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This study investigates the impact of cultural and politico-religious dominance on the practice of critical reading (CR) of texts by a group of Iranian postgraduate students in Australia. Four postgraduate students were interviewed individually four times (each time for reading one text) for critical understanding of two pairs of Persian texts, each with opposing viewpoints, on current socio-political and nationalistic debates of Iran. They were then involved in a focus group discussion for further critique of each other's viewpoints. Findings indicate two major Persian constructs that influence CR: "hefz-e zaaher" 'keeping up appearances' and "ta'sob/gheyrat," approximating to 'one's honor combined with prejudice and bigotry'. Findings also reveal that participants' CR is contributed by heavy emotional attachment to nationalistic views engendered by Persian poetry. Chafe (1982), too, found that emotional attachment in appraising text was true with American English speakers. Finally, the focus group discussion had a slight impact on encouraging CR. Overall, it seems that participants' repositioned journeys in Australia have influenced their perspective.

This study seeks to determine the possible interactions between listening proficiency and the state of strategic self-awareness; second, and more importantly, to investigate the effects of learned strategies on listening comprehension and recall; and finally to describe the most common real-time listening comprehension problems faced by EFL learners and to compare the differences between learners with different listening abilities. After ten training sessions, an assessment was made to see whether or not well-learned strategies could provide students with ample opportunity to practice the comprehension and recall processes. The analyses of the data revealed the causes of ineffective low-level processing and provided insights to solve the problems of parsing. Moreover, the study reveals that explicit instruction of cognitive and metacognitive strategies is needed if a syllabus wishes to help learners improve their listening comprehension and become more proficient at directing their own learning and development as L2 listeners.

This study was intended to determine whether or not the genre of a reading text affects the incidental vocabulary acquisition of L2 learners while reading. To this aim, 40 Iranian EFL students whose vocabulary knowledge was within a limited range (already determined by Nation's Vocabulary Levels Test) were divided into two groups of 20 each for the reading sections. The Narrative Group comprised the participants who read the narratives, and the Expository Group were those who read the expository texts. Three types of vocabulary tests (i.e., Form recognition, Meaning translation and Multiple-choice items) were administered after the reading sessions to assess the incidental vocabulary gains of the participants. Overall, this study demonstrated the relative superiority of expository texts over narratives in terms of enhancing readers' incidental acquisition of unknown words. It is argued that depending on the genre of a text, readers will invest processing resources with different depths and varying degrees of cognitive elaboration for the task of comprehension.

This paper investigates readers' recognition of unsourced evidentials in texts in association with critical reading. To this end, we involved four Iranian postgraduate students at an Australian university in a collective case study where each student read four Persian texts and participated in in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Data analysis employed critical discourse analysis and discursive power relations to examine participants' positionalities and subjectivities. Our findings in general confirm the students' recognition of unsourced evidential in texts as an indication of critical reading. More specifically, it was revealed that linguistic sources (e.g. Persian indefinite suffix '−i'), as well as socio-cultural factors such as normalization embedded within the Persian oral narrative and discourse, play significantly in identifying unsourced evidentials. Pedagogical implications for critical reflection on texts containing instances of unsourced evidentials are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the difference between points of view in narrating a short story. The EFL learners taking part in the control group were required to recount the events from the third person perspective and the subjects in the experimental group from the first person perspective. The methodological frame of the study was based on Koven's (2002) "content analysis" of codification of various speaker role inhabitances, published in the "Journal of Pragmatics". The results demonstrate that the first person narrators' recall performance and the length of their stories are closer to the original version of the story than those of the other group, which indicates a specific "orientation" towards the sequence of events. This was seen in the patterning of clauses as well as in authorial and interlocutory double voicing speech in the first person narrators, which may be justified by the enhancement of two components essential to literary engagement: namely, "aesthetic reading" and "personal response" as parts of "critical focalization". (Contains 4 tables.)

This study reports on the effect of different levels of proficiency on the students' achievements in collaborative learning instruction among 30 Persian-speaking EFL college students. Having been divided into dyads with different levels of proficiency, these subjects participated in nine sessions of collaborative instruction based on the form-focused collaborative text-editing task. The results of this study are obtained through the analyses of the proficiency gains in formal aspects of language in text-editing pre and post-tests and text-reconstruction post-test. The study highlights the significant effect of this type of instruction on more proficient students. Reasons provided in this study are the language analytic ability of the students, learning styles and strategies, and motivation. The findings of this study are helpful to teachers of the classes with heterogeneous language proficiency. (Contains 3 figures, 3 tables and 2 notes.)

This paper investigates participants' reflections on power relations embedded in the cultural-pragmatics of unsourced evidentials in Persian texts. Using Fairclough's (2013) critical discourse analysis, we adopted Hanks' (2018) ethnography of referential practices and Foucault's (1980) power dynamics to analyse 16 Persian texts through follow up interviews and focus group discussions on two opposing pairs of texts – one pair on Iranian national identity versus Persian literature, and another on Iranian politics versus religion. Our analysis revealed that unsourced evidentials appear in Persian predominantly due to censorship and sometimes due to deliberate use by authors (e.g., for winning an argument). Text consumers often overlook unsourced evidentials while reflecting on politico-religious referents, such as inequalities and bigotry. This has roots in Persian literature, religion, and politics of power embedded in the culture, and the participants' attention to inequalities and discriminations has roots in referential practices in current Iranian discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the impact of cultural and politico-religious dominance on the practice of critical reading (CR) of texts by a group of Iranian postgraduate students in Australia. Four postgraduate students were interviewed individually four times (each time for reading one text) for critical understanding of two pairs of Persian texts, each with opposing viewpoints, on current socio-political and nationalistic debates of Iran. They were then involved in a focus group discussion for further critique of each other's viewpoints. Findings indicate two major Persian constructs that influence CR: hefz-e zaaher 'keeping up appearances' and ta'sob/gheyrat, approximating to 'one's honor combined with prejudice and bigotry'. Findings also reveal that participants' CR is contributed by heavy emotional attachment to nationalistic views engendered by Persian poetry. Chafe (1982), too, found that emotional attachment in appraising text was true with American English speakers. Finally, the focus group discussion had a slight impact on encouraging CR. Overall, it seems that participants' repositioned journeys in Australia have influenced their perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates ideological strategies mainly embodied in X-phemism in light of Van Dijk’s and Charteris-Black’s frameworks of the construction of reality in news reports. To this aim, a representative sample of 239 news reports was selected for a one-year period (end of January 2010 to end of January 2011) from two Iranian newspapers published in English—theTehran TimesandKayhan International. A total of 11,938 strategies from 10,676 clauses in these newspapers were analyzed, both quantitatively in terms of frequency of occurrence for each strategy, and qualitatively for the reason of occurrence. Findings have revealed that both news outlets contain a wide range of ideological strategies, among which Objectivity with its sub-strategies, Negative and Positive Lexicalization as part of metaphor, and Exaggeration/Hyperbole were the most frequent whereas Counterfactuals, Openness/Honesty and Irony had the lowest frequencies. The quantitative and qualitative findings are discussed in the result and discussion sections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study has a twofold purpose. The first and foremost is to see whether there exists any correlation between the collocational knowledge and general linguistic knowledge of EFL learners. The second is to reveal which type(s) of collocation is or are more difficult for EFL learners. To this end, 35 subjects, screened by a proficiency test, were given a 90-item multiple-choice test including lexical collocations (noun+noun, noun+verb, verb+noun, and adjective+noun), and grammatical collocations (noun+preposition and preposition+noun). A native speaker checked the final version of the data and necessary corrections were made. The results showed that a) there was no significant correlation between general linguistic knowledge and collocational knowledge of EFL learners, and b) the grammatical collocations were more difficult than the lexical collocations for learners and from among all subcategories, noun+preposition was the most difficult and noun+verb was the easiest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]