Intertextuality can be generally defined as the influence and presence of previous texts in the construction of the present one; it shows the internal relations of a text with all other relating texts (Booker, 1996; Halliday, 2003). The consensus is that no text is a complete creation of its author; rather, it is constructed through the process of interconnections of textual elements of the relating texts and the author's creativity. In literary texts, intertextuality plays crucial roles (Abrams, 1993: 185-6; Peck and Coyle, 2002: 143). The author, un/consciously appeals to intertextual elements, elaborates them in his artistic career and creativity to create the intended textprose/poetry. Accordingly, in reading literature, being aware of intertextuality seems to be important in better understanding of the text. The present paper studies possible effects of intertextuality awareness on reading literary texts-short stories. To this end, a group of 25 homogeneous students of English literature at Arak University, Iran, were asked to take part in the study. Two short stories, as tasks of elicitation, were first given to them as pretest to read and answer the questions. Then, after 6 sessions of treatments relating to intertextuality, its features and examples, they were given the same stories, as posttest, to read and answer the questions. Their answers in both pre-and post tests were scored by two raters, and then compared. The results revealed strong effects of intertextuality awareness on reading the texts. Possible causes of the results along with the implications of the findings are discussed.
This paper introduces a corpus-driven measure as a method to assess EFL learners' knowledge of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody here is defined as the tendency of some words to occur in a certain semantic environment. For example, the verb 'cause' is associated with unpleasant things-death, problem and the like. Subjects were 60 Iranian Persian-speaking English learners drawn from 180 candidates taking English classes in five language institutes. To estimate the quality of the test, a 70-item test of semantic prosody was constructed, validated, and used to measure the subjects' knowledge of semantic prosody. The items were selected from COBUILD Dictionary and were mainly based on those cases of semantic prosody whose conditions (positive or negative) had been already determined by researchers. A proficiency test was applied to determine learners' level of language proficiency as a variable which may affect the results. Data analysis showed that learners' knowledge of semantic prosody is, and can be, appropriately measured by the corpus-driven test of semantic prosody. The implications of the findings for teachers, learners, and test developers are discussed.
This study aimed to determine the relationship between creativity on one hand and lexical reception and production knowledge of Iranian EFL students on the other hand. The data were collected using three tests: a creativity test (Torrance, 1990), the Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, 2001), and the Productive Version of the Vocabulary Levels Test (Laufer & Nation, 1995) which were administered to a group of 141 Iranian undergraduate students majoring in English Translation and Literature at Arak and Qom universities. The results demonstrated that there was not a high correlation between creativity on one hand and lexical reception and production on the other hand. The learners' passive and active vocabulary knowledge in the tests as a whole and at different word-frequency level were highly correlated. Passive vocabulary was always larger than active vocabulary at all levels; however, the gap between the two increased at lower word-frequency levels.
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