JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF LITERATURE AND HUMANITIES (KHARAZMI UNIVERSITY)
Year:2002 | Volume:9 | Issue:33|Papers Count:9

The present study addresses the issue of task difficulty which is a major challenge for those concerned with task-based language teaching and syllabus design. The main focus of the study is on identifying possible sources and factors as the determinants of L2 task difficulty. The various taxonomies identifying a range of factors contributing to task difficulty will be discussed and some models of taxonomies and criteria of task difficulty will be proposed which will be of particular relevance and help for both pedagogic and research purposes.

English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) is currently developing as a great financial and educational investment in the ELT curriculum at Iranian Universities. The main objective of these programs is claimed to be filling the gap between the students" general English reading competence and their ability to read authentic discipline-specific texts in their real academic world.In this paper, drawing upon the existing research and experiential evidence, it is argued that ESAP curriculum development in Iran has not been conducted systematically and coherently. That is, the participants involved in the development and implementation of ESAP programs have typically done their tasks independently of each other. More specifically, the policy makers have gone little beyond formulating general and ambitious statement of the goals. These goals, in turn, have never been translated into manageable course objectives in light of the learners" specific reading needs as well as educational, instructional and pragmatic constraints typical of the Iranian ELT settings. The syllabus designers and materials developers, then, have just offered rigid selections of reading passages and exercises to be implemented uniformly in the classes. At the classroom implementation level, the content departments and language departments/centers do not agree on objectives, materials, methods, and assessment approaches. Eventually, in such an incoherent curriculum local or national evaluation of the programs for both accountability and developmental purposes would naturally be missing. Following detailed discussions of the cases of mismatch in the curriculum and their instructional consequences, the paper concludes with some practical suggestions on renewing the procedures of curriculum development. The proposed process may accommodate both the theoretical nature of ESAP and the unique aspects of the present Iranian ELT context

Lexical representation of Persian simple, complex, and compound words is discussed based on the view that the lexical representation of a word (in the mental lexicon) is a representation termed the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS). BOSS, as theorized by Taft (1975), Taft and Forster (1975, 1976), and Taft (1979), is identified based on both orthographic and morphological factors. It is argued that the BOSS, with some major modifications, may account for lexical representation and lexical access of Persian simple and compound words, but not for morphologically related words of Arabic origin in Persian. An altematively compatible account is then presented.

This paper seeks to address the production-based theories in L2 pedagogy and argues that comprehensible input, underscored in perception-based theories, without being buttressed by production learning activities will fail to contribute to language acquisition. Following an introduction, the paper first weighs up both old and modem views on language input, then points out deficiencies attributed to input hypothesis, later takes up the discussion of production learning activities, and finally points out conditions under which student performance is conducive to L2 development in classroom settings.

Syntactic development in children is generally believed to begin during or after the multiple-word production stage (Ingram, 1986; Berman, 1988; Goodluck, 1989; Radford, 1990; Lyons, 1990; O"Grady, 1997). However, it is argued here that there might be some language specificity in this phenomenon as in Farsi, one of the languages investigated in this study, syntactic development may occur during the single-word stage. Data used for this article come from a longitudinal study of bilingual first language acquisition. Analyses of the data revealed that the subject produced his first grammatical utterances in Farsi during his single-word production period (12-18 months of age). This appears to be due to the flexibility of the syntactic structure of the language in question, i.e. in Farsi many sentences are superficially in the form of single words, whereas in English, with the exception of imperatives, sentences comprise of explicit subject, verb, and optional objects. This finding has significant theoretical implications as it raises doubts about the universality of the current syntactic development theory.