Alireza Jalilifar
Professor of Applied Linguistics, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran
[ 1 ] - The Impact of Podcasts on English Vocabulary Development in a Blended Educational Model
This experimental study attempts to see whether incorporating supplemental podcasts into the blended module of second language (L2) vocabulary teaching and learning leads to better learning outcomes in comparison with other common teaching and learning methods as self-study and conventional. To that end, undergraduate students from Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences were summoned ...
[ 2 ] - Mobile, L2 vocabulary learning, and fighting illiteracy: A case study of Iranian semi-illiterates beyond transition level
As mobile learning simultaneously employs both handheld computers and mobile telephones and other devices that draw on the same set of functionalities, it throws open the door for swift connection between learners and teachers. This study examined and articulated the impact of the application of mobile devices for teaching English vocabulary items to 123 Iranian semi-illitera...
[ 3 ] - Oral Requests in Advanced Level English Coursebooks and English Movies: An Evaluative Study
Concerns over the phony nature of textbooks and artificiality of their contents in reflecting authentic language have been raised by a number of researchers. It has been argued that many language teaching programs result in the failure of learners of English to successfully communicate in the target language. The problem with these programs is that there is no general agreement about the succ...
[ 4 ] - They Want To Eradicate the Nation: A Cross-Linguistic Study of the Attitudinal Language of Presidential Campaign Speeches in the USA and Iran
Politicians adopt a variety of linguistic strategies in their speeches to connect with their audience. To name one, appraisal, as a system of interpersonal meaning, is concerned with evaluation where resources are used for negotiating social relationships. Despite their significance in shaping texts, there have hardly been any extensive inventories of appraisal tools contrasting electoral speec...
[ 5 ] - The Effect of Using English in Persian Advertisements on Iranian Target Groups
The present study examined the effects of using English in products advertisements published in magazines in Iran on their Persian-speaking target audiences. 180 respondents, classified based on their gender and education, participated in this study. Respondents’ perceptions of the product/brand image and attitudes towards the advertisements, their purchasing intention, and degrees of their com...
[ 6 ] - A Comparative Study of Nominalization in an English Applied Linguistics Textbook and its Persian Translation
Among the linguistic resources for creating grammatical metaphor, nominalization rewords processes and properties metaphorically as nouns within the experiential metafunction of language. Following Halliday's (1998a) classification of grammatical metaphor, the current study investigated nominalization exploited in an English applied linguistics textbook and its corresponding Persian translati...
[ 7 ] - Construction of Evaluative Meanings by Kurdish-Speaking Learners of English: A Comparison of High- and Low-Graded Argumentative Essays
Academic writing ability is an important goal that learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) try to attain. While ESL students’ academic writings have been widely explored, owing to few studies investigating appraisal resources in EFL students’ argumentative writing, the gap still exists about EFL students’ academic writing. This study aimed to see ho...
[ 8 ] - Medical Research Article Introductions in Persian and English Contexts: Rhetorical and Metadiscoursal Differences
Medical discourse has recently attracted much scholarly attention. However, few studies have concentrated on both the overall rhetorical structure of the research article (RA) and the specific lexicogrammatical features of the texts, particularly English-Persian contrastive studies on medical RAs. Relying on Nwogu’s (1997) framework, the present study aimed at providing a macroanalysis of the I...
[ 9 ] - Iranian Scholars’ Revision of Their Submitted Manuscripts: Signaling Impersonality in Text
Nonnative English-speaking scholars have often been reported to be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their English native counterparts when it comes to writing a publishable research article (RA). When they submit their manuscripts to English-language journals, they sometimes receive comments criticizing their faulty English. One area of difficulty for these authors is the grammaticalization of neutr...
[ 10 ] - Comparative Study of Nominalization in Applied Linguistics and Biology Books
This study explored nominalized expression types in an applied linguistics book and a biology book as 2 distinct disciplines. The books were carefully read, the nominalized expression types were identified, the frequencies of the nominalization types were counted, and eventually chi-square was administered. Results revealed no significant difference in using nominalization. Furthermore, the den...
[ 11 ] - Current Trends in Research on Mobile Phones in Language Learning
This study aimed at examining the major mobile wireless technologies, that is,mobile phones and the possibilities associated with them, currently in use in theeducational domains, with an emphasis on language teaching and learning practices.Accordingly, some of the most typical studies using different functions of mobilephones such as e-mail, multimedia capabilities, Wireless Application Protoc...
[ 12 ] - Evaluative Strategies in Iranian and International Research Article Introductions: Assessment of Academic Writing
Despite a spate of interest in the study of the Introductions of scholarly articles, thefocal genre of knowledge construction, research is yet to reach conclusive answers onthe nature of this genre. Thus, the present study analyzed research articleIntroductions, aiming to explore how the process of knowledge construction isachieved by Iranian and international writers of English research articl...
[ 13 ] - The Effect of Hedging Instruction on Reading Comprehension for Iranian University Students
This study examined the effect of explicit instruction of hedging on English forSpecific Academic Purposes (ESAP) reading comprehension performance ofEnglish Language Learning (ELL) university students. A reading comprehensiontest was developed and validated as the pretest and the posttest. The test, includingitems for assessing the comprehension of the students in their area of specialization,...
[ 14 ] - A Comparative Study of Thematicity in the Argumentative Writing of University EFL Students and the Introduction Section of Research Articles
The present study aimed to find out thematic organization and progression in the argumentative writing of Iranian learners of English, representing two levels of language proficiency, and the introduction section of published Research articles (RAs) of Applied Linguistics. For this aim, 60 articles were downloaded from three journals and also 92 MA and BA students majoring in English Language T...
[ 15 ] - A Multimodal Approach toward Teaching for Transfer: A Case of Team-Teaching in ESAP Writing Courses
This paper presents a detailed examination of learning transfer from an English for Specific Academic Purposes course to authentic discipline-specific writing tasks. To enhance transfer practices, a new approach in planning writing tasks and materials selection was developed. Concerning the conventions of studies in learning transfer that acknowledge different learning preferences, the instruct...
[ 16 ] - Genre Analysis and Genre-mixing Across Various Realizations of Academic Book Introductions in Applied Linguistics
Motivated by the need to explore the introductory sections of textbooks, the present study attempted to scrutinize three realizations of academic introductions, namely, Preface, Introduction, and Foreword in terms of their functions and potential generic structures in light of Swales’s (1990) views of genre. Moreover, the study aimed to investigate genre-mixing as an interdiscursivity element a...
[ 17 ] - Cross-Cultural Investigation into Generic Structure of Dissertation Acknowledgements in English and Persian: Reflections on Politeness Strategies
This contrastive study, in the first place, examined the generic structure and, in the second place, explored the face theory proposed by Arundale (2006) in 140 doctoral dissertation acknowledgments written by native speakers of Persian (NSP) and native speakers of English (NSE) in 7 disciplines representing soft sciences to find out what discourse genre components writers employ to articulate ...
[ 18 ] - The Disourse of War in the Middle East: Analysis of Syria's Civil Crises in English Editorials Published in Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia
This paper examines the relationships between language and ideology and how ideology is constructed and presented via different language choices in English editorials published in different socio-cultural contexts. Van Dijk’s (2000a) ideological square in terms of representation of the self and other was applied to the editorials. Through a comparative analysis of Iranian, Turkish and Saudi Ara...
[ 19 ] - An Analysis of Iranian EFL Learners’ Dis-preferred Responses in Interactional Discourse
The present study, on the one hand, attempted to investigate the strategies applied in dispreferred responses by Iranian university students of English and the extent to which pragmatic transfer could occur. On the other hand, the study aimed to probe into the association between dispreferred organization and turn-shape. To this end, 31 relevant naturally occurring conversations, totaling 120 ...
[ 20 ] - Power and Politics of Language Use: A Survey of Hedging Devices in Political Interviews
One tactful strategy in political rhetoric is hedging which is associated with vagueness and innuendos. Despite the studies that address hedging in academic discourse and conversation analysis, studies that investigate hedges in relation to political power, face, and politeness are tremendously few. To this aim, four political interviews were selected from CNN and BBC websites on the basis of t...
[ 21 ] - Reflective Teaching in the Context of a Video Club: Nurturing Professional Relationships and Building a Learner Community
The purpose of this study was to examine how four teachers used the seven processes of videotape analysis to develop an analytic approach and reflective thinking towards their teaching. The study was organized within video clubs and was used to describe the interactions among four teachers about their experiences at a language institute. Data were gathered through videotaped recordings of lesso...
[ 22 ] - Comparative Study of Graduate Students’ Self-Perceived Needs for Written Feedback and Supervisors’ Perceptions
This study was an attempt to examine the supervisors’ and graduate students’ needs for written feedback on thesis/dissertation and juxtaposed them to see how each group views feedback. A mixed-method design was employed to collect the data. Questionnaires and interviews were deployed to collect the data from 132 graduate TEFL students and 37 supervisors from 10 Iranian Universities. Results ind...
[ 23 ] - Classification of EFL Students: EFL Teachers’ Criteria and a Case Study
Language learners have frequently been classified according to individual difference variables such as aptitude, personality, cognitive style, and motivation. However, a language teacher’s view seems to have been missing from such classifications. This exploratory research investigated whether and by which criteria Iranian EFL teachers classify their students. Based on preliminary interviews wi...
[ 24 ] - From Academic to Journalistic Texts: A Qualitative Analysis of the Evaluative Language of Science
This study examined academic articles and journalistic reports in 5 disciplinary areas to explore how similar contents might attitudinally be realized in two different genres. To this end, 25 research articles and 210 news reports were carefully selected and underwent detailed discourse semantic and grammatical analyses with the purpose of identifying the evaluative linguistic patterns....
[ 25 ] - Nominalization in Academic Writing: A Cross-disciplinary Investigation of Physics and Applied Linguistics Empirical Research Articles
The present study aimed to explore how nominalization is manifested in a sample of Physics and Applied Linguistics research articles (RAs), representing hard and soft sciences respectively. To this end, 60 RAs from discipline-related professional journals were randomly selected and analyzed in light of Halliday and Matthiessen’s (1999) taxonomy of nominalization. Comparing the normalized freque...
[ 26 ] - Exploring the Patterns of Evaluative Language in Physics Blurbs: The Appraisal Strategies in Focus
The current study qualitatively examined blurbs in the discipline of physics which is perceived to be less infused with evaluative resources and more objective and impersonal in its textual argumentation. The study followed the appraisal framework proposed by Martin and White (2005) to see how interpersonal meaning is textually constructed in blurbs. Findings indicated that writers of the blurb...
[ 27 ] - Developing a Corpus-Based Word List in Pharmacy Research Articles: A Focus on Academic Culture
The present corpus-based lexical study reports the development of a Pharmacy Academic Word List (PAWL); a list of the most frequent words from a corpus of 3,458,445 tokens made up of 800 most recent pharmacy texts including research articles, review articles, and short communications in four sub-disciplines of pharmacy. WordSmith (Scott, 2017) and AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2014) were used to sc...
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