step for three weeks) were collected and analyzed by qualitative content analysis and one-way variance analysis, respectively. Therefore, one educational class (30 persons) of the students of theSadie al-Hayat advanced course was selected by available sampling and divided into two experimental groups and one control group. By employing a quasi-experimental method, pre-test-intervention-post-test, the performance of learners in parallel syntax tests, before and after educational intervention, was evaluated by SPSS software. The results showed that all three educational groups had educational development in post-test skill, but Tukey post-test showed that reverse teaching method (standard approach) has more effect on promoting students' syntax education compared to traditional method and reverse teaching method (virtual approach). This significant difference in the studied teaching methods has been explored and reported in detail. Keywords: reverse

The aim of this study was to investigate the experiences of professors in identifying the characteristics of university textbooks from the perspective of professors of public universities in Tehran. The approach of this research and its strategy is qualitative based on phenomenology. The number of participants in the study was 19 university professors who were purposefully invited to participate in the snowball. The data collection tool was a semi-structured interview that was recorded visually and aurally and their content was implemented textually. The method of data analysis was reflective analysis or reflective analysis using Van Manen's (1996) six-step method. The interview data were analyzed in three coding steps by the 2018 version of MAXQDA software. The analysis showed that the main categories arising from the interviews are soft (non-technical) competencies and hard competencies. Taking into account these factors arising from the experiences of professors, a model of the characteristics of the academic textbook is presented. The content validity of the model was assessed by a 14-item questionnaire validated by 30 university professors who were selected by convenience sampling and the content validity of 13 components with cvr = 0.77 was confirmed. In order to validate the data, the proposed criteria of Goba and Lincoln (1989) validity, reliability, verifiability and transferability were used.

In the path of teaching and learning, content is very important; therefore, one of the things that need to be considered in an educational analysis is the analysis of course content. Textbooks should be compiled and selected based on the principles of content analysis, in addition to adapting to teaching-learning standards, and presented in an appropriate manner. The present study was conducted with the aim of identifying and validating these principles in the book Lessons of Preparation in the Rules of Jurisprudence by Sheikh Baqir Irvani. This book is the only textbook that has been prepared based on the principles and criteria of compilation, and is one of the specialized courses for the three levels of the university and the master's degree. The method of the present research is qualitative content analysis with two methods of scientific-authorial evaluation and educational design in a descriptive-analytical manner. In this way, in addition to the content analysis of the book, the editorial requirements were identified and validated. The findings of this study indicate that this book, despite having educational design criteria compared to other books written in this field, but in this case, has performed poorly and is far from the editorial standards and in terms of compliance. It is also at a moderate level with the criteria of scientific-authorial evaluation

Due to the importance of practical teaching methods and the lack of a systematic approach to writing textbooks for general Persian literature courses, the current study aims to investigate one of the most significant textbooks, i.e., General Persian Literature written cooperatively by Mahmud Fotuhi and Habibullah Abasi (2019), based on Conceptual Model of Education. A mixed research method is adopted, and the items in the content analysis checklist in the General Persian Literature textbook were examined and counted. Afterward, to examine the significance level between components of the Conceptual Model of Education in the General Persian Literature textbook, the collected data were analyzed using the Chi-squared test. It was revealed that there is a significant difference between Conceptual Model of Education components in the content of the mentioned textbook. Therefore, it is suggested that the Conceptual Model of Education should be paid more attention to so that the textbook contents are stored in students' long-term memory.

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has been more considered in these years. English for Medical Purposes (EMP) as one of its types plays a vital role for medical students. This study was conducted to evaluate the textbooks taught in teaching English in different programs of medical universities. The study focused on six textbooks widely used in medical universities. The method for the analysis was corpus linguistics. The researchers of the study compiled the English for Medical Programs (EMP) corpus as well as a corpus from the videos of YouTube with medical content. They compared the corpus of the textbook with the YouTube corpus as well as an already available corpus known as the Medical Web Corpus. Sketch Engine was used for the analysis. According to the findings, the YouTube corpus was somewhat consistent with the Medical Web Corpus and there was an overlap of 69.67%. Also, a 58.53% consistency was obtained between the two corpora of YouTube and EMP. According to further analysis, a Compact Medical Word List (CMWL) was selected according to its coverage in the Youtube and Web corpora. The CMWL which was of zero coverage in EMP corpus is useful to medical learners and professionals as a compact medicine-specific list as well as researchers who may use the new low-frequency lists in corpus studies.

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has been more considered in these years. English for Medical Purposes (EMP) as one of its types plays a vital role for medical students. This study was conducted to evaluate the textbooks taught in teaching English in different programs of medical universities. The study focused on six textbooks widely used in medical universities. The method for the analysis was corpus linguistics. The researchers of the study compiled the English for Medical Programs (EMP) corpus as well as a corpus from the videos of YouTube with medical content. They compared the corpus of the textbook with the YouTube corpus as well as an already available corpus known as the Medical Web Corpus. Sketch Engine was used for the analysis. According to the findings, the YouTube corpus was somewhat consistent with the Medical Web Corpus and there was an overlap of 69.67%. Also, a 58.53% consistency was obtained between the two corpora of YouTube and EMP. According to further analysis, a Compact Medical Word List (CMWL) was selected according to its coverage in the Youtube and Web corpora. The CMWL which was of zero coverage in EMP corpus is useful to medical learners and professionals as a compact medicine-specific list as well as researchers who may use the new low-frequency lists in corpus studies.

The textbook is the most important educational tool in all educational centers. It helps to achieve educational aims. That is why criticizing academic textbooks is essential, because it leads to more effective textbooks. Considering the necessity discussed, the present study intends to criticize the textbook entitled "History of Literary Criticism" (Ahmadzadeh Heravi, 2013) published by "Samat" publications for undergraduate students of English language and English literature based on one hundred features of academic books that are summarized in the ten categories. These ten categories include thematic specialization and purposefulness, theoretical strength and practical implications, citation and interdisciplinary nature, comprehensiveness and up-to-dateness, qualifications and resumes of author, writing and literary decency, content and structural coherence, compatibility with learning theories. The nature of interaction and motivational power are physical and visible characteristics. The method of this research is critical analysis. The results of the present study show that the author has not succeeded in fully observing the ten principles in her book. For this reason, the book needs to be revised to address the shortcomings in order to make it more effective.