Suchergebnisse

The main purpose of this study is to take the first step in raising foreign language learners' cultural awareness through comparing ECONOMY conceptual metaphors in Persian and English economic articles. It is hoped that in this way we can pave the way for the development in language learners' intercultural awareness. In this paper, the authors explored English and Persian economic articles for the source domains of ECONOMY AS A LIVING ORGANISM. The results revealed that linguistic realizations of ECONOMY IS A LIVING ORGANISM metaphor are largely shared by English and Persian, the difference being mainly in terms of frequency. This paper has also made an effort to demonstrate that focusing on conceptual metaphors may have a useful function in raising learners' linguistic and intercultural awareness.

This article reports on a qualitative study of the learners' beliefs about effective foreign language teaching in an Iranian setting. A semi-structured interview covering several fundamental issues in foreign language (FL) pedagogy was conducted with 22 upper-intermediate Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Qualitative content analysis of the transcript data yielded several interesting and informative themes. Among the most prominent results of the study, mention can be made of learners' strong penchant for modern, learner-centered approaches to FL teaching such as communicative language teaching (CLT) and task-based language teaching (TBLT). Among the other notable themes were learners' endorsement of teachers' high proficiency and pedagogical knowledge, positive teacher personality, the integration of culture teaching in the classes, and sustaining learner interest and motivation. The results have implications for knowledge-based teacher education as well as for practicing and prospective FL teachers.

Speeches articulated by politicians are often vehicles towards achieving their ultimate goals. That's why there is always tendency to find out the potential ideologies indicated by the discursive strategies and rhetorical devices which these politicians employ to express their political viewpoints. This study adopted a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to cognitively analyze the typical discursive characteristics underlying Iranian and American presidents' speeches at the UNGA (2013). The findings revealed that the most frequent of the strategies employed by Obama were polarization, self-glorification, positive self-presentation, negative-other presentation and victimization while the most prominent ones used by Rouhani were metaphor, vagueness, negative-other presentation and national self-glorification. The intricate, undeniable relationships existing between language, power and ideology is also what had been clear through the analysis of the lectures transcription.