IRANIAN JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS (IJAL)
Year:2003 | Volume:6 | Issue:1|Papers Count:9

The present study was conducted with the aim of shedding light on the learning strategy use of Iranian learners of English across three proficiency levels. The following three research questions were addressed in this project: 1. Which language learning strategies are more frequently used by Iranian English learners? 2. Are there any relationships between the type and the number of language learning strategies used by Iranian learners of English and their L2 proficiency level? 3. Is the frequency of L2 strategy use related to the learners intelligence test scores? One hundred and twenty eight English major Iranian university students (83 female, 45 male) participated in this study. Data analysis of the results of the study showed that there is a positive relationship between the use of L2 learning strategies by the subjects and their proficiency scores and that the category of Compensatory learning strategies is the best predictor of the subjects L2 proficiency. No significant relationship was found between the subjects strategy use and their IQ scores, while the statistical analysis of the findings indicated that learners of different proficiency levels had different patterns of L2 learning strategy use.

Current advances in computer technology and the growing application of "email" in academic settings as the main communication tool demands EAP practitioners awareness of the rules and conventions of this genre which determine the choice of discoursal and lexico-grammatical features used to materialize its communicative purpose. In line with such studies as Biria and Tahririan's (1997), Erickson's (1997), Henry and Roseberry's (2001), and Nagel's (1999), this study was an attempt to analyze the electronic messages from the perspective of genres; it contrasted the electronic messages with the parallel corpus of conventional letters in order to find in which level of organization - move schemata, strategies, or lexico-grammatical features - the differentiating factors between the two corpora lie. The results of statistical tests employed to different parallel features revealed significant differences between the two corpora regarding the generic and formal features under investigation. This study has implications for teaching writing to EAP/ESP students.

This study was an attempt to explore the status of sexism in current English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks that are locally designed to cater for and respond to the English language needs of Iranian students at secondary schools. To this end, two types of analysis were performed to examine the manifestation(s) of sexist attitudes and values in two textbooks Right Path to English 1 & H. First, a systematic quantitative content analysis was carried out with reference to (a) sex visibility in both texts and illustrations and (b) female/male topic presentation in dialogs and reading passages. Secondly, a qualitative inquiry was made into (a) sex-linked job possibilities, (b) sexbased activity types, (c) stereotyped sex roles (d) firstness and (e) masculine generic conception. Results revealed that Right Path to English I & II can be considered sexist textbooks that present students, in their early exposure to the English language, with an unfair and inexcusable picture of women. It is suggested that this sexism, though embarrassing and undesirable, seems to mirror the unfair sex discrimination to the disadvantage of women in society.

It is hypothesized that in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) context, providing readers with some knowledge about structural patterns and grammatical features of the corresponding academic or occupational discourse may enhance comprehension of ESP texts. This study aimed at identifying the most frequent grammatical features of English for the Students of Medicine (ESM) written discourse and the possible impact of the explicit instruction of them on medical students reading comprehension performance. To this end, first, fifty paragraphs were randomly selected from medical and general English textbooks to identify the most frequent grammatical elements of ESM texts compared with non-ESM texts. Then, two homogenous groups of medicine students - an experimental and a control group - participated in the instructional procedures for this study. The former received explicit instruction of the identified structural features, while the latter was just exposed to conventional ESP reading instruction. Right after the instruction, the performances of the two groups were compared through administering an ESP reading comprehension posttest. The findings were indicative of the significant effect of explicit instruction of grammatical features of ESM texts on students reading comprehension. Further, the results attested to a high correlation between the subjects General Language Proficiency (GEP) and their ESP reading comprehension performance.

Recently genre scholars have stated that writing research article is a challenging task assigned to the university students at both graduate and undergraduate levels, and it becomes more challenging if it has to be in a foreign language. On the other hand, recent research in the field of language teaching has shown that conscious knowledge of genre structures plays an important role in effective use of English in academic settings. That is, if the students become aware of genre conventions, they may combine the linguistic elements to serve their communicative purpose more effectively. Thus, following the Swalsian genre analysis, the present study investigated the move structure of the Discussion section of articles published in seven language teaching journals. The results indicated that there is a set of moves comprising the Discussion section of these articles. Moreover, the move structure of Discussion section is studied, the most frequent moves of the Discussion section are identified, and the move order of this section is determined. In addition, the most frequent grammatical forms associated with each move are presented.

A major issue in testing is the investigation of the nature and structure of language proficiency. Psycholinguists, too, deal with the internal mental representation of linguistic components. This is exactly where the convergence of testing and psycholinguistics reveals itself. One of the key issues in psycholinguistics concerns the form in which words are represented in the mind. Results of the studies in this regard show that prior to lexical search, a morphological analysis of words is attempted. So the morphemeand not the word is a basic unit in the mental lexicon. In testing, too, specialists have been concerned with the structure of language proficiency and whether certain traits exist or not. There exists strong evidence signaling the existence of a number of traits like listening and speaking abilities. In this piece of research attempt has been made to see if the finding in psycholinguistics, that the morpheme and not the word is a basic unit in the mental lexicon, matches the evidence coming from factor analysis which is so commonly used in testing. In this study, vocabulary items in a TOEFL were divided into categories of words with various combinations of morphemes and administered on 132 subjects. Findings form construct validity studies, based on factor analytic procedures, were found to show that prefixed words make up a construct different from the words with derivational suffixes, implying that vocabulary knowledge is not stored in one place. This finding supports the decompositional model in psycholinguistics which suggests that lexicon is represented in a morphologically decomposed form. As far as the distinction between derived and inflected words is concerned, the results of factor analysis show that inflected words do not load on the same factor as the derivational words do. So, it is concluded that derivational and inflectional morphemes, too, are different constructs. The whole finding in this piece of research suggests that due to the problems in the correlational evidence for construct validity studies, and due to the consensus in the field that statistical validity alone can no longer qualify a test as a good language test, as the papers in Language Testing (1985) put it, specialists in testing can get insights from psycholinguistic findings.

Linguistic simplification of written texts may increase their comprehensibility for nonnative speakers but, at the same time, it may perilously reduce their utility for language learning in other ways, for example, through the removal of linguistic items that learners do not know but need to learn. This study was, therefore, conducted to test the hypothesis that elaborative modification observed in oral foreigner talk discourse, where redundancy and explicitness compensate for unknown linguistic items, offers a potential alternative approach to written text modification. To accomplish this task, 5 reading passages were randomly presented to 140 language learners - who had been chosen from among 265 students and whose homogeneity was ensured through a valid test of general English - in one of the three forms; (a) unmodified, (b) simplified, or (c) elaborated. Findings of the study show that the subjects did nearly the same in elaborated and simplified reading passages. However, since elaborated passages preserve the authenticity and naturalness of the language to a quite degree, they are preferable to the conventional simplified texts.

This study aims at studying a kind of cognate words which are called false cognates in English-Persian and Persian-English data. False cognates are words which have the same form in the two languages, but despite their similarity in form, they have different meanings in the two languages. False cognates are of two kinds: a) those resulting from kinship relations across languages, and b) false cognates resulting from borrowings. False cognates can be found in almost all languages with any kind of relation to other languages. Due to remote kinship relation between English and Persian, the first type of false cognates was not found in the data; though there are still some "real" cognates found in the lexicon of the two languages. The second type of the false cognates was found in a relatively good amount in the two languages. These were classified into two subgroups according to their directionality, a) English-to-Persian lists, and b) Persian-to-English lists. Each of the two subgroups has its own subcategories. The study also resulted in finding a new phenomenon which we may term as "back borrowing". In this phenomenon, a borrowed word is sent back with a new meaning to the original language as a new instance of borrowing. The study of false Cognates has some implications for contrastive analysts, error analysts, translators, translation theorists, foreign language teachers, curriculum designers, as well as lexicographers and lexicologists.

Collocations are a pervasive feature of many languages and English seems to be particularly rich in such multi-word lexemes. They have not been a major focus of teaching and research, however, despite the fact that learners have serious problems with the production of idiomatically correct language. The present study, therefore, aimed at finding out the problems of high proficiency level Iranian learners of English with English collocations. The study had two phases. In phase 1, about 2400 pages of materials produced (in English) by 27 subjects were carefully studied and a list of collocational errors were extracted. The list was then analyzed and five patterns were found. In phase II, six cued production tasks were developed which were given to 64 subjects. Results showed that Iranian advanced learners of English do have serious problems with English collocations (about 55 percent of the time). The results of the present study can have theoretical and pedagogical implications for syllabus designers, teachers, and translators.