JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND APPLIED LITERATURE: DYNAMICS AND ADVANCES
Year:2019 | Volume:7 | Issue:1|Papers Count:15

Farshid Sadatsharifi has been visiting scholar at the Institute of Islamic Studies in McGill University, Montreal, Canada since 2016. He received his PhD and MA in Persian Language and Literature from Shiraz University, . . .

Due to the special (procedural) nature of the language (verbal communication) ‘ knowledge’ , the dominant trends in applied linguistics research in the last few decades have been advocating ‘ acquisition’ rather than ‘ learning’ activities where the main focus in SL & FL education should be on ‘ meaning’ while some ‘ focus-onform’ being justified. But the ‘ form’ to be ‘ focused-on’ is mostly misconceived to be ‘ grammaticality’ of sentences. This misconception is driven by the traditional outlook on language which considers it as a set of sentences carrying THE meaning deposited upon them, disregarding the true nature of verbal transactions where meanings are discursively constructed by the participants in interaction, and the text (enabled by its textuality) rather than sentences (supported by their grammatical accuracy) mediates this discursive process. The present paper argues that textuality representing an underlying discourse should be the ‘ form’ to be focused on in SLA facilitation tasks. It is the textuality and its ‘ impulse-creating and impulse-reiterating agencies which, upon their perception, help the receiver to grasp the hierarchical integrity of the linearly organized text. Each text can be seen as containing a set of units which are psycho-socio-linguistically determined packages facilitating the linear presentation of the textual hierarchy. These units, labeled as T-units in written text, can be defined as stretches of text occurring between two full-stops. These Tunits are the epicenters for ‘ impulse-creation’ while carrying some ‘ impulsereiterating’ elements as well. Variations in the overall configuration of the T-units including what is chosen as their main verb (epicenter), the number of impulsereiterating elements revolving around it and their mode of realization will be discussed. It will be argued that the SLA ‘ focus-on-form’ activities designed to raise the language learners’ consciousness should be along these textuality dimensions; and examples of such activities (mainly oriented towards reading/writing skills) will be discussed.

Applied literature is a term that is the outcome of a need to put literature to tangible uses in the ‗ real‘ world. A medical practitioner looking for a definition of life, for instance, finds literature a useful source for the answer. With paradigm shifts in scientific studies, interdisciplinarity has been a method to overcome the alienations that resulted from the isolation of disciplines from one another. Some would go even further to problematize the concept of being solely confined to the limits of disciplines or the textuality of literature because they are still hindrances to coming into direct contact with the ‗ real‘ world. Arguing that tangible real world should lie at the core of applied literary studies, this paper is an attempt to show how a path may be opened up towards the diverse nature of reality in literary studies through a critical review of relevant aspects of literary theory and by drawing upon studies of cultures.

Print advertisements not only directly try to persuade buyers but also indirectly play a role in shaping their social attitude. An interesting area of research that as yet has received little or no attention is the study of the representations of females in magazines with mostly women readers. This study examined print advertisements in local family and health magazine from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. It mainly focused on the use of women in advertisements and strategies employed by advertisers to manipulate and influence their customers. The analysis was based on Fairclough’ s three-dimensional framework. It demonstrated how the ideology of “ women’ s portrait” was produced and reproduced through advertisements in popular local women’ s magazines. The findings indicated that advertisers used various strategies to take advantages of women. The advertisements promoted an idealized lifestyle and directed readers to a certain extent into believing whatever was advertised was indeed true. This study revealed how the ideologies of beauty and health were constructed and reconstructed through magazines by stereotyping how advertised products were synonymous with a better life. Advertising language was used to control people’ s minds. Thus people in power (advertisers) used language as a means to exercise control over others.

The present study aimed to investigate the translation into English by Alaeddin Pazargadi of Parvin E‟ tesami‟ s poems; in particular, it attempted to analyze the structural elements such as verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections in them. Considering the relationship between Linguistics and Translation Studies, the theoretical framework chosen was that by Catford (1965) whose category shifts which are of a linguistic nature concentrate on the text constituents such as clause, phrase, and word. The main objectives of this paper were to determine what kinds of category shifts were mostly utilized by the translator, and, using linguistic-oriented approaches to translation, to shed more light on the source text (ST) structures. To this aim, the qualitative and quantitative methodologies of research were used. The analyses indicated that, amongst the 14 selected couplets, unit shifts had the most frequency while structure shifts were the least frequent category shifts used in the act of translation.

The South Asian American diasporic writer, Jhumpa Lahiri has been widely acclaimed by the first-world intellectuals for her truthful representations of diasporic experience. In recent years, however, some scholars have drawn upon Gayatri Spivak‘ s notion of ― Native Informant‖ to interrogate the controversial canonization of Lahiri in the West, and point instead to her disavowed participation in the production of favored knowledge. In consideration of the rising incidence of critical controversies in naming the diasporic writer, this article aims to conduct a review of the established literature to synthesize and integrate the copious amount of scholarly insights available on variables related to naming and categorizing. To this end, the corpus of interpretation, criticism and appreciation are surveyed with three questions in mind: What controversial and mixed reactions have Lahiri and her fiction provoked? How much deliberation has been given to interpreting her short stories and novels as works of art, and how much thought has been given to critique or to side issues? This will allow the researcher to track the critical gaze that seemingly produces auras of exoticism and thereby allegedly appropriates the position of the writer as a Native Informant. The study concludes that the major concern of any critical work on Lahiri should not merely be the issues of diasporas and cultural tensions, but facets of the author‘ s politics of representation.

Cohesive frames are linguistic elements that precede the grammatical subject in the main clause. This study investigated the frequencies and communicative purposes of cohesive frame types in results and discussion sections of research articles from 4 disciplines. To run this study, 40 results and discussion sections of research articles were selected from 4 disciplines, namely Applied Linguistics, Psychology, Chemistry and Environmental Engineering (10 from each discipline). Then, the corpus was analyzed using Ebrahimi‟ s (2014) taxonomy of cohesive frame types. The results showed that frequencies and communicative purposes of cohesive frame types were imposed by the rhetorical functions of results and discussion sections and disciplinary conventions of writing. The results may have implications for teaching students in writing the results and discussion sections of research articles, particularly for nonnative novice writers of English.

In this study, phonological, morphological, and orthographical spelling difficulties were identified to examine the correlation between spelling difficulties and the time taken to memorize the spelling of words (time of memorization) among Iranian EFL students in Malaysia. The participants were 41 Iranian EFL students (20 male and 21 female) who were selected purposefully from an Iranian secondary school in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. A pre-test and post-test design adapting Tabrizi, Tabrizi, and Tabrizi (2013) approach was used. Forty words from the second-year English textbook of Iranian EFL students were selected for use in both pre-test and post-test. After the identification of the most frequent type of spelling errors, a significant negative correlation was found between time of memorization and English spelling errors (r =-0. 765), indicating that when the time of response was short, English spelling errors increased. The findings may contribute to identification, classification, and treatment of spelling, and reducing spelling difficulties among EFL learners to mitigate spelling difficulties among young learners, particularly among Iranian EFL students.

Hafez Shirazi was a distinguished Persian poet. His poetry collection, Divan, is regarded as a literary work of profound significance. Iranians view this collection as something much more than poetry because it is also used for bibliomantic purposes. After studying Hafez in his social context and exploring distinctive qualities of his Divan, particularly its application as a divination tool, the present article largely aims to determine what type of reader the querent who uses Hafez‟ s Divan is. The answer to this question has led to the introduction of a novel reader construct in the realm of reader-oriented theories. Divining reader is the term I use to refer to the reader who consults Hafez‟ s poetry collection as a bibliomantic text so as to solve a problem or find an answer to a question. The divining reader has eighteen identifying characteristics, one of which is the willing unframing of disbelief, referring to the fact that the reader first unframes whatever disbelieving and then reframes the unframed disbelief into a belief.

This paper investigates major themes espoused in the national anthems of English West Africa. Further, it seeks to find out how these themes are projected linguistically and literarily. Five English-speaking countries in West Africa, namely, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and The Gambia, were purposively sampled based on their colonial history, language, and geographical location for this paper. Findings show that the major themes espoused in these national anthems are the themes of unity, religion, freedom, and modesty. The themes are projected linguistically by conscious diction. Content lexical items – nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs – are preferred to non-content words in projecting these themes. Besides, literarily, these anthems employ figures of speech such as repetition, apostrophe, oxymoron, imagery, rhythm, and metaphor to convey the various themes. These findings confirm the popular view in the study of national anthems that national anthems of countries which share colonial history, language, and geographical location are similar in content and style.

Dynamic Assessment is an approach to assessment within Applied Linguistics which is stemmed from Vygotsky’ s Socio-Cultural Theory of mind, his concept of Zone of Proximal Development and Feuerstein’ s theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability. This study is an attempt to pinpoint the sources of mental processing problems in listening comprehension and applies dynamic interventions to remove the problems and promote listening. Two male classes (each containing 5 upperintermediate members) ranging in age from 19 to 24, were selected based on an intact group design. One class was selected as the control and another class as the experimental group haphazardly. The research was on the pre-test, mediation, and post-test paradigm. In the beginning, the two groups were pre-tested purposefully and their real time listening problems were detected through verbal and nonverbal recall protocols. Then, in the mediation phase dynamic group experienced different treatment sessions in two weeks to overcome the problems detected on the pre-test. The experimental group was instructed with mediations based on the Sandwich format of interventionist dynamic assessment while the control group received no intervention and was taught traditionally. Finally, all two groups were post-tested. The qualitative analysis showed that both groups suffered from various listening problems related to mental processing in comprehension. Result of quantitative analysis also revealed that the experimental group which was instructed dynamically outperformed the control group which was taught non-dynamically. The findings of this study suggest that dynamic interventions would not only affect the promotion of the EFL listening comprehension in educational settings but also have a significant effect on the performance of the dynamic group in comparison with the nondynamic group.

The notion of expectancy grammar as a key to understanding the nature of psychologically real processes that underlie language use is introduced by Oller (1979). A central issue in this notion is that expectancy generating systems are constructed and modified in the course of language acquisition. Thus, one of the characteristics of language proficiency is that it consists of such an expectancy generating system. Therefore, it is claimed that for a proposed measure to qualify as a language test, it must invoke the expectancy system or grammar of the examinee. This article aimed at finding the relationship between textuality of a text and its realization in expectancy grammar. To this end, texts with high and low lexical collocational density (LCD) as a means of reaching textuality in a text are given to participants in the form of cloze test. Texts with high and low lexical collocational density were selected to act as cloze tests and administered on EFL learners. An independant t-test was used to analyse the mean of the scores obtained in pairs of low and high LCD texts. The results showd that texts with high lexical collocational density enjoy higher degrees of readibility and are suitable for cloze tests. In other words, the group who took cloze tests with high lexical collocational density outpeformed the group whose cloze tests had been prepared on texts with low lexical collocational density.

Teacher training programs in EFL contexts pursue the goal of promoting teaching skills and critical dispositions in prospective and experienced teachers and their ability to reflect on and enhance their mediating roles to maximize learning outcomes. Yet, discrepancies in teachers’ roles during and after the programs are not uncommon and accentuate the need to assess outcomes. This quasi-experimental study aimed to provide research-based data on the outcomes of a 60-hour reflective task-supported (RTS) teacher training course, comprising theoretical, observational, and practicum modules, in terms of immediate and delayed changes in the mediating roles performed by 37 pre-service and 40 in-service Iranian male and female teachers. The findings obtained from the structured observation of the participants’ teaching demonstrations at the onset and the end of the study and during the first working semester were analyzed statistically through One-way repeated measures ANOVAs and indicated significant improvements in the mediating roles in both groups from the first to the second observation immediately after the training and from the immediate to the delayed observation only in the pre-service group. The findings underscore vitality of in pre-service and in-service training programs and accommodating reflective teaching and observational tasks in enhancing teaching roles.

Identity is seen as a cultural and social construct, which indicates how we have been embodied and how we might represent ourselves. The knowledge that identities are the outputs of discourses is a familiar characteristic of some societal concepts. Gender, as an identity or a sense of our identity we build for ourselves, rather than something we are born with, is a constructed cultural category and is based on power relations and social norms that are part of a social system. Through gender as well as cultural studies, this paper will curiously look at the motion of mobility of self (identity) as it has been constructed in culture. The researcher also wants to note that the discursive practices such as the normal beliefs, social systems, and substantial behaviors of a cultural, religious, or social group view identity not as a kind of recognition with a group having common characteristics but as a construction among hidden cultural, political, and ideological intentions. Therefore, it is said that identity is in process and can be shaped by culture, media, and public opinion.

This quasi-experimental study investigated the instructional efficacy of genre-based approach on Iranian EFL learners’ motivation for writing. Out of 180 participants, 60 EFL male and female students at university level, with the age range of 19-28, based on a standard profeciency test, Preliminary English Test (PET), were selected and randomly assigned into control and experimental groups. Each group contained 30 students for which a pre-test and post-test (as motivation for writing questionnaire) were administered. The teaching materials of narrative texts were prepared in a way to conform to the genere-based approach. The results of the study, based on statistical analysis of one way of ANOVA, indicated that the genre-based methodology had significant effects on Iranian EFL learners’ motivation for writing. The finding is very useful for Applied Linguists and syllabus designers as well as language teachers and learners.