JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION
Year:2014 | Volume:4 | Issue:2 (8)|Papers Count:8

Game-based practicing of materials can be seen as a method of capturing an essence of real- life experience which is commonly missing in the conventional face-to-face classrooms. To serve the L2 learners' immediate communicative needs in wider classroom and societal contexts, this study sought to place L2 English learners within an interactional social framework through reinforcing their English language translation ability by drawing inspiration from the holy Qur'an verses that invite people to fulfill the affairs in consultation with each other. To that end, using 2×2 Latin Square, Qur'anic verses were grafted onto the mobile game (m-game) of ' Xane Bazi' in the m-game-enhanced translation module of L2 pedagogy so as their English translations then to be practiced individually or collectively by 180 Iranian male and female college students majoring in Translation Studies during 18 sessions of an academic semester. For the purpose of collective translation practice, the participants were randomly divided into 90 dyads afterwards. As the study adopted a triangulation research design; thus, the data were gathered through a preresearch questionnaire, continuous assessment of participants' performance, and also a focused interview. The achieved data were later analyzed using a paired-samples t-test as well as Spearman correlation. The results derived revealed that the difference between the two manners of translation practice was statistically significant. Drawing upon the findings, the favorable impact of collective manner of English translation practice of the Qur'anic verses in the m-game-enhanced translation module on learners' translation ability was considered.

With the advent of computer technology and educational software, hypermedia language learning materials made their way in foreign and second language classrooms. Today the role of hypermedia in improving communication skills is by no means deniable. This research aimed at investigating the effect of hypermedia on the oral performance as well as the motivation of Iranian EFL Learners. A pretest -posttest control group design was used. Two classes of female students aged 17-25 from Poya-Simin Language Institute, Qa’emshahr branch, were randomly selected. Next, in order to assure the homogeneity of the participants in terms of proficiency, the Oxford Placement Test (OPT), with reasonable measures of validity and reliability, was used to screen the participants. The comparison of the two groups on the speaking pretest confirmed the homogeneity of the participants before the instruction. Afterward, the experimental group was offered the educational software, Rosetta Stone. After 20 sessions both groups were reexamined by the speaking posttest to investigate the effectiveness of the software on users' oral performance. The results of the oral test and the motivation questionnaire indicated that the participants in the experimental group made great progress in speaking and hypermedia improved their motivation towards learning English.

Since the 1990s, multitudinous studies have sketched the main and comparative impacts of various approaches to L2 pragmatic instruction. To contribute to this line of research, the present study probed the immediate and delayed effect of explicit video-driven metapragmatic awareness-raising on Iranian EFL learners’ production of English "apologies," "requests," and "refusals." To this end, 54 intermediate EFL learners were assigned to an experimental or metapragmatic awareness raising group (N=29) and a control group (N=25). Treatment spanned 9 consecutive sessions (3 sessions on each speech act). The 3 speech act-specific treatment sessions involved the presentation of speech act-contained video input, followed by teacher-fronted presentation of the speech act strategy set in the 1st session, a video transcript-based speech act recognition and reasoning task in the 2nd session, and 5 multiple-choice discourse completion and reasoning task in the 3rd session. The control group, however, received the same video input as the experimental group, followed by class discussions around its theme in each of the 9 sessions. Speech act production of the 2 groups was measured through a 24-item Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) at the pre-treatment, immediate post-treatment, and delayed post-treatment phases of the study. The results indicated the positive short-term and long-term impact of metapragmatic awareness-raising on speech act production, though no significant improvement was detected from the immediate to the delayed posttest. The findings serve to augment evidence in support of the teachability of pragmatics, as well as the potential of video prompt-driven metapragmatic awareness raising for short-term and long-term interlanguage pragmatic development.

One of the most problematic areas in foreign language learning is collocation. It is often seen as arbitrary and an overwhelming obstacle to the achievement of nativelike fluency. Current second language (L2) instruction research has encouraged the use of collaborative output tasks in L2 classrooms. This study examined the effects of two types of output tasks (editing and cloze) on the learning of English collocations. The aim was to investigate whether doing the tasks collaboratively would lead to greater gains of knowledge of the target collocations than doing them individually. The knowledge of the target collocations was measured by means of a collocation knowledge test administered before and after the treatment. The results showed that collaborative output tasks led to greater collocation knowledge than individual output tasks. The results, however, showed an effect for task type in promoting the learning of the target collocations, with the cloze tasks being more effective than the editing tasks. One obvious implication is that teachers need to incorporate more collaborative output tasks into their instruction in their attempts to facilitate the acquisition of L2 collocations by the learners.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of morphology instruction through semantic mapping on vocabulary learning of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To do so, 50 out of 70 students were selected from one English language institute by administrating a PET test. Then, they were assigned into two groups randomly as experimental and control groups. A pretest (teacher made) was administered to both groups for ensuring their level of vocabulary knowledge. After ten sessions of treatment only for the experimental group, a teacher made posttest was given to both groups. To analyze the data, in-dependent samples t-test and paired samples t-test were conducted. The results revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between two groups but no significant difference was found be-tween the female and the male participants.

Having in mind the high level of challenge in writing as a foreign language, this research provided Iranian EFL learners with audiovisual feedbacks as an alternative of common written feedback and focused on its’ meaningfulness in order to provide an incentive medium for the participants and increase their motivation. One hundred young adult female learners in addition to six English language teachers took part in this study. The data was gathered through opinionnaires, interviews and learner’s composition papers and the triangulation method was used to analyze the data. The findings indicate that audiovisual meaning-focused feedbacks are not only effective in increasing the learners’ motivation to write but also have the ability to change the negative view of the learners towards writing which can help learners further their efforts in also achieving educational progress in English.

The belief that output practice is crucial in L2 learning affects foreign language teaching methodology. And researchers have endeavored to find the best ways to encourage learners to produce and practice whatever they hear as an input in the process of learning. Moreover, learning styles and the importance of matching learners’ styles with those of teachers inspired the researchers to investigate the role of different learning and teaching styles. This study investigated whether two types of output practices (reconstruction vs. interaction) were effective in improving speaking ability in relation to the learners’ learning styles. For this purpose, 54 female Iranian young EFL students at intermediate level were selected based on their performance in the Preliminary English Test (PET). Furthermore, Perceptual Learning Styles Inventory (Reid’s, 1987) was administered to measure the participants’ learning styles prior to the treatment. They were then divided into two groups that one group received the interaction practice-based treatment, while the other group was trained based on reconstruction practice. Finally, an interview was run as a post-test with the same topic with both groups. Meanwhile, their learning styles were also measured to pursue any the probable changes in learners’ learning styles. The results indicated that interaction-based output practice had a greater effect on the improvement of young learners speaking proficiency, while no significant changes were revealed in their learning styles’, though some changes were revealed in when the learning styles were approached discretely, indicating that when a trait is approached as a unitary construct or discretely in relation to certain variables, outcome would be different.

Culture is an extremely complex concept. Translating cultural elements is a demanding task due to the fact that these elements comprise specific meanings and implications belonging exclusively to the language and culture from which they have emerged. Regarding this point, the present article investigated the strategies employed for translating culture-specific items (CSIs) in an English novel, Unaccustomed Earth (2008) by Lahiri, which was rendered into Persian by three translators. After extracting and classifying CSIs based on Pavlovic and Poslek’s categorization (1999), the translation strategies were determined in the three Persian TTs according to Davies’ model (2003), and then, the researchers went on to compare every source item to its three target equivalents, which were in turn compared to one another, to determine their translation strategies. It should be mentioned that a total of 284 CSIs were identified. Finally, the frequency of the strategies was computed and the strategies were classified under Nord’s binary translation typology (2005) in order to pinpoint whether each TT belonged to documentary or instrumental type. According to the results, preservation was the dominant translation strategy in the three TTs, and all the TTs belonged to documentary translation.