JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDIES
Year:2010 | Volume:1 | Issue:3|Papers Count:8

Language learning strategies have been controversial ever since Rubin’s (1975) landmark article more that 30 years ago. To this day, there is no consensus regarding exactly what a strategy is, which has impeded research initiatives and at times threatened the validity of research findings. The relationship between strategies and successful language learning has also been questioned. Based on the literature of the last three decades, this paper attempts to establish a definition of strategies as activities consciously chosen by learners for the purpose of regulating their own language learning. Using the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning or SILL (Oxford, 1990) complemented by interviews, the paper looks at the strategies used by two successful learners, Nina and Kira, and considers the effect of other learner variables (motivation, nationality, age, gender, personality) on successful language learning. The paper concludes that although they were different in many ways, Nina and Kira were both frequent strategy users. Pedagogical implications of the findings are suggested.

This research was conducted to examine whether there was a significant difference between the quality of translations produced by translation students who used bilingual (English to Farsi) dictionaries with that of those using monolingual (English to English) dictionaries. To this end, 78 senior undergraduate students of English Translation took part in a piloted English proficiency test, 60 of whom were chosen on the basis of their performance on this test. Subsequently, the 60 participants were randomly divided into two groups and a nontechnical English text was given to both groups. One group used a bilingual dictionary while the other a monolingual dictionary in the process of translating the text. The works of these students were evaluated and scored by two raters who enjoyed inter-rater reliability. To respond to the research question posed in this study, the means of the scores of the two groups were compared through an independent samples t-test. The conclusion was that there was no significant difference in the quality of translation of the two groups. In other words, using a bilingual or monolingual dictionary was not a determining factor in terms of the translation quality of the students.

This study sought to investigate the impact of teaching speech acts and role relations through authentic audio-taped and video-taped materials on the level of Iranian EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. To this end, 55 intermediate learners were selected and randomly assigned to two experimental groups: the audio-taped group and the video-taped group. During the treatment, the audio-taped group received instruction through audio-taped materials (various authentic podcasts), while the experimental group through exposure to video-taped materials (extracts from some popular TV soap operas). The data analyses conducted prior to and following the treatment in both groups demonstrated that both groups had improved in terms of the knowledge of certain speech acts. However, the video-taped group was shown to have significantly outperformed the audio-taped group.

Different factors determine language teachers’ degree of success in their teaching practices. Among these factors, teachers’ own learning experience can play a pivotal role since it affects teachers’ attitudes toward aspects of the knowledge they are to teach. Educators and researchers may have paid less attention to an indispensable component of teachers’ learning experience: learning strategies, which is the focus of this study. This research aimed at finding out whether Iranian EFL teachers use their own learning strategies to teach English. Furthermore, the study investigated whether teachers’ qualifications had any significant effect on their use of language learning strategies and teaching strategies. The data was obtained from two questionnaires, the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) and the Strategy Inventory for Language Teaching (SILT). The findings suggested that there was a significant relationship between the teachers’ learning and teaching strategies and that teachers’ use of language learning strategies could significantly predict their employment of teaching strategies. Investigating the effect of teachers’ qualification on their strategy use revealed that more-qualified teachers outperformed the less-qualified ones in their use of learning and teaching strategies.

This study was an attempt to investigate the realization of Catford’s shifts in the Farsi translation of English psychology texts, from a product-oriented point of view, shedding light on the areas where Farsi is different from English. Inspired by a study conducted by Khorshidi (2010), the two questions raised in the study sought to detect the kinds of shifts applied in the translation of English psychology texts according to Catford’s theory, and to explore the most frequently used shifts in those texts which include the normal aspects of Farsi psychology texts. To this end, five books on psychology (originally written in English) and their Farsi translations were chosen and a total of six chapters were selected randomly for the analysis. Through a contrastive analysis, 307 coupled pairs of source text and target text segments were detected and extracted from these six chapters and thence tabulated and analyzed, being observed as instances of the realization of Catford’s model of shifts. The obtained results of the corpora demonstrated that all types of shifts were used in the translation of psychology texts from English into Farsi according to Catford’s theory. Furthermore, the results proved that structural shifts were the most frequently employed kinds of shifts.

The main concern of the present study was to compare the frequency of the use of semantic adjustment strategies in versed and free-verse styles in the English translations of Hafez poetry. The focus of the comparison was the number of expansion and reduction strategies employed in these translations. The corpus of the study comprised two translations of Hafez poetry; one was a versed translation by Gertrude Bell (1897) and the other a free-verse translation by Henry Wilberforce Clarke (1974) as two representatives of the formal and contented styles. One hundred and eighty eight lines were chosen to be examined in terms of the number of expansion and reduction strategies used by the translators. Based on the outcomes of the research, both content and form were meaningful, but the selection of versed or free-verse styles did not affect the use of expansions and reductions; however, in the two translations investigated in this study, different numbers of semantic adjustments were used.

Equating test scores is an important issue in large scale testing. Almost all standardized tests have several forms which vary in difficulty. New forms are written and added every year. When the items in different forms of a test vary in difficulty, direct comparison of test-takers who have taken different forms and are at the same ability level is not possible, hence, the issue of test fairness arises. In such situations there is a need for equating test scores so that standards can be maintained from year to year. That is, there is the need to adjust the scores for the difficulty of the test forms and report a scaled score that is comparable across all forms of the test. In this study, two forms of a reading comprehension test were equated and the pass/fail decision consistency was investigated under two conditions of with and without equating. Concurrent common item equating with one parameter Items Response Model (IRT) was used to equate the two test forms. Results showed that the lack of equating leads to unfair pass/fail decisions. The implications for high-stakes large scale testing are thus discussed.

Parody as a salient device in postmodern literature is extensively applied by Tom Stoppard in his plays. Having different layers of parody, Stoppard‟s "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", "The Real Inspector Hound", and "Dogg‟s Hamlet, Cahoot‟s Macbeth" exhibit his parodic application of other writers‟ plots. The analytical-qualitative scrutiny of the plot lines of these plays not only corroborates their parodic nature but also demonstrates the techniques Stoppard employs in each play to parody the plot of its hypotext. "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" dramatizes a specific parody of the plot of "Hamlet" both where it overlaps the plot of the tragedy and more intensely where it touches Shakespeare‟s plot tangentially. Stoppard‟s genre parody of the stock plot of the crime genre is portrayed in "The Real Inspector Hound". It simultaneously enjoys a parody of the plot of Agatha Christie‟s "The Mousetrap". The three-part performance in the first part of "Dogg‟s Hamlet, Cahoot‟s Macbeth" displays a specific parody of the plot of Shakespeare‟s "Hamlet".