Hamid Allami

Tarbiat Modares University | TMU · ELT

Language teaching has the potential not only to teach language skills but also to create a peaceful learning environment where students feel relaxed, safe and valued. To achieve this goal, teachers need to develop an ideal identity that reflects their commitment to promoting peace in their classrooms. In the interest of developing peacebuilder lang...

Politeness and impoliteness strategies create a vital social practice in our daily and professional interactions. Being once an issue in the code of conduct protocols, (im)politeness nowadays marks an interdisciplinary scientific field. Regarding this importance, this study explored the politeness and impoliteness strategies used in changing direct...

Pedagogical reasoning, as one of the major components of teacher knowledge base, is crucially important in teacher education. Motivated by the dearth of research in this area, this study investigated the pedagogical reasoning of four novice language teachers in relation to speaking instruction in order to further our understanding of language teach...

The study investigates Iranian English language teachers’ beliefs about Intercultural language teaching and the way their beliefs impact language learning and teaching. In this mixed-methods research, a total of 60 teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching at language institutes in Iran participated. A close-ended questionnaire and o...

This study intended to give an account of suggestion speech act awareness among Iranian EFL learners. To fulfil the aim, the study was designed based on four-fold purposes: (a) Iranian EFL learners' application of suggestion semantic formulae; (b) their attitude of appropriateness in terms of confidence in the employment of appropriate supportive m...

The present study aimed to follow twofold purposes of investigating the possible interrelations between intercultural sensitivity and knowledge of speech acts, in addition to identifying attitudinal ratings of appropriateness across EFL learners. In so doing, 30 advanced EFL learners were studied in terms of their intercultural sensitivity as well...

In spite of its prevalence in Iranian Persian-speaking communities, the issue of self-sacrifice expressions as a culture-specific verbal behavior has remained almost ignored in the existing literature on speech acts. The current study is an enquiry into the use of self-sacrifice expressions by Iranian Persian speakers in performing different speech...

This study aimed to develop and validate a 2 × 2 Standpoints and Standards measure of EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ achievement goals. To this end, 441 teachers were first involved in scale development and validation phase. In the second phase, responses by 194 teachers were used to examine the predictive utility of achievement goal...

The present study aimed to inquire how Burundian students in Iran use multilingual competence in their strategies of acquiring the vocabulary of Persian as an L3. Were investigated the frequency of cross-linguistic learner strategies, the distribution of lexical transfer types across strategy types, and the influence of prior linguistic knowledge o...

This study investigates the representation of ordinary people in the inaugural speeches of two Iranian presidents and their underlying ideologies through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). An aggregate model integrating Fairclough's three-dimensional (1989), Van Dijk's socio-cognitive (1993), and Van Leeuwen's socio-semantic (1996) appr...

Plagiarism in ESL and EFL learning contexts has become a topic engaging many researchers in a hot debate in recent years. Comparisons of student-generated texts with their source texts have shown that students rely amply on source texts in their writings, using copying as a major strategy. The students themselves relate these problems to their conf...

Disciplinary studies on metadiscourse in academic texts have come a rather long way (since the 1980s) to afford an awareness of the ways authors strive to signal their insights into their materials as well as their audience. However, few comprehensive corpus-based studies to date have provided a starting point for shaping our understanding of subdi...

This study aimed to investigate the L2 learners’, EFL teachers’, and American native speakers’ use of discourse markers as hedging devices to mitigate face-threatening acts considering gender, proficiency level, and control–experimental variables. It used open discourse role-play tasks, a self-assessment report of English competence, as well as a s...

The present research examined the Iranian in-service teachers’ attitudes towards some principles of English as a lingua franca (henceforth ELF), particularly intelligibility and acceptability of their accent, the authority of non-native speakers to own the English language, and the legitimacy of English used by them. What makes the present research...

This study investigates diglossic patterns of language use by speakers of Zoroastrian Dari in the city of Yazd, where most of Zoroastrian population of Iran lives. Efforts have been made to find out how, when and why the spoken language of Dari is favoured by Zoroastrian community members. For this reason, the evaluation by the informants of their...

Due to the lack of paralinguistic information, politeness gains a considerable significance in telephone conversations (TCs). The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study intended to primarily...

The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing request, apology, and refusal speech acts across intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners to identify their attitudinal ratings of their produced structures in terms of pragmatic success and (im)politeness mannerism. A discourse completion test includin...

The study seeks to provide a systematic pragmatic analysis of suggestion speech act among Iranian EFL learners. The purposes of the investigation are determining: the application of suggestion semantic formulae, the attitude of appropriateness in terms of confidence in the employment of appropriate supportive moves, polite and impolite mannerism, a...

Working within the appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), an attempt has been made to identify the dialogic positioning, by which texts can favor particular value positions while pretending to be sharing their readers’ views through employment of certain lexical choices, hence stance markers. A set of Iranian and Western journalistic texts hav...

Comprehension of Scalar Implicatures by Iranian EFL Students

Using Spencer-Oatey's (2002, 2004) rapport management approach, this research investigated the role of proficiency when responding to particular reprimands. To make this end come true, a six binary Discourse Completion Task was utilized. The results revealed intermediate learners claimed autonomy and thus refused to be controlled and also violated...

Using rapport management approach proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2005), this study focuses on the condolence giving strategies produced by Persian native speakers and EFL learners in six different situations. To that end, a Discourse Completion Task onto which a five point likert-scale is attached is utilized as the instrument of study. Participants re...

Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to the use of pragmatic knowledge as a component of communicative competence in standardized tests. This research aims to assess the degree of pragmatic knowledge assessment in the first section of IELTS listening tests based on the component parts of pragmatic competence proposed by Bachman (1990) and dev...

Reverse addressing is an interesting realization of kinship terms in interactive, face to face communication. This descriptive study was proposed to examine the use of family address pronouns in Iran as a function of the classical sociological parameters of age, sex, and social distance. It investigated various aspects of reverse addressing as a ve...

Reverse addressing is an interesting realization of kinship terms in interactive, face to face communication. This descriptive study was proposed to examine the use of family address pronouns in Iran as a function of the classical sociological parameters of age, sex, and social distance. It investigated various aspects of reverse addressing as a ve...

The present study aimed at a) investigating the effect of teaching collocations on the speaking ability of EFL Iranian Learners, b) examining the relationship between the participants' knowledge of collocations and the participants' use of collocation taking into consideration, and c) finding out participants' attitude towards teaching collocations...

Metadiscourse markers help writers make coherent and reader-friendly texts, which is of considerable importance in academic writing. The main aim of this study was to investigate how interactive and interactional meta-discourse markers are used by Iranian EFL learners. An inquiry was carried out to investigate cross-cultural similarities and di...

The present study aimed at examining the knowledge of Iranian EFL learners in responding to compliments in English, with a focus on the variables of gender, age and educational background. The data were collected through a 24-item English Discourse Completion Task (DCT) to which 40 male and female EFL learners were asked to provide short responses....

The present study was an attempt to investigate the ways through which teacher talk can create opportunities for learning in an EFL classroom. In addition, it identified how the teacher talk can lead to more and more learner involvement in an EFL context. The study also determined the types of the teacher talk which can decrease learning a foreign...

Inevitability of using evidentials (EVs) and references in all academic writings signifies the importance of distinguishing and applying EVs for those who attempt to write in academic prose. With the aim of creating a unique model of EVs in academic texts, this study used well-established taxonomies of metadiscourse markers adapted by Hyland (2005)...

This study examined the relationship between Teachers' self-belief of L2 learning and in-class practices and decisions. Thirty L2 teachers and 50 L2 learners participated in this study. To assess the learners' general proficiency level, a standard Proficiency test (Oxford Placement Test, 2010) was administered. The participants were given a questio...

This study examines Iranian EFL teachers' beliefs about writing instruction. A sample of 122 EFL teachers teaching at private language institutes were randomly selected, consisting of EFL teachers with different degrees of educational qualification, years of experience, and genders. Questionnaires were submitted to the participants and then analyze...

Within Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research area, speech acts studies are often conducted to measure SL learners' pragmatic (in)competence. Unlike other speech acts, the speech act of giving condolences has not yet been the subject of cross-linguistic or cross-cultural studies across Persian and other languages. This initiative study attempts...

Writers use metadiscourse markers to create and maintain relationship with their readers, influencing them by addressing them directly in various ways. The present study aimed at exploring the use of engagement markers as related to the quality of texts produced by IELTS student writers. To this end a quasi-experimental design was conducted through...

This paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the Persian native speakers. 200 Persian respondents took a 24-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenti...

The use of inferential discourse markers (IDMs) as a linguistic device implies significant results in satisfying conversational coherence. Therefore, with the aim of investigating their distribution of the use, this study was developed across three different sets of psychology articles written by English native speakers (NS), Persian non-native spe...

The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms of the Taxonomy proposed by Elwood (2004), representing the basic verbal strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers in offering congratulations. Based on the modified version of Brown and Levinson's model of politeness (1987), it further explored the positive po...

This paper reports the findings of a study designed to investigate the types of supportive discourse moves employed by Persian speakers in their Requestive Speech Acts. 372 respondents took a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with six scenarios ranging from formal to informal degrees of Perceived Situational Seriousness, and returned 2232 Requestive...

The present study aimed to recast the issue of production of refusals by Iranian EFL learners, exploring the frequency, shift and content of semantic formulas with regard to learners’ language proficiency (lower-intermediate, intermediate and upper-intermediate), status of interlocutors (lower, equal and higher) and types of eliciting acts (request...

Development of English language teaching materials for the school students’ requirements has been the concern of the Ministry of Education in Iran for many years. The current English language teaching materials have undergone a lot of revision since their inception in 1985. They still need to be revised in the light of the present-day concerns, nee...

The present paper underscores the importance of the cognitive orientation of EFL students in their success in writing courses. A few suggestions are made as to how EFL teachers can put their students on the right cognitive path in their writings.

The use of verbal humor in an L2 class has often been a great challenge to the teachers and materials-developers, as it is felt to require great linguistic, social and cultural competence. This feeling has led the instructors to include as little verbal humor as possible in EFL classrooms and textbooks. The present research was an attempt to help F...