The approximation of the pragmatic knowledge of English language learners to native speakers has been a realm of concern for the scholars and researchers in applied linguistics. Thus, this research was an endeavor to figure out the association between the proficiency level and politeness strategies and external/internal modifications in written communication skills in the speech act of requests in Iranian English language learners. To this end, a written Discourse Completion Test (DCT), adapted from Rose (1994), including 8 situations was administered to elicit data from Iran Language Institute120 female and male EFL learners, 60 upper-intermediate and 60 intermediate. The data were sorted out using Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies taxonomy (Brown and Levinson 1987) and external/internal modifications developed by Faerch and Kasper (1989). The written request utterances provided by each participant were analyzed in terms of frequency and types of politeness strategies, namely, positive, negative, bald on record, and off-record as well as external/internal modifications utilized in requests. The Pearson Chi-Square test results revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between upperintermediate and intermediate learners' type of politeness strategies and external/internal modifications.
Collocations are clusters of words that are acquired together and are subject to constraints in co-occurrence with their adjacent words. The inadequate acquaintance with collocations emerges into the formation of unacceptable collocations from the viewpoint of native speakers. The present study is a descriptive quantitative study of the translation of collocations in literary texts from English into Persin. The study sought to identify the most frequent types of unacceptable collocations in the Persian translated versions. For the purpose of the study, the four Persian translated versions of Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” were investigated precisely and all the unacceptable collocations were compiled and clustered into English patterns based on Benson’s theory, in an aim to decode the groups of patterns which are most frequently leading to bearing of unacceptable collocations in translation of English texts to Persian. A detailed SPSS analysis was conducted and the findings including frequency and percentage of each type of the unacceptable collocations were recorded. The most frequent types of unacceptable collocations spotted in the translated versions of the novel were as follows: 1. Adjective + Noun 23.3%, 2. Subject + Verb 11%, 3. Verb + Object 10.3% patterns.
Background & Objective: It is argued that students have less tendency to communicate in English classes even after several years of attending language courses. The general objective of this research was to find the effective factors for willingness to communicate in English across medical classes.
Materials & Methods:The participants in this study were 252 medical students from Zanjan University of Medical Sciences who were majoring in one of the fields of dentistry, medicine and pharmacy and were taking the course of English for Specific Purposes. Macintyre's Willingness to Communicate questionnaire was used to compile the data. After collecting the data using the questionnaire, they were processed in the statistical package. The collected data were then tabulated and analyzed via SPSS (20) and AMOS.Results: In the structural model, there were significant pathways between self-confidence and motivation and WTC in ESP classes. Motivation had a positive effect on self-confidence. The teacher's immediacy, with its negative impact on shyness, increased the motivation to communicate in the ESP class. On the other hand, the paths of shyness to motivation and self-confidence were negative. All pathways were significant at 0.05.
Conclusion:The findings of this study showed that, as in the previous studies, the tendency to communicate in language classes depends on several variables. Given that communication and speaking are the most important language skills, language learning planning is recommended to consider the importance of this skill. Language teachers should create conditions with low anxiety to encourage learners to speak and communicate. Shyness was another variable during the study that had a negative effect on the WTC. The results of this study also emphasize that highly motivated learners are more likely to participate in classroom activities and communication due to their self-confidence. Also, in this study, the teacher's intervention had a positive effect on reducing anxiety. Thus, it is recommended that teachers play an important role in motivating students to communicate I ESP classes.
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