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Appraisal/Evaluation within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a rather new framework for the analysis of evaluative language, focusing on how human beings reveal their emotions directly or indirectly, how they take stances, and how they align or disalign themselves with social subjects. Through an attitudinal analysis of the system of Affect in lucid and teacher friendly ways, this paper aims to smoothly invite ESL/EFL teachers into possible employment of this model in classes of intermediate levels and above, to align themselves with and avoid losing sight of the constant need to maintain a critical pedagogical atmosphere in foreign language literacy and education. To this end, we provide a simple analysis of the affectual language of two inauguration speeches delivered by two American presidential candidates, geared to equipping teachers with some quick tools of reflective and critical pedagogy and use the exploration and display of different categories of Affect in the classroom to engage students in critical reflection on the world and everyday events.

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This study examined the effectiveness of an integrated training programme (ITP) in reducing female students' test anxiety with a view to the mothers' perfectionism as a moderating factor. A total of 60 primary school students (30 mothers with perfectionism trait and 30 mothers without perfectionism) were randomly selected using multi-stage cluster sampling and screening methods. Spielberger's Test Anxiety Scale and Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS) were administered to the students and mothers, respectively. The participants were placed into four groups (two experimental and two control groups). The experimental groups received intervention in 14 sessions. The results suggested significant differences between experimental and control groups, but there was no significant difference between the two experimental groups (group 1: students with test anxiety and perfectionist mothers and group 2: students with test anxiety and non-perfectionist mothers). The moderating effect of mothers' perfectionism was not statistically confirmed. Implications of the study are discussed.

This paper undertakes an interdisciplinary study of the short story “Dash Akol” and the movie adapted from it. “Dash Akol” is a short story written by a famous Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat in 1932. Hedayat’s “Dash Akol” was made into a movie in 1971 by Masoud Kimiai. There are some discrepancies between the short story “Dash Akol” and the movie, triggering a number of significant implications. This article discusses these discrepancies along with Hedayat’s and Kimiai’s narrative techniques. To this end, it applies Genett’s (1988) Narrative Discourse and his three main narrative methods: narrating, characterization, and focalization. Meanwhile, it brings in Rimmon-Kenen’s (2002) strategy to study characters, and Stam and Burgoyne and Flitterman-lewis (2005) to show the ways in which the movie has deviated from the story. In terms of characterization, it studies traits such as, action, speech, naming and setting.

A glimpse at the stock of pragmatics literature brings to light a serious lack of studies delving into the speech act of responding to criticism. Hence, with the view of broadening the scope of research, this study set out to probe into the strategies Iranian celebrities employ to respond to the criticisms leveled at them in a press conference. Using a qualitative method supplemented with quantitative analysis of the data, the present study selected Iran's largest annual film festival, Fajr International Film Festival, as the data collection source. 40 press conferences held within this festival were watched and the celebrities' responses were translated and transcribed. Drawing on a model proposed by El-Dakhs (2020), the responses were categorized into four broad categories of total acceptance, partial acceptance, total resistance, and digression. The result of the analyses revealed that the celebrities most frequently preferred total resistance strategies to unreservedly and straightforwardly wave away the criticisms they had received irrespective of the threat their responses may have posed to the face of the critics. The findings were interpreted in light of the celebrities' disinclination to adhere to Iran's conventional cultural norms regarding saving other people's face and the asymmetrical power relations that might have sanctioned the use of explicit and confrontational strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among intriguing areas in vocabulary acquisition research are such variables as breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge, and their predictability in writing performance. In this spirit, this study set out to determine how receptive breadth, productive breadth, and receptive depth of word knowledge, using word families, predict total writing task score and the vocabulary component of EFL learners' narrative, descriptive, and argumentative writing performance. To this end, by administering Oxford Quick Placement Test to the learners enrolled in an advanced writing course, 70 (49 males, 21 females) EFL upper intermediate learners were selected as the participants of the study. To determine the participants' receptive depth, and productive and receptive breadth of the word knowledge, the Word Associates Test, the Lex30, and the Vocabulary Size Test were administered to the participants respectively. The participants also undertook descriptive, narrative and argumentative writing tasks. The results of the correlation coefficients and regression analyses of the data specified that: a) receptive vocabulary breadth and depth significantly contributed to both overall writing and vocabulary component of narrative, descriptive and argumentative writing; b) The breadth of productive vocabulary knowledge measured by the Lex30 only correlated with the vocabulary component score as well as the total score of narrative, descriptive, and argumentative writing. The implications include the fact that lexical knowledge aspects can be systematically used in both developing syllabus materials and classroom teaching methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policies and ideologies of countries are reflected in the propagated media of that country, and newspapers are no exception. Covid-19 has affected the lives of people all around the world. The present study investigated the ideological differences in reporting the news related to Covid-19 in light of Van Dijk's ideological square framework. To do so, a representative sample of 56 news articles was chosen over a period of one year (from January 2020 to the end of January 2021) from one Iranian and one American newspaper, the Tehran Times and The New York Times. Overall, 2,977 clauses were analysed both qualitatively, to find out the reason of occurrence, and quantitatively, to determine the frequency of occurrence for each microstrategy. Evidentiality, Hyperbole, Metaphor, National Self-Glorification, Negative Lexicalisation, and Number Game were the most frequent micro-strategies. Such high frequencies of the strategies can make for effective discursive apparatus to make readers believe what news articles claim is true. The most salient implication of this study would be raising readers' and academics' awareness of the need to view news articles critically to avoid negative ramifications of ideological propagandas. In the same vein, newspapers need to be cognizant of the micro-strategies they consciously or sub-consciously employ since certain micro-strategies can be used to manipulate readers' minds and help news agencies to feed their readers certain ideological and political agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study sought to investigate the most prevailing simultaneous interpretation strategies applied to culture-bound items by a number of professional simultaneous interpreters in Tabriz, Iran. To achieve this aim, 50 English and 50 Farsi culture-bound terms and expressions were selected and put in sentences and short paragraphs as the corpus of the study. These sentences were interpreted by seven professional and experienced interpreters of Tabriz. Kalina's and Pedersen's models were applied for eliciting interpretation strategies within Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) as the framework of the study to compare the strategies applied by interpreters. The results were then put into numerical mode in order to explore the most dominant interpretation strategies as well as the least frequent ones. The main aim of the present study was to explore the best and most common strategies applied by professional interpreters while dealing with culture-bound items. The results indicated that the most dominant strategies applied in interpretation of culture-bound items were Total Equivalence and Specification, while the least used strategies were Rephrasing and Substitution. It was witnessed that the interpreters have got a high tendency towards providing the target audience with extra information of the foreign culture in order to transfer the exact nature of the culture-bound items into target language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]