phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

the main purpose of this study was to investigate any relationship between high school efl teachers metaphorical understandings of their role in class and their self-efficacy beliefs. teachers metaphors were elicited through two different prompts: one picturing what they believed a language teacher should be like in class, and the other demonstrating what they are actually like in class; such...

acknowledgements i wish to express my gratitude to all those who have helped me in preparing this thesis. i would like to express my deep gratitude to my respected advisor dr. kourosh akef, whose advice and comments helped me in the early stages of the research and throughout the writing process. i would also like to express my gratitude to dr. hajar khanmohammad whose invaluable guidance he...

abstract previous studies on willingness to communicate (wtc) have shown the influence of many individual or situational factors on students’ tendency to engage in classroom communication, in which wtc has been viewed either at the trait-level or situational level. however, due to the complexity of the notion of willingness to communicate, the present study suggests that these two strands are ...

in the past couple of decades sociocultural theory of sla and its implications in efl contexts have attracted attentions of research circles worldwide and aroused some controversies. firth and wagner (1997) have questioned the principles of the cognitive view which gives importance to mental constructs in favor of sociocultural view which highlights social and contextual constructs. but if soci...

the purpose of the present study is to find out whether bilinguals of khuzestan-arab origin or monolinguals of iranian origin code-switch during learning or speaking english and which group is more susceptible to code-switch. to this end, the students of 24 classes from high schools and pre- university centers were screened out, and interviewed and their voices and code-switchings were recorded...

the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between teachers’ immediacy behaviors and iranian students’ willingness to talk in english classes. analysis of the results from willingness to talk scale represents a relatively high level of willingness to talk in english classrooms among iranian language learners. the total mean score of students’ willingness to talk was 66.3 ou...

translation studies have become an accepted academic subject and books, journals and doctoral dissertations appear faster than one can read them all (bassnet and lefevere, 1990). but this field also brought with itself so many other issues which needed to be investigated more, in the heart of which, issues like ideology, ethics, culture, bilingualism and multilingualism. it is reported that ove...

this study purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...