PAZHUHESH-E ZABANHA-YE KHAREJI
Year:2006 | Volume:- | Issue:27 (Special Issue) English|Papers Count:20

An important and recurring element of Oriental analysis is its constant confirmation of the thesis that the Oriental is primitive, barbaric, and incapable of rational selfgovernment. Such a discursive regularity or persistence exists in the discursive processes of Orientalist writers and scholars and as shall be seen, contrary to the claims of critics, Robert Southey is no exception. In this article, an analysis of his two major Oriental works, Thalaba the Destroyer and Roderick, Last of the Goths will reveal that despite claims made by Sharafuddin, Southey is unable to move beyond the dominant discursive practices of his era. In Orientalist texts such as Southey’s, while the relationship between East and West can assume highly dissimilar manifestations, the Westerner rarely loses the upper hand. This flexible positional superiority bolsters the assertion that Orientalism is an ideologically loaded discourse with severely bounded boarders, which regularly influences contemporary critics. However, it is not the purpose of this article either to posit a single, objective West which constructs ‘the Other’, even though constructions of ‘the Other’ are in certain significant ways not notably heterogeneous. The concept that an Orient and Occident actually exist and divide humanity into two distinct oceans, however influential, seems clearly to be a fictitious ideological construct.

Metafiction is one the techniques that postmodern writers utilized in their novels in order to find a way out of their dilemma, that was writing novels when some critics had announced its death. Metafiction, instead of putting a mirror up to human nature or reality, puts a mirror up to the art of novel writing itself, so that the readers may understand that some concepts such as “History” and “Reality” are human constructs and it is absolutely impossible to get hold of the absolute truth. Kurt Vonnegut is one of the prominent novelists of our era and his novels mainly aim at criticizing the culture of the contemporary American society and criticizing the catastrophes such as war. Vonnegut by using metafiction in his major novels challenges the concepts of “History” and “Reality” in order to give the readers a better understanding of the authenticity of these abstract terms.

This article is a parallel and comparative reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gaston Bachelard’s theoretical work, The Poetics of Space. It starts with this presumption that there is an affinity between what Marquez terms as the “poeticized space” and Bachelard’s notion of “intimate spaces”. The philosophical context of his study, i.e. phenomenology, clarifies the manner in which Bachelard chooses to perceive human spaces. The spaces discussed are phenomena rather than objects and gain their identity when they become intermingled with human consciousness. Three fundamental spaces (as examples of intimate spaces), city, house and objects are studied in order to illustrate the poetic depth of the novel. Furthermore, it will be discussed the way these spaces establish a “human geography” in which characters’ lives interact and interrelate emotionally with the spaces they live in.

This article is mainly focused on one of the elements of the narrative, focalization that is at work along with narration to produce desired literary effects. Focalization is basically a cognitively- minded narratological concept that deals with perceptual, psychological and ideological stances adapted in the narrative by either narrator(s) or character(s). In focalization studies we focus on the question of how the reader responds to the narrative drawing on the textual devices provided by the above stances. These assumed viewing positions attribute certain taint and color to narrative and help the reader to infer how the existents of the two levels of story and discourse perceive the fictional world and how they are related.

In the study of sonnet sequence as a genre, invented by Italian Renaissance sonneteers and practiced up to the seventeenth century, we find out that Petrarch has not only been the most influential figure who established the elements of the convention but he also seems to have become an integral part of the sonnet convention. Petrarchan elements such as the idealized images of the beloved, the theme of sublimation, and the tone of lamentation receive a totally different treatment in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets that is far from the spirit of Petrarch’s poetry. As a metaphysical poet, Donne uses these elements either in a mocking tone to question the purity of love or with a serious attitude to reflect the paradoxical nature of love. The objective of this paper is to elaborate briefly on the Petrarchan elements and then discuss Donne’s violation of such a convention.

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the frequency of the use of cognitive and metacognitive vocabulary learning strategies employed by undergraduate students. To achieve this, a vocabulary questionnaire developed on the basis of Oxfords’(1990) SILL, Wendens’(1987) classification of strategies, and Johnson and Gu’s (1996)VLQ was administered to 231 TEFL and non-TEFL undergraduate university students. The analyses of the questionnaire indicated that on the whole Iranian university students favor cognitive strategies in the process of vocabulary learning. It was also found that students’ major has a significant main effect on the choice of strategies. The results suggest language practitioners teach strategies to EFL learners and motivate them to use these strategies in their language learning process to promote learning.

This study examined the role of EFL elemetary learners’ heterogeneity in terms of age in their adoption of Communication Strategies (CSs). A secondary purpose was to probe the probable impact of such an educational context on the students’ overall vocabulary achievement. To this end, 60 elementary EFL male learners at an Iranian institute were assigned to two class conditions : the students of one class were at the age of 15 & 16 (the same-age group), and those of the other class were of different ages, ranging from 15 to 36 (the multiage group). The instructional procedures, the materials, and the teacher were consistent in both classes. The course took two and a half months for both groups and both classes received the same amount of instructional content. The results suggest that the kinds and frequency of CSs employed by the students were affected by the interlocutors’ age factor. However, no significant difference was observed in the students’ overall EFL vocabulary achievement.

For more than a decade focus-on-form coupled with meaning-focused instruction has been placed high on the agenda of SLA research. Planning time and feedback are two methodological procedures that hold some promise for meeting such a concern in EFL/ESL classrooms. The present study addressed the first procedure, i.e., planning time, and investigated its effects on the fluency, complexity, and accuracy of L2 output across modalities. Thirty seven Iranian English majors produced three narratives for different episodes of a silent cartoon under three conditions: 1) oral reproduction with a 10-minute strategic planning, 2) oral reproduction without any pre-planning, and 3) writing a narrative with on-line planning. The results showed that strategic planning and modality have marked effects on fluency and accuracy of L2 output whilst neither improved output complexity. Strategic planning and written mode of task accomplishment are proposed as effective methodological procedures in task-based instructions in EFL classrooms.

The present study investigated the effects of risk-taking on language learners" tendency to complexity or accuracy in descriptive and expository writing tasks. For this purpose, 185 EFL students took a TOEFL, wrote two compositions and filled out a risk-taking questionnaire. Out of this number, 118 subjects were almost at the same level of language proficiency. The researchers divided these subjects into three subgroups of low, moderate and high risk-takers. Analysis of Variance was used to investigate the relationship between risk-taking, syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy in both writing tasks. The results did not show any significant relationship between risk-taking, syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy in the writing tasks. However, in both writing tasks low risktakers tended to be more accurate than others. Moreover, the moderate and high risk-takers tended to write more complicated structures than the low risk-takers. The findings have some implications for language pedagogy and testing.

In this paper an attempt is made to find out whether Persian EFL learners facing article use in English perform better in the recognition or production of the articles. It is also suggested that articles cross-linguistically might encode definiteness or specificity. Next, an Article Choice Parameter is proposed, which governs whether articles in a given language are distinguished on the basis of definiteness or on the basis of specificity. To clarify this point, definiteness/specificity variation in both Persian and English languages are studied firstly within each of these languages and secondly among the two. The findings show that difficulty in distinguishing between definiteness and specificity is the major problem in English article use among Persian learners of English while, they perform better in recognition than comprehension of the articles.

This study investigates the reception strategies employed by EFL learners while completing a cloze test. It presents the strategies they used and how they arrived at a solution to the gaps. Data was collected via semi-structured interview and think – aloud technique. The data was analyzed on the basis of the categories of general scheme of cognitive learning / reception strategies proposed by Rubine (1987), in terms of type and frequency. The study revealed; (a) the effect of monitoring strategies on their performance; (b) the contribution of translation into first language on the task, and (c) the use of multiple strategies on “demanding items”. Other findings have also been discussed to give a better picture of their strategic performance during the course of performing on the task.

Over a century or so, testing has been the most common way to determine the achievement of the learners in educational centers. Among many test formats, multiple-choice has been more common for which many rules and regulations have been suggested for preparing sound items. Many researchers, therefore, have focused on whether observing the rules would improve the quality of multiplechoice tests. So, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of faulty options on item characteristics. To accomplish this goal, a sample of 50 male and female participants was chosen from the students majoring in TEFL. Participants were given two multiplechoice tests in a week interval: (1) Michigan Test of English Grammar, and (2) Distorted Michigan Test of English Grammar. The results of this study revealed that in general, violation of item-writing principles did not significantly influence item characteristics. However, use of grammatical clues made the distorted items significantly easier.