Language and Testing

Having realized that the students at post graduate level need to have language skills to communicate effectively in professional context, the present paper has attempted to identify the communicative capabilities of Business students by conducting a survey on their business English knowledge level. The study used a well-defined questionnaire containing questions related to business letters, reports, memos, emails, minutes of meetings, telephonic conversation and presentations, testing the communicative competency of the respondents. The test was conducted to assess the language skills of the students after they finished a specific course in Business English. Students performance was evaluated and presented through a graph. The assessment outcome manily focusing on the factors that affect the learning of business English is discussed.

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of concept mapping, as a learning strategy, on the receptive and productive knowledge of lexical collocations of Iranian high school EFL learners. It also explores whether teaching lexical collocations through concept mapping will be effective in terms of retention of lexical collocations or not. Sixty female Iranian third-grade high school students participated in this study. They were randomly divided into two homogeneous groups; control and experimental. In the experimental group, lexical collocations were taught through concept mapping, and in the control one, Persian translations of the same lexical collocations were provided. Both groups received 12 sessions of instruction by the researcher. Data analysis indicated a statistically significant difference between the receptive and productive knowledge of collocation of those learners who are taught lexical collocation through concept mapping and those who were taught traditionally. In other words, in terms of both receptive and productive knowledge, concept mapping strategy outweighed the traditional one in learning English collocations. However, there was no statistically significant difference between retention of receptive and productive collocational knowledge in the experimental group.

One of the issues in perception research that continues to be a matter of intrigue and moot point for both philosophy of perception and its neurophysiology is how vision can play an active role in the haptic adeptness of the visually deprived, especially the congenitally blind and the early blind, if it is granted that visual and tactile modalities follow two different routes of processing of information in the brain. Traditionally, philosophers adhering to the empiricist tradition, such as Berkeley and Locke have maintained that although visual and tactual modalities share one thing in common in that they can process the same object property like figure, spatial properties like distance and motion, the mode of visually grasping any of these properties is at variance with that of haptically perceiving them. This view offers one alternative to a locus classicus in this field of study — the oft-cited Molyneux’s dilemma over whether a long-time blind person familiar with object shapes through touch would also be able to identify the shape for the first time if he ever recovers his visual sensory capacity. In this brief study evidence has been collated, examined and analyzed in support of another alternative to Molyneux’s question. In this alternative, a case has been made for a robust visuo-tactile interplay. Another question this study addresses is whether the skillfulness perceived in vision-mediated tactile performance sparked by loss of vision or forced visual deprivation is an outcome of compensatory but de novo neural restructuring or indicates an integral, latent capacity for neuroplasticity that harnesses visual or spatial imagery so as to help the visually deprived sail through tactile identification and discrimination activities.

Teaching grammar has always been an area of concern for the practitioners and EFL/ESL teachers. While it seems more commitment has been given to this task, yet there is still room for more attention to innovative methods of grammar instruction which can help learners practice grammar through working on a combination of meaning and form which makes grammar learning more meaningful. The idea of teaching grammar as "Dictogloss Method" comes from a paper by Ruth Wajnryb (1990) in which learners use their grammar resources to reconstruct a text and become aware of their shortcomings and needs through learning-based procedure in which noticing, hypothesis-testing and metatalk are involved. This research is an attempt to find out if teaching grammar through Dictogloss method will significantly help Iranian EFL learners develop their grammatical competence. This study was based on a quasi-experimental research strategy with a pre-test post-test control group design. Eighty intermediate EFL students studying English at Sana'ato Ma'adan Language Institute (Isfahan) with the age range of 16-18, participated in this study. The performance of the learners who were exposed to Dictogloss method in the experimental group was compared with that of control group which did not undergo such a procedure. The analysis of the data indicated that utilizing Dictogloss method in experimental group helped the participants improve their grammatical competence upon verb tense usages significantly. In addition, the results suggested that Dictogloss can provide learners with opportunities to use their productive grammar in the task of text creation and meaningful communication.

The present study investigated the correlation between willingness to communicate (WTC) in Persian and WTC in English, Perceived Communication Competence in Persian and Perceived Communication Competence in English to see whether students with high willingness to Communicate (WTC) and Perceived Communication Competence in Persian have high willingness to Communicate (WTC) and Perceived Communication Competence in English, too, or not. Correlation analysis in this study indicated that when perceived communication competence in Persian increases, perceived communication competence in English increases, too, and vice versa. In addition, by the increase in willingness to communicate in Persian the willingness to communicate in English will increase, too, and there is a direct relationship between them.

English is a vehicle for international communication. In order to meet the demands of modern society, English teachers need to pay more attention to the development of learners’ competence and focus on a more effective and successful method. This paper aims at stressing current perspectives on pronunciation learning and teaching. It summarizes the background of pronunciation teaching, emphasizes the need for incorporating pronunciation into foreign language classes owing to regarding pronunciation as a key to gaining full communicative competence, The present study investigated the possible relationship between IPA, stress and pronunciation skill of Iranian EFL learners. Seventy Iranian intermediate EFL students were selected as the main sample based on their performance on Oxford placement test. All participants were given a test of IPA and word stress. There was also a pronunciation test which was performed orally to evaluate their total pronunciation proficiency. Two EFL teachers participated in the scoring procedure. Pearson correlation test was run to the results of different sections of the pronunciation test using SPSS 22 to answer the research questions and to investigate the possible relationship between IPA, stress, and pronunciation skill of Iranian EFL learners. The relationships between Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ total pronunciation skill and two components of pronunciation skill of including IPA competence and knowledge of word stress, were examined through running Pearson correlation test. The results indicated that there was a significant correlation between IPA competence and total pronunciation test scores of Iranian EFL students. It was found that there was also significant relationship between students’ English pronunciation test scores and their performance in word stress.

Egypt is pioneer on all fields of literature especially on translation and issuing western thoughts among intellectuals and scientists. In fact, most historians believe that France emperor "Napeleon BonaParte" attack to Egypt provoked "Arab Spring" that started from Egypt. Narrating and proceeding children’s literature prepare the ground for developing the covert talents among authors.Suhair Al-Qalamavi was a symbol of Arab educated woman and a pioneer on advocating Egyptian women rights .Having entered to the university, she was favored by most of the professors at Cairo University, especially Dr. Taha Hossein. Her voluble language on stories made readers fallow the scenario and satisfied the addressers to perceive the texts easily. As a literal critic, Al-Qalamavi was writing for Cairo’s prominent press. She studied the works of many great scholars as "Taha Hossein", "Mohammad Heikal", "Mohammad Abduh, etc. and criticized some of them . The present study intends to study the literary role of great Egyptian women as Suhair Al-Qalamavi as a pioneer based on their activities and literary works, to show the equal role of men and women in Islamic Society.

The aim of this paper was to study the impacts of a type of learning strategy, which was computer-assisted concept mapping, on EFL learners' reading comprehension. The research question was whether computer-assisted concept mapping technique had any notable effect on EFL students’ reading comprehension. To this end, students based on their scores in TOEFL proficiency test were divided into two experimental and control groups. A computer-assisted concept mapping learning strategy was presented to the experimental group learners. Through an independent sample t-test, it was proved that the computer-assisted concept mapping learning strategy improved the participants' reading comprehension in the experimental group.