Esmat Babaii

The current position paper is a brief account of the pitfalls I have found in the research manuscripts I have reviewed over a period of twenty years. As a review panel member of several academic journals, I encountered several problems in the submissions I have been asked to review, both minor ones and those beyond repair. In this paper, I intend to report my observations with a focus on what I may call unsophisticated and simplistic treatment of the findings. To put it briefly, while some submissions are rightly rejected due to sloppy data collection, biased sampling, or erroneous use of statistics, there are papers that succeed in following the strict methodological do’s and don’ts of research but fail to make sense of the bulk of the collected data, leading to fixation at the lower levels of Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy. I will try to address this issue, postulating that inadequate practice of critical thinking and other higher-order thinking skills such as analytical reasoning, evaluation, and inference could be partly responsible for this caveat. The paper ends with suggestions for educating would-be researchers not only by teaching the principles of conducting research but also by encouraging creativity, critical evaluation of information, and a genuine search for knowledge. Such qualities may not readily lend themselves to objective measurement and can hardly be translated into numerical indices by which research impact is estimated but they seem to add to the meaningfulness of research findings in the field.

This study aimed to propose a new method for scoring C-Tests as measures of general language proficiency. In this approach, the unit of analysis is sentences rather than gaps or passages. That is, the gaps correctly reformulated in each sentence were aggregated as sentence score, and then each sentence was entered into the analysis as a polytomous item. Rasch partial credit model was applied to analyze the test. To investigate the effectiveness of the new method, the results of this new strategy were compared with those derived from passage and gap levels as well as combining locally dependent items using the dichotomous Rasch model, the rating scale model, and the partial credit model. The obtained scores from the administration of a C-Test comprising four English passages, each containing 25 gaps, to 160 participants were subjected to dichotomous and polytomous Rasch model analyses. The models were compared regarding individual item fit, person/item separation and reliability, global fit (e.g., deviance), unidimensionality, local item dependence, and person parameters. Results showed the effectiveness of the new scoring method. The suggested strategy increases the number of items compared to the super-item approach, provides information at the sentence level, and reduces the impact of local independence.

The present study aims to investigate the portrayal of women in English and Persian proverbs using the multidisciplinary field of Cultural Linguistics as an alternative to critical discourse analysis. Utilizing a corpus analysis approach for Cultural Linguistics (Jensen 2017), 124 English and 186 Persian proverbs representing the theme of ‘woman’ were compared and contrasted cross-culturally. Results of grounded-theory driven analysis revealed: (a) while various cultural schemata and cultural metaphors reflecting both dark and bright sides of women in proverbs were unveiled, only one cultural category in Persian proverbs with no similar instance in English proverbs was revealed; and (b) in some English and Persian proverbs, interpreting cultural schemas predicates upon eliciting and understanding the cultural metaphors hidden in the proverbs. The results are discussed with reference to the potentiality of Cultural Linguistics as an analytical framework for paremiology that can provide an in-depth interpretation of proverbs as a culturally-loaded discourse.

Intercultural communicative competence has been offered as an open-minded replacement for ego-centric biases stemming from dogmatic national prejudice and its associated self-aggrandisement. While being a commendable proposal, its implementation in foreign language education has not been a widespread success story. Recent attempts to theorise intercultural communicative competence seem to emphasise negotiability in communication at the expense of some persistent issues, such as (cultural/national) identity. This article examines the prospects of intercultural communication in Iranian language policy as a country with a history of troubled encounters with foreign powers, culminating in protectionist approaches to nationalism, identity and the treatment of Others.

According to the IELTS official website, IELTS candidates usually score lower in the IELTS Writing test than in the other language skills. This is disappointing for the many IELTS candidates who fail to get the overall band score they need. Surprisingly enough, few studies have addressed this issue. The present study, then, is aimed at shedding some light on why IELTS candidates usually score lowest in writing by investigating IELTS candidates’ problems with the IELTS Academic Writing test. To this end, 10 Iranian IELTS candidates were interviewed concerning the difficulties they had with this test. The interview summaries were subjected to thematic analysis. The results suggested that IELTS candidates may face four main problems with the IELTS Academic Writing test: insufficient time, unclear and difficult-to-understand task instructions, “distant” topics, and overvaluation of advanced vocabulary and grammar in the scoring system. The study suggests that IELTS candidates’ problem of scoring lowest in the Writing test may not be entirely due to deficiencies in their writing skills, and that certain features of the IELTS Academic Writing test may aggravate undesirable testing outcomes. The implications of the results of the study are discussed.

English language teaching has always been treated as a socio-cultural issue in post-revolutionary Iran. Fueled by anti-imperialist sentiment, the political authorities diagnosed Western influence as the major ailment of the society. Having to accommodate for the undeniable virtue of learning English for international communication, educationalists prescribed limited, censured doses of culture-free, localized English input to bring up a new generation immune to the Western values. The analysis of the educational goals in Iranian macro educational documents and their realization in teaching materials reveals an organized effort to resist and undo the influence of neoliberal education and provide an alternative rooted in national-religious heritage of the country. To examine whether this localized version can survive amid neoliberal forces in education and compete with its imported goods, the present article attempts to provide a bird’s eye view about the interplay of policy, culture, and political ideology in the curriculum through content analysis of the Iranian macro official documents and their manifestations in local ELT textbooks, supplemented by the researcher’s perspectives as an insider with prolonged engagement in this educational system. Hopefully, careful scrutiny of Iranian ELT program in its wider socio-cultural context contains lessons about avertable errors when proposing alternatives to neoliberal education.

Culture is an indispensable part of Foreign Language Education Policy (FLEP), especially in English Language Teaching (ELT). In addition, the spread of English around the globe has resulted in English users’ tendency to embed their local culture in their English communication (Kirkpatrick, 2012). However, literature remains silent on culture representation ...

Directed Motivational Currents (DMCs) postulated as a novel motivational construct in second language acquisition (SLA) research to explain periods of intense and enduring behavior in pursuit of a highly valued goal or vision. Nonetheless, much of the discussion related to this new motivational phenomenon has remained theoretical, and only a limited number of empirical studies have investigated its various dimensions in language learning. The current qualitative study employed interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore a period of intense motivation experienced by an Iranian language learner in self-directed and mobile assisted language learning. The findings provided further empirical evidence for the triggering stimulus and the core characteristics of DMCs in terms of goal/vision orientedness, a salient facilitative structure, and positive emotionality in explaining the essence and the universal meaning of the phenomenon experienced by the participant of the current study.