Showing 446 results for Text
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
Writing assessment literacy(WAL) for second or foreign language (L2) teachers, which refers to teachers’ knowledge, conceptions, and practice of writing assessment in L2 contexts, has lately received attention from scholars. Although there has been significant debate about the impact of contextual and conceptual factors on teachers’ assessment literacy, studies focusing on how such factors influence teachers’ WAL are lacking. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the way Iranian English writing teachers' conception of assessment, and macro, meso, and micro contextual variables impact their writing assessment practice. It also looked at how writing teachers make assessment decisions in order to negotiate and find a compromise when their assessment views and beliefs diverge from the assessment policies in their local contexts. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews with ten in-service l2 writing teachers in Iran. The findings show that participants had positive conceptions about formative writing assessments but they stated that they mostly used summative assessment in writing classes. Macro level contextual factors turned out to mostly impacted teachers’ writing assessment practices and conceptions. The results underscored the role of school and work experience in shaping and changing writing assessment conceptions. The findings of this study contribute to our current understanding of WAL development and provision of more efficient assessment training for language teachers in teacher education programs.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
The present article aims to analyze six contemporary short stories based on Halliday and Matthiesen's systemic functional grammar framework (2014). In functional grammar, the message and textual meaning of clauses will not be revealed to the reader without identifying the topical themes and the discourse factors influencing to highlight them. Thus a perfect interpretation of the message will not be obtained. The study answers the question how the thematic structure in clauses helps highlight and convey the author's messages. The study hypothesis is: the thematic structure conveys the author's message by highlighting the topical themes by means of syntactic tools. the study corpus contains six contemporary short stories, comprising 3736 clauses. The descriptive- analytic method were used to analyze all the 3736 clauses based on thematic structure in textual metafunction. The data analysis showed that in unmarked clauses the topical themes were used in their natural place as subjects, mostly being participants to preserve and maintain the topic. However, when there were good discourse reasons such as new events, topic change and certain meaning, mostly preposed adjuncts were used as topical themes in marked declarative clauses. while the process was used as topical theme in imperatives to show the participants social status. Therefore, the readers by using the thematic structure and identifying the topical themes can understand the author's intended textual meaning and his message in unmarked and marked clauses.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
The present study was conducted with the aim of identifying the basic sentence structures of textbooks written for Iranian students in Persian language. The theoretical principles of the research are based on Tesniere's (1959) Dependency Grammar, which describes syntactic structures in different languages by examining the dependency relationships between head and dependent elements in syntactic groups. The basic sentence structures presented by Tabibzadeh (2001, 2006, 2011) have been used in this research for comparison. The data was extracted from the review of 211 texts belonging to textbooks. In order to collect data, 633 sentences were selected from all the textbooks and their basic structure was extracted using the purposeful sampling method. The findings indicate that in addition to the 24 basic sentence structures provided for Persian language, other basic structures have been used in textbook, which are: || sub., pro. Comp., pre.||, || sub., pro. Comp., pro. Comp., pre. ||. The most used basic structures in the sentences of textbooks of all levels were bi-valency constructions. The study of the complements showed that, the nominal subject 96.4%, the prepositional complement 41.9%, the direct complement 31.4%, the predicate 17.2% and the complement 15.3% are the most used. The findings of the present research show the profile of the language development of 10-12 year old children by identifying the level of syntactic complexity of the sentences in the textbooks. The results of this research show the readability of educational texts written for Iranian students and can be useful for textbook authors.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
Distributional semantics is a neo-constructuralist method that focuses on the use of words in real texts to understand the approximate meaning of a word, compared to other words. Since one of the goals of applying semantics in Quran, is to know the meaning of words according to practical context, the use of this method in Quran becomes important. In this research, in order to introduce the application of distributional semantics in the Qur'an, with the descriptive-analytical method, the steps of implementing, the challenges and solutions to overcome it, have been explained by examining a case study.The steps are: determining some words to compare with the main word, determining distributional features (surah, equivalent to document, and phrase), linguistic pre-processing of the Qur'anic text and removal of stopwords, forming context vector and co-occurrence matrix and weighting its elements, finding semantic similarity of words and its analysis. The most important challenges of using this method in Qur'an are the small volume of the Qur'anic text, the lack of suitable software for calculations in Quran, and the great difference in the length of surahs in the word-document pattern. Paying more attention to the basis of the distributional method (distributional hypothesis), not using this method for very low-frequency words, and comparing the results obtained from the word-document and word-phrase patterns are solutions to overcome some challenges. For the root-word Farah, it is obtained that the meaning from the Qur'anic context (close to the meaning of pride) is different from the meaning mentioned in dictionaries (joy).
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
Nowadays, many people and companies enter the business world. So, rgarding the important and prominent role of internet and commercial advertisements in daily life, the relation between the business world and people should not be ignored. The purpose of this research is to examine the persuasive language in terms of type and number of persuasive steps in a number of Persian commercial internet textual advertisements based on the Cheung’s (2008, 2010) persuasive move schema model. This research is of descriptive-analytical kind. Therefore, To this end, a number of 120 Persian commercial internet textual advertisements collected through official Persian websites have been analyzed as research data based on the type and number of the persuasive steps. As to the type of persuasive steps, the results showed the most used type of persuasive step was steps of the persuasive move "offering suggestions" having been used with a frequency of 63.7%. On the other hand, the persuasive steps of "explicit stimulus actions" included the lowest frequency with a frequency of 0.1%. It was also shown the new persuasive step "motto" has been used with a frequency of 17%. Besides, the examination of the number of persuasive steps indicated the most used advertisements were "four-step" advertisements with a frequency of 26.7%. "Ten-step" advertisements were observed with a frequency of 0.9. Finally, the analysis of the type and number of persuasive steps revealed there was a significant difference not only between the type of steps examined but between their number as well.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
This article explores the effect of iconicity and textual cohesion on processing causal relations in Persian discourse using an experimental method. A reading-time task with a within-subject design was set up. Twelve 3-sentence experimental scenarios and 12 filler scenarios were constructed. Iconicity and cohesion were the independent variables and participants’ reaction time (RT) was the dependent variable. The cohesion variable manipulated the degree of cohesion between the first and second sentences of scenarios. The iconicity variable manipulated the order of the second and third (cause and effect) sentences of scenarios. Forty-eight participants read the scenarios and verified if the target sentence, which asserted the implicit causal relation between the second and third sentences of scenarios, was correct. The RTs of the participants were collected using DMDX program. The data were then submitted to a mixed-model analysis in R. The main effect of iconicity and cohesion on participants’ RTs was found. There was no interaction effect between iconicity and cohesion. The target sentence had the shortest RT in the condition with iconic and high-cohesion scenarios. Also, the target sentence in the condition with iconic but low-cohesion scenarios was processed as fast as the target sentence in the condition with non-iconic but high-cohesion scenarios. The findings confirm the facilitatory effect of iconicity on understanding causal sequences. The results also show that if, for discourse reasons, information is provided non-iconically, the existence of highly cohesive relations between the causal sequences and the previous context can compensate the non-facilitatory effect of non-iconic sequences.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
Although, many studies have been conducted on time in the verses of revelation, the nature and functions of the category of time in the Qur’an, as a sacred text, has not received much attention. The present study aims to investigate the tenses used in the text of Surah Ghafir, in the light of concepts proposed by Reichenbach i.e. speech time, event time and reference time, both at sentence and text levels. The results of present research indicate that along with a great number of nominal sentences as well as past and present tenses in the mentioned surah, a wide range of tenses including past, present and future have been used, so that the past tenses are mainly used in a sense other than the past, and their point of reference is located in the present or future; they may also refer to a general truth not exclusively to a particular tense. Thus, throughout the surah Ghafir, just the present and future tenses, the past tenses function in line with the general tendency of the whole Surah to realize an extended concept of the present time.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
The poetries of Sheevan Foumani are various from the conceptual and functional views.These stylistic varieties in poetries represent the frequency of experience that by means of them the poet incorporates component of meaning to the linguistic community of poetries.He carries out the aim by using the symbolic units in a specific style.Since the most of his poetries are symbolic and symbols of poetries are manifested in the forms of attributes,identification,personalization,impersonalization,the current research aims at investigating the semantic components of poetries of Fokhos and Aghadar in accordance with sociolinguistics. Also, it aims at drawing discursive boundaries through the symbolic representation of social actors based on the discursive functions.Therefore, two combined models of socio-semantic of Van Leeuwan and semio-semantic of Paris have been chosen to achieve these goals.As a main purpose,this research investigates the features of the model of Van Leeuwan on poetries.Consequently,the critical approach of the semio-semantic analysis of Paris tries to explain the discursive boundaries of poetries. Primarily by implementing the model of Van Leeuwan on verses, the results of research indicated that the representation of social actors in two poetries has been mostly formed by the factor of impersonalization. Moreover, based on the saliency of impersonalization, the semio-semantic analysis of poetries is formed by instrumenting this component in the direction of creating discursive spaces and the result indicated that discursive functions of appeasement,resistance,and insistence are often organized in textual layers that are related to the subcomponents of impersonalization.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
The efficient and systematic design of language education programs through deploying instructional strategies and techniques and with the knowledge of learners’ cognitive make-up and their environment helps develop increasingly effective and capable language learners. Effective instruction begins with effective educational design which involves a wide range of practices, the most important of which is informed and structured material development. In line with these, the present study was carried out to analyze exercises in Arabic textbooks for public junior high schools in Iran based on Nation and McAllister’s (2010) principles of format and presentation of learning materials and activities. The research employed a descriptive design using qualitative content analysis and to achieve more valid and reliable results, Shannon’s entropy for weighting codes and statistical tests of homogeneity of variance, univariate analysis, and Kruskal-Wallis were used. The population and the statistical sample of activities considered in the study were the same and included all the exercises in the selected Arabic textbooks for the 1401-1402 AH / 2022-2023 academic year. Content analysis was done following a researcher-made scheme based on the layers proposed in Nation and McAllister’s (2010) principles, i.e., meaning-oriented input, form-oriented input, meaning-oriented output, and form-oriented output. The validity of the scheme was verified through expert opinion and its reliability was calculated using Pearson correlation. The results of the research showed that in these textbooks, there is no four-way balance in the activities and no harmony between the expected four types of activities on form, meaning, input, and output.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
Research on L2 learners’ engagement has highlighted the impact of emotional engagement on task performance to uphold their language development, but there remains a need for further empirical evidence, especially from the text-driven perspective on task-based language teaching. The present mixed-methods study aims to explore Vietnamese EFL learners’ emotional engagement during two task-based lessons driven by two text genres. One speaking task and a writing task that engaged the learners in solving problems driven by the texts were implemented in two three staged lessons. Quantitative data was collected by using a post-task questionnaire analyzed with SPSS v.29 to gauge 33 English undergraduates’ emotional engagement, and an interview was conducted with eight students on a voluntary basis to delve into factors that influence their emotional engagement. Observations during the lessons were further used to triangulate evidence. Descriptive statistics revealed that the participants were highly emotionally engaged in both task-based lessons, expressing high enjoyment and low anxiety. Further thematic analysis of engagement during the lessons indicated that pre-task visual prompting, text processing, the proper cognitive challenges of tasks and texts, and peer monitoring were the main influential factors. These findings imply that task design and implementation based on engaging texts potentially heighten learners’ emotional engagement in task-based performance, thereby facilitating their language acquisition.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
Authorship Attribution is an application of stylometry that assigns authors to anonymous texts based on writing features. Several models have been developed for languages, such as English, Chinese, and Dutch. Although many studies address authorship attribution in Arabic, most of them do not critically assess whether the applied theories and techniques fit Arabic’s unique linguistic features. This study aims to identify the most suitable techniques for Arabic authorship attribution by evaluating computational theories and artificial intelligence methods. Using a descriptive-analytical methodology, it reviews and compares empirical studies on Arabic texts, including literary and online materials. Data were collected from published studies, experiments, and corpora applying authorship attribution to Arabic, focusing on method effectiveness relative to Arabic’s structural features. Results show that among computational theories, only the K equation reliably determines Arabic text authorship. Among AI’s Machine Learning methods, SVM outperforms KNN, AdaBoost, and Naïve Bayes, but the master-slave technique performs significantly better. In NLP approaches, ARBERT and AraELECTRA achieve up to 96% accuracy, with POS tagging outperforming LSA. Further research is needed to determine the most accurate technique for Arabic authorship attribution.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (1-2024)
Abstract
The present study investigates the effect of baking temperatures (140, 160, 180, 200, and 220℃) on texture kinetics. It also explores a statistical classification meta-algorithm, called Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), to predict texture changes during conventional cake baking. The experimental results indicated that texture properties were significantly affected by baking temperature and time. As time and temperature increased, there was an increase in hardness, cohesiveness, gumminess, and chewiness and a decrease in springiness. However, the impact of time and temperature on resilience was inconsistent, as it was maximum in the last quarter of the process. The predicted results revealed that the AdaBoost algorithm accurately predicted the texture properties with a high coefficient of determination (R2 > 0.989) and minimal root mean square error (RMSE < 0.0019) across all textural properties. Therefore, it can serve as an efficient tool for predicting the texture properties of cakes during baking. Furthermore, the proposed methodology can be extended to predict the texture properties of other baked goods.
Volume 1, Issue 1 (10-2011)
Abstract
Contextualism refers to an approach to urban planning, which considers the city in its totality. It also emphasizes on the role of social, cultural, geographical and historical influences on individual development, because of the increasing interest in understanding environment in post-modernist architecture. It is also the degree to which new architecture is sensitive to its site and location. It farther varies from building to building and place to place. Moreover, architecture in context is neither a brief attention nor a radical innovation; rather it is a strong and expressive visual relationship to the surroundings. Individual building is always seen first as a part of the whole. Creating places and spaces that enrich the lives of the people who use them is the foundation of architect’s work. Every building can and should engage in a dialogue with the history, beliefs and needs of a particular place and time. In fact, current architecture in metropolitans of Iran including Tehran has an attitude based on ignoring the environment and the context of projects, including climate, history, geography, culture, etc. This attitude leads contemporary architecture to a sort of chaos and disorder. It also brings about contemporary architecture to lose its distinctiveness, besides increasing tendency and willingness of young generation of architects to imitate foreign works and projects without any attempt to adjust them to the context and environment of local projects. It means that this attitude can face contemporary architecture with a serious danger and threat, which enjoys no identity and character. The aim of this paper is to elaborate how correct and effective designing approaches in contextual architectural design can be obtained in architectural studios in order to provide designing with a dialogue to their context and environment, to have more successful designing, and also to illustrate a clear vision for contemporary architecture. Design studios in Iran, where architectural design lessons are being taught, are the main and fundamental part of architectural education. Considering that most of undergraduate students in Iranian architectural departments are ignoring the context without paying attention to its influences in their designing, we are going to figure out how context can be reflected and used in architectural designs in this paper. For this purpose, architectural designs in 4 different studios including Educational space, Cinema, Hospital, and Residential Space in Sooreh University in two semesters during a year (2009-2010); were evaluated among 20 groups, which were divided into two controlled and uncontrolled units. The evaluation was based on 9 examinations, which the authors had already extracted from the architectural designing principles. It is worth mentioning that the only difference between those two units (controlled and uncontrolled) was the constructed site model that the controlled units could adjust and adapt their designing to. Final evaluation, which was the average score of each designing group in each examination, showed that controlled unit’s designing gathered higher score; consequently, their approach in designing was more successful and effective. It means that contextualized approaches in studios can improve architectural designing and result with architecture in context. In addition, professors at architectural departments should pay more attention to the context and environment and their role in designing process. They further should integrate their teaching with contextualism. To this end, they may utilize many innovative solutions including a model of the project site.
Volume 1, Issue 1 (3-2014)
Abstract
Linguistic stylistics is one of the modern linguistic approaches to text analysis, which analyzes the unique expression style of a given text as well as the goal and effect of adopting that style. It is maintained in this approach that each text has specific linguistic features, which, on the one hand, gives uniqueness to the text, and makes the text categorized in a category with a number of other texts on the other. From stylistic point of view, regarding a number of shared features, two texts can be categorized in the same category, referred to as “text genre”. However, two texts can be distinguished based on a number of their features. Since text is the aim in translation, a process in which a text is rendered into another language, it is plausible to consider text translation as reconstructing the linguistic features of the source text to the form of target language elements in a relative way. In layer stylistics approach, text features are studied in five layers, namely phonological, lexical, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic. On the basis of this approach, the present study focuss on the lexical layer of Ḥadīth texts, as one of the religious texts genre. We shall further deal with five aspects of the style-making lexical features of Ḥadīth texts; then we shall investigate the methods, challenges, and tools of reconstructing such features in Persian. In the present study, a number of Ḥadīth s of Behar-al-Anvar shall be analyzed as the special cases of our discussion.
Volume 1, Issue 1 (6-2020)
Abstract
According to the development of Tehran and the joint of many rural contexts surrounding it, urban-rural contexts with special ecological and social conditions constitute a major part of Tehran. While the ecological and social qualities of these contexts are exposed to destruction, on the other hand, urban facilities and services are not properly received. The dominance of ecological, physical, social, and economic problems in these contexts requires the comprehensive plan to sustainable urban regeneration. This study aims to formulate the conceptual framework for sustainable urban regeneration in order to improve the quality of life and solving (social, economic, and environmental) problems in these contexts. Also, in order to make an equilibrium between development and environmental conservation and attention to the ecological nature of urban-rural contexts, the green network approach has been chosen to formulate the conceptual framework. This study is based on library studies, through qualitative content analysis on sustainable urban regeneration and green network, sustainable urban regeneration goals and green network design policies have been extracted. In conceptual framework, green network has been used as tools to create identity and sense of place, local economy, linkage and connections, multiple functions, placemaking and spatial arrangement of public and green space, climate compatible development, ecological integrity for landscape, compatible design with environment in multi-level of urban, neighborhood, green network and components of green network.
Hassan Abniki,
Volume 1, Issue 2 (6-2008)
Abstract
For some time hermeneutics has been posed as a competitor for positivism in the field of cognitive and human sciences and has almost prevailed.The field of literature and interpretation of literary texts is one of the fields this branch has influenced.The aim of this article is to examine this subject , coin the term "Literary Hermeneutics" and explain how to apply it for interpreting literary texts,especially novels.To do that,we first define hermeneutics and then literary hermeneutics and its different circles and in the conclusion mention the obligations resulting from selecting each of these circles for interpretation.
Ali Mohammad Haghshenas,
Volume 1, Issue 2 (6-2008)
Abstract
In this article, I have tried to see whether one can find any signs of Mowlavi's influence in the poetry of Hafez. Two considerations have made me deal separately with the form and the content of works of the two poets; a) the deeply static and change resistant nature of the Persian traditional culture, which makes it difficult to say whether one is facing a case of shared culture or one of poetic influence; and b) the need for use of two theoretical standpoints (intertextuality and metaphor v. metonymy) to deal with content and form respectively. The results I have come up with are as follows: 1. As regards the content, one can detect more of an empathy arising from cultural unity rather than any trace of influence of one upon the other. 2. As for the form, one cannot help noticing that Hafez is exceedingly conscious of form, whereas Mowlavi pays little attention to it. 3. Whiltst Hafez leans heavily upon metaphor, Mowlavi is greatly inclined towards metonymy; one tends to ascension, the other to movement forward along the same route. 4. Finally, Hafez does not seem to have made any greater use of the form and content of Mowlavi's poetry with an eye to emulation than of the poetry of other poets, both previous and contemporary with him.
Volume 1, Issue 2 (10-2013)
Abstract
Literary works are good sites for cultural energies; to live, negotiate, and challenge the dominant discourse and each other, sometimes this presence is reproduced and sometimes, if is challenged. P. Machery’s “The Unconscious of the Text” and A. Sinfield’s theory of Faultliness show that how literary works trouble the dominant discourse.Some women – in Shakespeare’s tragedies- revolt against the dominant discourse of Elizabethan patriarchal ideology; they question its basic assumptions and its very ideology. On the other hand, S. “Greenblatt in Circulation of Social Energies” states that the dominant social energies or discourses are continually reproduced in the literary works. In Safarbeygi’s poetry – although the socio-political ground-works have been changed in the favour of women rights – the patriarchal ideology is reproduced in a circular movement; men have constructed that ideology centyries ago, then it came into their collective unconsciousness, and finally, via the help of literary works, it entered the society again
Volume 1, Issue 2 (10-2014)
Abstract
One of the style-oriented features of narrative texts is frequent application of “epithet” with various functions. In documents and texts of narrations, epithet often refers to persons through expressing the parentage relationships, such as a proper noun; however, in addition to the foregoing, in many of cases not as per such parentage relationships, but through a virtual implication, it makes a certain name for someone to show him/her as considerable in being attributed to a certain feature, so that again it virtually names other phenomena or even abstract concepts. Whereas the epithet discussion is fully based on Arabic culture, it causes certain challenges in translating narrative texts into Persian; especially due to the fact that apparent inclusion of the same in Persian text as a proper noun hides the relevant variable semantic implications; like the fact that due to the syntax and spelling differences between Arabic and Persian languages, the aforementioned also causes further problems in terms of writing. The action of translating narrative text into Persian language enjoys a considerable background, but after all, the problems caused by epithet inclusion in such action have not been studied in any independent work. Relying on several samples taken from the narrations of Bihar Al- Anwar Book, this study addresses and analyzes some of the major issues caused by transferring epithet in translating narrative text into Persian and then practically gives certain solutions to solve such issues and problems.
Volume 1, Issue 3 (12-2013)
Abstract
Aim: Using short text messages (SMS) is the easiest and cheapest method of health education programs in order to increase women’s’ knowledge and early detection of diseases. This study was conducted in 2013 in order to compare the educational effect of breast self examination (BSE) by two different methods of SMS and lecturing in female students who work and study in non- medical fields. Method: In a quasi-experimental study, 108 twenty- two to thirty year old female students of non- medical fields were chosen by random cluster sampling and then divided into 2 groups. One group was educated by lecturing and the other by SMS. Data collection tool was a questionnaire including demographic, knowledge, attitude and performance sections (KAP) and a check list for direct observation. Collected data were analyzed by SPSS 20 software, using parametric statistical tests (paired T-test) with the significant level of p<0.05. Findings: After education in both groups, a significant difference was observed in the average scores of KAP (p= 0.001). Educating by both lecturing and SMS promoted the level of KAP about BSE (p=0.001). KAP score of doing BS in text message group was higher than the lecture group (p=0.001). SMS was chosen as the best way of BSE education. Conclusion: Compared KAP scores about the quality of doing BSE in the SMS group were higher than the lecture group; therefore, it is suggested that this educating method can be used in the health education programs especially in controlling breast cancer and maintaining the level of health among women in the society.