IRANIAN JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS (IJAL)
Year:2004 | Volume:7 | Issue:1|Papers Count:5

The purpose of the present study was to assess the movement towards LSP testing and the usability of IELTS academic reading tests at the university level in Iran. The research question addressed was: Do learner variables such as levels of proficiency, background knowledge, and sex affect the performance of the participants on ESP reading comprehension tests? 245 university students, both male and female majoring in English literature, economics, medicine, electronics and chemical engineering from the universities ofIsfahan and Medical Sciences were selected to participate in the project. In three consecutive administrations, they were exposed to three different elicitation procedures: (a) locally constructed teacher-made EST reading tests, (b) a version ofIEL TS academic reading test, and (c) a version of the TOEFL test. The obtained data were, then, subjected to different statistical analyses (analysis of variance, two- and three-way ANOVA, and the post-hoc Scheffe tests). Filling these statistical procedures, three rather different results emerged: First, except for some minor cases, the gender of the participants was not related to the test performance. Second, levels of proficiency (high and low) affected the test performance of the participants on EST and IEL TS reading tests. Third, background, or (content area) knowledge did relate to the participants test performance on EST and IELTS reading tests, that is, the hypothesized interaction between students major fields of study and test content was confirmed. What can thus be implied from the results of the present research and their related interpretations is that language testers should take into account background knowledge when defining the construct of EAP reading comprehension tests. And to successfully perform on LSP tests, the subject area knowledge is surely regarded as a necessary factor ifnot a sufficient one. Finally, in this study IEL TS academic reading module, that was regarded as a distinguished example of the specific purpose proficiency testing, proved to be applicable at the university level in Iran.

This paper examines the ways through which the idea of war has been "suppressed" in Bushs speech addressing American people on the first anniversary of the September 11. As is common in the political speech (Jucker, 1997), Bush, as an authoritative figure, tries to make his audience accept his views and, through identification with them, to persuade them to believe his stance. Although Bush has never used the word war overtly in this speech, the idea is present all through his talk. This could stimulate the curious mind to find out why there is no direct reference to the term "war". The point is that although Bush is conscious of peoples anger with what happened on the September 11, he is not sure about the extent to which the world people in general and the American in particular would accompany him and his government in retaliating the enemy. He is well aware of the significance of gaining public consensus in this regard and, to achieve this, he skillfully resorts to discursive strategies which will be of major concern in this study.

Some experimental studies in EFL vocabulary acquisition have documented the efficacy of the original use of words (loe, 1995, 1998), pushed output (Swain, 1996), and multiple exposures to words (Carey, 1978; Stahl, 1986) in the recall of word meaning. However,studies showing the superior effectiveness of exposures to a word over a word-focused activity, e.g. sentence writing, are scarce (Laufer, 2001). In this research, two parallel homogeneousgroups of learners were exposed to two conditions of idiom learning: sentence writing and multiple exposures in different contexts. The results of the test for the immediate recall of the idioms and the test for the delayed recall of those idioms demonstrated that it was the former task that yielded better word gains.

The relationship between proficiency tests and strategies has recently become an area of interest in test performance studies. So far, however, the relationship has been studied in light of test-taking strategies. This study investigates the relationship from the vantage point of language learning strategies.To this end, the cloze, as an integrative measure of language proficiency, and a 70-item language learning strategy questionnaire were presented to 764 EFL learners. The results bear evidence to two conclusions. First, the cloze has a significant correlation with the cognitive category of learning strategies. Second, it falls short of reflecting the totality of language learning strategies, particularly metacognitive strategies as the most frequently used strategy category in the process of language learning. The results imply that the cloze gives a narrow, distorted picture of the process of language learning, as reflected in the use of language learning strategies. They also imply that the process of test validation should be founded on both the learning product and the learning process.

This study was undertakento trace possible patterns of meaning deficiency in the writings of Iranian EFL students and to comparethe proportion of such deficiencies across two different writing tasks: descriptive and narrative. A comparison of students ability to recognizesuch deficiencies and their actual performance on the writing tasks was also made. As a result, eleven groups of such deficiencies were recognized in the data. It was also found that learners had more difficulty writing the narrative tasks and that their recognition of such deficiencies was better than their writing performance.