Literature

John Bunyan's The Pilgrim’s Progress, is one of the most important religious texts ever written in English. There are several important factors that have made for the perfect and excellent structure of this seventeenth century work of English literature. What follows is an attempt to analyze these elements in detail in order to find how such a masterpiece has been created and why it has gained such importance in realm of religious writings that has been given the title of Second Bible.

A novel depicts a wide range of imaginary characters concerning the behaviour of human beings in real life. An individual who takes delight in interpreting novels can gain knowledge and obtain worldly wisdom. Also, since the reader is exposed to several situations, most of them being real-life circumstances, he/she gets an opportunity to acquire and enhance the soft skill sets required for both personal and professional lives. What is resolutely believed by the employers and colleges these days is that a student of technology must possess few most important identities of soft skills which cannot be overlooked, especially the soft skills like communication skills, leadership qualities, time management, interpersonal skills and presentation skills. Offering training in soft skills through children’s literature facilitates the students in putting up their behavioural skills in a superior style.

The astonishing research on the nature of students’ and teachers’ beliefs about language learning in the 1980s by Horwitz paved the way for a multitude of investigations into this topic. There have been different studies focusing on the beliefs of EFL learners but the focus on students who learn English for their major field of study is lacking. This study aimed to address this gap and examined beliefs about learning a foreign language held by 90 Iranian female university students majoring in Theology and Islamic sciences. The present inquiry addressed beliefs held by the beginners and intermediate learners in order to assess which areas of beliefs were commonly shared by the two groups of learners and which areas contained considerable differences in beliefs hence finding the cause for their weakness in English. This study employed a questionnaire based on Horwitz’s (1988) Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) as a research instrument, with some modifications to be appropriate to Iranian context. Statistical analysis detected three items where opinions of these two groups of students were significantly different and a pattern derived from the beliefs of both groups in Iranian context and in relation to English for Specific Purposes (ESP).

This paper entitled A Study of Placelessness in V. S. Naipaul’s Life and Works focuses and analyzes with great sovereignty how the fire of getting a place fulgurates repeatedly in V. S. Naipaul’s own life and his works. This theme, directly or indirectly, has been smeared by him in some of his fiction and non-fiction works. The paper analyzes uselessness, rootlessness, placelessness, selflessness and unsuccessfulness of his characters. Place becomes burning issue in his own life also. In Naipaul’s works, his characters deliberately get staunch support by him as they personally feel a lack of a suitable place to affirm and confirm their presence in the mundane world. This paper is an attempt to give answer why is called Naipaul rootless despite of having his good roots not only in Trinidad but also in the other countries of the world and why his characters feel suffocation and seem taciturn. Naipaul gave vent to his accumulated anguish or grief through his characters in his works. Naipaul, a noted raconteur, to what extent remains successful in his endeavors with regard of the concept of place, is the key concept of this paper.

This study examines a survey and analysis of the wrong use of the past perfect tenses by students in essay writing. The survey became necessary because of the in-depth deficiency students exhibited in essay writing in West African Senior Certificate Examination (WASSCE) and National Examination Council (NECO). The respondents of the study consisted of final year senior secondary student for the WASSCE and NECO classes and respondents from High Impact Capacity Teacher Building Workshop. They were required to write an essay or composition titled ‘My Best Teacher’ on page I of High Impact Capacity Teacher Building Workshop. It was discovered that there were some similarities in the type of errors, especially in the area of past perfect tenses in the second composition: ‘My First Day in the School (page 48-50). (Taken from Countdown for WASSCE/SSCE, NECO, JME English Language (Ogunsanwo et al 2005).

The present research aimed to investigate the thematic concepts of lullabies as folk songs which have passed orally through generations. The themes are hidden ideologies of lullabies that carry cultural attitudes; in this regard, lullabies’ themes can reveal narrators viewpoints which originate from cultures and surrounding areas. Regarding the mentioned elements, the themes suggested by Homayuni (2000) considered as the appropriate model for data extraction using the comparative and descriptive method. The findings showed the same themes in lullabies of both Persian and British cultures; but, in spite of similarities between themes, they had different ways of expression. This is to say, similarities were found in the themes as the basic ideas and hidden layers of lullabies and differences were in their expressing ways as people attitudes.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of corpus-based instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ knowledge of idioms. To this end, 100 students from Islamic Azad University, Tonekabon Branch whose major was English Language Translation, was given an OPT in order to homogenize them. Out of this, 60 students whose score fell one standard deviation below the mean was selected and regarded as intermediate students. Then, the subjects were randomly assigned into an experimental group (n=30) and a control group (n=30). The students in both groups were given a pretest. The experimental and control group used the online British National corpus and a course book, namely Every day idioms for reference and practice, respectively. After the experiment, all the participants were given a post test. The results indicated that there was no significant difference between two groups in relation to dependent variable in pre-test (t58=1.58, p>0.05). The finding showed that the differences in pre-post test scores (2.92) clearly showed the efficacy of concordance in enhancing knowledge of idiom. It was showed that there were significance differences in knowledge of idiom between the groups in post test.

Tajikistan is one of the greatest poets and writers Mirza Tarson Zadeh great contribution in the field of literary creation in this part of Persian language and literature is extensive . Tarson Zadeh in 1911. Was born in 1977. He died in Dushanbah . In his works , humanity , equality, prosperity, freedom and patriotism is a special place. Tajik scholar capable of writing not just for artists and writers in contemporary Tajikistan , but all have been worthwhile.

In the realm of language teaching, corrective feedback and how to treat errors has a long and contentious history. On account of the controversial nature of this issue, whether and how to correct errors have given rise to numerous studies in this area in the domains of second language acquisition. Therefore, lots of researches have probed its role in language classrooms. This paper sheds light on various types of corrective feedbacks, reviews the main differential effects of various types of feedback, and the conditions determining the efficacy of them.

This paper discusses the phonemic changes that EkeGusii EkeGusii loanwords from English undergo in the process of being accommodated into the EkeGusii phonological system. The data used in the paper is from native speakers of EkeGusii and Optimality Theory (here after OT) is used in the analysis of the data. This paper is different from most papers of its kind in that it uses a constraint based theoretic framework unlike others which either do not use any theoretical framework or use rule based theories when they do . The paper focuses on vocalic and consonantal phonemic changes that EkeGusii loanwords from English undergo in order to be accommodated into EkeGusii phonological structure. For example, the paper analyzes whether English Phonemes maintain their features or phonemic status upon entering EkeGusii phonology given that some phonological processes such voice dissimilation affect EkeGusii and not English. The question the paper seeks to answer is; do these processes affect EkeGusii loanwords from English? For example, the English word tractor /tr?.kt?/ is nativized as /ke.ra.?i.ta/ [ke.ra.?i.ta]. As can be observed, there is voice dissimilation between [k] and [ r] and [?] and [t] in the nativized form. This is explained by Dahl’s law of dissimilation.