IJALEL Vol 6 No 6 2017

International Journal of
Applied Linguistics &

English Literature
ISSN 2200-3592 (Print)

ISSN 2200-3452 (Online)
Pioneering in Language & Literature Discovery

International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature
All papers on which this is printed in this book meet the minimum requirements of "Australian
International Academic Centre PTY. LTD.".
All papers published in this book are accessible online.
Editors-in-Chief
· John I. Liontas, University of South Florida, United States
· Jayakaran Mukundan, University Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
· Zosia Golebiowski, Deakin University, Australia
Managing Editor
· Seyed Ali Rezvani Kalajahi, Maltepe University, Turkey
Journal Information
ISSN Print: 2200-3592
ISSN Online: 2200-3452
ISBN: 978 -600-5361-84-1
Website: www.journals.aiac.org.au/index.php/IJALEL
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2012–2017-CC-BY- IJALEL
ii
IALEL Editorial Team
Editor(s)-in-Chief
John I. Liontas, University of South Florida, United States
Zosia Golebiowski, Deakin University, Australia
Jayakaran Mukundan, University Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
Managing Editor
Seyed Ali Rezvani Kalajahi, Maltepe University, Turkey
Senior Associate Editors

Ahmad M. Al-Hassan, Bremen University, Germany
Ali Al-Issa, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
Ali Miremadi, California State University, United States
Biook Behnam, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran
Christina Alm-Arvius, Stockholm University, Sweden
Eugenio Cianflone, University of Messina, Italy
Haifa Al-Buainain, Qatar University, Qatar
Hossein Farhady, University of Southern California, United States
John W. Schwieter, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Juliane House, University of Hamburg, Germany
Kazem Lotfipour-Saedi, Ottawa University, Canada
Kimberley Brown, Portland State University, United States
María-Isabel González-Cruz, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), Spain
Mats Oscarson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Meixia Li, Beijing International Studies University, China
Roger Barnard, The University of Waikato, New Zealand
Ruth Roux, El Colegio de Tamaulipas & Universidad Autonoma de Tamaulipas, Mexico
Sebnem Toplu, EGE University, Turkey
Seyyed Ali Ostovar-Namaghi, Shahrood University of Technology, Iran
Shameem Rafik-Galea, University Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
Simin Karimi, University of Arizona, United States
Taher Badinjki, Al-Zaytounah University, Jordan
Xitao Fu, Zhanjiang Normal University, China
Yolanda Gamboa, Florida Atlantic University, United States
Yuko Goto Butler, University of Pennsylvania, United States
Zdenka Gadusova, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia
Zia Tajeddin, Allameh Tabatabai University,Tehran, Iran
Associate Editors
Ahmed Gumaa Siddiek, Shaqra University, Saudi Arabia
Anne Dragemark Oscarson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Asghar Salimi Amirghayeb, Maragheh University, Iran
iii
Bahman Amani, University of Malayer, Iran
Bilge Öztürk, Kocaeli University, Turkey
Christopher Conlan, Curtin University, Australia
Efstathios (Stathis) Selimis, Technological Education Institute of Kalamata, Greece
Fan-Wei Kung, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Ferit Kilickaya, Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Turkey
Javanshir Shibliyev, Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus
Maryam Azarnoosh, IAU, Semnan, Iran
Naser Nayif AlBzour, Al AlBayt University, Jordan
Natasha Pourdana, Gyeongju University, South Korea
Obaid Hamid, The University Of Queensland, Australia
Rachel Adams Goertel, Pennsylvania State University, United States
Reza Kafipour, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran
Shaofeng Li, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Vahid Nimehchisalem, University Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
Distinguished Advisors
Brian Tomlinson, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
Charles Goodwin, University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Claire Kramsch, University of California, United States
Dan Douglas, Dan Douglas , Iowa State University, United States
Hossein Nassaji, University of Victoria, Canada
Jalal Sokhanvar, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Roger Nunn, The Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Susan Gass, Michigan State University, United States
Advisors
Ian Bruce, The University of Waikato, New Zealand
Kristina Smith, Pearson Education, Turkey
Oytun Sozudogru, University of York, UK
Steve Neufeld, Middle East Technical University, Cyprus
Editorial Panel
Abdolvahed Zarifi, Yasouj University, Iran
Ali Albashir Mohammed Al-Ha, Jazan University, Saudi Arabia
Ali Asghar Yousefi Azarfam, IAU-Tabriz, Iran
Arif Ahmed Al-Ahdal, Qassim University, Saudi Arabia
Aseel Zibin, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
Bakhtiar Naghdipour, Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus
Bora DEMIR, Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey
Cecilia Chu, Hong Kong Baptist University, China
Dawn Rogier, Embassy of the United States of America, Philippines
Erdem AKBAS, University of York, UK
iv
Farah Ghaderi, Urmia University, Iran
Gerry Loftus, University of Buckingham, UK
Isa SPAHIU, International Balkan University, Macedonia
Jiaoyue Chen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Mahdi Alizadeh Ziaei, The University of Edinburgh, UK
Naemeh Nahavandi, IAU-Tabriz, Iran
Neslihan Önder Ozdemir, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Noelia Malla García, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Omid Akhavan, University of Texas at Dallas, United States
Orkun CANBAY, Qatar University, Qatar
Reza Vaseghi, Shomal University, Iran
Ruzbeh Babaee, University Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
Seyyed Ali Kazemi, Islamic Azad University, Iran
Shannon Kelly Hillman, University of Hawaii, Hawaii
Tin T. Dang, Vietnam National University, Vietnam
Yasemin Aksoyalp, Turkish-German University, Turkey
Book Reviews Editor

Marilyn Lewis, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Deceased Editor
Cem Alptekin, Boğaziçi University, Turkey
v
Vol. 6 No. 6; 2017
Table of Contents
Articles
A Comparative Study of Transference of Humor in Translations of “The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn” by Mark Twain
Rezvan Barzegar Hossieni, Mohsen Mobaraki, Maryam Rabani Nia 1-8
TESL Trainee Practitioners’ Self Perception of their Personality Traits and Verbal Communication
Skills
Abdul Rashid Abdul Sitra, Ain Nadzimah Abdullah 9-18
The Impact of Presenting Semantically Related Clusters of New Words on Iranian Intermediate EFL
learners' Vocabulary Acquisition
Saiede Shiri, Ehsan Rezvani 19-27
The Impact of Immediate and Delayed Corrective Feedback on Iranian EFL Learners’ Willingness to
Communicate
Mahtab Zadkhast, Majid Farahian 28-39
The Realizations of Point of Departure of Message in General English Texts
Seyed Foad Ebrahimi 40-44
The Rhetorical Analysis of Criticism in Persian and English Linguistics Papers
Shabnam Dezfoolian 45-52
The Savage Within
Yu-Miao Yang 53-56
The Effects of Using Podcast on Listening Comprehension among Iranian Pre-intermediate EFL
Learners
Islam NamazianDost, Ghassem Bohloulzadeh, Rezvan Rahmatollahi 57-70
Do Task Complexity Demands Influence the Learners’ Perception of Task Difficulty?
Nasrin Sanajou, Leila Zohali, Fateme Zabihi 71-77
Orwell's Satirical View of Romantic Love in the Terrorized World of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Mohammad Hossein Besharati, Golnar Mazdayasna, Sayed Mohammad Anoosheh 78-82
Stress Assignment in N+N Combinations in Arabic
Abdel Rahman Mitib Altakhaineh 83-100
Essential of Cultural (literature, Art, Music, customs …) Negotiation as a Resources of Smart and
soft Power in Age of Globalization
Mohammad Khosravishakib 101-105
Rethinking and Reconfiguring English Language Education: Averting Linguistic Genocide in
Cameroon
Carlous Muluh Nkwetisama 106-114
Morpho-phonological Structure of Sound Feminine Plural Suffix -aat: Revisited
115-122
Bassil Mashaqba, Anas Huneety
vi
"An Eyesore among Eyesores" : The Significance of Physical Setting in Faulkner's "A Rose for
Emily"
Sura M. Khrais 123-126
The Effect of Using Online Collaborative Tasks on Incidental Vocabulary Learning of Impulsive vs.
Reflective Iranian EFL Learners
Khalil Motallebzadeh, Farideh Samadi 127-133
Variation of Linguistic Form of News Titles of Indonesian National Newspapers
Atiqa Sabardila, I Dewa Putu Wijana, - Suhandano 134-143
The Impact of ESA Elements on Motivation of EFL Learners to Speak: A Case of Iranian EFL
Learners
Hooshang Khoshsima, Hadi Shokri 144-157
Understanding Syntactic and Semantic Errors in the Composition Writing of Jordanian EFL Learners
Yazan Shaker Almahameed, May Al-Shaikhli 158-164
The Comparative Effect of Collaborative Strategic Reading and Content-Based Instruction on EFL
Learners' Reading Comprehension
Mania Nosratinia, Negin Hooshmand Fateh 165-173
Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: The Poets’s Passion for Auden’s Greatness
S. Bharadwaj 174-194
Qur’an-related Intertextuality: Textual Potentiation in Translation
Aladdin Al-Kharabsheh 195-207
Motivation and Attitude of Islamic Azad University’s Faculty Members toward Learning English
Hamid Gholami 208-213
Apology Strategies Used by EFL Undergraduate Students in Indonesia
Payung Cedar 214-222
Repetition and Reactance in Graham’s "Underneath" Poems
Roghayeh Farsi 223-234
Between Languages and Cultures: Arabic into English Transliteration in English Travel Literature
Nusaiba Adel Almahameed, Renad Mohammad Abbadi, Atef Adel Almahameed 235-245
The Metalinguistic and Linguistic Knowledge Tests and Their Relationship between Non-native In-
service and Pre-service Teachers
Saeideh Ahangari, Morteza Abdi 246-251
The Effectiveness of Teaching Critical Thinking Skills through Literature in EFL Context: A Case
Study in Spain
Svetlana Stefanova, Jelena Bobkina, Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez 252-266
The Effect of Reflective Reading on Reading Comprehension of Iranian EFL Learners
Nava Nourdad, Rasoul Asghari 267-273
Needs Analysis and Course Design; A Framework for Designing Exam Courses
Reza Eshtehardi 274-288
vii
I International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature
ISSN 2200-3592 (Print), ISSN 2200-3452 (Online)
Vol. 6 No. 6; November 2017
Flourishing Creativity & Literacy
Australian International Academic Centre, Australia
A Comparative Study of Transference of Humor in

Translations of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
by Mark Twain
Rezvan Barzegar Hossieni
Translation Studies, Birjand University and Payame Noor University, Kerman Branch, Iran
E-mail:Rezvanbarzegarh@yahoo.com
Mohsen Mobaraki (Corresponding author)

English Department, University of Birjand, Iran
Email: mmobaraki@birjand.ac.ir
Maryam Rabani Nia

Chabahar Maritime University, Iran
E-mail:Amin.Rabani.Maryam@yahoo.com
Received: 26-03-2017 Accepted: 23-05-2017 Advance Access Published: September 2017

Published: 01-11-2017 doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.6p.1 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.6p.1
Abstract
Translation is a difficult and complex task. Some elements such as linguistic and socio-cultural differences in two
languages make it difficult to choose an appropriate equivalent; the equivalent which has the same effect in the target
language. In the present study, one of the richest sources of the humor and satire is investigated. Humor is completely
obvious in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain. He tried to laugh at social and cultural problems of
his time by this novel. Two translations of this book by Hushang Pirnazar and Najaf Daryabandari are investigated. The
author tries to investigate on transference of humor from the source language to the target language by a syntactic
strategy of Chesterman. By investigating the text, it will be found out that which translator is more successful in
recreation of humor by using the strategies.
Keywords: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, humor, translation of humor, Hushang Pirnazar
1. Introduction
Humor, in most of European languages, means criticism which is provided by a humoristic language. Humor can be in
prose or poetry. It challenges the human’s mistakes or undesirable behavior, socio-political corruptions and
philosophical thoughts. Humor has a significant statue in literature. The humor goes back to the entrance of theatre to
Greece and Rome. Nowadays humor as a kind of art has an important statue in literature. Chekhov, Anatole France,
George Bernard Shaw, Günter Grass and Edward Albee are the famous scholars in this field. Also in Iran, the tendency
to humor goes back to years ago in Persian prose and poetry.
1.1 Significance of the research
Today, humor is a very powerful artistic form used to criticize specific human behaviors. In addition to content, form is
also important in a humoristic work. Humor is a device which is used by poets and creative writers. Humoristic
elements can be found in literary works in almost all languages. So for a translator especially a literary translator, the
knowledge of translating humor is very important. The translator needs some guidance or theories in order to reflect the
humoristic effects into the TT. In this case, the translators will be acquired with some strategies which make the humor
of the ST more clear for the readers of the TT and reproduce an acceptable translated piece of literature. This research is
done in order to find out the humoristic devices used in a great satirical novel, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”,
and to investigate on different strategies which are used in translating humoristic devices.
Research question: Were translators able to recreate the same humoristic features of the source text in the target text by
using the presented strategies? Which translator was more successful in transference of humor?
Research hypothesis: Both translators could recreate the humoristic feature by using the presented strategies.
1.2 Types of humor
Humoristic works have an important role in historical studies of a culture and society. Therefore, humor is a socio-
cultural phenomenon in addition to its linguistic aspects. Humor is something’s “quality of being funny” (Vandaele,
IJALEL 6(6):1-8, 2017 2
2002: 153). linda Broeder (2007: 35) quotes Van der Parre (1985: 393) that, humor functions as a connector and tries to
capture and retain the attention of the audience. As mentioned above, humor can be divided into two categories:
linguistic and cultural. The first one is a kind of the humor which is related to the linguistic aspects of the humor, for
example using wordplays such as pun and malapropism in the text. “Humour based on wordplay may have ‘silly’ or
‘witty’ undertones, slapstick may strike people as ‘simplistic’, nonsense talk in an unfamiliar environment may be
slightly frightening etc." (Vandaele, 2002: 154).
According to the above definitions, it is obvious that among these literary devices there are so many overlapping
devices which lead to more confusion to understand the intention of the author.
In this research, two linguistic games in humor are investigated: repetition and parallelism.
According to "The Dictionary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms”, (2007: 26) repetition is a device in which words,
sounds, and ideas are used more than once to enhance rhythm and to create emphasis. Bergson states that repetition
refers to a regular occurrence of a scene, producing a humorous effect because of the expectation it builds (1911: 90).
According to "The Dictionary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms”, (2007: 26) parallelism refers to a grammatical or
structural similarity between sentences or parts of a sentence. It involves an arrangement of words, phrases, sentences,
and paragraphs so that elements of equal importance are equally developed and similarly phrased often referred to as
parallelism.
1.3 Translation of humor
Huang (2011: 14) states that in literary translation, the typical features of the source literary text not only need to be
taken into account, but also the influential elements from the target perspective, such as the linguistic and cultural
differences and the target readers must be considered. Literary texts are characterized by rhetorical and aesthetic values,
which are expected to be captured and maintained in a literary translation. One of the main tasks for literary translator is
to reproduce the rhetorical and aesthetic values of the original text. In literary translation, the form links to the content;
but in non-literary translation the content may be considered detachable from the form or structure. In prose, like poetry,
a certain linguistic features can also have a certain textual function. For example, the repetition in Hemingway’s "In
Another Country" is a linguistic feature to express the character’s tedious life.
Rener (1989: 161) states that a 'rhetorical' sentence is "a carefully and skillfully assembled construction".
Nida (1964), cited in Venuti's book (2000: 154) that content and form affect each other. He believes that “the content of
a message can never be completely abstracted from the form and form is nothing apart from content”. The linguistic
differences, however, pose a great challenge in literary translation. In prose, the linguistic differences should also be
carefully considered. For instance, the pun is an extremely language-dependent wordplay.
Translation is a complex and difficult task. Translator must pay enough attention to translation of this kind of works.
The translator must be sure that the reader can recognize humor in the text. In addition, he/she have to make sure that
the function of humor in the target text is the same as its function in the source text. The first problem in translation of
humor is its identification. Humor is usually provided indirectly and it makes the translator unable to recognize it. The
lack of socio-cultural equivalence between source and target languages is another problem in translation of humor.
Liu Lei (2010: 7) states that "humor is shared by people from every nation. However, different nations have different
kinds of sense of humor, closely related to religion, ideology, society, politics and culture. Therefore, although humor
has been studied for a very long time, most are from the perspective of literature, art, sociology, psychology pragmatics
or linguistics. Some scholars doubt that humor can be fully translated into another language because humor is language-
specific and culture-specific. Only a few scholars study the translation of humor."
Attardo (1994: 95) believes that "there are two kinds of jokes (…) on one side, we have referential jokes, and on the
other, we have verbal jokes. The former are based exclusively on the meaning of the text and do not make any reference
to the phonological realization of the lexical items (or of other units in the text), while the latter, in addition to being
based on the meaning of the elements of the text, make reference to the phonological realization of the text."
Referential jokes refer to humor focused on the pragmatic level. They are humor which play with language. However,
verbal jokes refer to humor focused on the linguistic level and are playing through language
Regarding to humor at the linguistic level John Richard Morton Gledhill (2001: 170) declares that the translation of
humor and paranomasia is yet another important neglected field in literary translation theory. Delabastita (1996: 127)
rightly sees this area as not only difficult but he also opens up the problem of defining the limits of translation.
1.4 Mark Twain’s humor
The case study of the current research as mentioned before is "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and its two Persian
translations. The reason behind choosing this work as the case study is that Twain is a famous satirist and this novel is a
rich resource of satire and humor.
According to Olivier Nyirubugara (2001: 5), Twain started as a humorist in his brother Orion’s magazine, The Journal.
He used to quarrel at the articles to publish with Orion who had no sense of humor. He thought that they need a little
humor, things that make people laugh, something which give a little life to the journal. Twain already had the sense of
humor which he would develop first as a journalist, then as a lecturer and finally as a novelist and essayist. Mark Twain
was convinced that telling a story without humor is like offering a meal without salt. That story would not be tasty.
Thus, humor made him a humorous fictionist. Twain wrote about his personal experiences and the things he knew from
IJALEL 6(6):1-8, 2017 3
first-hand experience. The various characters in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are based on the types Twain
had encountered both in his hometown and while working on the river boat on the Mississippi river. Many of vices exist
in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" had been witnessed by the author, who was sometimes victim of them.
Twain's life and experience provided him with much material, which is estimated at four or five of all his writings. This
proves that Mark Twain dealt with a situation that really existed and which he knew very well.
He was lauded as the greatest American humorist of his age. Jelliffe (1956: 88) quoted William Faulkner (1955) that
Twain is called "the father of American literature."
2. Theoretical framework
Chesterman (1993: 1) says that "to translate without a theory would therefore be to translate blind. To translate without
seeing or knowing what one is doing. With no self-awareness, no self-criticism. It would mean relying entirely on
common sense, one might say."
He (2000: 1) says that strategy memes are the most useful sets of professional translation memes. He (ibid: 4) states that
these memes are essential conceptual tools of the translator’s trade and defines strategy as "any well-established way of
solving a translation problem." Using this strategies makes a diference between a professional and an amateur
translator. So in Chesterman's viewpoint (ibid: 7) "a memetically enlightened professional, then, is someone who can
recognize a typical problem, register the relevant contextual conditions, and select an appropriate strategy."
Chesterman (1997: 92) distinguishes between comprehension strategies and production strategies. Comprehension
strategies deal with understanding and analyzing the source text and the whole nature of translation commission.
Production strategies are the result of various comprehension strategies. These strategies have to do with how the
translator manipulates the linguistic material in order to produce an appropriate TT.
Chesterman has divided production strategies to 3 categories: semantic, syntactic and pragmatic strategies. Each
strategy has 10 techniques. The author's focus in this research is on one of techniques of syntactic strategy.
Syntactic strategies
Chesterman (1997: 94) declares that these strategies "may be thought of as involving purely syntactic changes of one
kind or another. Larger changes may obviously tend to involve smaller ones too. Syntactic strategies primarily
manipulate form". The strategies are as bellow:
1. Literal translation 2. Loan, calque 3. Transposition 4. Unit shift 5. Phrase structure change 6. Clause structure change
7. Sentence structure change 8. Cohesion change 9. Level shift 10. Scheme change.
The 10th technique, scheme change, is used in this research. He (ibid: 99) declares that "this refers to the kinds of
changes that translators incorporate in the translation of rhetorical schemes such as parallelism, repetition, alliteration,
metrical rhythm etc."
He (ibid: 100) believes that the translator can choose between three basic alternatives:
1. ST scheme X → TT scheme X. That is, if the ST scheme is judged to be relevant to the translation task, it can be (to
some extent) preserved: in fact no change.
2. ST scheme X → TT scheme Y. That is, the ST scheme can be changed to another scheme that is deemed to serve an
appropriate or similar function in the TL.
3. ST scheme X → TT scheme ø. That is, the scheme is dropped altogether.
4. ST scheme ø → TT scheme X. Here, the translator opts to use a rhetorical scheme of some kind, although not
prompted directly to do so by the ST.
3. Review of literature
Researching on humor is a wide field and many scholars have worked on it. The aim of this research is translation of
humor. Salvatore’s general theory of verbal humor in 1994 focused on linguistic methods of humor translation. He
provided 6 parameters for providing humor. Using these 6 parameters helps translators to recreate the humor in target
language. Also in 2007, Vandaele, the researcher and professor of university of Oslo, investigated on translation of
humor. In his opinion, translation of humor is different from other fields; therefore, translators cannot translate the
humoristic texts as other texts (Vandaele, 2007: 1-6). In addition, Delabastita studied on translation of wordplays which
are types of linguistic humor. He declares that the wordplays make some problems in translatability of a work because
each language is different in form and meaning (2004: 601). Linda Broeder (2007) also, in her article, "Translating
Humour: The Problems of Translating Terry Pratchett", presented some solutions in translating humor. Her work is
divided into two parts. In the first part, she talked about the translation of parody to Dutch in the works of Terry
Pratchett. In the second part, she focuses on translating satire, then translating pun and after that language varieties. In
each of these sections, she gave a model to translate these techniques. She also provides some translation procedures to
translate them. Brigid Maher (2011) in her book "Recreation and Style: Translating Humorous Literature in Italian and
English" explores the translation of literary and humorous style, including comedy, irony, satire, parody and the
grotesque, from Italian to English and vice versa. By analyzing translations of works by Rosa Cappiello, Dario Fo, Will
Self and Anthony Burgess, the author explores literary translation as a form of exchange between translated and
receiving cultures. At the end, she recounts her own strategies in translating the work of Milena Agus.
IJALEL 6(6):1-8, 2017 4
4. Methodology
4.1 Corpus
As mentioned above, to investigate the extent that the translators had been successful in transferring humor by using
strategies, a book titled "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" written by famous American writer Mark Twain (1884)
was chosen by the researcher.
The target texts that are used by the researcher are two translated versions of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn".
Najaf Daryabandari translated the first target text (TT1). He is an Iranian translator of works from English into Persian.
In addition to being a translator, he has also a hand in literature, philosophy, and humor. At the beginning of his
translation of the novel, he talked about different aspects of the novel such as humoristic aspect which is the subject of
this thesis.
Hushang Pirnazar translated the second target text (TT 2). He is an author and translator. He translated "the Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn" in 1957. In the preface of his translation of "the Adventures of Huckleberry", Hushang Pirnazar
(1961) declares that it is a story of a homeless boy and a runaway slave and people whose lives are ludicrous because of
great sadness.
4.2 Data collection
The researcher analyzed different models, approaches as well as quotes and suggestions by the scholars in the field of
parallelism, repetition and wordplay translation in order to come up with a model for the translation of humor. The unit
of investigation in this study was text. The first step in data collection was to recognize and find parallelism and
repetition in English text and its translations. Therefore, 496 pages (all pages) of the novel and their translations were
studied in order to find 30 examples of repetition and 20 examples of parallelism.
4.3 Procedure
Firstly, the researcher tried to recognize the parallelism and repetition in the source text and found their equivalents in
the target texts. Then each translation version is compared and contrasted based on scheme change strategy to see if it
has been applied. After specifying the strategy applied by each translator, four tables are drawn as follow.
5. Data analysis
Some examples of parallelism and repetition are provided and discussed in the following:
1. NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will
be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."(p. 1)
‫ "ﺍﺧﻄﺎﺭﻧﻮﯾﺴﻨﺪﻩ‬:(TT 1)
‫ﻫﺮ ﮐﺲ ﺑﺨﻮﺍﻫﺪ ﻣﻮﺿﻮﻉ ﺍﯾﻦ ﺩﺍﺳﺘﺎﻥ ﺭﺍ ﭘﯿﺪﺍ ﮐﻨﺪ ﺗﻌﻘﯿﺐ ﻣﯽ ﺷﻮﺩ؛ ﻫﺮﮐﺲ ﺑﺨﻮﺍﻫﺪ ﻧﺘﯿﺠﻪ ﺍﺧﻼﻗﯽ ﺁﻥ ﺭﺍ ﭘﯿﺪﺍ ﮐﻨﺪ ﺗﺒﻌﯿﺪ ﻣﯽ ﺷﻮﺩ؛ ﻫﺮﮐﺲ ﺑﺨﻮﺍﻫﺪ ﻧﻘﺸﻪ ﺁﻥ ﺭﺍ ﭘﯿﺪﺍ‬
(33 .‫" )ﺹ‬.‫ﮐﻨﺪ ﺗﯿﺮ ﺑﺎﺭﺍﻥ ﻣﯽ ﺷﻮﺩ‬
‫ ﺣﺬﻑ‬:(TT 2)
This sentence has a special scheme as Parallelism. As we said before, it is the repetition of the same pattern of words or
phrases within a sentence or passage to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance. Twain used it in
his novel as a humoristic device. The structure of three sentences above is repeated and Daryabandari perfectly,
maintained the repetition based on the grammatical structure of the Persian language. Based on Chesterman's syntactic
strategies, the first translator used the scheme change strategies to translate these sentences. Daryabandari used the first
procedure which is ST scheme X → TT scheme X. It means that the parallelism is preserved. But Pirnazar has
completely omitted the sentences and missed the humor of the text.
2. I stood a-looking at him; he set there a-looking at me, with his chair tilted back a little. (p. 18)
(55 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﺻﻨﺪﻟﯽ ﺍﺵ ﺭﺍ ﮐﻤﯽ ﺑﻪ ﻋﻘﺐ ﺩﺍﺩﻩ ﺑﻮﺩ‬،‫ ﺍﻭ ﻫﻢ ﻧﺸﺴﺘﻪ ﺑﻮﺩ ﻣﺮﺍ ﻧﮕﺎﻩ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩ‬،‫ ﺍﯾﺴﺘﺎﺩﻡ ﻧﮕﺎﻫﺶ ﮐﺮﺩﻡ‬:(TT 1)
(38 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﺍﯾﺴﺘﺎﺩﻩ ﺑﻪ ﺍﻭ ﻧﮕﺎﻩ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩﻡ ﻭ ﺍﻭ ﻫﻢ ﺻﻨﺪﻟﯽ ﺍﺵ ﺭﺍ ﺑﻪ ﻋﻘﺐ ﺑﺮﺩﻩ ﻭ ﻣﺮﺍ ﺗﻤﺎﺷﺎ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩ‬:(TT 2)
Parallelism exists in two sentences of the ST because the structure of two sentences is the same. Daryabandari has used
the first strategy of scheme change which is ST scheme X → TT scheme X. It means parallelism can be (to some
extent) preserved. However, Pirnazar has used the third strategy of scheme change which is ST scheme X → TT
scheme ø. It means, the scheme (parallelism) is dropped. Also repetition is a device which Twain used to add humor to
the text. The verb "a-looking" is repeated two times. Daryabandari translated both of them as "‫"ﻧﮕﺎﻩ ﮐﺮﺩﻥ‬, but Pirnazar
has translated them once as "‫ "ﻧﮕﺎﻩ ﮐﺮﺩﻥ‬and the next one as "‫"ﺗﻤﺎﺷﺎ ﮐﺮﺩﻥ‬. Therefore, Daryabandari has used the first
strategy and Pirnazar has used the third one.
IJALEL 6(6):1-8, 2017 5
3. Every time he got money he got drunk; and every time he got drunk, he raised Cain around town; and every time he
raised Cain he got jailed. (p. 21)
‫ ﻫﺮ ﺑﺎﺭ ﻫﻢ ﮐﻪ ﻋﺮﺑﺪﻩ ﻣﯽ‬،‫ ﻫﺮ ﺑﺎﺭ ﻫﻢ ﮐﻪ ﻣﺴﺖ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩ ﺗﻮ ﺷﻬﺮ ﻋﺮﺑﺪﻩ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺸﯿﺪ‬،‫ ﻫﺮ ﺑﺎﺭ ﮐﻪ ﭘﻮﻝ ﺑﻪ ﺩﺳﺘﺶ ﻣﯽ ﺭﺳﯿﺪ ﻣﯽ ﺭﻓﺖ ﻣﺴﺖ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩ‬:(TT 1)
(60 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ﮐﺸﯿﺪ ﻣﯽ ﺍﻓﺘﺎﺩ ﺯﻧﺪﺍﻥ‬
(43 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﻫﺮ ﻭﻗﺖ ﭘﻮﻝ ﻣﯽ ﮔﺮﻓﺖ ﻣﺴﺖ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩ ﻭ ﻫﺮ ﺩﻓﻌﻪ ﻣﺴﺖ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩ ﺷﻬﺮ ﺭﺍ ﺷﻠﻮﻍ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩ ﻭ ﻫﺮ ﺩﻓﻌﻪ ﺷﻠﻮﻍ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩ ﺑﻪ ﺣﺒﺲ ﻣﯽ ﺍﻓﺘﺎﺩ‬:(TT 2)
Both translators have used the first strategy of scheme change in translating parallelism. They preserved the scheme of
the ST sentences in TT sentences. So the humoristic feature of the ST is transferred to the TT. Also the word "every
time" is repeated 3 times in the ST. Daryabandari has translated it as" ‫"ﻫﺮ ﺑﺎﺭ‬. He used the first strategy of scheme
change and preserved the repetition. However, Pirnazar has translated it to two word as "‫"ﻫﺮ ﻭﻗﺖ‬and "‫"ﻫﺮ ﺩﻓﻌﻪ‬. He used
"‫ "ﻫﺮ ﺩﻓﻌﻪ‬two times, and "‫ "ﻫﺮ ﻭﻗﺖ‬just once. It can be said that Pirnazar also preserved the scheme but to some extent. It
is the first strategy of scheme change. Therefore, both translators have preserved the scheme and could transfer the
humoristic feature.
4. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died … (p. 88)
(164 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﻫﺮ ﻭﻗﺖ ﻣﺮﺩﯼ ﻣﯽ ﻣﺮﺩ ﯾﺎ ﺯﻧﯽ ﻣﯽ ﻣﺮﺩ ﯾﺎ ﺑﭽﻪ ﺍﯼ ﻣﯽ ﻣﺮﺩ‬:(TT 1)
(164 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﻫﺮ ﻭﻗﺖ ﻣﺮﺩ ﯾﺎ ﺯﻥ ﯾﺎ ﺑﭽﻪ ﺍﯼ ﻣﯽ ﻣﺮﺩ‬:(TT 2)
In this sentence the parallelism which is Twain's humoristic device is preserved in the first sentence. So translator has
used the first strategy of scheme change. But Pirnazar has omitted "died" and mentioned it just once. So he used the
third strategy of scheme change and could not transfer the humoristic feature.
5. They all smoked and talked, and I eat and talked." (p. 84)
(159 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﺩﻭﺩ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩﻧﺪ ﻭ ﺣﺮﻑ ﻣﯽ ﺯﺩﻧﺪ ﻭ ﻣﻦ ﻫﻢ ﻣﯽ ﺧﻮﺭﺩﻡ ﻭ ﺣﺮﻑ ﻣﯽ ﺯﺩﻡ‬:(TT 1)
(158 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﻫﻤﻪ ﭘﯿﭗ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺸﯿﺪﻧﺪ ﻭ ﺍﺧﺘﻼﻁ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩﻧﺪ ﻭ ﻣﻦ ﻫﻢ ﻣﯽ ﺧﻮﺭﺩﻡ ﻭ ﺣﺮﻑ ﻣﯽ ﺯﺩﻡ‬:(TT 2)
The parallelism in both translations has preserved. The structure of both translations is similar to the sentence of the ST.
so translators have used the first strategy of scheme change in transferring the parallelism. The word "talked" is
repeated two times in the ST. Daryabandari has translated it as "‫ "ﺣﺮﻑ ﺯﺩﻥ‬and again used the first strategy and
preserved the scheme of the ST, but Pirnazar has translated it to "‫ "ﺍﺧﺘﻼﻁ ﮐﺮﺩﻥ‬and "‫"ﺣﺮﻑ ﺯﺩﻥ‬. Therefore, he used the
third strategy of scheme change and dropped the scheme and could not transfer the humoristic feature.
6. It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too. (p. 85)
(160 .‫ ﭼﻪ ﺧﺎﻧﻮﺍﺩﻩ ﺧﻮﺑﯽ ﻭ ﭼﻪ ﺧﺎﻧﻪ ﻗﺸﻨﮕﯽ! )ﺹ‬:(TT 1)
(159 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﺧﺎﻧﻪ ﺷﺎﻥ ﻫﻢ ﺧﻮﺏ ﺑﻮﺩ‬.‫ ﭼﻪ ﻣﺮﺩﻡ ﺧﻮﺑﯽ ﺑﻮﺩﻥ‬:(TT2)
Daryabandari, based on the structure of the TT, could transfer the parallelism to the TT. He used the first strategy of
scheme change. But Pirnazar is not successful in translating the scheme and dropped it. The third strategy of scheme
change is used in the second translation. "Mighty nice" is an example of repetition in this sentence. The first translator
rendered it as "‫ "ﺧﻮﺏ‬and "‫"ﻗﺸﻨﮓ‬. He could not transfer the repetition of the ST to the TT and used the third strategy of
scheme change. But Pirnazar has used "‫ "ﺧﻮﺏ‬for it. He used the first strategy and preserved the scheme of the ST in the
TT.
7. It was awful thoughts and awful words (p. 180)

(289 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﭼﻪ ﻓﮑﺮ ﺑﺪﯼ ﻭ ﭼﻪ ﺣﺮﻑ ﺑﺪﯼ‬:(TT1)
(326 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﺍﯾﻦ ﻓﮑﺮﻫﺎ ﻭ ﺍﯾﻦ ﺣﺮﻑ ﻫﺎ ﺧﯿﻠﯽ ﻭﺣﺸﺘﻨﺎﮎ ﺑﻮﺩ‬:(TT2)
The repetition of "awful" is preserved in the first rendition and dropped in the second one. The first translator used the
first strategy and the second one used the third strategy. So Daryabandari has preserved the humoristic feature of the ST
in the TT.
8. …thinking and thinking… (p. 176)

(283 .‫ )ﺹ‬...‫ ﻓﮑﺮ ﮐﺮﺩﻧﺪ ﻭ ﻓﮑﺮ ﮐﺮﺩﻧﺪ‬... :(TT1)
(320 .‫ )ﺹ‬...‫ ﻓﮑﺮ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺮﺩﻧﺪ ﻭ ﻧﻘﺸﻪ ﻣﯽ ﮐﺸﯿﺪﻧﺪ‬... :(TT2)
"Thinking" is repeated in the ST. Daryabandari has preserved the repetition in the TT and used the first strategy of
scheme change, but Pirnazar has used "‫ "ﻓﮑﺮﮐﺮﺩﻥ‬and "‫ "ﻧﻘﺸﻪ ﮐﺸﯿﺪﻥ‬for the single word "thinking". He used the third
strategy of scheme change and dropped the repetition. So he could not transfer the humoristic features.
IJALEL 6(6):1-8, 2017 6
9869. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more." (p. 75)
(147 .‫ )ﺹ‬.‫ ﺍﻣﺎ ﺣﺎﻻ ﮐﻪ ﺣﺎﻟﯿﻢ ﺷﺪﻩ ﺑﻮﺩ ﺩﺳﺖ ﺍﺯ ﺳﺮﻡ ﺑﺮﻧﻤﯽ ﺩﺍﺷﺖ ﻭ ﺩﻟﻢ ﺭﺍ ﻣﯽ ﺧﻮﺭﺩ ﻭ ﻣﯽ ﺧﻮﺭﺩ‬:(TT1)
(141 .‫" )ﺹ‬.‫ ﯾﮑﺠﺎ ﻣﻠﺘﻔﺖ ﺷﺪﻩ ﺑﻮﺩﻡ ﮐﻪ ﭼﮑﺎﺭﯼ ﺩﺍﺭﻡ ﻣﯽ ﮐﻨﻢ ﻭ ﺍﯾﻦ ﻋﺬﺍﺑﻢ ﻣﯽ ﺩﺍﺩ‬:(TT2)
"more and more" is a repetition which Twain uses to add humor. Daryabandari has translated it in the best way by
repeating verb "‫ "ﺧﻮﺭﺩﻥ‬two times. He used the first strategy of scheme change and preserved it by repeating a verb. But
Pirnazar has missed repetition in his rendition and dropped it. He used the third strategy of scheme change.
Table 1. The frequency of strategies used in translation of repetition
ST scheme X → ST scheme X → ST scheme X → ST scheme ø →

Scheme change TT scheme X TT scheme Y TT scheme ø TT scheme X
TT1 27 0 3 0
TT2 4 0 26 0
Table 2. The frequency of strategies used in translation of parallelism
ST scheme X → ST scheme X → ST scheme X → ST scheme ø →

Scheme change TT scheme X TT scheme Y TT scheme ø TT scheme X
TT1 20 0 0 0
TT2 4 0 16 0
90
80
70
60
50
40 TT 1
30 TT 2
20
10
0 TT 2
1st strategy TT 1
2nd strategy
3rd strategy
4th strategy
Figure 1. The percentage of strategies used in translation of repetition

IJALEL 6(6):1-8, 2017 7
100
80
60
TT 1
40
TT 2
20
0 TT 2
1st strategy TT 1
2nd strategy
3rd strategy
4th strategy
Figure 4. The percentage of strategies used in translation of parallelism
6. Discussion
As illustrated above two translators transferred parallelism and repetition in different ways. As it is shown in the table1,
30 instances of repetition were identified and investigated. Daryabandari used the first strategy of scheme change which
is ST scheme X → TT scheme X, in 27 instances and the third strategy which is ST scheme X → TT scheme ø, in 3
instances. These results show that he could transfer the humoristic effect of repetition in most cases. It is also shown
that Pirnazar has used the first strategy in 4 instances and the third one in 26 instances. It is clear that Daryabandari is
more faithful to the linguistic form of the ST and the first strategy is the best one in conveying the repetition which is a
humoristic device in this novel. According to table 2, 20 examples of parallelism are investigated. Daryabandari used
the first strategy in all 20 instances but Pirnazar used the first strategy in 4 examples and the second one in 16 examples.
These results show that Daryabandari created the same effect in the TT in all cases but Pirnazar could not transfer the
humoristic effect. Figures 3 and 4 show the percentage of scheme change strategy used in translation of repetition and
parallelism in two different translations of the novel.
7. Conclusion
As mentioned above translation of humor has a significant statue in literary translation. The linguistic and cultural
features of humor make some problems in translation. Because of the unequal structures of source and target language,
the translator encounters difficulties in translating linguistic features of humor. Therefore the investigation on
transference of humor is a significant field in comparative literature. In order to produce a version which contained the
same humorous effects of the original, the translator should be able to utilize creative strategies. According to tables it
can be said that two translators rendered completely different and used different strategies. Generally Daryabandari
could transfer repetition and parallelism to the target language but Pirnazar was not successful in its transference and
could not recreate humor in the target text. The results of this study fostered several points of discussion such as the
problems with transferring humor, the amount of creativity a translator can use and different strategies of scheme
change, which can be used in translating parallelism and repetition as two humoristic tools. The findings of this study
may be useful for translators entering the area of literary translation and humoristic works. The results can also be used
in the evaluation of a translated satirical work.
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MacMillan, London.
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Chesterman, A. (2000), Memetics and Translation Strategies, Retrieved on September 7th, 2013, from:
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Jelliffe, R. A. (1956),Faulkner at Nagano,Kenkyusha Ltd, Tokyo.
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From the Perspective of Reception Aesthetics. University of Wisconsin-Platteville. Retrieved September 3th, 2013,
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http://nbnresolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=nbn%3Ade%3Agbv%3A547-200300472
Nyirubugara, O. (2001),Mark Twain’s Satirical Approach to Mind- 19th Century American Society as Depicted in The
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. University of Bangui. Retrieved on September 1th, 2013, from:
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Rener, F. M. (1989),Interpretation: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler. Atlanta G. A, Amsterdam.
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.‫ﺗﻬﺮﺍﻥ‬،‫ ﭼﺎﭖ ﺳﻮﻡ‬،‫ ﺍﻧﺘﺸﺎﺭﺍﺕ ﺧﻮﺍﺭﺯﻣﯽ‬،‫ ﺗﺮﺟﻤﻪ ﻧﺠﻒ ﺩﺭﯾﺎﺑﻨﺪﺭﯼ‬،‫ ﺳﺮﮔﺬﺷﺖ ﻫﮑﻠﺒﺮﯼ ﻓﯿﻦ‬،1380 ،‫ ﺗﻮﺍﯾﻦ‬،‫ﻣﺎﺭﮎ‬
.‫ ﺗﻬﺮﺍﻥ‬،‫ﭼﺎﭖ ﺷﺸﻢ‬،‫ ﺍﻧﺘﺸﺎﺭﺍﺕ ﺍﻣﯿﺮﮐﺒﯿﺮ‬،‫ﺗﺮﺟﻤﻪ ﻫﻮﺷﻨﮓ ﭘﯿﺮﻧﻈﺮ‬،‫ ﻣﺎﺟﺮﺍﻫﺎﯼ ﻫﺎﮐﻠﺒﺮﯼ ﻓﯿﻦ‬،1389 ،____،____
TESL Trainee Practitioners’ Self Perception of their

Personality Traits and Verbal Communication Skills
Abdul Rashid Abdul Sitra
SMK Taman Medan, KM 12, Jalan Klang Lama, 46100 Petaling, Selangor, Malaysia
E-mail: guptgupt75@gmail.com
Ain Nadzimah Abdullah (Corresponding author)

Department of English, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
E-mail: ain@upm.edu.my

Abstract
The teaching and learning of English as a second language involve many different skills. This study investigates the
relationship between Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) trainee practitioners’ (TPs) personality traits and
their verbal communication skills. The personality traits investigated are the Big Five, while the verbal communication
skills investigated include interpersonal skills, verbal-linguistic skills, motivation, altruism, and self-regulation. This
study involved 277 TESL TPs from four different teacher training institutes in Malaysia. This quantitative study used
questionnaires to investigate both the variables. The findings show that out of the Big Five personality traits, only
openness showed positive relationship to verbal communication. This trait deserves greater attention if students are to
maximise the use of effective communication skills. This study profiles personality traits to examine the relationship of
each trait in relation to communication skills. The findings of this study would be significant for the Higher Education
Ministry of Malaysia and education regulators, apart from the teaching community.
Keywords: Verbal Communication Skills, Personality Traits, Trainee Practitioners, TESL Programme
1. Introduction
Today, good English communication skills are of paramount importance in a globalised world. Hence, ESL teachers in
Malaysia should have the relevant proficiency and skills to teach the English language effectively in schools and
colleges. However, this is not so. In order to rectify this situation, the government has embarked on a policy to recruit
English language teachers from English speaking countries on a contract basis. Thus, Malaysian ESL teachers need to
improve their proficiency and teaching skills so that the teaching and learning of English in schools and colleges can be
improved.
Meiking (2015) reported that the Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) viewed the lack of good English language
and communication skills to be an obstacle blocking fresh graduates from obtaining jobs. Sim (2016) also reported that
a survey by an online employment agency JobStreet.com found that lack of proficiency in the English language, poor
communication skills and poor personality traits were among the top five reasons for graduates’ failure to find
employment in Malaysia. Hairi, Nazuir and Razally (2011) found that local graduates in Malaysia were not able to find
jobs in local and multinational companies because of their lack of soft skills such as communication skills. Although the
teaching profession does not operate in a ‘free’ market scenario as the other professions, the intake and final placement
of teacher trainees are very much controlled according to projected needs in schools. Communication skills are still an
issue as teachers are also expected to have good communication skills in order to be effective educators. In addition,
they should also have the appropriate personality traits that befit the profession. Given the importance of these skills and
traits, this study attempts to investigate the connection between the two sets of broad variables to understand the related
operational phenomenon.
Having soft skills, including communication skills, would mean that graduates must be able to work comfortably with
people from other culture, solve problems creatively, write and speak well, think in a multidisciplinary manner, and
evaluate information critically (Gewertz, 2007). Educational institutions play an integral role in preparing graduates for
professional careers and in discharging their responsibilities effectively through the teaching of communication skills.
These institutions include teacher training institutes which are responsible for producing effective teachers. Generally,
many Malaysian Trainee Practitioners (henceforth, TPs), especially those involved in the Teaching of English as a
Second Language (henceforth, TESL), face problems in communicating effectively in the English Language as English
is not their mother tongue.
IJALEL 6(6):9-18, 2017 10
Likewise, appropriate personality traits are imperative for communication to be successful in the teaching and learning
context. Fatemi, Ganjal and Kafi (2016) in their research on Iranian teachers found that personality traits influenced the
teachers’ communication. A teacher’s job, in fact, is very complex as it involves more than mere teaching. Having the
requisite soft skills, such as good communication skills, is a must for teachers (Barrick & Mount, 1991).
The Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) in Malaysia are responsible for
nurturing future teachers. The teacher training institutes are under the umbrella of the MOE, while universities which
have education faculties are under the purview of the MoHE. However, both these ministries have the same aim, which
is to produce quality teachers. Therefore, the selection process for teacher training institutes employed by both the
ministries is somewhat similar and stringent.
The TPs in this study were the first batch of students enrolled in a new TESL programme and were being trained under
the Bachelor of Teaching English - TESL programme. In order for these participants to enroll in this programme, they
should be in possession of the School Leaving Certificate with at least an A2 grade in their English Language paper. In
addition, they should have performed well overall. Beginning from 2013, anyone who intends to enrol in this
programme should have obtained at least 7As out of 10 subjects (including English). This is to give greater importance
to the teaching profession. However, during interviews, these aspiring teachers are not given any personality traits’ tests
as this has never been a requirement, even though both, the right personality traits and communication skills are
important factors in successful teaching.
Since the selected trainees do not undergo a personality test, they are often left on their own to gauge their personality
traits. It could be surmised that the trainees are quite unaware of their own personalities, let alone the connection
between communication skills and personality traits. Having insights into the related elements will enable teachers or
educators to understand the links and lead them into modifying their behaviour or communication skills where
necessary, to suit the communicative event in the educational environment. According to Hamacheck (1985), there is
probably no other profession where one’s personality traits are as important a factor as in teaching since they contribute
significantly to creating the interpersonal medium within which learning occurs.
Thus, it is generally perceived that teachers’ personality traits influence students’ learning, which in turn could affect
communication skills as they form the channel through which learning is imparted to students. Personality traits,
without doubt, affect teachers’ mode of teaching and the approaches they take to interact with their students in the
classroom. Davis (2005) concludes that commitment, compassion, and positive attitudes (part and parcel of personality
traits) of teachers affect students’ learning and their achievement. Preliminary studies in the field of teaching have
found associations between teachers’ beliefs and attitudes and their effectiveness in their interactions with students
(Howes, Burchinal, Pianta, Bryant, Early, Clifford, & Barbarin, 2008). Chu (2003) has also opined that personality
traits affect a teacher’s behaviour, attitude, and classroom management as personality is central to behaviour, attitude,
and thinking. Additionally, Cloniger (2000) defines personality traits as characteristics that distinguish one person from
the other and cause a person to behave more or less consistently. Keeping these postulations in mind, it is noted that,
although all teachers are trained identically using similar current methods and approaches, they may not teach the same
way, as their approaches could vary due to variations in individual personality traits.
A problem may arise when a teacher is unable to communicate effectively and appropriately either owing to a lack of
proficiency or the teacher has been influenced by his or her personality traits. Barrick & Mount, 1991; Joinson, 2004;
Saunders & Chester, 2008 support this view that there is also convincing evidence that communication skills are also
linked to and influenced by personality traits. Teachers sometimes get into trouble with the school management when
they say things that are not appropriate to their students, colleagues and sometimes even to the school administration.
This problem may occur due to teachers’ personality. Henson and Chambers (2002) also opine that teachers’ personality
traits influence their interpersonal skills. Taking this into consideration, this study looks at the relationship between
TPs’ personality traits and their communication skills.
1.1 Aim of the Study
The aim of this study is to first identify the personality traits and the level of communication skills of the TESL TPs.
Thereafter, their relationships in terms of the sub traits and communication skills are explored to reveal the finer aspects
of the connection.
The research question was formulated to define the scope of this study, and the hypotheses support aspects of the
research question. The research question and hypotheses are as follows:
How do personality traits’ correlate with the verbal communication skills of the TESL trainee practitioners?
The research question is further supported by five hypotheses. These hypotheses test the relationship between trainee
practitioners’ personality traits and their verbal communication skills.
Hypothesis 1
NullH0:β1= 0 (There is no relationship between openness and verbal communication).
AlternateHA: β1≠0 (There is a relationship between openness and verbal communication).
Hypothesis 2
NullH0:β1= 0 (There is no relationship between agreeableness and verbal communication).
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AlternateHA:β1≠0 (There is a relationship between agreeableness and verbal communication).
Hypothesis 3
NullH0:β1=0 (There is no relationship between conscientiousness and verbal communication).
AlternateHA:β1≠0 (There is a relationship between conscientiousness and verbal communication).
Hypothesis 4
NullH0: β1= 0 (There is no relationship between extraversion and verbal communication).
AlternateHA: β1≠0 (There is a relationship between extraversion and verbal communication).
Hypothesis 5
NullH0:β1= 0 (There is no relationship between neuroticism and verbal communication).
AlternateHA: β1≠0 (There is a relationship between neuroticism and verbal communication).
2. Literature Review
2.1 Verbal Communication Skills
Norazila (2010) conceptualised communication skills as the exchange of information, facts, feelings, and emotions
between individuals which results in achieving a certain objective. Successful communication occurs when the receiver
perceives the meaning of the message as being similar to the intended meaning of the source. It has been said that
communication and oral presentation skills of undergraduates acquired during their studies have positive effects on their
later work performance (Mason, Williams, & Cranmer, 2009).
In today’s world, good communication skills are considered fundamental and essential to the workplace. Efficient and
effective communication skills in everyday work situations are important when communicating with superiors,
subordinates, peers, and most importantly, clients or customers (Yuksel-Sahin, 2008).
Communication plays an important role in the teaching and learning process as knowledge is transferred through
it(Sanders & Wiseman, 1990). Communication is the life blood of schools as it links individuals in the organisation.
The meaning between the intended and the received message, if distorted because of poor communication skills, may
cause problems even for the best teachers (Lunenburg & Ornstein 1996). Communication skills can be described as the
essential key to effective and successful teaching.
This is supported by West and Cannon (1988) and Griffin, Dettmer, Thurston and Dyck (1996), who view
communication as among the most important skills for educators to possess. This is because effective classroom
communication ensures that teaching and learning take place. Therefore, during lessons, students will benefit from the
teachers’ good verbal communication skills (Ismail & Idris, 2009). Teachers and students can become frustrated when
there is a breakdown in communication. The negative impact would be that the students may begin to play truant by
skipping uninspiring lessons and in the classroom, they would become a problem to the teachers and other students.
Teachers too would feel the pressure when the students lose interest in their lessons and start to lose concentration in
class. Atan (1988) forwards three main aspects that contribute to quality teaching: teachers’ personality, knowledge, and
communication skills.
Communication skills of teachers are not only essential for teaching but also for collaborating with other teachers.
According to Berry, Johnson, and Montgomery (2005), teachers need good communication skills to collaborate with
each other to improve teaching skills, and this can be achieved by sharing information. Limited communication skills
prevent teachers from coming to a consensus on matters concerning the students (Schmoker, 1999). Thus, modern
teaching involves a collaborative teaching style, peer tutoring, and many more approaches which require the use of a lot
of communication skills among the teachers.
2.1.1 Verbal Drivers
Verbal communication skills are divided into five drivers for this study. Each driver is important as it represents the
reason why teachers’ communicate. The communication drivers in this study include interpersonal skills, verbal
linguistic skills, motivation, altruism, and self-regulation.
It could be said that verbal linguistic intelligence plays a major role in communication. It has been defined as sensitivity
to spoken and written language, and the ability to learn languages and to use language to attain goals (Gardner, 2011).
Gardner adds that this intelligence includes the ability to effectively use language to express oneself rhetorically or
poetically. He also says linguistically intelligent people tend to be more skilled in explaining and speaking. These are
the kinds of skills that are vital for teachers, especially language teachers, to have. Generally, verbal-linguistic
intelligence is considered by Gardner (1993) as the most widely and most democratically shared skill across the human
species.
TESL TPs are in a profession which requires higher interpersonal intelligence. This is because their jobs require them to
deal with many different groups of people, who, at any given time, may have different emotions, intentions, or needs.
Today, teacher-centered teaching has evolved into learner-centered teaching. This provides an opportunity for co-
operative language learning, which is in the domain of interpersonal intelligence (Chen & Gardner, 2005).
In the area of second language (L2) learning, it has always been recognised that motivation is a pertinent factor in
determining the success of L2 learners as it is recognised as a driving force in achievement (Cheng & Dörnyei, 2007).
IJALEL 6(6):9-18, 2017 12
Motivation can be classified as intrinsic (internal) or extrinsic (external). This study is concerned with the extrinsic
factor: teachers’ ability to motivate students through communication.
Putting other people’s welfare before our own, without any selfish motive, is an act of altruism. Wasko and Faraj (2000)
identify altruism as the intention to help others. For Somashekhar, Pundhir, and Saxena (2011), altruism is actually an
intentional behaviour to help others without expecting any material gains or recognition in return. Costello (2001) says
that altruism is manifested in the action done and is not just a felt sense. It is expected of teachers to portray and
communicate this virtue. In this study, altruism has been included as a driver to determine whether teachers employ this
verbal communication skill when interacting with different categories of people.
Personal, behavioural and environmental processes have been identified by Bandura (1986) as the three main elements
which affect an individuals’ self-regulation. Bandura further elaborated that individual knowledge, meta-cognition, and
postulated aims were part of the personal process of self-regulation. According to him, behavioural process includes
self-observation, self-judgement, and self-reaction. Environmental processes include verbal persuasion and modelling.
All these elements can be connected to the teacher’s self-regulation. A concrete example of exercising self-regulation is
when teachers consciously seek to know whether students are able to understand a given lesson before attempting to
start another fresh topic. It is clear that teachers today are expected to play multiple roles within and outside of the
school environment.
2.2 Personality Traits
There is a considerable body of research which indicates that individual differences such as personality traits play a
significant role in the learning and teaching process. For teachers, personality traits can mediate the relationship
between students’ behaviour and the teachers’ approach towards the students (Teven, 2007). Therefore, it is deemed
essential for teachers to incorporate the consideration of unique aspects of students’ learning into their teaching and try
to facilitate the process of learning based on the styles and modes by which learners learn more easily and effectively
(Tevan, 2007). In one of the few studies investigating personality and its relation to teaching, distinguished teachers
were seen to differ from typical teachers in their tendency to be more optimistic, active, imaginative and sensitive
(Rushton, Morgan, & Richard, 2007). Wubbels and Levy (1991) support this view that there is a strong relationship
between teachers’ affective traits and learners’ emotional development.
A well-used measure of personality traits is the Big Five Inventory (BFI), which consists of 44 items devised by John,
Donahue, and Kentle in 1991. It defines personality traits in terms of five broad elements, namely Openness,
Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. The BFI uses short phrases to elicit information on
the ‘Big Five’ traits. Although the phrases are short, they do not jeopardise the content that taps information on the
construct properties therein (Benet-Martinez & John, 1998). As a point of elaboration, teachers with openness as a
dominant personality trait are creative and have intellectual curiosity and are aware of other people’s feelings.
Conscientious teachers have the tendency for self-discipline, to act dutifully and aim for achievement against measures
or outside expectations. Teachers who are extroverts enjoy being with people and are often perceived as being full of
energy. A person who is generally considerate, friendly, generous, helpful, and willing to compromise his or her
interests for the benefit of others comes under the umbrella of agreeableness. Finally, neuroticism, is, however,
characterised by negative emotions like anger, anxiety, or depression.
Outstanding teachers may portray a distinct personality profile (Ripski, LoCasale-Crouch, & Decker, 2011) in order to
ease the teaching and learning process, especially when interacting with students who have communication and
emotional issues. Research within classrooms indicate that the interactions teachers share with students in the classroom
directly contribute to students’ success (Hamre & Pianta, 2005).
3. Methodology
3.1 Instrumentation
This study adopts a quantitative approach in its research design in which the researcher looks at the pending issue raised
in the research question and explains why something happens, which may require an explanation on how one variable
affects the other (Creswell, 2012). The study employs questionnaires as an instrument to gather information, namely the
communication skills and personality traits questionnaires. The inventory measures the Big Five personality traits of the
teacher trainees through the use of 44 items which includes openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion,
and neuroticism as the domains. On the other hand, communication skills are measured through the use of the
Communication Skills Questionnaire (focusing on the use of English), which was adapted from a PhD thesis by Wan-
Gould (2010). The questionnaire was sectionalised into five different communication drivers: altruism, interpersonal
intelligence, motivation, verbal linguistic intelligence, and self-regulation. Both the questionnaires used a five-point
Likert scale as a measurement, ranging from 1 (disagree strongly) to 5 (agree strongly). The communication skills
questionnaire was divided into two sections, with the first section eliciting the TPs’ background information. The
second section investigated the TPs’ self-perception of their level of verbal communication skills.
Necessary changes were made to the questionnaire after a pilot test was conducted. Following feedback from the
respondents, the font size was increased from 10 to 12 to help participants read the questionnaires clearly. The time
allocated was also increased to allow the participants to adequately complete the questionnaire. The original
questionnaire was designed for event planners and as such the choice of words needed to be changed as follows: “I have
close working relationships with my customers and team members” was changed to “I have close working relationships
with my students and colleagues”.
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A total of 27 items were constructed in the questionnaire to determine the five communication drivers. Each
communication driver was evaluated by a number of items. Each driver was deemed to have equal importance to
represent the reason as to why teachers communicate. Teachers communicate for various reasons and with various
groups of interlocutors. However, the reasons selected for this study are closely related to the teaching and learning
environment.
3.2 Data Collection
The research was conducted in four Malaysian teacher training institutes. Consent was obtained from the relevant
parties, such as the Ministry of Education Malaysia which is the governing body of the teacher training institutes and
also from the heads of the individual institutes. The researcher personally administered the questionnaires to the
participants. First, the communication skills questionnaire was administered to all the 277 students in the four teacher
training institutes. The TPs were given 30 minutes to complete the communication skills questionnaire; however, most
of the participants completed the questionnaire in about 20 minutes. Once the communication skills questionnaire was
collected, the personality traits questionnaire was distributed to the TPs. The TPs were also given 30 minutes to answer,
but they took less than 20 minutes to complete the questionnaire.
3.3 Participants
The 277 respondents in this study were third year TESL trainee practitioner (TP) undergraduates. These TPs were
considered suitable for this study as they had been exposed to the school environment in their various practicum
training programmes and they had covered all the major courses in their TESL programmes. Thus, the participants were
aware of the school scenarios and were also theoretically equipped to teach the English language in schools.
3.4 Personality Traits Dominance Steps
The following calculation method was used to determine TPs’ dominant personality traits.
Step 1- TPs’ responses from the questionnaire were summated according to the traits in SPSS.
Step 2- The summated scores were transferred to Excel.
Step 3- The summated score from each trait was divided according to the number of items in each trait to obtain the
average score for each respondent.
Step 4- The maximum average score for each trait and respondent was identified through the “MAX” command. The
highest average score among the traits for each respondent was identified through “MATCH” command.
Step 5- A frequency analysis was then carried out to determine the dominant personality trait and its percentage.
Steps one to five analysed the dominant personality traits of the TPs. The aggregated scores were summed up and the
highest average was identified, which determined the dominant personality of the TPs. Two types of statistical tools
were combined to analyse the data. First, Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21 (IBM Corp,
2012) was used to analyse the data on the personality traits. Microsoft Excel (2007) was used to calculate the dominant
personality traits of the TPs. The combination of both the tools was to facilitate the analysis effectively as the Excel
(2007) programme was better managed by the researcher.
4. Results
This section answers the above research question and also addresses the hypotheses. A total of five tables are presented
together with this discussion. TPs’ performance in the verbal drivers are first presented and discussed in this section.
This will help readers to obtain an overview of the comparative dominance of the verbal drivers among the participants.
In the verbal communication questionnaire, a total of 27 questions were asked.
4.1 Descriptive Statistics of TPs’ Verbal Communication Skills
The table below shows TPs’ self-perception of their verbal communication skills in English. The mean results indicate
the different levels of TPs’ strength in the skills evaluated.
Table 1. TPs’ Self Perception (TPSP) of their Verbal Communication Skills
Verbal Drivers TPSP Mean Std. Deviation
Interpersonal Intelligence 3.83 0.52
Motivation 3.79 0.53
Verbal Linguistic Intelligence 3.73 0.59
Altruism 3.67 0.51
Self-Regulation 3.59 0.51
TPSP – Trainee Practitioners Self Perception
From Table 1, it is evident that the difference between the mean scores is very minimal for all the components. Mean
scores provide an avenue for comparison as computed and tabulated in Table 1. The maximum average mean score is
five for each of the drivers. It can be observed that the mean scores are quite high as they are close to a score of four.
IJALEL 6(6):9-18, 2017 14
Thus, the skills are perceived to be more than satisfactory as a mean score of four is considered to be relatively high and
a score of five would show the attainment of the highest level.
From the table, the highest mean can be seen in interpersonal intelligence. This indicates that most of the TPs were
helpful, friendly, and understanding (Maulana, Opdenakker, den Brok & Bosker, 2011). Numerous studies have also
found that teachers rated themselves high on interpersonal communication such as providing support to students and
encouraging students to be involved, which is equivalent to motivating them (Fraser, 1982, 1986; Wubbels,
Brekelmans,& Hooymayers, 1992). The lowest mean can be seen in self-regulation. Though this has the lowest mean
score it is still satisfactory. The success of TPs is very much influenced by their self-regulation strategies (Hwang &
Vrongistinos, 2002).
The standard deviations in Table 1 do not show much variation. This shows that the answers did not deviate much.
However, only verbal linguistics shows a slightly higher standard deviation at 0.59, which could mean that this
construct is more varied among the TPs.
Table 2. TPs’ Perception of the Various Properties of Verbal Communication Skills
TPPSVCS
Mean 101.03
Median 101.00
Std. Deviation 12.54
Skewness -0.25
Kurtosis 0.28
Minimum 63
Maximum 132
Number of items 27
TPPSVCS – TPs’ Perception of Self Verbal Communication Skills
Table 2 presents data describing the TPs’ perception of self-verbal communication skills (TPPSVCS). The figures
provided are combinations of the five drivers. The table displays a composite score for all of the communication
variables. Twenty-seven items were used to measure these variables. The mean value of 101.03 and median of 101.00
are almost the same. The standard deviation is 12.54 which indicate a varied distribution in the responses of the
respondents.
In general, the skewness is close to “0”, which produces a normal bell shaped curve. The kurtosis is also close to “0”
which indicates a normal curve. This generally implies that the data is normally distributed and we can proceed with
inferential statistics rather than non-parametric statistics.
4.2 Descriptive Statistics of TPs’ Personality Traits
Table 3. TPs’ Self Perception (TPSP) of their Personality Traits
Personality Traits Mean Median Std. Deviation Skewness Kurtosis Min Max
Agreeableness 33.74 34 4.01 -0.07 -0.10 24 44
Extraversion 26.45 26 4.53 0.25 -0.04 14 40
Conscientiousness 28.57 29 4.46 0.09 0.27 15 42
Openness 35.28 35 4.28 0.04 -0.25 24 49
Neuroticism 24.18 24 5.24 -0.07 0.04 09 40
No. of items x 5 marks = Max Score
Agreeableness : 9 items x 5marks = 45 marks
Extraversion : 8 items x 5marks = 40 marks
Conscientiousness : 9 items x 5marks = 45 marks
Openness : 10 items x 5marks =50 marks
Neuroticism : 8 items x 5marks = 40 marks
The next set of data was obtained from the personality traits questionnaire. Table 3 provides descriptive statistics for the
traits analysed in the study. Descriptive statistics are used to describe the basic features of the data in a study. They
provide simple summaries about the sample and the measures (William, 2006).
The table establishes the normality distribution of data. The maximum score for each trait is shown below. As can be
seen, the maximum score depends on the number of questions in each variable. The minimum (min) and maximum
(max) scores in the Table 3 indicate the scores obtained by the participants for each trait. The maximum scores obtained
in each trait are similar or close to the maximum scores possible. This indicates that at least one or more participants
obtained the projected maximum score. The mean and median are similar, which indicates that there are no extreme
results.
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The standard deviation shows the behaviour of the responses. The biggest variation of responses comes from
neuroticism. This indicates that the TPs’ responses differ from each other. The skewness result was very close to “0”,
which indicates minimal skewness. The kurtosis shows results close to “0”. This means that the distribution produces
fewer and less extreme outliers.
Table 4 illustrates the dominant personality traits of the respondents. Costa and McCrae (1995) found that personality
trait composition is blemished by the fact that the domains themselves are not mutually exclusive as when some traits
appear within two or more domains of the personality traits. A person may have all the traits in him, but one of the traits
m as the dominant personality trait. (?) This means that TPs have specific personalities which are projected as more
pronounced in comparison with the rest. This is because every TP has all the personality traits, but one of the traits is
dominant or stronger than the other.
Table 4. TESL TPs’ Personality Trait Frequency
Personality Traits No of Respondents Percentage
Agreeableness 143 51
Openness 52 19
Extraversion 37 13
Neuroticism 35 13
Conscientiousness 10 4
One hundred and forty-three respondents (51%) showed that they have agreeableness as their most dominant
personality trait. This may be due to influence of culture where they are always taught to give in and be humble, which
fits the personality domain of agreeableness. Kosnin and Lee (2008) also found in their study on secondary school
teachers that agreeableness was the dominant personality trait in most of the teachers’ and neuroticism the least. On the
other hand, only 4% of the respondents were found to have conscientiousness as their dominant personality trait, which
had the lowest number of respondents with this personality. Self-discipline and to act dutifully and aim for achievement
against measures or outside expectations is a big responsibility for anyone. Fifty-two respondents (19%) out of the 277
respondents illustrated openness as their main personality trait, which was the second highest trait. Although openness
is found to be the second highest personality trait in this study, a study on prospective teachers’ personalities in Punjab,
Pakistan by Arief, Rashid, Tahira and Akhter (2012) found that out of the 100 prospective teachers, openness was found
to be the dominant personality trait. Extraversion was found in 37 respondents (13%) showing it as their main
personality trait. Being sociable is one of the main domains of this personality. As most of the respondents are
Malaysian females they are bound by Asian culture. Thus, it’s safe to say that the score is acceptable. Thirty-five
respondents (13%) showed themselves as having the trait of neuroticism, which is a negative personality trait. Watson,
Clark, and Harkness (1994) opined that those who exhibit high traits of neuroticism are inclined towards expressing
more negative emotions and exhibiting emotional instability and stress reaction. Thus, they become more susceptible to
burn-out, which increases the risk of developing psychopathology.
4.3 Relationship between TPs’ Big Five and their Verbal Communication Skills
Table 5 presents the results of the Chi square analysis, which is a univariate analysis, to show the relationship between
the TPs’ personality traits and their verbal communication skills.
Table 5. TPs’ Personality Traits and their Relation to Verbal Communication Skills
Value Df Sig. (2-tailed) Value Approx. Sig.
Agreeableness
Pearson Chi-Square 1195.67 1200 0.53 Phi 2.08 0.53
Likelihood Ratio 673.83 1200 1 Cramer’s V 0.46 0.53
Extraversion
Conscientiousness
Openness
Neuroticism
Number of Valid Cases = 277
IJALEL 6(6):9-18, 2017 16
Table 5 illustrates the association between the TPs’ verbal communication and personality traits. From the table, the
only personality trait that shows a significant association with communication skills is openness, which is not the most
dominant trait. In a study by Zhang (2007) on the correlation of Chinese teachers’ personality traits and their teaching it
was found that only openness was positively correlated. The significance value is 0.01, which is lower than 0.05.
Openness implies that the students regard themselves as imaginative, intelligent, original, insightful, curious, and
sophisticated, among others traits. TPs with openness as their dominant personality trait tend to communicate verbally
more than those with other dominant personality traits. The other personality traits were not significantly associated
with the TPs’ verbal communication skills. Job (2004) found in his study that agreeableness, neuroticism and openness
were negatively correlated with teachers’ effectiveness which included teachers’ communication skills. Buela and
Mamman (2015), however, differed on this issue as in their study they found agreeableness to have the highest
correlation. In other words, this could imply that TPs with agreeableness as their most dominant personality trait may be
more accepting, but it does not manifest in the greater use of the English language in communicating. Hence, the
hypothesis on the positive relationship between openness and verbal communication is accepted. As for the other
hypotheses, the null is accepted and the alternate is rejected.
5. Discussion and Conclusion
As for the verbal communication drivers, they all had mean scores of above 3.5, which are all reasonably high. The
highest self-perception score for the verbal communication drivers can be seen in interpersonal intelligence (3.83) and
the lowest score in self-regulation (3.59). The mean scores are similar to each other, and this may indicate that the TPs
generally regarded themselves as having a good command of verbal communication skills. There is also a possibility
that the drivers are not mutually exclusive, and they are intertwined to a certain extent. Though each driver is defined
exclusively, the drivers do converge to a certain degree. However, as teachers, the scores indicate that there is still room
for improvement. They should strive to be excellent communicators with scores of 4.0 and above to indicate a marked
distinction in their profession insofar as the use of communication skills is concerned. As the literature implies, teachers
must excel in their communication skills as this is paramount in effective teaching. Thus, TESL teachers should set their
goals to a higher level in their ability to communicate in the English language.
The results of the univariate analysis also show that out of the five personality traits, only one of the traits showed a
significant value in its relationship to TPs’ verbal communication, which is openness (rated only by 19% as being
dominant). If the stand is taken that communication skills are core skills in successful teaching, then the TPs would
want to pay attention to this personality traits by exploiting to the fullest its relation to the ability to communicate. In
other words, openness needs to be more dominant as a personality trait. While agreeableness is highly valued, it would
also make sense to explore how this could further enhance the use of communication skills. Perhaps there is a path that
could be explored to investigate how the sub skills of agreeableness could be functionally and consciously translated
into the use of the English language to convey the trait of agreeableness. This suggestion could also apply to the other
traits under investigation as a manner of enhancing the relationship between personality traits and communication skills.
Generally, the TPs rated themselves as having a reasonable level of awareness of their personality traits and the
questionnaire could be an eye opener for self-evaluation and reflection. Also, they could explore more about the
constructs in a conscious effort to improve on the traits so that students and teachers benefit from the exercise.
Personality traits may be viewed as a composite behaviour. Though each respondent may have a dominant personality,
Costa and McRae (1995) found that personality traits are not mutually exclusive, which means the traits may influence
one another.
The teaching profession and in particular, teachers, are always under scrutiny about their teaching skills which include
their knowledge, communication skills and their personalities. This could put them under a lot of pressure. Constant
improvement is necessarily the clarion call if teaching is to be effective. Improvements to the teaching profession can
only take place by the teachers’ own initiative and government initiative. TPs need to acquire and possess good
communication skills and develop or enhance their personality traits positively in order to communicate effectively.
This study has attempted to investigate the relationship between personality traits and communication skills. The study
also illustrates that there are further innovations in education to be explored. A change in mindset is needed so that
teachers will be able to further develop their repertoire of skills.
The study has provided an opportunity for teachers to assess their personality traits and communication skills. More
importantly, it opens an avenue for discussing the relationship between personality traits and communication skills.
With this awareness, the teaching profession can definitely be enhanced with the addition of relevant knowledge
towards the ultimate aim of raising the standard of teaching and learning. Currently, the Ministry of Education in
Malaysia is embarking on an ambitious change and so no stone should be left unturned in the quest for positive and
meaningful change.
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The Impact of Presenting Semantically Related Clusters of

New Words on Iranian Intermediate EFL learners'
Vocabulary Acquisition
Saiede Shiri (Corresponding author)
English Department, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Iran
E-mail: saiede.shiri17@gmail.com
Ehsan Rezvani
English Department, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Iran
E-mail: rezvani_ehsan_1982@yahoo.com

Abstract
Teaching vocabulary in semantically related sets use as a common practice by EFL teachers. The present study tests the
effectiveness of this techniques by comparing it with semantically unrelated clusters as the other technique on Iranian
intermediate EFL learners. In the study three intact classes of participants studying at Isfahan were presented with a set
of unrelated words through “ 504 Absolutely Essential words”, a set of related words through “The Oxford Picture
Dictionary “, and the control group were presented some new words through six texts from “Reading Through
Interaction”. Comparing of the results indicated that, while both techniques help the learners to acquire new sets of the
words, presenting words in semantically unrelated sets seems to be more effective.
Keywords: Semantically related clusters, semantically unrelated clusters, vocabulary acquisition, and interference
1. Introduction
The undeniable importance of vocabulary and vocabulary teaching in second language acquisition (SLA) has been
proved. Without words, expressing a wide range of meaning cannot happen in meaningful ways (MC McCarthy, 1992).
On the other hand, some other skills such as listening comprehension, reading or language use hinge on the knowledge
of vocabulary. Therefore, it is necessary to find a proper and effective ways of teaching it. Investigating such ways is
necessary to enhance second language vocabulary acquisition. According to Meara (1993), vocabulary acquisition
which had been neglected in language learning has reached to a growing publication area. Two prevalent methods of
presenting new words to learners are semantically related sets and semantically unrelated ones. However, the usefulness
of presenting vocabularies in semantic clusters has not yet been empirically proved and the effects of semantically
unrelated sets are still under investigation. Previous studies have reported a lot of semantic confusion errors in adults'
vocabulary retention and recall, when the words had been presented in semantic clusters. Older adults also showed the
ability to use context information in more meaningful situations and encoding information less distinctively (Craik &
Simon, 1980; Rabinowitz et al., 1982). This study will compare the presentation of L2 vocabularies in the following
ways: semantically related way and semantically unrelated one, and it also compares the effectiveness of the so-called
ways on vocabulary acquisition of young adult learners. It also aims to help curriculum designers of this level to choose
the most effective way of presenting new words to learners which mostly help them retain words longer in their mental
lexicon.
In the semantic cluster words carry the meaning of a related semantic group (colors) and the same semantically forms
(nouns), whereas in the thematic content and may be from different word classes (adjectives, nouns, and verbs) but are
still related to the special concept of the frog's environment and behavior thematically.
The idea of presenting new words and chunks in semantically related clusters has its root and origin in educational
psychology. It seems the earliest and most influential of semantic clustering technique belongs to Ausuble. As a
psycholinguist’ he suggested (Ausuble, 1968), that superordinate concepts can be presented in advance in order to
activate the existing schema in the mental lexicon, which prepares the organization of new lexicon into those pre-
activated slits.
1.1 Statement of the Problem
Language is a multi-dimensional subject and include components. One important component of all languages is
vocabulary in which having good knowledge improves learners' comprehension. According to the instrumentalist view
of Schreuder and Welten (1993), vocabulary knowledge is a major prerequisite and causative factor in comprehension.
IJALEL 6(6):19-27, 2017 20
For many years, designing English vocabulary textbooks has been based on presenting words in semantic clustering for
learners in all ages. Based on the working experiences of the researcher and also that of other teachers, Iranian EFL
learners have a lot of difficulty in acquiring and retaining vocabularies. Beside the use, the most important goals of
teaching vocabulary are acquiring and retaining them, so that they can still be available after the course ends. As the
results of previous studies (Erten & Tekin, 2008; Nation, 2009; Tinkham, 1993; Waring, 1997), show and according to
the controversial point of views regarding the effectiveness of these techniques, it is necessary to conduct a research in
this area to reach to a general agreement on which method is better for young adult learners who are studying English at
the intermediate level. Furthermore, the impacts of semantically related and semantically unrelated presentation of
words on learners will be gained.
1.2 Research Questions
1. Does semantic clustering of words exert a significant effect on the acquisition of vocabulary by Iranian intermediate
EFL learners?
2. To what extent does presentation of words in semantically related or unrelated sets facilitate Iranian elementary EFL
learners' vocabulary learning?
1.3 Research Hypothesis
Semantic clustering of words does not exert a significant effect on the acquisition of vocabulary by Iranian EFL
learners.
Ediger (1999) believes in some reasons to guide learners enrich their vocabulary knowledge: Learners can express their
ideas with more clarity if they have a rich scope of vocabulary. Learners who work in English work places can improve
the quality of their proficiencies in case of having good knowledge of vocabulary. Individuals will be more proficient in
other skills such as speaking and reading. Developed vocabulary improves individuals' power of expressing themselves
and consequently their personality. By having a rich vocabulary scope, learners enthusiastically participate in
communication with other people, whether a writing communication or a speaking one.
The review of Folse (2004) investigated teaching vocabulary on semantically related sets, and said grouping of words
can actually impede the learning of vocabulary. Nation (2000, 2005) recommends the teaching of high-frequency
vocabulary. Hill (1999) points out the fluency which is the common problem of most learners. He believes that as
"collocational competence" of learners is limited, we should work on the vocabulary they have already got.
Regarding the discussion of meaning, Pica (1994) claimed that negotiated cooperation may be beneficial in learning
lexicon. Long (1996) also argued that at least in the realm of vocabulary and morphology, negative feedback obtained
in discussion works may facilitate L2 development. Mackey (2000) found out the type of interactional feedback, which
illustrated a promotion in lexical acquisition. According to what Ellis, Tanaka, & Yamazaki (1994) established, better
comprehension and receptive acquisition of vocabulary is the result of negotiation.
A comprehensive vocabulary development program meets different needs of learners among which one can mention the
following (Anderson & Nagy, 1991):
It teaches the strategic words to academic success.
It trains learners how to be independent word learners through systematic procedures.
Smith (1995) believes that an effective vocabulary instruction depends on the relationships between words and
concepts. Concepts are the basic units of thought and belief for which words are the labels. He declares a familiar
concept that attracts more corresponding words. In this regard, Christen and Murphy (1919) contend that new
information will be integrated with what the learners already know. Smith, C. (1997) asserts that when learners are
directly involved in constructing the meaning of words rather than just memorizing the definitions, they learn more
effectively. Some of his recommended techniques to instruct vocabulary are:
 Webbing, which involves students' personal perspectives to develop vocabulary in the classroom.
 Semantic association, through which students brainstorm a list of words associated with a familiar word.
 Semantic mapping, through which words are grouped into categories and arranged on the visual "map" to clear
the relationship among them.
 Semantic feature analysis, through which the grouping of words is according to certain features, such as
similarities and differences.
 Analogies, that is making relationships among meanings of words. Course book writers are driven to provide
semantically related vocabulary columns/components mostly as they consider the communicative needs of the
students in a certain context.
Course books are provided into various units which respond to any situation students might find it necessary to
communicate (e.g. shopping).The claim is supported by Modern Psychologists that believed to fragments of information
which are stored and loaded up in the mind separately.
IJALEL 6(6):19-27, 2017 21
There exists the basis of agreement among linguists, that word not only does not come separately, but this refers to the
other related terms and concepts (Levin & Pinker, 1991; Taylor, 1995, p.83). Psychologists believed that words are not
kept in the mental lexicon as a single chunk, but they construct clusters in coupled concepts. In this regard, Grandy
(1992) asserted that semantic field includes a set of one or more contrast sets and possibly permutation relations such
as:
"At most one covering term does not occur as an element of a contrast set in the semantic field. Except for the
main term mentioned in (1), any expression that occurs in a contrast set with an element of the semantic field is
also in the field. Thus, a semantic field can be a semantic field." (p.109).
According to Aitchison (1994), the arrangement of lexical units of the same semantic category is in complex network in
which every single concept links to other related notions. The power of related words in strengthening one another's
meaning and facilitating the acquisition of words in association with each other is not deniable. Recalling those words
which are related to each other is also very easy.
Grandy (1999), Hashemi and Godasiaei (2005), Haycraft (1993), Seal (1991), Stoller and Grabe (1995), Wharton and
Race (1999), are the authors who have supported presenting new words in semantically related clusters as the most
effective way to teach vocabulary that is a reflection of the natural word organization in mental lexicon (Aitchison,
1994, 1996).
For many years the majority of L2 course books introduced new words in semantic groups. Some textbooks consider
the effectiveness of introducing new words in semantically related clusters. For example learners are expected to learn
"jobs" in Headway Elementary (Sears and Soars, 1993), necessary items in a classroom in Vistas (Brown, 1991), family
members in Express Way (Molinsky & Bliss, 1996), clothes in the New Cambridge English Course (Swan & Walter,
1990).
As Erten and Tekin (2008) believe, semantically related offering new words has a lot of adverse and accordant theories.
Lehrer (1974) who introduced semantic field theory advocates the approach of organizing and presenting L2
vocabularies. According to Wilcox and Medina (2013), in this theory instead of storing words randomly, they should be
stored based on the semantic link between them. Therefore, we feed learners' mental lexicon with abundant lexical links
and networks which have been made of same concepts.
Hashemi and Gowdasiaei (2005) took the pedagogical implication of this theory and state that those vocabularies which
are presented in semantic groups resemble those in the mental lexicon of learners. Semantic clustering is also supported
by componential analysis by Nida (1975) in structural linguistics. The importance of deconstructing words into their
separate semantic components is emphasized.
Haycraft (1993) argues that learning an entry can be reinforced by the learning of the other one. He analogizes learning
an unrelated set of words to a tree with no trunk and branches but only leaves. He claims that teaching vocabularies that
have common semantic field is easier because learners will make a certain pattern of interrelated words in their minds.
Houston (2001) argued the basis of human learning and memory presented in experimental, theoretical, and
psychological researches. He demonstrated that retention processes are not separated from the acquisition and transfer
part of the overall process of learning. According to Houston, learning process is defined as "a relatively permanent
change in behavior potentiality that occurs as a result of reinforced practice" (2001, p.14). Houston (2001) analyzed that
in the processing approach, "the durability of a memory trace is determined by the depth to which it is
processed"(p.270). Semantic network models of memory and retention deal with the storage of semantic and
meaningful input.
In a study administered by Abdollahzadeh (2009), the effectiveness of applying semantic mapping approach in
vocabulary instruction to EFL learners with different perceptual modalities versus traditional method was examined. To
determine learners' modality types, a modified version of Reid's (1987) questionnaire which was about learning style
was employed, and the results showed the remarkable impact of semantic mapping in empowering vocabulary learning
of EFL learners, in contrast to traditional approach.
Furthermore, Bourne, Healy, and Schneider (1996) recorded that initial learners bear semantic clusters in mind better
than unrelated ones. But long term tests and long term time have indicated completely different results.
In an experiment conducted by Tinkham (1993), two lists of three semantically related words and semantically
unrelated ones were presented to the learners. Testing subjects by trail-to-criterion tests revealed that they learned
semantically related words with more difficulty and slower pace than unrelated list. Thus, his research supports
organizing words into nonrelated or thematically related groups. The same experiment was repeated by Waring (1997).
He conducted his experiment by two lists of six semantically related words and semantically unrelated ones to
determine which of these sets are learned faster. The conclusion was the same. According to Finkbeiner and Nicol
(2003), as the similarities between clusters items decreases, possible interference effects reduce too.
In a study done by Thomas M. Hess in 1984, the researcher conducted two experiments to check the differences
between adult ages in the use of contextual information in remembering and the specific conditions that affect context
use. To fulfill the course requirements, twenty four young adults with the mean age of 20 participated in this study. The
researcher selected forty five nouns which had distinct meanings. Then, he constructed two separate sets of acquisition
word slides with half of the subjects in each group and presented the sets to each of them. A recognition test
IJALEL 6(6):19-27, 2017 22
immediately followed the presentation which contained 90 word pairs were selected in which 45 items were the target
ones and the other 45 contained lures.
Each subject was tested individually or in groups of two to four. At first, learners were asked to memorize all the words
on the slides. But, they were not given about the strategies or probable relationships between the words on each slide.
The participants had to indicate each word pair in the test that had appeared on one of the study slides with no time limit
for completion of the test.
Experiments of Hess (1984), showed that when there was an apparent semantic relation between those items that must
be remembered and the context in which they happened, older adults were more probable to encode context
information. But, the probability of utilizing contextual information was less in those situations which there was no
immediate available or familiar encoding context in presented targets. By this finding, we can compare older adults’
memory performance to that of young adults in those situations that they can call upon past experience or existing
knowledge (e.g., Waddell & Rogoff, 1981).
Despite older adults ability to use context information in more meaningful situations, in a comparison between older
and young adults, it was found that the type of information encoded by elders were less distinctive. According to Craik
and Simon (1980) and Rabinowitz et al., (1982), this observation is matching the notion that older adults will be less
probable to encode unique information. It is believed that automatic access of word meaning features is related to
encoding of general semantic information. The less distinctive encoding has a negative effect on the performance of
memory when the discrimination between similar events is required. Considering the fact that the probability of making
more semantic confusion in older is higher (Hess & Higgins, 1983; Rankin &Kausler, 1979; Smith, 1975), the
hypothesis of encoding semantic information in a non-distinctive manner by adults is supported.
The first experiment of Hess (1984), showed that when there is an automatic access to general semantic information and
intentional demands were in their lowest levels, older adults utilized contextual information. On the contrary, young
adults who have abundant processing resources showed context effects in all situations.
In a replication done by Robert Waring in 1997, two experiments conducted by Tinkham (1993) were investigated. In
those experiments, Tinkham noticed the interference of semantically grouped sets of words in learning the new words.
Tinkham found that the speed of learning new words in those learners who are given lists of words with common
superordinate concept is slower than words without common superordinate concept. The findings of his study suggested
that learners should not be presented with words from the same semantic set, but presenting words in semantically
unrelated ones.
Robert Waring (1997) in his close replication of Tinkham’s (1993), used Japanese word pair nouns which were paired
with imaginary words. Three of the words had a shared superordinate concept and labeled "related words", while the
other three ones did not share any common concept and called "unrelated words". The researcher conducted this
experiment with the purpose of finding which sets were learned faster.
Twenty subjects, eighteen of which were native speaking Japanese and two non-natives, voluntarily participated in both
experiments. All the participants had university education and aged from eighteen to mid-sixties. Participants were
asked to learn two sets of six word pairs in experiment 2. The sets of words were labeled "related words" and "unrelated
words" with the same intention as experiment 1.
Replicating Tinkham’s findings, Waring found effects against learning semantically related words. He also concluded
that presenting new words in semantically related sets interfere in learning new words. In his first experiment, words
were presented in a mixed way and in the second experiment, as two separate lists. Something obvious in the first
experiment was the production of incorrect words which were taken from within the same set. In related sets, this
phenomenon occurred 25% of the time and 5% in unrelated sets.
Many EFL teachers, who believed in presenting words in semantically related sets, were surprised by the findings of
these two papers. Although semantic relationships, thematic relationships and word associations are considerable in
helping learners to build semantic networks and benefit learners in learning new words, but we must be aware of using
these ways to not to create interference effects. Despite all these clear results, these findings are not yet acknowledged
by a lot of course designers, course book writers and language teachers.
A study done by Mohammad Nowbakht (2015), investigates the comparative effects of presenting the new vocabulary
items to students in semantically related groups vs. semantically unrelated groups on vocabulary receptive acquisition.
Thirty participants, who were studying at the pre-intermediate level at the Iran Language Institute, were selected for this
study. The researcher used The Total Placement Test published by Pearson Education (2006) in order to select a
homogenized group of thirty students out of the larger group of 85. The students whose scores placed within one
standard deviation above and below the mean score were selected as subjects of the study. Participants were selected
randomly to two groups of the study consists of a control group and an experimental one. Each group consists of 15
male students from 13 to 16 years old.
The vocabulary items were chosen from the Oxford Picture Dictionary (OPD), the second edition. The chosen twenty
vocabulary items were divided into four groups of five words. The words were selected out of 50 words selected from
OPD. To make sure that the selected words are unknown to participants, a pre-test was done. The vocabulary items all
were concrete words such as family members, furniture, animals and vegetables names. A pre-test and post-test were
IJALEL 6(6):19-27, 2017 23
designed by the investigator and all the stages of reliability was calculated through the KR-21 formula. The reliability of
the pre-test was estimated 0.83. Total placement test was designed to determine if students were homogenous.
The significant difference between the experimental and the control group was proved at the end. The results of the
study showed that the semantically unrelated sets facilitate receptive vocabulary acquisition better than semantically
related sets. There might be some arguments for better performance of the control group. It has been argued that words
are stored in mind semantically, which is the last destination of vocabulary learning and acquisition rather than a means
of acquiring new words. When words are presented in semantically related groups, learners should be able to
discriminate between their semantic properties in order to learn them (Mclaughlin, 1990, as cited in Erten and Tekin,
2008).
According to Higa (1963), Tinkham (1993) and Nation (2001), presenting words in semantically related sets may
confuse learners, because they have to discriminate between similar words. This might interpret why similar words and
also synonyms are more difficult for students to learn. The study argued why similar words may cause confusion by
presenting the interference theory as another argument. It adds, specifically, vocabularies cause less interference and
confusion for learners.
The other study done by Hamid Marashi and Atefeh Azarmi (2011) aims to compare the effect of presenting words in
semantically related and unrelated sets in intentional and incidental learning contexts on Iranian EFL learners. The
study was conducted among EFL learners who were 120 females selected among a total number of 180 bases on their
performance on Cambridge Key English Test (KET) into four experimental groups randomly.
The findings of the study generally demonstrated that those who exposed to semantically unrelated sets outperformed
those who exposed to semantically related sets of words. Additionally, it proved that intentional learning is more
effective than incidental learning.
Yagoub Zahedi and Morteza Abdi (2012), who were the researchers of the other study, investigated the effect of
semantic mapping strategy on EFL learners' vocabulary learning on forty Iranian learners' vocabulary’ mastery. The
participants selected randomly and assigned to a control group that received traditional direct translation of new words
and an experimental group that received instruction on semantic mapping. Some debates have found the effects of
memory vocabulary learning strategies. The findings of their research are equal with Kaelin (1991) who have studied
the impacts of semantic mapping or the graphic organizer on the vocabulary learning of beginners and advanced adult
learners of second language.
Although the participants of control and experimental groups were instructed with the same topic material, what the
members of experimental group used more was a mnemonic graphic organizer strategy to acquired vocabulary. Results
of the study revealed that the use of graphic organizers was effective with beginners ESL learners over the regular
classroom instruction.
It was also as effective as the regular classroom technique in participants' vocabulary acquisition. The findings cleared
that using semantic mapping strategy resulted in a significant difference in the participants' vocabulary learning.
The results of the study (Zahedi & Abdi, 2012) are also in congruent with Craik and Lockhart’s (1972) theory. They
claimed that the more cognitive energy a learner exerts when thinking and manipulating about a new word, the more
likely it will be recalled and used (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975).
The depth of processing is important; that means students must be taught on how to process new information deeply.
Hence, memory strategies on vocabulary acquisition involve learners, processing ability and better retention to recall
new information effectively. The obtained findings of the study (Zahedi & Abdi, 2012) are also consistent with the
results of Sagarra and Alba (2006), which indicates that semantic mapping as a memory strategy on vocabulary recall,
engages learners in more cognitive activity, deeper processing, and more powerful retention in vocabulary acquisition.
The findings of the current study are in line with some other students (Etern & Tekin, 2008; Nation, 2000; Tinkham,
1993; Waring, 1997), which concluded that presenting the words in semantically related sets may actually impede new
vocabulary learning.
As mentioned, the objective of this study was to compare the effects of two opposite and destine techniques of
vocabulary teaching on long-term receptive vocabulary acquisition. The aim of the study was to examine the effects of
both techniques on vocabulary retention in long-term memory.
In conclusion, the research lends support to the claim that teaching vocabulary through memory strategies facilitates
storing and retrieving new vocabulary items.
2.1 The convenience hypothesis
Almost there exist no empirical evidence in favor of semantic clustering. Tinkham (1997) certifies that the prevalent
usage of semantically organized word sets results rather from convenience than from any well-established theoretical
basis.
Educationally some groups of authorities are believed in convenience hypothesis. First, clustering vocabulary in
semantic fields is convenient for the language educators in which they will have to cover special pre-chosen areas of the
national and overall curriculum with language classes. In this way it is easy to supervise whether the areas concerning
lexical instruction are covered in that due time. In the following, material designers aim to produce a set of materials
which is organized in semantic fields, since that kind of material responds to needs of educators in educational system.
IJALEL 6(6):19-27, 2017 24
Another area in favor of the convenience hypothesis is designing of L2 exercises. The presentation of new vocabulary
in semantically and syntactically related sets are supported by this kind of single word recognition exercise. For
example, "she bought a ____ dress" (noted by the L1 equivalent of the intended word), it is very convenient the new
vocabulary in semantic clusters, which would be, for example, colors or clothing materials. Convenience, with this
interpretation, seems to be the only rational reason to present new vocabulary for L2 learners in semantic clusters.
2.2 Interference theory
Is it easy for learner to remember a group of new words if they are too similar? So far, two theories introduced about the
similarity of words that will be discussed below. The interference theory "hypothesizes that the more similarity between
selected information, the more difficulty of learning and remembering that selected information" (Tinkham, 1993). This
delineated difficulty of learning a list which its words are all nouns and belong to a same concept. This difficulty was
explored by Higa (1963), Mc Geoch and Mc Donald (1931), and Tinkham (1993; 1997). They found out supporting
reasons for the interference theory through their related studies. They inferred that too similar words interfere with each
other and get in the way of solid learning. Interference theory is a tenacious opponent of semantic clustering. The
interference theory and the distinctiveness hypothesis which "relates ease of learning to the distinctiveness of the
documentation to be acquired (without similarity) (Tinkham, 1993, p.373) " are in contrasted with each other.
Tinkham hypothesizes it would be greater to learn new words unrelatedly. Eliminating interference factor in the school
setting increases the degree of success in lexical items presented should be as distinct as possible new word learning.
2.3 Distinctiveness hypothesis
Another piece of evidence against learning new words by use of semantically related word lists is the distinctiveness
hypothesis, following Higa's interference theory (Eysenck, 1979). This hypothesis argues lexical items presented should
be as distinct as possible to be acquired better. The investigations of the effects of distinctiveness and memorizing
demonstrated different effects of semantically related lexicon (Hunt & Worthen, 2006; Schmit, 1985).
The hypothesis suggests selecting and presenting words from a variety of word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.)
and different semantically related contents due to facilitate vocabulary acquisition and recalling them. Lexical item
recognition, acquisition, and retention facilitate when the level of distinctiveness on orthography and phonology
increase (Wilcox & Medina, 2013).
3. Methodology
3.1 Participants
Sixty native speaking Iranians in intermediate proficiency in Isfahan, Iran were used as participants in the experiment.
The participants were either of researcher’ acquaintance or were studying English as foreign language at a language
educational institution in Isfahan. They all accepted to participate in this study. Almost all have a range in age from
sixteen to twenty-one. The diversity of the participants was not an important factor in the study as it was a within
participants design.
3.2. Instrument
A proficiency test was administered to see the level of learners participated in the study and keep the homogenization
between groups. In this study three types of instruments were used to collect the research data. They were as follows:
1) Oxford Picture Dictionary (OPD) (2006) to test the first experimental group who were tested by semantically related
clusters of words
2) 504 Absolutely Essential Words (1996) book to test the second experimental group who were tested by semantically
unrelated words
3) Reading Through Interaction, Book 3, by B.Wegmann, M.Knezevic, and M.Bernsten (2001), which used to test the
control group by a mixed set of semantically related and unrelated new words clusters
3.3 Procedure
Having analyzed the results of the proficiency test to ascertain the homogeneity of three groups, the researcher selected
two of them as the experimental groups, and the other as the control group. At first, the researcher randomly selected
60 learners, at the age of 16-21 at the intermediate level of EGP in language institute in Isfahan participants were
explained about the procedures clearly. The procedure was done during four weeks of two month and a half of the term.
Three sessions were administered every week. The researcher taught five concrete semantically related words from
OPD (2006) to the first experimental group at the end of each session. She was asked to teach five semantically
unrelated words from 504 (1996) to the second experimental group. Control group learners received six reading during
sessions from Reading Through Interaction, Book 3, by B.Wegmann, M.Knezevic, and M.Bernsten (2001). Before
starting the treatments, to ensure that participants did not already know the clusters of words, three pretests were
designed by the researcher, administered by the teacher singly. The first and second experimental groups were
pretested by two 30 items multiple choice tests. The vocabulary pretests which were based on OPD (2006) and 504
Absolutely Essential Words (1996). A 30 item test contained vocabulary of the reading texts that were intended to be
red in control group.
In the first experimental group the teacher taught five of 60 animal names from OPD (2006) that were selected to be
taught each session. First, she defined the intended word and tried to motivate learners to guess the animal name. Then,
IJALEL 6(6):19-27, 2017 25
she showed the animal picture to the learners and completed the guidance. She asked learners to say any information
they have about that animal. The selected words were chosen from the first five lessons of 504 (1996) were taught to the
second experimental group. In the second experimental group, first the teacher wrote example sentences on the board
with underlined intended words. Then, she asked learners to read sentences and guess the underlined word meanings
one by one. The teacher confirmed answers or modified by presenting some clues to the learners. At the end, she wrote
the word phonetics on the board and explained more to complete the word meanings. Similarly, the teacher repeated
this process for the next four words.
In the control group, the learners were received some printed versions of reading from Reading Through Interaction,
Book 3, by B.Wegmann, M.Knezevic, and M.Bernsten (2001), with some blanks in each reading texts. Then she asked
learners was asked to read one sentence and give the best option as an answer of the blank. After checking the
correctness of the given answer she asked other learners to present their answers too. At the end they had a complete
reading text.
At the end of the term, the researcher collected the second set of quantitative data as posttests. The 30 items multiple
choice posttests were contained the same taught words, but in distinctive contexts from pretests. By comparing the
results of pretests and posttests of each three groups with SPSS, the researcher concluded some consequences.
4. Data Collection Procedure
Semantic clustering of words does not exert a significant effect on the acquisition of vocabulary by Iranian EFL
learners.In the hypothesis, the impact of semantically related word clustering is examined on the ability of vocabulary
learning. The statistical assumptions related to this hypothesis can be presented as the following:
H 0 : 2  1

 H 1 : 2  1
µ1 and µ2 show the mean of the pretest and posttest scores, respectively. Accepting the null hypothesis shows that the
research hypothesis is confirmed. To test the hypothesis, pretest and posttest scores of the first experimental group were
compared. The statistical distribution of the scores was examined before this comparison. For this purpose, the results
of Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is shown in the following table (Table 4.1).
Table 4.1 Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test Result

Variable N Test Statistics Significance Level
Pretest Scores 20 0.542 0.931
Posttest scores 20 1.039 0.230
According to the achieved results of Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (Table 4.1), both of the two pretest and posttest scores
of the first experimental group follow a normal distribution. Therefore, to compare the two sets of scores, t parametric
method can be used.
Due to the nature of the scores, two scores were extracted for each learner. Hence, a significant relationship is
predictable between pretest and posttest scores. The following table (Table 4.2) shows the Pearson's correlation
coefficient between two sets of scores:
Table 4.2 Pearson Correlation Coefficient

Pretest Score Posttest Score
Pretest Score 1 0.924
Posttest Score 0.924 1
According to the results of Pearson's correlation coefficient (Table 4.2), there is a strong correlation (0.924) between the
scores of pretest and posttest of the first experimental group. This correlation is statistically significant (sig. <0.05).
To define the different groups, Duncan’s multiple range test is used. The results of this test has been shown in the next
table (Table 4.9). This test, put these groups in a category that there is no significant difference between their posttest
mean score.
Table 4.3 The Results of Duncan’s Test

Group Mean Score of Posttest
Experimental group1 17.35a
Experimental group 2 22.35b
Control 18.10a
IJALEL 6(6):19-27, 2017 26
According to the results of Duncan’s test (Table 4.3), the two groups of experimental 1 and control are categorized in
the same level (level a), and the second experimental group is in level b. This categorization shows, there is no
significant statistical difference between the means of the posttest scores of the first experimental group and control
group. But, the second experimental group has a significant difference with the two other groups.
The following figure (Figure 4.1) shows the mean of posttest of three groups. The category of each group has been
defined in this graph.
Figure 4.1 The mean of posttest of three groups
The comparison of the results revealed that the performance of the learners of the second experimental group was better
than the first experimental group and the control group
The reliability was checked with alpha Cornbach method and the index was estimated to by 0.72 the validity was
checked by two experts.
5. Conclusion
The empirical evidence gained from this study supports some of the following pedagogical implications: The positive
effects of semantically unrelated clusters of words on the maximization of vocabulary acquisition of learners inspire
teachers in conducting the vocabulary teaching part in language classes. Teachers can also design creative vocabulary
tasks based on the dissimilar nature of vocabularies to facilitate acquisition.
The ease of use and convenience of vocabulary acquisition through semantically unrelated clusters benefit also
individual learners who are in shortage of time for going to language classes and want to expand their knowledge of
vocabulary.
The undeniable benefits of presenting words through semantically unrelated clusters is conspicuous for syllabus
designers and textbook writers. Through this technique, they can design more effective textbooks for intermediate EFL
learners in which words are presented in semantically unrelated sets. Even this method can be used in designing the
course books of English for specific purposes.
Due to the administration of these techniques in the experimental groups, one of the most important limitations that the
researcher faced was the fastidious procedures that language institutes had. Asking the researcher to pay money for the
permission to conduct the research and not cooperating with the researcher were some of them.
Another restriction was the time limitation. As conducting these procedures were at the end of each class, consequently,
learners were somehow bored and were not as energetic as the beginning of the class.
The participants of this study were young intermediate learners, and they were able to learn more words in every
session. But, due to the time restriction the researcher had to limit her procedures to just one category of OPD, the first
five units of 504, and six reading passages of "Reading Through Interaction".
For further research one can come up with expanding the scope of this study to a larger sample size of Iranian EFL
participants, choosing different geographical areas to investigate the probable effects of different cultures on this
technique, and on different levels of language proficiencies.
The researchers of other languages can also replicate the experimentation of this study to find out whether or not the
results can be the same. Another area for further research can be exploring the extent to which learners’ background
variables such as other ages of learners, and the gender make differences in learners’ responses.
It is also recommended to other researchers, in case of doing such research in the same or other proficiency levels and
with learners at different ages or in a single gender class, to design a teacher's guide which focuses on how to present
and instruct vocabularies for that system. As, not having a guide may lead to controversial issues.
IJALEL 6(6):19-27, 2017 27
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261-274.
The Impact of Immediate and Delayed Corrective Feedback on

Iranian EFL Learners’ Willingness to Communicate
Mahtab Zadkhast (Corresponding author)
Department of ELT, Kermanshah Science and Research Branch, Kermanshah & Department of ELT, College of Literature and Humanities,
Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran
E-mail: mahtab.zadkhast@gmail.com
Majid Farahian
Department of ELT, College of Literature and Humanities, Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran
E-mail: farahian@iauksh.ac.ir

Abstract
The present study investigated the impact of immediate and delayed corrective feedback on Iranian EFL learners’
willingness to communicate. To attain the purpose of the study, 45 females intermediate students that were roughly
selected according to their previous grades and their assigned level in language school were chosen to participate in this
study. Then they were divided to three equal groups: Experimental group 1(immediate feedback), Experimental group 2
(delayed feedback) and control group. In the first session, WTC questionnaire (MacIntyre ,2001 modified by Pourya
Baghaei and Ali Dourakhshan) was administered to all groups as pretests. In group 1 the students’ errors were corrected
by the teacher immediately after committing but in the second group, the students’ errors were written by the teacher
and her comments were given to them when they finished their tasks. For the control group, the routine procedure of
New Headway intermediate was followed. After about 12 sessions WTC was repeated as posttests. The findings
revealed that immediate and delayed corrective feedback have a significant effect on EFL students’ level of WTC. The
results, also demonstrated that experimental group 1 (immediate feedback) outweighed the other two groups in relation
to their WTC. The findings have implication for pedagogy as well as further research.
Keywords: Immediate and Delayed Corrective Feedback, Willingness to Communicate, EFL learners
1. Introdution
During the history of language teaching, a growing body of research has been concerned with the importance of
speaking skill. The reason for such an emphasis is laid in the general view over language learning which is confined to
knowing how to speak. In other words, it seems that the focus on language and communication is the major criterion for
foreign language (FL) learning (Wang, 2005). Accordingly, FL instructors never stopped searching and developing
better ways for reaching more effective teaching goals, accessing authentic materials, and providing techniques that
benefit their students’ knowledge and enhance their skills specifically speaking (Wang, 2005). Considering speaking
ability as a crucial aspect of language learning experience, one of the areas in which language learners face problems in
language classroom is their reluctance to communicate.
By now, it is accepted that in the process of FL learning both cognitive and affective domains should be optimally
activated. In some situations, after speaking, some learners learning English and having a presumably high level of
language competence are still reluctant to interact (MacIntyre, 2007). Such communication dislike displayed by these
learners might show that there must be an elusive variable which can put that competence into practice and make the
individual more responsive, leading to the actual and volitional initiation of second language (L2) communication
(Dörnyei, 2005). This elusive variable that seems to have an important effect on the speaking ability of the learners is
their level of willingness to communicate( WTC). According to MacIntyre, et al (2002), WTC is defined as “an
underlying continuum representing the predisposition toward or away from communicating, given the choice” (p.538).
As WTC is an affective factor, it can be claimed that the role of teacher in classroom may have direct effect on language
learners' WTC. This variable which is in close connection with communicative reluctance may be laid in teachers'
behavior in the classroom.
Additionally, a large part of teachers' behavior in the classroom is allocated to error treatment. Thus, in the FL
classrooms, language errors and corrective feedbacks comprise a large part of the teaching-learning process. Corrective
feedback is a signal to a learner that his or her use of the target language is incorrect, and includes different responses
that a language learner receives (Lightbown & Spada, 1999). Based on the aforementioned definition, if we consider
corrective feedback as a signal, the teacher is responsible of sending this signal; therefore, it seems that the way the
IJALEL 6(6):28-39, 2017 29
English as foreign language( EFL) teacher sends this signal may affect EFL learners’ WTC and therefore their
classroom interaction.
Communicating and speaking with others in English classrooms is a problematic issue for many language learners. As
we know, the main aim of learning a second language is for communicating in that language and this is a prominent role
of FL learning. So we should look for the reasons of this problem. In other words, the comparison between students'
willingness to communicate when they receive immediate or delayed corrective feedback can be one of the helpful
ways to overcome these difficulties and a good guide for teachers to apply appropriate corrective feedback in their
classrooms for getting better pedagogical results.
In recent decades, the emphasis on L2 teaching and learning has shifted to communication and therefore, both as a
necessary process and as a goal of learning an L2, it is needed that a way to consider individual differences in L2
communication be investigated. One of the area which received little attention was WTC. The main focus of the
present study was on language learners' WTC. WTC is a recent trend in what seems to be affecting learners’ L2 learning
and it has drawn attention of the researchers to itself in accounting for individuals' L1 and L2 communication and
learning.
If WTC is the ultimate goal of L2 instruction (Dörnyei, 2005), then unwillingness to communicate may be supposed as
a barrier to communicate and any reason for this unwillingness such as anxiety, demotivation, not supporting teacher
talk, etc. may be increased. Therefore, students' silence in the classroom may result in crucial problems in learning
process. Over the last two decades, second language acquisition (SLA) researchers such as MacIntyre et al (2002) have
all emphasized the importance of willingness to communicate as a crucial component of modern language instruction.
So, it can be claimed that the notion of WTC, which is actually the intention and desire to initiate communication, plays
a key role in learning a second/foreign language. Furthermore, communicative tasks enable learners to speak freely
without teacher’s pressure, classmate’s stresses, and some other factors threatening their fluency. One of the area which
received little attention was WTC. The concept of WTC, defined as the probability of speaking when free to do so
(McCroskey & Baer, 1985; MacIntyre, Clément, Dörnyei & Noels, 1998), helps to orient our focus toward a concern
for “ microlevel processes and the sometimes rapid changes that promote or inhibit L2 communication” (MacIntyre,
2007). Yashima & Tanaka (2001) found that WTC affected the psychological adjustment of Japanese students who
lived and studied in the United States for a time, because students who were more willing to speak to their host families
learned more English, made more friends, and had a more positive experience than those with lower WTC.
Through communicative tasks, they can participate in classroom interaction which will provide language learners with
the opportunity of real world exchanges. However, it seems that one of the issues which bars free communication is the
way EFL teachers correct EFL learners’ errors.
One of the questions that foreign language teachers most often address is what to do about error correction: how and
when should they correct whom, if at all? Error correction is not only of practical importance, but is also a controversial
issue in the SLA literature, where it is often included in the more general term ‘negative evidence’ in spite of the
importance of the question. We have hardly an evidence for or against error correction during oral communicative
activities in the second language classroom.
Therefore, this study can be beneficial for FL teachers who wonder how they can increase their students’ WTC which
will eventually lead to better learner-learner and learner-teacher interaction, and therefore better L2 learning. On the
other hand, teachers can benefit from the findings of this study, which attempts to find out what kind of feedback or
error correction gives way to educating L2 learners with a high rate of WTC and which type of error correction does not
seem to contribute to increasing learners’ WTC. Having such perspective in mind, the present study was an attempt to
investigate the effect of immediate and delayed corrective feedbacks on Iranian female EFL learners' willingness to
communicate.
2.1 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
The intended outcome of these methodologies is meaningful student-student interaction, which research has shown
creates learning opportunities and facilitates the second language acquisition process (Long, 1983). However, for CLT
to be effectively implemented, students need to have WTC (MacIntyre, Baker, Clément, & Conrod, 2001).
Task-based teaching and other popular pedagogical proposals that fall under the umbrella of CLT are useful in that they
promote classroom interaction. However, interaction can only happen if students consider this learning environment
beneficial (McCroskey & Richmond, 1987). Past research (Aubrey, 2009; Littlewood, 2000) has indicated that Asian
students respond positively to CLT under certain conditions. Aubrey (2010) states that “Of particular interest to teachers
is the finding that having a more positive attitude towards CLT is essential for producing an ideal classroom situation”.
(p. 42)
2.2 Speaking
In communicative era of language teaching, speaking gained an important position among other skills. As Egan (1999)
states, speaking skill is the main component of second language teaching and learning but in recent years, it has been
neglected for a number of reasons. In Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), speaking is considered as an
interactive productive skill which focuses on receiving, processing and transferring intended meanings in spoken form
of language. (McDonough & Shaw 1993; Brown 1994).
IJALEL 6(6):28-39, 2017 30
Accordingly, the main duty of speaker of every language is not only producing sounds but also employing language in
order to interact successfully with the listener (Fulcher 2003). Beside these, there are two elements in our speech, first
manifestation of sound waves and second expression of internal meanings through concentrating on the lexico-
grammatical aspects of spoken and written form of language (Brown, 1994).
Accordingly, Levelt (1989) suggested four steps to observe those two elements in speech production:
- Conceptualization: encoding messages;
- Formulation: selection of lexical item;
- Articulation: psychophysiological mechanisms of speech production; and
- Self-monitoring: Identification and correction of mistakes
Levelt’s model is clarifying different components of speaking skill in a way that a person produces speech sound
individually while the nature of speaking skill is reciprocal. As Nunan (1991) argues speaking is an ability for human
being in which there are conventional ways of transferring information, expressing our idea, and thought we have in our
mind. In line with this view, Bashir, Azeem, and Dodger (2001) consider speaking as a skill which can be employed not
only for merely expressing words through mouth, but also conveying the message through the words of mouth.
Concerning aforementioned points, assessing the nature of speaking skill indicates that it evolves through interpersonal
interaction. Accordingly, the nature of speaking skill is cooperative. This collaboration among interlocutors leads to
negotiation of meaning which is crucial for mutual understanding (Bygate, 1987). Negotiation of meaning becomes
accessible if the interlocutors follow certain criteria in their speaking. These criteria are embedded in the following
terms in TEFL, accuracy and fluency (Bygate, 1987). Now, to have an accurate view over the characteristics of
speaking skill in the following parts, first we will review the differences between spoken and written form of language
after that different characteristics of speaking skill i.e. accuracy and fluency will be presented.
2.3 WTC and L2 Learning
WTC was applied to L2 communication by MacIntyre and Charos(as cited in Kang, 2005). The significance of WTC in
L2 acquisition comes from the important role that interaction plays in language acquisition, which has been justified
from both linguistic and socio-cultural perspectives (Kang, 2005). Thus, WTC which is deemed to affect the frequency
of interaction (Clement, Baker, & MacIntyre, 2003) can contribute to SLA and is considered as an important component
of modern L2 pedagogy (Macintyre et al., 1998).
Adapting WTC to L2 communication, MacIntyre et al (2001) suggested a theoretical heuristic model to show the role of
both individual and contextual variables in WTC based on a combination of motivational and attitudinal factors. They
considered WTC as a situational variable, which influences communication in the four language skills. The model
which was presented in the shape of a multi-layered pyramid integrates various social-psychological, linguistic and
communicative variables as precursors of L2 communication (Peng, 2007).
According to MacIntyre et al (2001) L1 WTC is not transferable to L2 communication; meaning that L1 WTC and L2
WTC are relatively independent. MacIntyre et al (2001) attributes this lack of transferability to the variation in
communicative competence of L2 users and social factors related to the L2 communication situation.
Within the L2 acquisition context, it is not uncommon to see people with a high level of L2 communicative competence
who tend to avoid communication (Yashima, 2002). This implies that L2 WTC function as a mediating layer between
having the L2 competence and using this competence to communicate (Dornyei, 2005). The past decade has witnessed a
growing body of research into L2 WTC (Clement, Baker, & MacIntyre, 2003; Kang, 2005; MacIntyre, Baker, Clement,
& Conrod, 2001; Yashima, 2002).
These studies have mostly aimed at validating the complex nature of the WTC. Baker and MacIntyre (2000) compared
L2 WTC in immersion vs. non-immersion learners. The result revealed significant situational differences. Immersion
learners showed higher level of WTC and more frequent use of L2 for communication. Kang (2005) employed a
qualitative approach to investigate situational variables influencing L2 WTC. She studied four Korean students studying
in an American university for eight months. She found that their level of L2 WTC is a function of interaction among
psychological variables of excitement, security and responsibility on one hand and situational variables including the
interlocutors, the topic and the conversational context on the other hand.
Yashima and her colleagues` studies in Japan (Yashima, 2002) revealed that perceived communicative competence, L2
communication confidence, and communication anxiety are the most significant constitutes of L2 WTC. The result of
several studies indicated that motivation to learn an L2 influences L2 WTC either directly or indirectly (Hashimoto,
2002; MacIntyre, et al. 2002). It was also found that L2 WTC is associated with personality traits ( MacIntyre et al.,
1996), gender ( Baker and MacIntyre, 2000; MacIntyre, 2002) and social support ( MacIntyre, Baker, Clement and
Conrod, 2001).
2.4 Feedback
EFL teacher traditionally emphasizes a kind of correction of every learner’s errors firmly, while nowadays, he gives
more focus on the learners’ reaction to his provided feedback to solve learners’ problems which are shown through the
ambiguity of the conveying message.’’Feedback usually refers to the learners’ response given to the teachers spoken or
written output’’(Duly, Bust & Krashen,2006).This indicates that feedback refers to the information or suggestion that
the teacher as a listener or as reader gives or provides to his learners speaking performance or written production.A
IJALEL 6(6):28-39, 2017 31
definition suggested by (Mory, 2002):’’Feedback is the information presented to the learner after any input with the
purpose of forming the concept of input of the learner’’(p.7).Morover,he states that feedback determines the
comparison between the learners and the teachers intended answer.According to MCDonough(2007) they demonstrate
two main parts of feedback: assessment and correction, assessment is presented through providing information on how
the learner performs his/her tasks while the correction is the fact of describing the learners committed errors when
performance through giving information on what is wrong or right.
2.5 Types of Feedback
Teachers’ feedback can be done in different ways. In the following parts various aspects of oral feedback will be
reviewed.
2.5.1 The Oral Feedback
According to Frey and Fisher (2004) “it happens basically in spoken language. In order to achieve significant learning
output, the oral feedback should be accompanied by the setting characteristics, the structure, and the tone” (p.9). These
aforementioned points are of great importance to student when receiving the oral feedback.
The setting is selected in the classroom according to some extents: “it gives learners a place to concentrate on what is
being said and to determine the tone in which it is delivered” (Richards, 2006, p.8). If the teacher’s feedback is brief,
teacher should close to the student and lower his voice in order to move smoothly in the conversation. This type of
feedback helps the learner to get it.
Through effective oral feedback, the teacher should be specific and should demonstrate the learner to which is correct or
not. There are three parts of the structure for academic feedback:
 Showing the result of learner’s performance.
 Describing and distinguishing between the right form and the wrong form that should be changed.
 Motivating and encouraging to centime.
 Use the supportive form
Harmer (2004) claims that the teacher’s feedback is helpful during the oral tasks, in which the teachers should react to
their learners’ performance in different way; the helpful feedback based mainly on the stage of lesson, the activity, the
type of committed errors, and the particular receiver of the feedback. So, he suggests two situations of feedback.
According to Harmer (2004), it can be done by different ways:
 Repeating: by asking students to repeat what they have said.
 Echoing: it is a precise way of pin-pointing an error through emphasizing the incorrect utterance’s part; for
example, through uttering the wrong part as questioning intonation.
 Statement and question: by indicating or demonstrating that a part of the utterance is not correct.
 Expression: by using the simple facial expressions and gestures to indicate how the utterance is worked, but it
should have done when the teacher knows his class well.
 Hinting: by giving a hint to the wrong part in order to apply the known rules
 Reformulating: correcting the learner’s utterance through reformulating what he said (pp. 106-107).
2.6 Advantages of Cooperative Learning

Cooperative learning strategies may be especially favorable in college courses which controlled the traditional lecture
forms that have the least students’ discussions. Incorporating cooperative learning processes may allow learners to
become active participants in the learning process and lead them to think and comprehend the materials in the best ways
(Ebert- My, Brewer, & Allred, 1997 as cited in Carrol, Williams, & Hautau, 2005).
Cooperative learning considers the instruction in schools’ lessons and the formation of heterogeneous groups. These
methods are structured, organized and instructional strategies which are applied at any level of the learners and in most
school subjects. All of the methods forcing teachers to choice the students in groups that include two to six members
with different knowledge levels, high, average, and low doer; boys and girls; Anglo, black, Hispanic students, and
mainstreamed academically disable students as well as normal classmates (Slavin, 1985 as cited in Wang, 2009).
Cooperative learning tries to make the student-centered classroom in which all the students contribute in group work,
and student trust on each other to complete the task. The teacher plays the role as a mediator and tries to shift the
responsibility to the students while holding them liable (Wang, 2012).
Cooperation is working together to attain shared goals within cooperative condition, individuals seek issues that are
helpful to themselves and to all other group members (Prveen, Tariq Mohammad, Mahmood, & Arif, 2011). Ideally,
cooperative learning empowering both teachers and learners. It teaching them to structure their own goals and their own
learning (Sapon-Shavin, 1994). It needs the situation in which teachers feel valued, trusted, and empowered to design
and shape their classes and curricula as they see fit (Kohn, 1992, as cited in Sapon-Shevin, 1994).“Cooperative learning
develops resolution skills among students. It creates better attitudes toward school, the learning process and the
IJALEL 6(6):28-39, 2017 32
classmates. Cooperative learning improves collaborative ability among students, increases self-esteem and interpersonal
skills’’ (Clemen& Hampton, 1994 as cited in Zarei, 2012, p.20).
Cooperative learning is necessary for making inclusive classroom environments that meet the needs of all students,
because it takes the heterogeneity in to account, improving peer support and connection (Magre & Joshi, 2013). It is
practical as an instructional method in which small groups are considered to maximize students- working together in
groups to attain shared goals (Johnson& Johnson, 1999 as cited in Simpson, 2012). In cooperative learning classes,
students working in heterogeneous-ability groups on clearly given tasks with the hope that they will be rewarded on the
basis of group accomplishment (Johnson, Maruyama, Johnson, Nelson, & Skon, 1981; Slavin, 1990, 1996 as cited in
Hancock, 2004).
Cooperative learning techniques prompts some skills in learning as follow:
 Develop learners learning, and academic achievement
 Promote students retention
 Support learners to improve skills in oral communication
 Help learners to improve higher order thinking skills
 Create better natural motivation to learn
 Provide the same participation and simultaneous connection (Davis & Murrill, 1994; Philiphs, et. al., 2004 as
cited in Khader,2011, p.204)
2.7 Problems with Cooperative Learning

One of the problem which teachers have about the use of pair work (cooperative activity), especially in foreign
language (FL) classes is that learners share their first language rather than (L2) in their pair work (Carless, 2008 as cited
in Srorch, 2012). In many classes teachers resist to use cooperative strategies in their classes because, they are afraid to
lose the control of the classes, they don’t prepare materials for using in their classes or teachers are not enough trained
in cooperative teaching techniques (Zarei, 2012).
3. Method
3.1 Aims of Study
Accordingly, the main focus of the present study was on language learners' WTC and the kind of feedback they receive.
Based on such assumption the following research questions were suggested:
Q1) Does immediate corrective feedback have a significant effect on intermediate EFL learners' WTC?
Q2) Does delayed corrective feedback have a significant effect on intermediate EFL learners' WTC?
3.2 Participants
To accomplish the objectives of the study, the researcher chose 45 females intermediate Iranian EFL learners through
available sampling to participate in this study. The participants were selected from among 60 EFL language learners
who were studying at a language school, in Kermanshah, a city in west of Iran. They were both high school and
university students. It should be mentioned that, the participants’ age ranged between 16 to 22 and their first language
was Persian.
3.3 Instrument
In order to measure the learners’ WTC levels, a modified version of the Likert-type questionnaire developed by
MacIntyre (2001) that was changed by Pourya Baghaei and Ali Dourakhshan for using in Iranian context (2012) was
distributed among the participants. The questionnaire includes 20 items relevant to the factors contributing to WTC in
learning a FL. The questionnaire items were translated into participants' native language (Persian) to avoid any possible
misunderstandings and to increase the validity of responses. This questionnaire ranges from strongly disagree (1) to
strongly agree (5). The learners were asked to indicate their responses to the items across the continuum
3.4 Procedure
To conduct the present study and to select the main sample for the study, 45 of the students within the range of
intermediate level of proficiency that were roughly selected according to their previous grades and their assigned level
in the language school were chosen as the available sample and participants of the study. After that they were divided
to three equal groups:
Experimental group 1. immediate feedback,
Experimental group 2. Delayed feedback and Control group.
As the first step, WTC questionnaire was administered to all groups. To begin the treatment, the teacher corrected her
students' errors in group 1 (immediate feedback group) immediately. In other words, she employed different types of
corrective feedback whether implicit or explicit. Implicit corrective feedback included recasts and prompts. Prompts
also involved clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation and repetition. Some examples are presented
below:
IJALEL 6(6):28-39, 2017 33
Recast:
Student: The patient sent to Tehran.
Teacher: The patient was sent to Tehran.
Prompt:
1-Clarification request:
Teacher: Sorry what?
2-Metalinguistic feedback:
Teacher: You need an auxiliary verb because that sentence is passive.
3-Elicitation:
Teacher: Try that sentence once more.
4-Repetition:
Teacher: The patient sent?
And explicit correction:
Teacher: That's not right. you have to say, the patient was sent to Tehran.
The treatment for the group 2 (delayed feedback group) involved writing the students' errors and giving them corrective
feedback when the students finished their tasks. The teacher explained their errors to the class in details. For the control
group, the routine procedures proposed by New Headway intermediate presented in the teachers' guide were followed.
New Headway consisted of some common class activities such as reading, listening and speaking. In reading section,
the students read the texts and looked up words in dictionary and teacher explained some vocabularies and expressions
then they memorized vocabularies. The speaking section consisted of a set of observation tasks based on teaching
pragmatics. These tasks asked the students to use for example the politeness function to offer a suggestion or ask a
request. The format of these tasks was designed in conversational formats.
At the end, the participants of control group checked their answers with a listening item, which was produced by native
speakers. In other words, the students’ answers were compared with the native speakers’ answers. After about 12
sessions WTC questionnaire was given to the participants as posttest.
As the sampling procedure of this study was available sampling, it was conducted in quasi-experimental mode with the
inclusion of two experimental and one control groups. The independent variables of this study were immediate
corrective feedback and delayed corrective feedback, and the dependent variable of the study was EFL learners’
WTC.The design of this study was pretest-posttest control group design.
3.5 Data Analysis
To answer the research questions, One–Way ANOVA procedure followed by Post- Hoc Scheffe test was run . This test
provided analysis of variance for the dependent variable (i.e. WTC) by the specific factor (i.e. types of feedbacks) to
scrutinize which type of feedback was more beneficial for improving the participants' WTC. Finally,to examine the
participants’ possible progression from pretest to posttest , three sets of Paired Samples T-tests were run to the results of
pre and posttest of each group.
4. Results
The result of the study is presented as below.
4.1 Descriptive Statistics for the Pre -Test Scores of the WTC Questionnaire
At the beginning of the study, all the 45 participants participated in the pre-test. The main goal was to set up a baseline
measurement from which the participants’ achievements on the post-test could be examined and explained. Table 1 and
2 reveal the results of One-Way ANOVA used to analyze the participants’ scores in the pretest of WTC.
IJALEL 6(6):28-39, 2017 34
Table 4.1 Group Statistics for the Pre- Test Scores of the Three Groups
Pretest scores
N Mean Std. Std. 95% Confidence Minimu Maximum
Deviatio Error Interval for Mean m
n Lower Upper
Bound Bound
Control group 15 17.89 4.58 1.16 16.78 21.71 14.00 23.00
Experimental A 15 18.21 5.21 1.23 19.46 24.13 14.00 24.00
(immediate )
Experimental B ( 15 18.11 5.12 1.30 21.32 23.37 15.00 25.00

delayed)
Total 45 18.63 5.20 .67 21.28 23.97 14.00 25.00
The descriptive Table 2 revealed the sample size, the mean, the standard deviation, and the standard error for all the
three groups at the beginning of the study. For WTC, the means for the control group, experimental (A) and
experimental (B) groups were (X- control group = 17.89), (X- experimental group (A) = 18.21) and (X- experimental group (B) =18.11),
respectively. In addition, the degree of variation of the scores for the experimental group (B) (SD experimental group (A) =
5.21) was a little higher than the extent of dispersing of scores around the mean score for the experimental group (A)
and the control group (SD experimental group (B) =5.12; SD control group = 4.58). The ANOVA examined whether these
differences in the mean scores of the three groups were statistically significant before presenting the particular
treatments to the experimental groups.
Table 4.2 One-Way ANOVA for the Pre- Test Scores of the Control and Experimental Groups
Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig.
Between Groups 46.433 2 23.217 .854 .431
Within Groups 1549.500 57 27.184
Total 1595.933 59
According to Table 2, there was no meaningful difference between the mean scores of the three groups in pre-test of
WTC (p≥ .05). This meant that, the groups were almost at the same level regarding WTC at the beginning of the study.
The following figure illustrates the three groups’ performance on pre-test of WTC.
Figure 1. The three groups’ performance on pretest of WTC
To answer the research questions, One-Way ANOVA procedure was run that produced a One-Way Analysis of variance
for the quantitative dependent variable that was posttest of WTC by the independent variable (types of corrective
feedback). ANOVA was used to test the hypothesis that the means of the three groups were the same on posttest of
WTC. Since analysis of variance is sensitive to deviation from normality, the uniformity of the variances for the three
IJALEL 6(6):28-39, 2017 35
groups was assessed for the results of the posttest, too. It was assumed that each group was an independent random
sample from a normal population. To test this assumption, Levene's homogeneity of variance test was run for the
results of the post-test.
Table 4.3 Test of Homogeneity of Variances for the Post Test Scores
posttest scores
Levene df1 df2 Sig.
Statistic
3.068 2 57 .058
The test of homogeneity of variance revealed that the variances of the three groups were identical for the post-test of
WTC. It was shown that the levene’s test was not significant for the posttest scores; F posttest (2, 57) = 3.068, p= .058– at
the .05 alpha level. After confirming the homogeneity of variances, ANOVA was run to the results of the WTC post-
test. The descriptive statistics for the WTC posttest is presented in the following table:
Table 4.4 Descriptive Statistics for the Posttest Scores

posttest scores
N Mean Std. Std. 95% Confidence Interval for Minimu Maximum
Deviation Error Mean m
Lower Upper Bound
Bound
Control group 15 19.01 5.22 1.26 21.75 22.04 18.00 25.00
Experimental A 15 24.16 5.86 1.31 26.90 24.39 18.00 25.00
(immediate )
Experimental B ( 15 22.48 5.44 .83 27.65 23.14 20.00 24.00
delayed)
Total 45 24.81 5.640 .72 24.35 23.27 18.00 35.00
The results of the post-test disclosed that the Mean of the (control group, X- =19.12), Mean (experimental group (A), X-
=24.16), and the Mean of the (experimental group (B), X- =22.48), differed significantly. The significance value of
the F test in the ANOVA table was less than (.05). Thus, the hypotheses that average assessment scores of the WTC
(post-test) were equal across the three groups were rejected (F 2, 57= 6.552, Sig. = .003≤.05).
Table 4.5 ANOVA for the Results of the WTC (Post-Test)

ANOVA
posttest scores
Between Groups 350.833 2 175.417 6.552 .003
Within Groups 1526.150 57 26.775
Total 1876.983 59
The following figure illustrates the means plot for the results of the posttest of WTC.
Figure 2. Means plot for the results of the WTC (Post Test)
IJALEL 6(6):28-39, 2017 36
4.2 The Analysis of Research Questions
The first research question enquired if immediate corrective feedback has a significant effect on EFL learners' WTC.
In general, F statistics firmly settled that there were statistically significant differences among the three groups' means,
and means plots exposed the position of these differences. The participants of the experimental group (A) outperformed
their counterparts including experimental group (B) and the control group.
After it was revealed that the groups differed in some way, post- hoc test displayed more about the structure of the
differences. In other word, doing multiple comparisons Post- hoc test (Scheffe) was employed for comparing the means
of the three groups.
Table 4.6 Multiple Comparisons for the Results of the Posttest

Dependent Variable: posttest scores
Scheffe
(I) groups (J) groups Mean Difference Std. Sig. 95% Confidence Interval
(I-J) Error Lower Upper
Bound Bound
Control group Experimental A -5.25000* 1.63629 .009 -9.3628 -1.1372
(immediate )
Experimental B ( -5.00000* 1.63629 .013 -9.1128 -.8872
delayed)
Experimental A Control group 5.25000* 1.63629 .009 1.1372 9.3628
(immediate ) Experimental B ( .25000 1.63629 .988 -3.8628 4.3628
delayed )
Experimental B ( Control group 5.00000* 1.63629 .013 .8872 9.1128
delayed ) Experimental A -.25000 1.63629 .988 -4.3628 3.8628
(immediate )
*. The mean difference is significant at the 0.05 level.
As it is displayed in Table 6, the highest mean difference was reported between “experimental group (A)” and the
“control group” with mean difference of (5.25). On the other hand, the lowest mean difference was shown between the
two experimental groups (mean difference= .25). As it is shown in Table 4.6, “experimental group (A)” outweighed the
other two groups in relation to their WTC (mean experimental group (A) =29.65; SD=5.86). The second research question
investigated whether delayed corrective feedback has a significant effect on EFL learners' WTC.
The above findings revealed that delayed corrective feedback significantly affected EFL learners’ WTC. Based on the
findings of the analyses, in the second place, the “experimental group (B)” performed better than the “control group”.
In other words, the “control group’s” performance was lower than the other two groups.
5. Discussion
In language teaching studies, many contributing factors have been identified which can have facilitative or
impedingrole in the process of language learning. Some factors are closely connected to the role of teacher in the
classroom. Among these factors various types of feedback have been gained an important position. “Feedback generally
refers to the listeners or readers' response given to the learners' speech or writing” (Duly, Bust & Krashen, 2006). This
indicates that feedback refers to the information or suggestion that the teacher as a listener or as reader gives or provides
to his learners speaking performance or written production. A definition suggested by Mory( 2002): “Feedback is the
information presented to the learner after any input with the purpose of shaping perception of the learner” (p.7).
Moreover, he states that feedback determines the comparison between the learners and the teachers intended answer.
The other variable of this study was WTC. Considering the definition of WTC it can be applied both for first language
acquisition and second language learning. In first language acquisition, it is defined as a stable predisposition toward
communication when free to choose to do so (McCoskey& Baer, 1985). Thus, WTC which is deemed to affect the
frequency of interaction (Clement, Baker, &MacIntyre, 2003) can contribute to second language acquisition and is
considered as an important component of modern L2 pedagogy (MacIntyre et al., 1998). The findings of this study
show that these three techniques of scaffolding can have positive effect on promoting WTC.
In this study attempts were made to investigate the effects of immediate and delayed feedback on language learners'
WTC and anxiety. It was perceived that “immediate corrective feedback” and “delayed corrective feedback”
significantly influenced Iranian EFL learners’ WTC and anxiety. The study revealed that “immediate corrective
feedback” improved the participants' WTC and anxiety better than “delayed corrective feedback”.
IJALEL 6(6):28-39, 2017 37
The results of this study subscribe to this point that feedbacks can have facilitative role on language learning process.
Because, they can reduce the level of anxiety and increase the level of WTC among language learners. These findings
are in line with the results of following studies.
Ferreira et al. (2007) investigated two approaches to corrective feedback in language education: the GAS strategy (i.e.,
Giving Answers Strategy) in which the instructors use the right answer, and the PAS strategy (i.e., Prompting Answers
Strategy) in which instructors encourage language learners to use right answer. Their findings indicated that GAS was
employed more often than PAS; however, PAS was considered as a variable which can improve student Performances
in the classroom significantly (as cited in Thurlings et al., 2013).
Goodman et al. (2008) and Scheeler et al. (2010) advised that feedback should be specific and corrective. An
overwhelming majority of these (student) teachers indicated 90–100% of the appropriate performance in short term and
in the 2010 research, Scheeler et al.’s participants showed their appropriate performance in the long term as well as in
various contexts in 75–100% of the cases (as cited in Thurlings et al., 2013). In Auld et al.’s (2010) and Rodriguez et
al.’s (2009) studies, the students also showed an increase of their desired behaviour (e.g., less interrupting in Rodriguez
et al., as cited in Thurlings et al., 2013).
This results of this study are in line with what Carroll and Swain (1993); Ellis et al (2006) and Sheen (2006) claimed
that learners would benefit from immediate feedbacks, whereas other researchers, such as Lyster and Ranta (1997),
Oliver (2000), and Oliver and Mackey (2003) suggested that for particular forms in particular contexts feedback is
effective when it is delayed corrective feedback.
6. Conclusion
In communicative era of languge teaching, speaking gained an important position among other skills.As Egan(1999)
states, speaking skill is the main component of second language teaching and learning, but in recent years, it has been
neglected for a number of reasons.in Teaching English as a Foregn Language(TEFL), speaking is considered as an
interactive productive skill which focuses on receiving, processing and transferring intended meanings in spoken form
of language.(McDonough & Shaw 1993;Brown 1994).
Based on the above points, Finding and designing appropriate techniques for teaching speaking skill are of great
importance. Subsequently, in present study, attempts were made to investigate the effects of immediate and delayed
feedback on Iranian EFL leaners WTC.According to the obtained results, it can be concluded that, the teachers and
material developers should pay attention to these two techniques and employ them for the educational purposes. The
implication of this study for language teacher is that they should allocate a lot of time of the class to employing different
kinds of techniques in the classroom for teaching speaking. However, it should be noted that various types of oral
feedback can have constructive effects on promoting learners' ability in language learning. As the results show teacher
should try to employ them very carefully.
Concerning the nature of these two techniques which is cooperative, language learners should pay special attention to
the key role of communicative and interactive activities in the classroom. Therefore, they should be very active in the
classroom. Considering the scores of experimental groups in this study, language learners should be careful about their
roles in the classroom. The results of this study can be helpful for material developers in a way that they should
consider the role of teachers and language learners in the conversational classes. Instead of bolding the role of teachers
they should try to give priority to the language learners and materials.
6.1 Limitations and Future Study
In order to make this study easier to perform, the group is selected only among female students. However, this might
limit the generalizability of the findings to other groups.Also,this study was carried out with a small number of learners
so this can decreases the generalizability of the results to all language learners.
This study was conducted based on a limited number of participants. So in the future more language learners should be
assessed and also student’s opinions about using immediate and delayed feedbacks may be asked. These feedbacks were
conducted to promote WTC level of language learners, while they could be applied for other language skills such as
reading.
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‫‪Notes‬‬
‫‪A Sample of Translated WTC Questionnaire‬‬
‫ﺳﻨﺠﺶ ﺍﺷﺘﯿﺎﻕ ﺑﺮﻗﺮﺍﺭﯼ ﺍﺭﺗﺒﺎﻁ ﺩﺭ ﯾﮏ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ ﺑﯿﮕﺎﻧﻪ‪:‬‬

‫‪ -1‬ﺍﮔﺮ ﺑﺎ ﯾﮏ ﺍﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ )ﺑﺮﯾﺘﺎﻧﯿﺎﺋﯽ‪ ،‬ﺁﻣﺮﯾﮑﺎﺋﯽ‪ ،‬ﮐﺎﻧﺎﺩﺍﺋﯽ ﯾﺎ ﺍﺳﺘﺮﺍﻟﯿﺎﺋﯽ( ﺩﺭ ﺧﯿﺎﺑﺎﻥ ‪ ،‬ﺭﺳﺘﻮﺭﺍﻥ‪ ،‬ﻫﺘﻞ ﯾﺎ ﻏﯿﺮﻩ ﺑﺮﺧﻮﺭﺩ ﮐﻨﻢ ﺍﻣﯿﺪﻭﺍﺭﻡ ﻣﻮﻗﻌﯿﺘﯽ ﭘﯿﺶ ﺑﯿﺎﯾﺪ‬
‫ﮐﻪ ﺑﺘﻮﺍﻧﻢ ﺑﺎ ﺁﻧﻬﺎ ﺻﺤﺒﺖ ﮐﻨﻢ‪.‬‬
‫‪ -4‬ﻣﺨﺎﻟﻒ ‪ -5‬ﮐﺎﻣﻼ ﻣﺨﺎﻟﻒ‬ ‫‪ -3‬ﻧﻪ ﻣﻮﺍﻓﻖ ﻭ ﻧﻪ ﻣﺨﺎﻟﻒ‬ ‫‪ -2‬ﻣﻮﺍﻓﻖ‬ ‫‪ -1‬ﮐﺎﻣﻼً ﻣﻮﺍﻓﻖ‬
‫‪ -2‬ﺍﮔﺮ ﺑﺎ ﯾﮏ ﺍﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ ﺩﺭ ﺧﯿﺎﺑﺎﻥ‪ ،‬ﺭﺳﺘﻮﺭﺍﻥ‪ ،‬ﻫﺘﻞ ﯾﺎ ﻏﯿﺮﻩ ﺑﺮﺧﻮﺭﺩ ﮐﻨﻢ ﺑﻬﺎﻧﻪ ﺍﯼ ﭘﯿﺪﺍ ﻣﯽ ﮐﻨﻢ ﻭ ﺑﺎ ﺁﻧﻬﺎ ﺣﺮﻑ ﻣﯽ ﺯﻧﻢ‪.‬‬
‫‪ -3‬ﺍﮔﺮ ﺑﺎ ﯾﮏ ﺍﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ ﮐﻪ ﺩﺭ ﮐﺸﻮﺭ ﻣﻦ ﺑﻪ ﺧﺎﻃﺮ ﻧﺪﺍﻧﺴﺘﻦ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ ﻣﺎ ﺑﺎ ﻣﺸﮑﻞ ﻣﻮﺍﺟﻪ ﺷﺪﻩ‪ ،‬ﺑﺮﺧﻮﺭﺩ ﮐﻨﻢ ﺍﺯ ﺍﯾﻦ ﻓﺮﺻﺖ ﺍﺳﺘﻔﺎﺩﻩ ﻣﯽ ﮐﻨﻢ ﻭ ﺑﺎﺍﻭ ﺣﺮﻑ ﻣﯽ‬
‫ﺯﻧﻢ‪.‬‬
‫‪ -4‬ﻣﺸﺘﺎﻗﻢ ﮐﻪ ﺍﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺯﺑﺎﻧﺎﻥ ﺭﺍ ﻫﻤﺮﺍﻫﯽ ﮐﻨﻢ ﻭ ﺑﻪ ﺻﻮﺭﺕ ﻣﺠﺎﻧﯽ ﯾﮏ ﺭﻭﺯ ﺭﺍﻫﻨﻤﺎﯼ ﮔﺮﺩﺷﮕﺮﯼ ﺁﻧﻬﺎ ﺑﺎﺷﻢ‪.‬‬
‫‪ -5‬ﻣﺸﺘﺎﻗﻢ ﮐﻪ ﺑﺎ ﺍﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ ﻫﺎ )ﺑﺮﯾﺘﺎﻧﯿﺎﺋﯽ‪ ،‬ﺁﻣﺮﯾﮑﺎﺋﯽ‪ ،‬ﮐﺎﻧﺎﺩﺍﺋﯽ ﯾﺎ ﺍﺳﺘﺮﺍﻟﯿﺎﺋﯽ( ﺣﺮﻑ ﺑﺰﻧﻢ‪.‬‬

‫‪ -6‬ﺍﮔﺮ ﮐﺴﯽ ﻣﺮﺍ ﺑﻪ ﯾﮏ ﺍﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ ﻣﻌﺮﻓﯽ ﮐﻨﺪ‪ ،‬ﺩﻭﺳﺖ ﺩﺍﺭﻡ ﮐﻪ ﺗﻮﺍﻧﺎﯾﯽ ﻫﺎﯾﻢ ﺭﺍ ﺑﺮﺍﯼ ﺑﺮﻗﺮﺍﺭﯼ ﺍﺭﺗﺒﺎﻁ ﺑﺎ ﺍﻭ ﺑﻪ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ ﺍﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺑﻪ ﮐﺎﺭ ﺑﮕﯿﺮﻡ‪.‬‬
The Realizations of Point of Departure of Message in General

English Texts
Seyed Foad Ebrahimi
English Department, Shadegan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shadegan, Iran
E-mail: seyedfoade@gmail.com

Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the realization of marked and unmarked theme types as point of departure of message in
general English texts. The corpus of this study was 15 general English texts extracted from English general textbooks
for university students published in Iran and taught at universities in Iran. The corpus was analyzed based on Halliday’s
(1985) framework of thematic organization. Findings suggested the unmarked theme was predominant compared to
marked theme. This is due to that writers prefer to use simple structure that help readers to get a better comprehension.
Findings also showed that different types of marked theme were used to help in text organization and contribute to
better comprehension. In such cases, the writers felt the need to mention some elements in the thematic position other
than grammatical subject. The findings highlighted that general English instructors and developers need to take on
board the notion of theme and its importance in teaching and developing general English texts.
Keywords: Theme, marked theme, unmarked theme, general English text
1. Introduction
Academic written and spoken discourses have been studied in the last two decades for the rhetorical structures and
linguistic features. One of the linguistic features that have been received attention was Halliday’s notion of theme.
Halliday (1985, p. 30) defines theme “as an element which serves as the point of departure of the message and what the
speaker has in mind to start with. It is the element in a particular structural configuration taken as whole, and it
organizes the clause as a message. The remainder of the message is called the rheme”. Therefore, a clause consists of a
theme combined with a rheme and the structure is expressed by order. The order for this is theme followed by rheme. In
the same line, Brown and Yule (1983) stated that one of the constraints on the speakers /writers is that they can produce
only one word at a time when they are producing their messages. They have to choose a beginning point for their
utterances in order to organize their messages. The initial point is important in the clause and also in the discourse. It
influence the hearers/readers' interpretation of everything that follows in the discourse since it constitute the initial
textual context for everything that follows. What is placed in this initial position is called theme.
A number of studies have been carried out to find out the possible types of thematic organization and progression in
different academic genres. Some of these studies (Borsinger, 2003; Ebrahimi, 2008; Ghadessy, 1999, 2001; Gosden,
1992, 1993; Jalilifar 2010; Jalilifar and Khedri 2011; Lores, 2004; Martinez, 2003; North, 2005; Whittaker, 1995) are
reviewed below.
To find out the possible similarities and differences in case of thematic organization types and thematic progression
patterns, Jalilifar (2010) analyzed research articles written by Iranian local and international writers. He ran his study on
a corpus of 32 research articles, 16 written by Iranian local writers and 16 written by international writers. To analyze
the corpus, Jalilifar (2010) used two models of thematic organization and thematic progression proposed by Halliday
(1985) and McCabe (1999). The unit of analysis was t-unit. Jalilifar (2010) found similarities regarding thematic
organization types in both corpora. He justified these similarities in terms of genre similarity. This means that similarity
in genre engender similarity in textual choices. The result also showed that in both corpora textual, marked and multiple
theme were implied more in result and discussion comparing to other sections, introduction and method. He explained
this based on the argumentative nature of result and discussion suggesting that textual and marked are implied more to
show the argumentative nature of result and discussion. The findings of his study suggested that the analyzed research
articles had impersonal and factual tone. The low percentage of interpersonal theme could show that reader and writer
are not systematically related to each other.
How students pack and progress the information thematically was studied by Ebrahimi (2008). He analyzed students’
composition writings to find out the possible thematic organization types and thematic progression patterns and their
relation to students' level of language proficiency. He built his study on a corpus of 240 compositions written by
undergraduate students majoring in English language translation in Abadan Islamic Azad University in Iran. Eighty
students were participated in this study. The result in terms of theme types applied by students in their compositions
IJALEL 6(6):40-44, 2017 41
revealed a) more use of textual theme than interpersonal themes; suggesting the higher impersonality of students'
writings, b) more application of simple than multiple; indicating the students’ tendency toward using simple sentences
in their compositions, and c) over-use of unmarked theme; showing students’ preference of placing theme in the subject
position, making sure that their sentences are grammatically correct, and at the same time, giving continuity to the text
since the rheme or theme of the previous t-unit is used in the thematic position of the next clause and this connects the t-
units together.
In analyzing the thematic structure of the Method and Discussion sections of Biology research articles, Martinez (2003)
ran her study on a corpus of 30 method and discussion sections of Biological science research articles. She selected the
articles from 15 high quality journals. Analyzing the gathered data for the theme structure revealed significant
differences between the method and discussion section regarding theme types. Interpersonal theme was mostly found in
discussion section. Textual theme was used more than interpersonal theme. This theme was presented in method section
by external temporal theme and in discussion section by adversative theme. In discussion section, multiple theme was
four times more than that in method section. This suggests “the author’s rhetorical effort to persuade readers” (p.119).
In discussion section, some of the multiple themes included all, the three themes of interpersonal, textual, and topical.
The result revealed that marked theme was mostly circumstantial. In method section, marked theme was mostly
illustrated the purpose and time. The marked temporal theme used in this section was external temporal sequences,
which organize the text from the time perspective with the focus on the chronological sequences of the steps of the
research. The higher proportion of marked theme in discussion section contributes to “the logical organization of the
text” (p.119). She found that unmarked theme was distributed interestingly in the method and discussion sections. More
application of unmarked theme in discussion section also showed that this section could be more argumentative and
abstract section. She finally argued that thematic choices are different across different sections of the research articles.
Exploring the thematic organization types and thematic progression patterns in English Applied Linguistics textbooks
and their Persian translation was the focus of the study conducted by Jalilifar (2011). To build a representative corpus,
they selected 18 Applied Linguistic textbooks, 9 in English and 9 in Persian. Halliday (1994) and McCabe’s (1999)
models of thematic organization and thematic progression were used to analyze the data. They found that translators
included more textual themes in their texts, about two times, compared to the writers of the original texts. The result of
their study reported that interpersonal theme was treated similarly in both texts. Both authors and translators dedicated
small number of themes to interpersonal theme. They justified interpersonal theme underestimation on the ground that
writer-reader relationship was not well-balanced. Their findings illustrated difference and similarities between the two
corpora concerning marked and unmarked themes in order. Regarding manifestation of marked theme, the frequency of
non-subject topical theme was higher in Persian results in more argumentative translations. Dealing with unmarked
theme, the tendency was greatly toward presenting participants in the theme position. This indicated that in both
textbooks the sentences were active, and both authors and translators used this theme to give continuity and maintain
coherence between the sentences. They also found similarity in case of simple theme, but difference in case of multiple
theme, with more application in translated texts. They also ran chi-square on the data to see the significance of the
differences reported by the results. The differences were statically meaningful in terms of textual, multiple, and marked
themes.
Ebrahimi and Chan (2015) explored and compared the discourse functions of unmarked theme (grammatical subjects)
used in research article abstracts from two disciplines namely Applied Linguistics and Economics. They ran their study
on a corpus of 60 research article abstracts published in 2010 and 2011. The research articles were extracted from two
journals namely Applied Linguistics and Oxford Economic Papers. They analyzed the corpus based on the classification
of discourse functions of unmarked theme (grammatical subjects) suggested by Gosden (1993). The results reported
some disciplinary differences regarding the discourse functions enacted by the application of the unmarked theme types.
The findings of their study could add to academic writing (e.g. research article abstract) is imposed by the writer’s
disciplinary background with particular reference to the use of the unmarked theme.
The reviewed literatures indicate that most of the attention was devoted to the study of the realization of marked and
unmarked theme in research article and research article abstracts. Thus this study intends to shed the light on the
realizations of marked and unmarked themes in general English textbooks taught at Iranian universities.
2. Methodology
2.1 Design and Corpus
This study is following the mix-method design. In this study not only the frequency but also the functions of themes
were reported and discussed. This study was carried out on a corpus of 15 general English texts extracted from English
general textbooks for university students published in Iran and taught at universities in Iran.
2.2 Framework of analysis
Halliday (1985, p. 54) classified theme as follows:
1. Topical theme: this is presented by a nominal group (e.g., everyone), a prepositional phrase
(e.g., with ships continually at sea), or an adverbial group (e.g., by the middle of 15th century).
2. Interpersonal theme: this is consisted of any blend of vocatives (direct addresses such as: personal names), modal
adjuncts and mood marking elements (finite verbal operator (temporal & modal), WH-interrogatives and imperative
let's.
IJALEL 6(6):40-44, 2017 42
3. Textual theme: this is presented through continuatives (small set of discourse items which signal that a new move is
beginning, such as: yes, no, oh…), structural elements (coordinates & subordinates) and conjunctive adjuncts which
relate the clause to the preceding texts (e.g., in other words).
The other classification proposed by Halliday (1985) is marked and unmarked themes. Unmarked theme is realized
when one element occupies two positions of grammatical subject and thematic.
“Example: she went back downstairs.”
Marked theme is realized when an element other than the subject occupies the theme position, so a condition is created
for the appearance of marked theme (p.44).
“Example: when she opened the door, she screamed at him like a crazy person.”
2.3 Unit of analysis
This study implement t-unit as the unit of analysis. T-unit is defined by Fries (1994) “as a clause complex which
contains one main independent clause together with all the hypotactic clauses which are dependent on it” (p.318). The
rationale behind this selection was that:
“Analyzing theme at the level of t-unit rather than the individual clause makes it easier to focus on patterns of thematic
development in large amounts of text, and can also be justified on the grounds that the thematic structure of a dependent
clause is often constrained by the independent clause” (Fries & Francis, 1992).
2.4 Procedure of Analysis
To analyze the corpus, the following procedures were followed: First, the textbooks from which corpus was extracted
were selected. Second, texts were selected and changed to word files. Third, the t-units were identified. Forth, theme of
each t-unit was identified. Fifth, the findings were tabulated and discussed.
3. Results and Discussion
The corpus was analyzed for marked and unmarked themes and the results are plotted in Table 1.
Table 1. Frequency of marked and unmarked theme

Theme type Frequency Percentage
Unmarked theme 249 72%
Marked theme 96 28%
Total 345 100%
The results presented in Table 1 indicate that unmarked theme (Example 1) is used greater than marked theme
(Example 2). This is in line with findings reported in Ebrahimi and Chan (2013) and Ebrahimi (2016 a). This similarity
might suggest that disregarding the academic genre of analysis, writers in academic texts prefer to use topical unmarked
theme in the thematic position. Such a use could be discussed based on the fact that in academic texts, writers prefer to
use simple structures and to develop texts that follow the simple structure of sentence in English at which sentences are
started by grammatical subject at the thematic position followed by verbs. The other justification could be that writers
do not feel the need to situate any information before the grammatical subject and prefer to present grammatical subject
in the thematic position. This might suggest that generally academic texts do not requires writers to shift topics that
result in less need of marked theme.
“Example 1: she marched upstairs to remind him of his promise.”
“Example 2: On Saturday, his friends would come over and I would get to a whole band”.
The corpus was analyzed for marked theme types and the results are plotted in Table 2.
Table 2. marked theme types

Marked theme types Frequency Percentage
1 Time 32 34%
2 Condition 24 25%
3 Contrast 16 17%
4 Sequence 10 10%
5 Addition 6 6%
6 Validation 3 3%
7 Purpose 3 3%
8 Cause 2 2%
Time marked theme (Example 3) was use greater compared to other types of marked themes. This finding is in line with
Ebrahimi (2016 b) and in contrast with Ebrahimi and Chan (2016) findings. This might suggest that the genre of
analysis could have required writers to select this type of marked theme.
IJALEL 6(6):40-44, 2017 43
“Example 3: Last year we had a storm that blew half of our roof off. “
This marked theme type was used to a) sequence events (Example 4) and b) present the time contexts of presented
information (Example 5).
“Example 4: The very next day, he blasted his stereo.”
“Example 5: Every year her landlord raises the rent five percent.”
The next more frequent marked theme type is condition (Example 6). The finding plotted in Table 2 concerning the
condition marked theme is in line with Ebrahimi and Chan (2016) and in contrast with Ebrahimi, Chan and Tan (2015)
findings. This might suggest that textbook writers prefer to situate the condition based on which the attached
information could make sense in the thematic position. The similarity and differences between the result of this study
and other studies in literature might suggest that the selection and frequency of the condition marked theme is highly
related to the genre of analysis.
“Example 6: Nervously, the young female teller handed the man three big bags loaded with cash.”
The condition marked theme was used mostly to present a) the condition for the attached information (Example 7) and
b) the information in a form of cause and effect (Example 8).
“Example 7: Sweating and dizzy, she left a cigarette out of one pack.”
“Example 8: If he wanted to see the pyramids, she said he could rent a video or Google the pyramids online.”
The third marked theme type is the contrast marked theme (Example 9). The result plotted in Table 2 concerning the
contrast marked theme is in line with Ebrahimi et al. (2015) and Ebrahimi and Chan (2016) findings. It seems that the
use of this marked theme could help in creating a negative relation between the information.
“Example 9: occasionally, the police received reports about people being pick pocketed while waiting in the overnight
lines. But such reports were rare.”
The contrast marked theme was used to contrast the information reported which could act as strategy to catch the
attention of readers (Example 10).
“Example 10: Even though he loved the convenience of home delivery, Alfred’s sleep was far more valuable to him.”
The sequence marked theme was used for 10% of marked theme types realized in the analyzed corpus. This result is in
contrast with results reported by Ebrahimi et al. (2015) and Ebrahimi (2016 b). This might suggest that in textbooks,
writers prefer to present information in sequence of their appearance (Example 11).
“Example 11: He yelled at her and then hit her sharply across her back with rod. Then the bodyguard kicked her in
stomach.”
The other three types of marked theme have received little attention. This might suggest that in textbooks, writers do not
feel the need to realize these marked theme types with high frequency.
4. Conclusion
This study aimed to investigate the realizations of marked and unmarked theme in general English textbooks taught at
Iranian universities. The corpus was analyzed and findings suggested the greater use of unmarked theme compared to
marked theme.
In the preceding section, it is mentioned that the predominance of unmarked theme is due to the fact that in general
English texts , writers prefer to use simple structure that help readers to get a better comprehension. In the cases where
the writers felt the need to mention some elements in the thematic position other than grammatical subject, they resorted
to the use of marked theme. Such a structure could help in text organizations that act an important role in increasing the
text comprehension. The findings reported in this study could general English instructors and developers in taking the
notion of theme and its importance in teaching and developing general English texts.
“This study was supported by a grant number (15003) from Islamic Azad University, Shadegan Branch, Iran. The grant
entitled: Thematicity in pre-requisite, general, and English for specific purposes textbooks, aim at finding thematic
structures with the implication to help syllabus designers.”
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in teaching writing skill Unpublished master’s thesis. Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch Press:
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Ebrahimi, S. (2016a). Theme Types and Patterns in Research Article Abstracts: A Cross Disciplinary Study.
International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies, 4(3), 104-115.
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The Rhetorical Analysis of Criticism in Persian and English

Linguistics Papers
Shabnam Dezfoolian
Department of English Language and Literature, Allameh Tabataba‘i University, Iran
E-mail: shabnam.dezfoolian@gmail.com

Abstract
Successful academic writing depends on being familiar with different rhetorical strategies .One of these strategies used
by authors of scientific articles is the act of criticism, the criticism of the previous works or other members of their
respective communities. Actually this helps writers to justify their own study and to create a gap. Therefore the socio-
pragmatic variable of Academic Conflict (AC) has been investigated in different academic genres and disciplines. This
study aims to examine this variable in linguistics papers in Persian and English. To this end a corpus of 60 papers, 30 in
Persian and 30 in English, have been chosen randomly. First in the quantitative phase of the study, the direct and
indirect AC variables that have been used for critical speech acts were compared by within and between languages and
then in a qualitative examine, the discourse analysis of important features were examined to show the probable relations
to the cultural contexts . The results showed that English writers used more criticism acts than Persian writers and both
groups used direct AC more than indirect one. Although both groups of papers are written in different cultural contexts,
the strategies used by authors seem familiar and have minute differences and this may show that the effect of discipline
and the language of instruction are more than cultural contexts in rhetoric of criticism.
Keyword: academic criticism, academic conflict, Evaluation, Attitudinal lexis, professional disagreement
1. Introduction
The importance of research articles as one of the genre in academic setting has become more distinctive nowadays, and
as Martín-Martín, P (2005) states the research papers are the main devices used for communication between scientists in
different discourse communities in the current century. Hyland and Salager‐Meyer (2008) discussed the importance of
academic genre and its attraction to researches and presented that these studies provide communities with academic
practices. They believe that the main task of academics is to write, therefore the academic discourse has become more
and more important to text analysts.
Text analysis as a way of demystifying different genres such as academic genre has been the center of attention these
days. Rhetoric analysis of the texts has had lots of advantages for linguistics and applied linguistics in both research and
pedagogy. Ceccarelli (2001) discusses that although there are differences between academic texts and public texts but
these differences cannot prevent us from analyzing academic texts meticulously; however, the analyst should be aware
of the context in which a text is used and the subject matter and the author should also be considered.
The rhetoric of criticism in academic setting became important when the number of studies increased in recent years
and as Salager-Meyer and Alcaraz Ariza (2007) clarify, it became a difficult task to choose the suitable and appropriate
paper among so many published ones around the world, therefore the researcher should be familiar with the principles
of critical approach to reading papers and should be aware of the methods of criticism.
Academic Criticism and evaluation of research papers have been defined by many scholars of text analysis. Hunston
and Thompson (2000) discusses the issue of evaluation in academic setting and present three functions for evaluation:
the first one is to talk about others opinions, the second one is to maintain relationship between readers and authors or
listeners and speakers and the last one is to organize the discourse. They also mention the two factors of ideology and
the value system of the community as the main elements effective in this essential process.
The methods used for evaluation has been also different historically. Connor (1996) believes that empirical research on
contrastive rhetoric conducted in the area of Psychology, Anthropology can be divided into three groups. The first are
related to social functions of writing, the second one are on the role of instruction and the last one are on literacy of L1
area.
A variable which attracted the attention of researchers is academic conflict or criticism (AC). Academic conflict is
defined by Hyland (2000) as how scholars express their disagreement to other authors of academic papers in one special
field. AC is divided into two: direct AC in which the author of paper criticizes the opposing ideas very overtly and
indirect AC in which the writer uses mitigating devices such as hedging devices to dissent in a covert manner.
This variable has been under study from different perspectives and in different areas of scientific papers. Among them,
some researchers have studied general academic works and compared different fields With each other regarding AC
IJALEL 6(6):45-52, 2017 46
variable (Afros and Schryer, 2009; Harman, 1989; Giannoni, 2005; Thetela, 1997). One study considered AC in online
instruction (Sellani, and Harrington, 2002). However, the literature is replete with studies on criticism of medical
discourse. The researchers actually have done studies on AC variable in different medical genres (Salager-Meyer, 1999
;Salager-Meyer, 2002; Salager-Meyer, 2000; Salager-Meyer, and Zambrano, 2001; Salager-Meyer and Alcaraz Ariza
and Zambrano, 2003; Salager‐Meyer and Ariza, 2003 ; Salager-Meyer, 2000). Some researchers have constrained the
area of research on special parts of the papers such as abstracts ( Martín-Martín and Burgess, 2004; Stotesbury, 2003)
.Despite the studies done on this area, Hyland (2000) believes that our knowledge regarding criticism is very low and
more work needs to be done on this area.
1.1 Purpose of the Study
Most of the studies in the area of academic criticism are on medical papers or medical editorials and if we want to
broaden our knowledge of criticism in academic setting we should do the research on the other areas of science. To the
researchers' knowledge, no study has been done on the Persian language and especially on the linguistics for criticism
features. Therefore the aim of the present study is to address this gap and to investigate this variable in Linguistics
papers in Persian and English .To do a contrastive analysis of rhetorical analysis, the field of Linguistics were chosen
because this major is taught in Persian in Iran and papers are published in Persian too. A further aim will be to find the
relationship between differences and contextual factors. Therefore analyses of the papers especially regarding the
conflict variable will provide us with invaluable information.
The present study was conducted to answer the following research questions:
1. Is there any statistically significant difference regarding rhetoric of criticism, between Linguistics papers in
Persian and English?
2. What are the cultural and social effects on different patterns of academic conflict variable in linguistics papers
in Persian and English languages?
Criticism and its effects in academic setting is of high importance. In each communication there will be conflicts but
these become more noteworthy in academic area .To solve the conflicts we as researchers should be able to understand
the structure of evaluations, and be familiar with the methods of presenting them effectively.
There have been different efforts to define criticism and evaluations; however, researchers could not reach unanimity
regarding the structure of criticism. Hunston (1993, p.58) presents a definition for evaluation as follows: evaluation is
“anything which indicates the writer’s attitude to the value of an entity in the text.” She also believes that there are three
procedures for showing criticism, status, value and relevance .She further explains that status shows how much the
writer is sure and certain about beliefs and this goes through all research report, the value is considered as the attitudes
of writers on a scale of good-bad. As all of us have value system which is culturally bound and we criticize others based
on that. The last one, relevance, is the evaluation of how much the argument in the research papers is relevant and
significant. Hunston talks about relevance markers to show the significance and relations of the arguments to the
respected scientific community.
Cheney & McMillan (1990) examined the nature of rhetoric organization and the methods of text analysis and the
relation of them to communication organization .They also showed how persuasion is used and constrained.
McKerrow (1989) pus forward 8 principles for the act of criticism and he believes that the theory includes the critics of
freedom and critics and domination. He sees the act of criticism as a transformative action rather than a method.
AC conflict variable is classified into direct AC in which the author straightforward writes his disagreement and indirect
AC the writer does not take the responsibility of criticism directly and puts it on other factors the following examples
show clearly these two variables:
 “Abels and Neeleman in their commentary offer us exactly the wrong way of doing this. They argue that any
attempt to unify linguistics and cognitive science must follow the principle of ‘methodological modularity”
(direct AC)
 “It seems that the data is not sufficient”(indirect AC)
Hunston (1993) also called AC variable as “professional disagreement.”
Generally, some researchers have worked on different majors and investigated academic papers. Afros and Schryer
(2009) has done one study on the articles in North America academic journals published during 2001 to 2006 years. The
experiment revealed that the authors have used two rhetorical devices to show the gaps they intended to fill in their
respected fields; one is to talk positively about their works and the other is to criticize negatively the opposite views.
They identified the devices as using personal pronouns, evaluative word, comment clauses, lexical cohesive,
coordination and discourse chunks sequencing .They concluded that in ESP setting, we should consider the very
specificity and writing should be taught towards the very special needs of learners. In another study, Harman (1989)
addressed the issue of organizational culture and studied the works written by very famous experts in an American
university. It showed the different levels of culture and the necessity of adding the perspective of the culture to AC
studies.
Thetela (1997) discusses the two kinds of discourse, related to subject of academic papers and context, and talks about
evaluation variable as connected to both. By Scrutinizing 60 papers, he identified the entities, which are evaluated and
classified them into process and product, and presented a value scale for them.
Giannoni (2005) examined 20 articles from Anglo American and Italian journals in one field of study. The researcher
focused on the linguistics and pragmatic features of criticism especially on the ones used for presenting negative
IJALEL 6(6):45-52, 2017 47
evaluations .The results showed some similarities and differences in the strategies employed by American and Italian
authors. Online teaching, the product of CALL, has been under study regarding the criticism too. Sellani & Harrington
(2002) reported that in online instructions, there were some conflicts to be identified between academics and the faculty
and they tried to show how they can be solved.
Most of the previous studies have been done in the area of medicine. Salager-Meyer (1999) did a research to investigate
AC or the academic conflicts in medical papers in journals from 1810 to 1995. The period was divided into 2 blocks;
1810-1929 and 1930-1995. The study is of mixed method study ones, and the quantitative part showed that the number
of direct criticism was more than the indirect ones in both blocks (p=.0001), and the frequency of direct criticism was
higher in the first block 1810-1929 than the second one 1930-1995. The results also showed that indirect AC like using
hedging and mitigated devices increased by the passing of time in second block, and direct one such as using personal
pronouns and aggressive tone decreased.
Salager-Meyer (2002) analyzed the speech acts used in medical education and found that not using hedging and
mitigating and using self direct and sarcastic tone correlates positively with the social role of the writers in their
respective communities as the dominant experts who always advise others and are knowledge holders.
Salager-Meyer (2000) in another study probes AC or academic conflict realizations in 90 medical articles published in
the period of 1810-1995. Like some of the previous studies, the time divided into two periods. The results showed that
the direct criticism acts were more than indirect ones in two groups (p=.0001) and indirect acts are more than direct
ones in the second group. The study also revealed that the frequency of indirect criticism acts started slow from 1910s
and but had a continuous ascent. The qualitative aspect of research showed that 19 and 20 centuries was the time for
criticism to be personal in an authority manner and contemporary century was distinctive for using mitigation in
conflicts.
Salager-Meyer and Zambrano (2001) investigated the AC features in 20 English and French medical papers in 185
years span. To study the evolution of the rhetorical strategies of criticism, they divided the 185 years into 9 blocks.
The interesting result showed that during the years 1810-1929, there was no difference between direct and indirect ones
in two languages; however, in 1930-1995the direct AC was more in French and indirect one was more in English than
ones in French(.001). The study showed that the century 19 and 20 had more personal way of criticism as opposed to
21st century, and intellectual climate can affect the rhetoric of criticism a lot.
Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza, and Zambrano (2003) did an experiment on the research medical papers in three
languages of Spanish, French and English from 1930 to 1995. They concluded that French and Spanish writers were
more critical, and wrote in an authority manner than English authors. From 1990, the method of criticism of Spanish
writers were changed and became more indirect like English ones. Although French researchers did not change their
style completely however, they moved toward indirect AC.
Salager‐Meyer and Ariza (2003) studied AC variable in four different genres in medical Spanish articles. They
examined medical genres included editorials, review papers, research articles and case studies. They selected 76 papers
written from 1930-1999. The results indicated that the number of AC variable is more in editorial genre than others, and
from 1970 t0 1999 the number of AC enhanced in all genres more than that of AC in 1930 to 1970 period. They cited
the divergent communicative functions of divergent genres and social roles of authors in relations to audience, as
reasons for diversity in rhetoric of criticism.
In another similar study Salager-Meyer (2001) chose 50 articles in medical journals in four genres as research papers,
review paper, editorials and case study. He concluded that in editorial genres, there are more direct and authority form
of criticism because they are written by experts in the field. Then the writers of reviews write in amore assured way, and
in contrast the research articles are created in acclimate of humble and imposing tone. The last group of genres, case
studies, have the least number of AC features
Some studies have been done on abstracts of articles, and have addressed the issue of criticism in that special parts of
academic papers. Martín-Martín and Burgess (2004) chose 160 research articles abstracts in English and Spanish, in the
fields of Phonetics and Phonology. The results confirmed the use of Indirect ones more in English than Spanish
abstracts, and researchers concluded that reason for this phenomenon is that the socio pragmatics contexts of the two
groups of researchers are different, and also the relation between the authors and the research community they wrote to,
is different. They believed that the relation is determined by the size of the community and the pressure in it.
Stotesbury (2003) investigated the abstracts of research papers in humanities and natural sciences. The study showed
the number and kinds of explicit evaluations features were different across disciplines, and suggested for teaching those
to novice researchers of different majors.
3. Methodology
3.1 Corpus
To the purpose of the study, 60 papers in the field of Linguistics were randomly chosen. 30 linguistics articles in
English, and 30 papers in Persian were selected. In order to have the most authentic data and omit the factor of transfer
from L1, it was decided to choose papers written by native speakers of English and Persian; therefore, papers in English
were chosen that were written by the authors with English names and Persian papers written by Persian names and not
translated ones. The affiliations of the authors were considered as an additional factor helped the data of the research to
be authentic. After consulting with one professor in Linguistics ,the English papers selected from the magazine
IJALEL 6(6):45-52, 2017 48
“Lingua,” as it is one of the most important and international journals in Linguistics, and Persian articles from magazine
”language and linguistics” related to Iranian linguistics community; this is also one of the most referential magazine in
Persian and in Iran.
The magazine, Zaban va Zabanshenasi, “language and linguistics” has been published from 2003, therefore to do the
contrastive analysis of two languages, the same period were chosen for “Lingua” magazine: 2003-2014.
3.2 Procedure
First each paper was read by the researcher then, the AC variables in each 60 paper were found, and the frequencies of
indirect AC and direct one were measured separately in English and Persian papers. If one criticism was used to refer to
one person or one source, all were considered and calculated differently, because the different strategies used was
subject of the study ;however, if one criticism was cited by other scholars not the writer himself it was not considered as
AC . Valle (1999) says: “A project in which the study is outside the writer’s own discipline necessarily requires help
from members of the scientific community under study.” Therefore in order to increase the reliability and validity of the
results, one Linguistics professor reviewed and commented on the direct and indirect AC variable. Then the data were
tabulated and the different groups were discussed and classified.
3.3 Data Analysis
When the frequencies were counted in each of the direct and indirect AC in two groups of papers ,chi-square was used
to see if there are significant differences between direct and indirect in each group and between direct ones and indirect
ones in two groups. Then each kind of categories was discussed to see why the authors of two languages chose those
specific ways of rhetoric of criticism in their papers.
4. Results
After identifying direct and indirect AC, they were calculated per each language and the data was tabulated. Table 1
shows the number of words in each corpus, English and Persian, and also the number of total AC variables in each
corpus.
Table 1. Total Academic Conflicts (AC)

Number of AC
Persian 116
English 159
Total 275
As the table shows, the number of AC in Persian articles is more than English ones. These shows that Persian linguists
tend to criticize more than English linguists. In order to compare the indirect and direct AC in two groups of papers, we
measure each one separately, the results have been shown in table 2.
Table 2. Total Number Direct And Indirect Academic Conflicts (AC)

Persian English
Direct AC 82 120
Indirect AC 34 39
total 116 159
As it is clear from numbers in table, writers of Persian articles have 82 direct AC, and 34 indirect one; therefore the
writers have preferred overt criticism more than covert negative evaluation. Similarly, English writers have used direct
AC than more indirect one. It seems that none of the groups has a way of conservative evaluation.
In order to make the comparison easier and tangible, the results have been changed to percentages.
Table 3. Percentages of Direct And Indirect Academic Conflicts (AC)

Persian English
Direct AC 70.68% 75.47%
Indirect AC 29.31% 24.52%
total 116 159
It is obvious that Persian writers in 70 percents of the cases have criticized directly and in only 30 percent have used
indirect AC and similarly their English counterparts have used 75 percents direct and 24 percents indirect ones. The
following graph shows clearly the difference of variables in two groups of papers.
IJALEL 6(6):45-52, 2017 49
Figure 1. Cross-language comparison of the percentages of direct and indirect academic
By looking at sentences, structures and examining the cases, which have been used by Persian researchers, some
interesting patterns emerged. Firstly in overt criticism it seemed that they have used different strategies for criticizing.
The targets of criticisms in Persian papers have been four: the reasoning and justifying of previous theories, the
statistical parts of past studies, the ignored problems in area of study and doubt in comments. For each group different
structures have been used. The following table shows them comprehensively.
Table 4. the Targets of Criticisms and Structures Used in Persian Papers

justifying of previous theories frequency doubt in comments frequency
The reasoning cannot be accepted. 3 It has not been specified clearly. 2
It is not defendable. 1 There is uncertainty. 1
It cannot be justified. 5 It has not been surely stated. 3
It cannot be confirmed. 3 the ignored problems in the study frequency
It needs modification. 2 The problem has been omitted. 2
It should be reconsidered again. 1 It has been overlooked. 4
If it was so … it would … 3 the statistical parts of past studies frequency
It is not logical. 1 It has been solved without special 3
It is mere imitation. 3 instrument.
Statistics have a kind of conflicts. 3
As it is obvious from the table, the most targeted area of criticism in Persian articles is the reasoning and justifying part.
The structure cannot be accepted and cannot be justified have the most cited ones by frequencies 3 and 5 respectively.
The problem has been ignored with total 6 frequencies are the highest one. The mentioned structures are not the only
one used by writers and have been chosen because of being more distinguished patterns in the discourse analysis .the
followings are some parts of the structures to clear the issue: for example:
 cannot be accepted:‫ ﺍﺳﺘﻼﻝ ﺑﺰﻓﺘﻨﯽ ﺗﯿﺴﺖ‬,‫ﻧﯿﺴﺖ‬.... ‫ ﻭﻟﯽ ﺩﺭ ﻧﻬﺎﯾﺖ ﺑﺎﺳﺦ ﻗﺎﻧﻊ ﮐﻨﻨﺪﻩ ﺍﯼ ﺑﺮﺍﯼ‬.
“the reasoning cannot be accepted, however it is not a convincing answer for…”
 Not logical:‫ ﻫﺮ ﺩﻭ ﻧﻮﯾﺴﻨﺪﻩ ﺑﺮﺍﯼ ﻣﻌﺎﻧﯽ ﻣﺨﺘﻠﻒ )ﺍﺯ(ﻓﻬﺮﺳﺘﯽ ﺍﺭﺍﯾﻪ ﺩﺍﺩﻩ ﺍﻧﺪ‬. ‫ﮐﻪ ﮐﺎﻣﻼ ﺩﻟﺒﺨﻮﺍﻫﯽ ﻣﯿﻨﻤﺎﯾﺪ‬
“Both writers have put forward a list of different definitions for…, it seems too arbitrary”
 It has been overlooked‫ ﻫﯿﭻ ﺍﺷﺎﺭﻩ ﺍﯼ ﺑﻪ ﺍﯾﻦ ﻣﻌﻨﺎ ﻧﺸﺪﻩ ﺍﺳﺖ‬. , ‫ﺑﻪ ﺍﯾﻦ ﻣﺴﺎﻟﻪ ﻧﺒﺮﺩﺍﺧﺘﻪ ﺍﻧﺪ ﺍﺯ ﻗﻠﻢ ﺍﻓﺘﺎﺩﻩ ﺍﻧﺪ‬
“It is not mentioned, Are missing, the issue has not been considered”
 If it was so … it would. ‫ﺑﺪﯾﺮﻓﺘﻨﯽ ﺑﻮﺩ‬.... ‫ﺍﮔﺮ ﺗﻤﺎﻣﯽ ﺍﯾﻦ ﺗﺮﮐﯿﺐ ﻫﺎ ﺻﻔﺖ ﻣﯽ ﺑﻮﺩﻧﺪ ﺍﻧﮕﺎﻩ ﺍﺳﺘﺪﻻﻝ ﻓﻮﻕ ﻣﺒﻨﯽ ﺩﺭ‬
“If All these compounds were adjectives, then the reasoning based on .... Could be accepted”
\About indirect AC, the kinds of mitigating devices used are of interest. The following words and structures are used as
rhetorical devices: seem, maybe, probably, it was better and in contrast to some. The targets of criticisms in English
papers have been found three: the reasoning and justifying of previous theories, the ignored problems in area of study
and doubt in comments. For each group different structures have been used. The following table shows them:
IJALEL 6(6):45-52, 2017 50
Table 5. The Targets of Criticisms and Structures Used in English Papers
justifying of previous theories frequency doubt in comments frequency
study were not meaningful 3 we still lack precise information 4
it cannot account for 3 he does not provide examples 1
It cannot be justified. 4 Further investigation is needed 3
It is not logical. 3 …..did not detail the process 3
he does not provide examples 3 It has not been explored further. 1
we argue against 3 the ignored problems in the study frequency
This would be a fundamental mistake 4 It has been overlooked. 2
Like Persian authors, English researchers criticize their collogues on the reasoning parts more. Although the general
structures used are similar however, there are some minute differences, and this variety is obvious more in the strategies
used for showing doubts toward other works. The ignored problems are like Persian papers and have been criticized by
both groups as well. These are only the most obvious ones and corpus presents more varieties .The followings are some
examples to show the structures used by English writers:
Reasoning:
 “However, the inability of ‘say’ to introduce subject complements in these creoles does not necessarily negate
its status as a complementizer”
 “The problem with this position is”
 “One thing apparently lost from Harley’s (2007) analysis of Latinates is the general failure of Latinate and
particles to co-occur. Harley treated the Latinate prefixes as particles in the same position as the Germanic
particles in other constructions”
 “Most of these disputes are undignified and ill-informed, and do not serve the discipline well”
 “it cannot account for Latinate”
 Doubt in comments:
 “There is need for formal comparison, Further research is necessary”
 “further research on early varieties of Sranan Tongo is needed”
 “However, he does not provide examples or attempt a full comparison between Ewe and Sranan”
the numbers show little difference between using indirect AC in English and Persian paper; however, the kinds of
mitigating devices used are of more variety in English articles for example these two kinds of sentences, show how
English writers are conservative in their criticism:
 “I differ from Harley by arguing that though Latinate”
 “Deserve more detailed discussion”
5. Discussion
Actually genre and rhetorical analysis have been investigated across different languages and on different parts of
academic papers such as, introduction, method, results and conclusion. It attracted the attention of researchers recently
and examined it from different perspectives.
The results of the present study showed very clearly that in the corpus of the research, the English linguists tended to
criticize more than Persian linguists, and they not only want to criticize more but also they do this in a very overt and
authority manner and even sometimes in a sarcastic tone.
In contrast, Persian writers tended to criticize less and in those cases they did not seem to be very conservative. In
contrast to most of the previous studies (Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza, & Zambrano, 2003; Martín-Martín, & Burgess,
,2004; Salager-Meyer & Zambrano, 2001) the English writers did not use different rhetorical devices to lessen their
effects of criticism and to save the face of other researchers.
Actually the percentages of the direct and indirect AC in both English and Persian articles in the corpus were close by
70.68 - 75.47 and 29.31 -24.52 for direct –indirect tones. The similarities in the results of this study can be explained by
the one specific field of study which is Linguistics. The results actually are in line with the Hunston (1989) conclusion
of the study on research articles from three different field, biochemistry, sociolinguistics and history. The results of her
study showed that linguistics strategies used for showing disagreement depend on the specific discipline. It means that
the strategies used in biochemistry were unique to that field and because the corpus of study is chosen from one field of
study, the results showed similarities. Although the language used in classes is Persian, because most of the academic
text books and papers in linguistics departments in Iran are taught in English, it seems that researchers and graduated
students have been accustomed to type of writing in English and have transferred them to their Persian papers.
Although using direct AC was observed in the two groups of papers in the corpus but the ones were not the kinds of
direct attack or the serious ones. Regarding this, Hunston (1989) believes that “incorrect knowledge claims” and direct
attack cannot be found in the current written English papers.
IJALEL 6(6):45-52, 2017 51
Researchers for convincing the readers use power ,and using direct AC more in English and Persian can be justified in
this way. The current time is the time of competition especially in academic situations. It seems that the Persian writers
want to take part in this rival and have learned by experience if they want to be heard, they should talk from the
authority status. Consequently, they aspire to use direct AC more like English authors. Hyland (2002) says that although
use of self pronoun is not a very good way of expressing ideas in academic papers it can help the writer to make identity
in his or her own community. Therefore his research showed underuse of personal pronouns in Hong Kong
undergraduates learning English as a second language. They thought that it had authority connotations.
Although the Iranian culture is famous for compliments, Taarof in Persian term, it seems that it is not dominant or
effective in academic setting. Therefore Iranian researchers are like their English counterparts under the impact of
academic status and their disciplines in criticism. It means that the pressure from the community to be a distinguished
member and the subject of Linguistics itself are the determinant factors in using special rhetoric of criticism.
The most targeted issue in criticism especially in Persian was justifying insufficiently, it means that the writers believed
that support was not sufficient. Some cases are related to not mentioned data but most important one was related to the
reasoning part that did not seem rational.
In using indirect AC variable, there were similarities between two languages especially in using hedging. Hedging are
mitigating devices that as Hyland (1996) presents are used by writers to let them predicts probable disagreement to their
own claims ,and show deference to their collogues. He puts further that hedging has been used by authors as means of
politeness to show that they don’t intend to impose their beliefs on others.
The following words and structures are used as rhetorical devices: seem, maybe, probably, it was better, in both groups.
It is really in the opposite of the belief presented by Vassileva (1997) that hedging is culture specific .It is also against
the idea put forward by Clyne (1981,1987) that academic writing strategies and styles are related to the attitudes of a
community toward learning and knowledge that is transferred by educational system, and this itself depends on cultural
contexts. It has been stated that (Kreutz & Harres, 1997) using more hedging show that the language is more
interactional and dialogic; However, using hedging in papers of two languages were approximately similar and it cannot
be concluded that which one is more interactional.
6. Conclusion and Implication
The importance of writing especially in an academic setting has been proved by many experts. Hyland (2004) state that
in the past academic writing was considered as a homogenous skill at colleges and universities, and now it is believed
that each discipline has its own way of writing and the members make those traditions instructionally. The rhetoric of
criticism is one of the characteristics which is special in every field and every language. This study was done to show
the rhetorical contrastive analysis of English and Persian linguistics papers. The results showed that the English
linguists tend to criticize more and also do this overtly, and Persian linguistics criticize less but in a very similar way.
The research has implications for writing instructions specific for each major at universities; as Hyland (2002) states
that each discipline has its own way of negotiation of identity and for example all don’t use impersonality tone equally.
Therefore, it is the responsibility of teachers and instructors to make students and language learners aware of
characteristics and specially AC variables. Moving toward ESP and specificity can show the need for such instructions.
Learners should know that if they want to be a member of a community, they should be familiar with the way language
used by its other members. The research has also implications for decoding the mysteries of social and cognitive
factors in each specific field. One point should be regarded that Linguistics consists of so many sub fields and each one
has the characteristics of hard and soft sciences like Computational Linguistics and General Linguistics. As Stotesbury
(2003) investigated the abstracts of research papers in humanities and natural sciences. He Concluded that the act of
criticism were different across disciplines and suggested for teaching those to novice researchers of different majors;
However, in this study, the corpus include all and did not separate them and further study can be done in different
subfields. And also the gender, age and profession and status of the writers may have some effects on the rhetoric of
criticism, and this can be studied by other interested researchers.
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The Savage Within

Yu-Miao Yang (Corresponding author)
Department of Applied English, I-Shou University ,Taiwan
Email: yyangp@isu.edu.tw

Abstract
Heart of Darkness is often viewed as an allegory that relates the tragic demise of the colonists and the annihilation of
the noble ideas they hold. In Heart of Darkness, the colonial theme is best examined through the fate of Kurtz, the
protagonist of the novel who emerges from the surface of conventional European values as a man of varied talents and
high culture. Equipped with moral ideas, Kurtz travelled to the Congo to campaign for noble ideals, yet having arrived
in a primeval place, the uncivilised wilderness awakened his “brutal instincts” and “monstrous passion”. He submitted
himself utterly to the temptation to “go native”, descending into a moral and physical state of degeneration. He is to
become a savage man, consumed by the tangled and unforgiving jungle. The life and death of Kurtz in the wilderness
helps to demonstrate that the treat of barbarism comes from indeed within civilisation itself. This paper thus seeks to
examine the savage humanity by scrutinising Kurtz’s Mephistophelian transformation in the heart of darkness.
Keywords: Conrad, Barbarism, Colonialism
1. Introduction
Travelling from the presumed centre of the civilised world to a primitive territory, Marlow’s peregrination in Heart of
Darkness is often viewed as a spiritual voyage of self-discovery. To précis the impact this experience has upon him,
Marlow states: ‘It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow
to throw a kind of light on everything about me – and into my thoughts”. What Marlow brings out from the Dark
Continent is realistic and detailed depiction of hair-raising horror and miseries the colonists caused in the name of
civilisation and progress. Heart of Darkness is therefore often viewed as an allegory that relates the tragic demise of the
colonists and the annihilation of the noble ideas they hold. The colonial theme is best examined through the fate of
Kurtz, the protagonist of the novel who emerges from the surface of conventional European values as a man of varied
talents and high culture. Equipped with moral ideas, Kurtz travelled to the Congo to campaign for noble ideals, yet
having arrived in a primeval place, the uncivilised wilderness awakened his “brutal instincts” and “monstrous passion”.
He submitted himself utterly to the temptation to “go native”, descending into a moral and physical state of
degeneration. He is to become a savage man, consumed by the tangled and unforgiving jungle.
2. Discussion
Although the storyline of this novella obits around Kurtz, Conrad actually denies us a direct access to Kurtz for most of
the narration, while concretely creating a fantastic image in his stead with Marlow’s assistance. Through Marlow’s
progressive revelation, a dim picture of Kurtz gradually emerges: “It was a distinct glimpse … the dugout, four
paddling savage, and the lone white man turning his back suddenly on the headquarters, on belief, on thoughts of home
perhaps, setting his face towards the depth of the wilderness, towards his empty and desolate station” (34). This picture
encapsulates Kurtz’s idealistic as well as romantic reflection as an individual who has turned his back on home for the
wilderness, trading the stricture of civilisation for the lure of enforcing his own beliefs. With conviction that rivals a
crusader’s, Kurtz sees himself as the first man in this savage land, a messenger for the Enlightenment.
In truth, Kurtz’s approach to Africa rests firmly on the expansion of material interests, believing strongly that Africa
could only be rescued from darkness through the establishment of the ivory trade. Calling upon the power of
commercial interests to boost social development, Kurtz’s proposal for cultivating Africa corresponds to the one
Charles Gould tenders for Costaguana in Nostromo. As an idealistic intellectual educated in the West who deeply
committed himself to the Western idea of civilisation, like Kurtz, Charles Gould postulates that the world can be made a
better place by good faith and unselfish idealism. In Costaguana, a poverty-stricken country almost ruined by
continuous coup détat, Charles Gould sees the success of economic progress as the only useful, solid force capable of
underpinning the law, restoring justice for an oppressed people, and thereby turning the country around.
Sentimentalising the role material interests play, Charles Gould insists
What is wanted [in Costaguana] is law, good faith, order, security. Anyone can declaim about these things, but
I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to
impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That’s how your money-making is justified
IJALEL 6(6):53-56, 2017 54
here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands must be
shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That’s your ray of hope (Nostromo,
81).
A better future will come, in Charles Gould’s mind, yet only through the triumph of relentless economic development.
Commercial interests, in this respect, become the means of progress and enlightenment. Acting as an agent of capitalist
encroachment, Kurtz echoes the same sentiment in Heart of Darkness when he claims “each station should be like a
beacon on the road towards better things, a centre of trade of course but also for humanising, improving, instructing”
(34). Both Charles Gould and Kurtz seek to establish their credentials with respect to the benefits of capitalist
development; however, the juggernaut of capitalism, under whichever façade, soon ultimately consumes all individual
bravado.
Indeed, in the name of civilisation and Enlightenment, what both Charles Gould and Kurtz ignore is the utter
exploitation they as colonists have inflicted. In Heart of Darkness, as an imperial trader, however idealistic, Kurtz has
much in common with his sordid fellow agents. In fact, despite the quixotic image he projects and haughty rhetoric he
pronounces, he is an even greater imperialist trader than his “profit-seeking” colleagues, sending in “as much ivory as
all the others put together” (22). The ivory, once given Kurtz as a symbol of his hero’s quest, now becomes the measure
of his guilt.
Reading this oil painting as a silent statement of Kurtz’s crusade into the wilderness, it effectively foretells Kurtz’s
moral downfall. The oil painting reveals the self-righteous confidence the colonists exude in their relentless expeditions
in Africa. Unable to recognise the tensions and contradictions intrinsic to the enterprise of imperialism, Europeans
delude themselves into believing the noble causes they claim to serve. As in Kurtz’s case, he initially positions himself
as an oracle who sees through the hypocrisy of colonialism and is determined to become the true advocate for
Enlightenment values. Ironically and sadly, however, whilst he sets out to be the torch, Kurtz turns to be part and parcel
of the Enlightenment myth that blindfolds Europe.
The image of Africa has for centuries been thought of as ‘evil, ignorant, corrupt and atrocious”, in contrast to the image
of Europe as “good, true, pure and beautiful” (Parry 1983, pp. 4-5). For the western world, without ordered political and
social structures and objective standard of civilisation, the mysterious, but vicious Africa is an unenlightened place
waiting for salvation. Of course, with rapid imperial expansion and Western material interests increasingly focusing on
Africa, salvation did not come too late. Identifying themselves with Atlas, who bore the heavens on his shoulders,
European colonists pledged to bring the savage African out of the darkness of chaos and into the light of civilisation. As
a result, innumerable European adventurers explored the so-called Dark Continent, promising to bring law and order to
Africa. Sadly, the torch they held serves only to illuminate the evil greed and horrible nature of imperial
aggrandisement. Instead of salvation, the Europeans burdened the natives with chaos, wretchedness and widespread
displacement. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad sardonically portrays these rapacious colonists as “faithless pilgrims” or
ruthless invaders from a “spiritless alternative world” (Brantlinger 1988, p.258). European adventurers soon succumb to
their unbridled craving for power and wealth, abandoning every vestige of the moral and human ideals upon which
civilisation is founded (Conrad, 1998). In An Outpost of Progress, Conrad satirically implies that the colonialists will,
eventually, form themselves from the heart of jungle. Indeed, “outside all social restraints and hypocrisies, against the
backdrop of native life”, the world of the savage becomes a “perfect setting for men who had escaped the reality of
civilisation” (Arendt 1968, p.70).
The first inkling of Kurtz’s conversion comes to light in a seventeen-page report he composes to the International
Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs for its further instruction. Kurtz begins with the argument that “we
whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, must necessarily appear to [savages] in the nature of
supernatural beings – we approach them with the might as of a deity” (Conrad 1988, p.50). Although written in the
name of progress, of “good practically unbounded”, at the bottom of the report’s last page, “luminous and terrifying like
a flash of lightning in a serene sky”, Kurtz has scrawled “Exterminate all the brutes!” (Conrad 1988, p.51). This
scrawled postscript, viewed as an evidence of a private assertion, apparently suggests that for Kurtz, the only way to
salvaging the Dark Continent is to practice genocide. Laid behind this horrid statement is Kurtz’s prescription for a
modern world, a world that exists only in the shape of battlefield, where the uncivilised must be totally subjugated or,
ideally, exterminated. Kurtz’s report recalls a familiar argument made by the Professor in The Secret Agent, who also
seeks his own brand of social justice by means of terror. In proclaiming extermination for “the only way of progress”,
the Professor reveals his vision of progress, which is committed not to rebuilding society upon progressive ideals, but
merely to its destruction (Conrad 1994, 263). However, because of his total self-nihilism, the Professor is incapable of
engaging in the social revolution he advocates. Far from being the enthusiastic revolutionary he claims to be, the
Professor is actually a boastful, but immobilised armchair “activist”. In contrast with the Professor’s impotence in
action, Kurtz’s will-power drives him to exercise imperial power to its extreme: his chief weapon is his will-power – the
kind of full-blown personal terrorism which comes to characterise his endeavours.
Indeed, in Heart of Darkness, as an imperial trader as well as the embodiment of European’s noblest values, however
idealistic, Kurtz’s approach to Africa does have much in common with that of his sordid fellow agents. In fact, despite
the quixotic image he projects and the haughty rhetoric he pronounces, he is an even greater imperialist trader than his
“profit-seeking” colleagues, sending in “as much ivory as all the others put together” (Conrad 1988, p.22). The ivory,
once given Kurtz as a symbol of his hero’s quest, now becomes the measure of his guilt.
IJALEL 6(6):53-56, 2017 55
Worshipped by the natives, the divine roles Kurtz takes on is no longer that of a Prometheus-like deity, on the contrary,
approaching the natives with “thunder and lightning”, Kurtz transforms from an idealist to the furious God similar to
that of the Old Testament (Cox 1974, p.81). Those heads encircling Kurtz’s outpost, which are glittering like ivory balls
in the sunshine, are not “ornamental but symbolic”, bearing the evidence of how far he “lacked restraint in the
gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him – some small matter which when the pressing
need arose could not be found under his magnificent eloquence” (Conrad 1988, p.57). When Marlow confronts Kurtz in
the forest, he confronts a man in total isolation. There is no standard or sentiment to which Marlow can appeal, Kurtz
has not just “kicked himself loose of the earth”, he has indeed “kicked the very earth to pieces” (Conrad 1988, p.65).
It’s always intriguing to see the fall of someone who has been set on a pedestal for the virtues he apparently represents;
yet in Kurtz’s case, as an advocator of imperialism, Kurtz’s fall and transformation at the heart of jungle becomes
symbolic. Alone in the forest, Kurtz has lost a community that helps to define his social and racial identity, so he
becomes an isolated soul questing after his worthiness in the geopolitical as well as moral wasteland. In the hostile
jungle, the primeval wilderness arouses Kurtz’s dark impulses by whispering things to him about himself, things that
echoed in his head because he was “hollow at the core”:
[T]he wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion.
I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no
conception till he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It
echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core (Conrad 1988, pp.57-8).
More significantly, as Marlow observed,
[T]he heavy mute spell of the wilderness that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of
forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passion. This alone, I was convicted,
had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the
drones of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted
aspirations … (Conrad 1988, p.65).
It is obvious that Marlow attributes Kurtz’s moral degeneration to the deprivation of a community, which would have
helped to restraints him. Yet it is undeniable that, carrying the arrogant isolation of the colonialist to its extreme, Kurtz
has lost not just self-restraint, but any notion of moral conduct. Therefore, Marlow’s reasoning would soon sound like
an excuse to Hannah Arendt, who claims that
“Many of these adventurers had gone mad in the silent wilderness of an overpopulated continent where the
presence of human beings only underlined utter solitude, and where an untouched, overwhelmingly hostile
nature that nobody had ever taken the trouble to change into human landscape seemed to wait in sublime
patience for the passing away of the fantastic invasion of man. But their madness had remained a matter of
individual experience and without consequence” (Arendt 1966, p.191).
However, can such an experience, as proclaimed by Arendt, remain relevant only to the individuals? Reading Marlow’s
depiction of the colonialism at work at the heart of darkness, the answer cannot be more poignant.
Dedicated himself to the philanthropic task of illuminating the Dark Continent, Kurtz has gone farther into the savage
world of Africa than any other faithless agents have, at the expanse of great solitude. This mental and physical
alienation that Kurtz has endured in the depth of the jungle turns his mind into an island. Yet “no man is an island”, say
John Donne, insisting that no individuals can exist without the rest of society. Donne considers solidarity essential to
human existence, for the interdependence between individuals helps to define humanity. Solidarity is Janus-faced,
however; it can work for gong-ho butchery as well as humanitarian compassion. On the one hand, it provides an identity
to which an individual subscribes; one the other, by providing this security, it demands a minimum obedience to
consensus, which is, at times, unquestionable. Whoever violates this golden rule of solidarity is therefore condemned to
exile.
This is the “hidden truth” that Marlow discovers in the deepest of the jungle, or rather at the innermost of man’s heart.
And the knowledge is difficult for Marlow to share with his fellow Europeans. Because “with solid pavement under
[their] feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer [them] or fall on [them], stepping delicately between the
butcher and the policeman”, they cannot possibly image “what particular region of the first ages of man’s untrammelled
feet may take him into by the way of solitude – utter solitude without a policemen – by the way of silence – utter
silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion” (Conrad 1988, p.50).
Marlow remains silent about his epic journey to the African wilderness, thereby allowing his fellow Europeans to
continue to live in a world of “sunny illusion” (Tucker 1975, p.30).
The best lesson we learn from Kurtz’s physical and mental decline perhaps lies in its exposure of the savage aspects of
humanity. By giving no names except Kurtz and Marlow to his characters, Conrad seems to imply that anyone, however
romantic and idealistic, in a place like colonial Africa where “everything can be done”, would easily become an
instrument for imperial exploitation and eventually fall for the temptation of going native. They soon stray from the
self-assigned mission and become the irredeemable imperialists, the lost souls who easily relieve themselves of “the
burden of the white men”.
IJALEL 6(6):53-56, 2017 56
3. Conclusion
In Author’s Note to Heart of Darkness, Conrad claims that the book is “experience pushed a little (and only very little)
beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosom of
the readers” (Conrad 1988, p.4). What Conrad brings out from the centre of Africa is a personal record of things “seen
and done” in the Congo region in 1889. Therefore, the universal and prophetic value of Kurtz’s story lies in its
recognition of the potentialities of moral deconstruction not far beneath the surface of civilised society. Kurtz’s various
vanities are forms of one abstract desire in one man who has seen through all conventional satisfactions, and who has
been given the chance to exercise unlimited power. Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s allegory, his thoughtful warning that
without the consistent framework of moral community, all civilizational values can diminish into the rhetoric of
expediency. After all, the darkness lurks quietly in the corner of human heart, as we are not as far removed from
barbarism as we like to think. The threat of barbarism comes not from the heart of jungle, but from within civilisation
itself.
References
Arendt, H. (1966). The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Allen & Unwin.
Arendt, H. (1968). Imperialism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Brantlinger, P. (1988). Rules of Darkness. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.
Conrad, J. (1998). A Personal Record, ed. Mara Kalnins. London: Penguin.
Conrad, J. (1994). The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. London: Penguin.
Conrad, J. (1988). Heart of Darkness. New York & London: Norton & Company.
Cox, C. (1974). Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd..
Parry, B. (1983). Conrad and Imperialism. London: The McMillan Press LTD..
Tucker, M. (1976). Joseph Conrad. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co..
The Effects of Using Podcast on Listening Comprehension

among Iranian Pre-intermediate EFL Learners
Islam NamazianDost (Corresponding author)
Department of English Language Teaching, Ahvaz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran
E-mail: e.namazi75@yahoo.com
Ghassem Bohloulzadeh
Department of Law, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
E-mail: ghassem_bohloulzadeh1971@yahoo.com
Rezvan Rahmatollahi
Department of English Language Teaching, Ahvaz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran
E-mail: Donyaye_ajiib@yahoo.com

Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to explore the effects of using podcast on listening comprehension among Iranian
pre-intermediate EFL learners. To fulfill the objectives of the study a Homogeneity test (Oxford Quick Placement Test)
was administered among 90 students at the pre-intermediate level of Poyesh language Institute and finally 60
participants were selected. Then, they were non-randomly divided into two subgroups, namely control and experimental
groups. Before starting the treatment, a validated teacher-made listening comprehension test was administered to
students as pre-test to assess the participants' listening comprehension at the beginning of the course. Then, the
experimental group received the treatment, which was teaching listening comprehension through using podcasts while
the control group was taught using traditional methods of teaching listening with no multimedia source. After 20
sessions of treatment, the two groups were administered the same teacher-made listening test as post-test. Data were
analyzed by Paired and Independent Samples t-test. The findings showed that the experimental group significantly
performed better than the control group. Generally, the experimental groups outperformed the control groups. The
results suggest that podcasts can be used in English classes to develop listening ability among Iranian EFL learners.
Keywords: Computer-assisted Language Learning, Listening Comprehension, Podcast
1. Introduction
1.1 Preliminaries
The verifiable part of English as a worldwide method for correspondence can be the reason that English is obliged as
one of the subjects educated at school. The vital part of English is brought up by Diem (2011) who states, "To satisfy
the necessities in globalization period, English will assume the vital position on the planet" (p.160). Hence, having
English aptitude can be considered as advantageous. For instance, individuals who need to have better openings for
work and in addition better possibilities in staying aware of what is new in their field of claim to fame can acquire more
credit on the off chance that they can communicate in English.
In addition, the advancement in data and innovation has revolutionized English educating and learning approaches;
learners of English can without much of a stretch make utilization of their own electronic gadgets to study English. In
instructing and learning English listening aptitudes, podcasts are said to give English learners additional listening
practice both inside and outside classrooms. They offer understudies sounds and recordings listening documents with
credible and relevant materials, then students’ listening understanding capacity can be expanded by time. Particularly,
they convey understudies chances to work on listening in a self-coordinated way, and at their own places that implies
broad listening exercises outside classroom with fascinating points podcasts which can be downloaded naturally from
for nothing out of pocket podcasts sites (Kavaliauskienė & Anusienė, 2009).
Nowadays, In Iran, English has a key part in numerous parts of life, especially in science and innovation, English has
been instructed as required subject from junior high school up to the senior high school level. The significance of
English, as Ihsan (2011) claims, incorporates the capacity to impart both orally and in composing, Therefore, Ihsan
(2011) contends, "individuals need to master all skills of English to be specific tuning in, talking, perusing, a written
work" (p.12). Listening as one of the English language skills is the receptive skill which is the most well-known
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 58
correspondence action in day by day life. It is a dynamic action that includes accepting, understanding, and seeing a
message from a discussion. Morley (1991) calls attention to that listening as one of the language skills is a significant
component that should be aced by grown-up outside language learners since, individuals can hope to listen twice as
much as they talk, four circumstances more than they read, and five circumstances more than they write. In other words,
listening has essential parts in human life as individuals listen more than they talk, read, and compose. The significance
of listening in English language learning is additionally highlighted by Richards (1990, 2008) who expresses that
language learning relies on tuning in, which gives the aural info that serves as the reason for language procurement and
empowers learners to connect in talked correspondence. Listening can likewise give a great part of the info and
information that learners get in language learning, since when individuals begin to take in a remote language, their most
punctual learning comes essentially through their ears (Scott & Yterberg, 1990). However, listening does not seem to
receive as much attention as the other language skills. As indicated by Tompkins and Hoskisson (1995, p. 81), "Among
four dialect abilities –listening, talking, perusing, and composing listening has been known as the slighted skill for a
couple of decades". Moreover, Persulessy (1988, as cited in Wicaksana, 2009) states, "one reason for the sentiment that
listening has a tendency to be dismissed is the inclination among language instructors that this ability is naturally gained
by the learners as they figure out how to talk language ". In other words, Most English instructors underestimate it and
trust that listening skill will grow normally inside the procedure of English language learning.
Additionally, listening appreciation is a standout amongst the most hazardous aptitudes for dialect learners. Regardless,
when it is seen as that an extensive part of the learners have mechanical devices, for instance, MP3 players, PCs, tablets
and phones allowing them to listen to the sound reports easily, the issue of listening gives off an impression of being
more sensible. There are various courses for upgrading dialect learners' listening capacities with the help of contraptions
said above, and the mix of two clear words which are iPod and broadcasting gives lingo learners and teachers with a
champion among the most promising techniques for discarding this listening issue: Podcasting. Podcasting is a late
development which has started to be used for lingo guideline. Late surveys on informative podcasts have maintained
their sufficiency in dialect learning (Ashton-Hay and Brookes, 2011; Hasan & Hoon, 2013; O'Brien & Hegelheimer,
2007).
McGarr (2009) noticed that podcasting alludes to the sharing sound or video records in computerized format. It can be
downloaded physically from the web or naturally appropriated to endorsers. These records are open straight from the
desktop or transmittable to a media gadget. The term podcasting turned out from the utilization of Apple's compact
sound player, the iPod. Additionally, different organizations made a scope of transportable sound and video players in
which the term podcasting issued to portray the telecom of all sound or video records over the Internet.
Therefore, in order to develop listening skills and listening competence, podcast may assume a critical part. Podcast is
viewed as a ―new innovation for building up students’ listening and talking abilities (SZE, 2006, p. 127). Since it
offers a lot of materials on the web, learners can have entry to those at whatever point they need through web. It is true
that in Iran, podcast has not yet been extensively executed. However, the effect can be accepted considering its focal
points and drawbacks. This review will see if podcasting, can enhance listening abilities of Iranian EFL students.
As the educational modules of schools and universities basically concentrate on perusing and composing skills, most
students depend on ― comprehension and writing composition‖ in Iran (Matin, 2012, p. 239). Moreover, educators
abstain from listening and talking activities because of extensive class (Chowdhury, 2012) or for insufficient or minimal
presence of appropriate materials. Accordingly, listening and speaking skills both get to be distinctly peripheral abilities
from Iran setting. The present review tended to this issue and attempted to see if podcast can be utilized as a part of
especially improving students’ listening abilities. It also addressed the fact that even though technology can help
promoting learner autonomy (Warschaur, Shetzer, & Meloni, 2000), whether students will be independent or not.
Hence, how podcast can be utilized and how students respond to podcast will appear in this review.
Moreover, many studies show that listening comprehension is the skill with which L2 learners feel most uncomfortable
(Artyushina, Sheypak, Khovrin, & Spektor, 2011; Graham, 2006). The use of authentic listening materials may help
language learners to manage listening related problems (Chinnery, 2006; Gilmore, 2011). These materials are easily
accessible thanks to the recent developments in technology which includes educational podcasting. Podcasting may
have a huge potential for improving students’ listening skills and making them more comfortable with it (Artyushina, et
al., 2011). However, because of the novelty of this technology, the studies on educational podcasting directed at
developing listening skills are limited (Fox, 2008; Hasan & Hoon, 2013).
1.3 Objectives of the Study
Podcasting wonder, an inventive innovation for broadcasting sound documents and projects on the Internet has been
presented in 2005 and from that point forward there have seemed quick advances (Selingo, 2006). Podcasting which
was initially an apparatus for passing on data, news, and stimulation, soon, was identified by instructors who
appropriately saw the potential it can have for educating and learning (Adams, 2006). The present review endeavored to
see if podcasting can be a valuable system in advancing learner self-rule from Iranian understudies' point of view. It
likewise expected to demonstrate the viability of utilizing innovation, i.e. podcast as opposed to utilizing customary
technique. In this manner this review appeared to what degree podcasting can be useful in advancing learner
independence and in building up understudies' listening abilities.
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 59
1.4 Research Questions and Hypotheses
This study attempts to answer the following question:
RQ1. Is there any significant difference between Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners who are users and nonusers of
podcasting in terms of listening ability?
This study is based on the following null hypothesis:
H 0 1. There is not any significant difference between Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners who are users and nonusers
of podcasting in terms of listening ability.
1.5 Significance of the Study
Podcasting changes the study propensities the same number of understudies no longer attempt to take part in
conventional classes, yet they like to connect with the course substance for all intents and purposes (Facer, Abdous, &
Camarena, 2009; McCombs & Liu, 2007). By executing podcasting to classroom educational programs, a noteworthy
feeling of adaptability is improved as understudies will not miss any point in the event that they dropped any session.
Podcasting ought to be incorporated with typical classroom exercises as it is an extraordinary way to deal with
advanced does not shared learning styles. In fact podcasting makes preparing more advantageous. In any case, it doesn't
imply that it can supplant genuine classes, yet it can go about as a medium to repay the classroom participation.
Students can utilize this innovation as a supplement of the genuine classes in which they can allude to the materials
whenever they need. Moreover, this study will be an attempt to find out the use of technology in teaching listening in
pre-intermediate level. It found out whether podcasting can be used as an effective tool in encouraging learner
autonomy. The findings of this research provided information to further research studies, which include CALL and
Learner Autonomy in the field of education in Iran. This study also look forward to taking hold of attention of the
English language teachers of Iran. It demonstrate to them an alternate way where they can reconsider their conventional
methods and incorporate CALL in showing listening skills.
2. Review of the Literature
The utilization of PC and data advancements in dialect learning and educating has prompted to PC helped dialect
learning turning into an examination field all alone. Dialect instructors and understudies are turning out to be
progressively acquainted with the utilization of PCs for dialect learning purposes.
CALL is a moderately new term that came into support in the mid-1980s, supplanting the more established term CALI
(PC helped dialect direction). The term CALI dropped out of support since it got to be connected with customized
learning, i.e., an instructor focused as opposed to a learner-focused approach that drew intensely on behaviorism
History of CALL (2004).
CALL is essentially characterized as any procedure in which the language learner utilizes the personal computer (PC)
keeping in mind the end goal to accomplish certain learning results Beatty (2003). It incorporates such issues like
materials plan, innovations, academic speculations and methods of direction. Because of the changing way of CALL, it
is viewed as a trained teach, continually creating in both instructional method and mechanical advances in equipment
and programming. Beatty (2003) portrays conveyance techniques for CALL as including individual PCs at home or in
the classroom, dialect research centers in which PC capacities have been consolidated, online direction through the
Internet, and separate and arranged learning using email and different methods of online communication
Davies (2004) characterized CALL as a way to deal with dialect educating and learning in which the PC is utilized as a
guide to the presentation, support and appraisal of material to be adapted, for the most part including a generous
intelligent components. Also, Philips (1986) included, CALL is an approach of instructing and learning dialect
movement helped straightforwardly by a PC. To aggregate up, CALL, when all is said in done, can be characterized as
a scholastic field for educating and learning remote dialects in which the PC assumes a focal part in understudies
learning and in the assessment of their execution.
Additionally, as Warschauer (2008) put it, CALL has enhanced in the course of recent years. It has experienced three
stages: behavioral CALL, informative CALL, and integrative CALL. Each stage identifies with a particular level of
development and certain informational theories (Gorjian, Pazhakh, and Parang, 2012). Behavioral CALL which began
from 1950s and kept going to 1960s-1970s, depended on overwhelming behaviorists' hypotheses of learning. This stage
involved dreary dialect bores and practices. The PC was utilized as a gadget for introducing instructional materials to
the understudies. Two critical elements undermined behavioral CALL in the late 1980s. To begin with, behavioral
approaches to manage lingo learning had been rejected both at theoretical and informative level. In addition, the
presentation of the microcomputer allowed a radical new extent of potential results. Open way to deal with instructing
got the opportunity to be particularly no matter how you look at it in the 1980s.Proponents of this approach felt the
drills and practices of the earlier decades were not of much esteem and they impeded genuine correspondence.
The integrative phase of CALL was developed based on the integration of language skills like listening and reading.
Hypermedia made multimedia powerful and it made authentic learning environment available by listening through
seeing. Skills were easily integrated and students by themselves controlled and managed their learning. The primary
focus was the content, and language forms were secondary focus. Internet surprisingly boosted writing and reading
skills, online speaking and listening. Actually, this phase put all theoretical language teaching principles into practice
and integrated meaningful and authentic communication into language learning curriculum. In addition, this
combination helped learners to significantly recall a greater number of vocabularies when reading a text.
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 60
Besides, CALL has assumed a vital part in customizing instruction. The late advances in instructive uses of PC
equipment and programming have given a quickly developing asset to dialect classrooms. The useful uses of Computer
Assisted Language Learning (CALL) are developing at such a fast pace, to the point that it is practically unimaginable
for a classroom educator to stay aware of the field. This development is very legitimate as far as instructive focal points
it offers especially the accessibility of rich assets for both learners and educators and the expanded probability of online
cooperation as a hotspot for further learning. As Roger (1996, cited in Lai, 2006) states, when the computer is utilized
as a part of conjunction with conventional second dialect classroom examine, understudies can concentrate all the more
freely, leaving the instructor more opportunity to focus on those parts of second dialect showing that are still hard or
outlandish by PC. Attributable to such academic advantages, PC innovation has turned out to be more available to both
people and schools and the developing comprehension of its possibilities has energized a move of accentuation far from
PC innovation itself to different utilization of such innovation in more pragmatic parts of educating and learning.
Podcast is a cutting edge advanced innovation that can be utilized viably for dialect educating and Purposes. As
indicated by Robinson (2009) the term podcast is a mix of two words: Pod mean iPod-the name of famous MP3 player
and Broadcasting. As he characterizes, podcasts are sound or video records on the web which can be uninhibitedly
downloaded to a PC and listened to on a PC or any compact playback gadget that backings MP3 documents.
Moreover, Sze (2006) characterized podcasts as a powerful action identified with dialect perception. Sze's (2006)
thoughts are considered as the previous renditions of the present conceptualization of podcasting that characterizes
podcasts as more than watching or listening only for delight. They express the view that learners ought to have both joy
and learning destinations in utilizing these documents (podcasts). Understanding these documents needs the learner's
past data about the diverse components of the content, for example, syntactic and semantic parts, which assume an
essential part to anticipate meaning (Rezapour, Gorjian, & Pazhakh, (2012).
Based on the distinctive record sorts of podcasts, they are isolated into three principle sorts are sound just, sound and
still envisions, and video. Be that as it may, with respect to podcasts' makers, Man (2007) arranges them into two sorts
are radio podcasts and autonomous podcasts. Existing radio projects that transform into podcasts are called as radio
podcasts, for example, RTHK-radio TV Hong Kong. Conversely, online podcasts created by people and associations are
characterized as autonomous podcasts. These podcasts are demonstrated to have immense potential for English dialect
educating, and afterward they are called ELT podcasts. ELT podcasts are said to be the most reasonable for broad
listening however they can likewise be potential hotspots for serious tuning in, as showed by Stanley (2006). The
scientist then partitions ELT podcasts into three littler sorts as underneath:
Authentic podcasts: which are often not aimed at ELT students but are believed to be a potential source for listening.
Although many podcasts belonging to this type seem to be more suitable for advanced students, some others are ideal
for upper and lower level ones.
Teacher- created podcasts: are created by teachers and usually aim to support students’ learning by producing
listening content not being available elsewhere.
Students- created podcasts: are produced by students, often with teacher help. However, concerning about ELT
podcasts’ content, Man (2007) shows different content types of ELT podcasts such as comprehensive, whole lessons,
vocabularies, idioms, conversations with transcripts, and so on.
As guaranteed by Thomas (2006) podcast may bring another worldview of educating and learning. With podcasts
understudies can really ruminate, and listen again to addresses and instructional exercises as a method for empowering
basic, scientific methodologies. Podcasts are a rich hotspot for legitimate materials that could be used in educating and
too learning outside dialects. In 2007, Gura & King (cited in Bartoš, 2008) calls attention to that podcasts bring new
shots for instructors to find the zones of showing which are appealing yet appears not to be really attempted by
educators. They can utilize podcasts for sharing their thoughts and proposals to enhance their technique for educating.
More than that, with respect to understudies, podcasting is said to be elective technique for discovering that can
improve their listening skills. Patten and Craig (2007) asserts that the utilization of podcasts engage understudies to deal
with their own particular time that implies it empowers them to learn during an era that the best suits them the best, take
control over their learning, deal with the speed of their learning amid predefined address times. Obviously, Bartoš
(2008) proposes in his paper that podcasts can be essentially utilized for addresses recording, autonomous learning, and
project- based learning as well.
Based on the examinations on podcasting instructional method, podcast appears a device to encourage learners creating
English dialect aptitudes. Hasan and Hoon (2013) have demonstrated that podcasts could bolster learning in talking and
tuning in, as well as in other dialect abilities and territories, for example, articulation, vocabulary, and linguistic use, It
likewise gives chances to EFL educators to rearrange taking in a dialect and discover an answer for the conventional
instructing and learning techniques challenges.
According to a study done by Kargozari and Zarinkamar (2014) in Iran, use of podcasts as an instructive gadget in
learning vocabulary was extensively more viable than procedures utilized generally as a part of EFL classes. Istanto
(2011) and Chan, Lee, and McLoughlin (2006) proposed that podcasts can be utilized to quicken EFL learners'
capability in English as supplementary material to bolster the course targets in accordance with the course materials.
Vandergrift (2006) cited that listening comprehension ability may rely on upon metacognitive learning, for example
record sorts, listening systems and targets. With respect to scientist encounter there is an extensive variety of podcasts
on the web that gives chances to each learner to be utilized as a supplementary and offbeat material. It can upgrade
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 61
learners' listening perception capacity. Kan (2010) examined that Web content planners should explain their method of
reasoning, systematize the substance and consistently enhance its activities to address the learners' issue in building up
their listening aptitudes.
The effect of listening to podcasts on the listening cognizance capacity of some Iranian EFL college understudies has
been explored. The aftereffects of this review demonstrated that members in the test bunch who used podcasts for their
listening exercises had higher and huge execution than the ones in the control group. They likewise had uplifting states
of mind toward podcast application for listening. (Ashraf, Noroozi, & Salami, 2011).
Generally persuading learners outside the class can be a troublesome mission; however, the implementation of
podcasting can support this issue (Asoodar, Marandi, Vaezi & Desmet, 2014; O’Bryan & Hegelheimer, 2007). A
gathering of studies finished up the constructive outcome of podcasting on the understudies' uplifting states of mind
toward learning through podcasts (Chan, Chi, Chin, & Lin, 2011; Heilesen, 2010; Kim & King, 2011). In a review
study, Kavaliauskienė and Anusienė (2009) investigated learners' view of listening to podcasts. The review observed
that seventy six percent of the subjects indicated inspirational states of mind toward the utilization of podcasting to
upgrade listening aptitudes. So also, Chan et al. (2011) investigated the impact of two podcast courses proposed to
supplement classroom educating for Chinese and Koreans as remote dialects. The outcomes found that members who
utilized podcasting had critical inspirational states of mind towards this instrument. Heilesen (2010) presumed that
understudies' dispositions were for the most part positive towards the usage of podcasting and there were not very many
members who reported dismissal towards podcasting. Ruler (2008) assessed a joint venture on utilizing podcasts for an
undergrad phonetic course with a specific end goal to assess understudies' elocution and mentalities. The findings
reported that the majority of the participants enjoyed the project. Similarly, Evans (2008) found that understudies were a
great deal happier with considering and looking into their topic by the utilization of podcasts than course notes. In a
later review, Fernandez, et al. (2009) made judgments about the responses of a few members who utilized podcasts. As
indicated by their discoveries, they expressed that podcasting was not a substitute for conventional learning framework;
in any case, it expanded their inspiration. Kim and King (2011) guaranteed that their discoveries observably
demonstrated that the execution of podcasting into the classroom was intriguing, and persuasive. Furthermore, they
concurred that mentalities toward podcasts fluctuated relying upon their past encounters with different sorts of PC
innovations.
According to Underwood (1989), listening means "the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from
something we hear" (p.36). Mendelsohn (1994) defines listening comprehension as the ability to understand the spoken
language of native speakers. O'Malley, Chamot, and Kupper (1989) likewise give a decent meaning of tuning in:
"Listening appreciation is a dynamic and cognizant process in which the audience develops importance by utilizing
signs from logical data and from existing information, while depending upon different key assets to satisfy the
undertaking necessity" (p.19).
Listening is a psychological phenomenon, which happens on an intellectual level inside individuals' heads, and a social
marvel, which grows intuitively amongst individuals and the earth encompassing them. “Listening is considered as an
intricate procedure, which should be comprehended keeping in mind the end goal to show it, and therefore, assess it
before coordinating it with phonological angles and with the expertise of talking” (Bueno, Madrid & McLaren, 2006, p.
282). As we know, listening is the skill of understanding spoken language. Listening is an essential skill, present in
most of the activities we carry out throughout our lives, as Lindsay and Knight (2006) suggest:
“We listen to a wide assortment of things, for instance; what somebody says amid a discussion, up close and personal or
on the phone; declarations giving data, for instance, at an air terminal or railroad station; the climate conjecture on the
radio; a play on the radio; music; another person's discussion (spying); an address; proficient exhortation, for instance,
at the doctor's, in the bank; guidelines, for instance, on the most proficient method to utilize a scanner or other
apparatus; bearings; a taped exchange in class” (p.45).
Listening as comprehension is the conventional state of mind about the way of tuning in. Undoubtedly, in most
technique manuals listening and listening perception are synonymous. The perspective of listening is based the
suspicion that the fundamental capacity of listening in second language learning is to encourage comprehension of
spoken discourse (Richard, 2008). Richard states that to comprehend the way of listening procedure, we have to
consider a portion of the qualities of talked talk and the uncommon issues they posture for audience members. Spoken
discourse has altogether different qualities from composed talk, and these distinctions can add various measurements to
our comprehension of how we prepare discourse. For example, talked talk is typically momentary. The audience must
process it ―online‖ and there is frequently zero chance to hear it out once more.
Moreover, the significance of listening in language learning and showing request the language educators to help their
students get to be distinctly compelling audience members (Maria, 1998), for example, the school builds up one day in a
week to utilize English language, so the understudies will be acquainted with listening process.
Rezapour, Gorjian, and Pazhakh (2012) aimed at clarifying the probable effect of Podcast versus Moodle as Web-based
Language Learning approaches on vocabulary development of Iranian Pre-intermediate EFL learners. To fulfill the
objective of the study, the concentration of the review was converted into two invalid theories tending to these two sorts
of methodologies. The study was conducted in Islamic Azad University of Abadan. Ninety EFL learners were selected
out of 120 learners. Three classes were chosen based on a Placement test (Richards' Interchange Language Placement
Test, 2007) whose reliability value of this test was calculated through KR-21 formula, and then 90 male and female
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 62
learners whose scores were one standard deviation above and one standard deviation below the mean were selected as a
homogeneous group. Then they were divided into three groups whose level was indicated as pre-intermediate. Each
group included 30 subjects who were divided into Podcast group, Moodle group, and Control group. In the present
survey, three tests were used: Interchange Language Placement Test (Richards, 2007) was used as the homogeneity test
to test the level of proficiency among the learners in order to determine the learners’ proficiency level and divide the
sample population into three groups, it included 50 multiple choice items and its reliability value was calculated by KR-
21 formula as (.78). It came to be realized that the Podcast bunch beat alternate gatherings while the Moodle amass
outflanked the control one (p<.05).
Rahimzadeh, Gorjian, and Pazhakh (2013) tried to find the effect of using computer-assisted language learning
approach on the learners' recall and retention at the elementary level. In order to have homogeneous participants, the
researcher used Nelson proficiency test (Fowler & Coe, 1976). 50 participants whose scores fell one standard deviation
below the mean were chosen to take part in the research. Two groups took a post-test immediately after the treatment
and a delayed post-test after a-two-week interval. Paired samples t-test and independent samples t-test were used to
compare the groups' means. The findings revealed that control group was good only at the recall of vocabulary items
and the experimental group was good not only at recall but also at retention of vocabulary items.
Yeh (2013) investigated a podcast learning project integrated into an English speaking and listening class for the
purpose of promoting extensive listening and fostering independent learning. The study was conducted in an English
speaking and listening course at a public university in southern Taiwan. The course was mandatory for first-year
English majors and was also open to all other students on an optional basis. Among the 23 undergraduates registered for
the course, 13 were English majors and 10 were non-English majors. Their estimated English competence levels ranged
from low-intermediate to low-advanced. Results proposed that understudies were key in picking podcasts appropriate
for their interests and capability levels. Overall, they discovered gaining from podcasts advantageous as well as helpful
in improving their dialect capability and world learning. Their general fulfillment with the experience can be credited to
elements including flexibility of decision, significant practice, and close incorporation with the syllabus. Be that as it
may, understudies likewise experienced disappointment with podcasts containing unscripted true substance conveyed at
a quick discourse rate.
In a study by Shahramiri and Gorjian (2013), the researchers investigated the effect of podcast transcription on learners'
writing accuracy of intermediate and advanced groups among Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners. The study was
conducted at Abadan University, Iran. Fifty EFL learners were selected out of 90 learners. Two classes were chosen
based on a placement English test extracted from Barron’s TOEFL iBT developed by Sharpe (2009). Toward the finish
of the treatment which took 10 sessions of direction, they sat for a post-test composing precision accomplishment test.
Information were gathered and dissected through engaging and inferential measurements. Matched Samples t-test was
race to look at the impact of podcast translations among gatherings. It came to be realized that advanced learners
outperformed the other group in increasing higher scores in composing accomplishment post-test (p<.05)
Asaadinezhad and Gorjian (2015) aimed to investigate the effect of reconstruction podcasts on pre-intermediate English
as foreign language (EFL) learners’ speaking proficiency. It attempted to examine students' speaking skill among
Iranian Islamic Azad University of Ahwaz at BA course level. The study was constructed at Islamic Azad University of
Ahvaz, Iran. The present study suggests that the use of the reconstruction podcasts in speaking proficiency could be a
beneficial activity which improves both fluency and accuracy of the EFL learners’ speaking skill.
Moreover, Davoudi and Rezaei (2016) investigated the influence of podcasts (POD) on language comprehension of
Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners. The participants of this study consisted of sixty (N=60) male and female
university students, ranging in age from 18 to 20, who were in their first semester. The experimental group received just
the audio file of the POD, and the control group received a different treatment which was the transcript file of the same
audio podcast file of the experimental group. The results of the t-tests revealed that there was no significant difference
in language comprehension scores across the posttest between two groups. Based on the interview results after the post-
test, all of the participants (100%) agreed that both audio and the transcripts (written texts) were useful for them and
claimed that it is a good method of improving language comprehension.
3. Method
3.1 Participants
The participants of this study were 60 language learners who were selected among 90 pre-intermediate students from
Poyesh English language institute in Dehloran, Iran. They were all female students and their age range was from 12
to20. They took an Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) (Appendix A). Upon the administration of this test, 60
participants whose band score was between 19 to 39 were selected as participants of the study. Then they were non-
randomly divided into two equal groups of control (n=30) and experimental (n=30). The participants were further
assigned as the control group who were taught using traditional methods of teaching listening with no multimedia
laboratory. But the experimental group attended multimedia language laboratory and had a personal computer, so that
they could use podcasts of listening materials. It means that the experimental group was exposed to listening using a
new method through podcasting, while the control group was taught listening skill through listening to CDs and class
question and answer and discussion.
3.2 Instruments
The following instruments were used in order to collect the data in this study.
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3.2.1 Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT)
The first instrument of this study was the OPT (Appendix A). The Second Version of Quick Placement Test developed
by Oxford University Press and University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (Syndicate, 2001)) had been
used to choose two nearly homogenous experimental and control groups in which all the participants were at the pre-
intermediate level of language proficiency. This placement test has two main parts including part one (Questions 1 – 40)
and part two (Questions 41 – 60) that needed to be complete in 40 minutes. This instrument was used to gather
information on the learners' proficiency. It included 60 multiple-choice items and the leaners who achieved from 19 to
39 were determined as the pre-intermediate level.
3.2.2 Pre-test
The second instrument was a listening pre-test. To realize current participants' listening comprehension level, a
researcher-made pre-test (Appendix B) was designed based on the students' text book. (i.e., New Interchange 1)
developed by Richards (2008). It was a listening comprehension test of 40 objective items including filling the blanks,
true or false items, and multiple choice items. The participants have sat for the test in a regular session. They have
accomplished the test individually and silently in approximately 30 minutes after which their copies have been gathered
to be analyzed. Then as treatment, the students in the experimental group received listening skills according to the
principles of the Podcasting and the students in control group were exposed to listening skills according to the
traditional methods. The reliability of the pre-test was calculated through a pilot study and it was met based on
Cronbach Alpha formula as (r=.934). Moreover, the validity of the pre-test was confirmed by two experts.
3.2.3 Post-test
After the treatment, a modified version of the pre-test was used for the post-test (Appendix C) as the third instrument of
the current study and it was given to the participants to assess their listening comprehension after the treatment period
and to measure the impacts of using podcast on their listening comprehension skill. Face validity of the post-test was
confirmed by two English experts who validated the pre-test. It was piloted among pre-intermediate EFL learners and
its reliability index was calculated through Crobach Alpha formula as (r=.899).
3.3 Data Collection Procedures
In order to elicit relevant data from the respondents, the researcher administered the Oxford Placement Test to realize
the participants' homogeneity level. Then the listening comprehension pre-test was administered to assess the
participants' listening comprehension at the beginning of the course. After the pre-test, the researcher practiced the
treatment on the experimental groups. As podcasting was the treatment of the study, the researcher had chosen 13 files
among 23 podcast files as supplementary material to be used asynchronously prior to each session of the class. The
podcast files were about personal development and they had been developed by Pavlina (2005). There was no need to
listen to the podcast files online but it could be listened asynchronously. The students in the experimental group had the
opportunity to choose the time they wanted to listen. Moreover, the students selected the order of the podcast files
that the researcher assigned them to be heard during the term. In the control group the learners were asked to listen to a
radio program in English for thirteen times before each session. All activities in both groups were completely the same
the only difference was the type of treatment in the experimental group. Based on the teacher’s instruction there was no
linear direction to do the activities and students were free to return to any part they needed and follow the process as
they have required. The teacher did not teach the content of the podcasts and the students listened to the files prior to
their class time. They were used as supplementary materials apart from their main course book. There was just a quick
review and evaluation of the learners’ listening practices and their general understanding of the topic to be discussed in
groups within the class. The activities accomplished within each class were as follows:
 Every session all students listened to one podcast in the experimental before the class time.
 Every class was divided into two groups of 6 to 8 students.
 Each podcasts was divided into equal chunks for each student within her group.
 Per session a group of students (6 learners in the experimental group) and (8 learners in the control group) was
responsible to transcribe one podcast for the next coming session.
 Every session the assigned group of students shared the complete transcription with all their classmates before
the class.
 Based on the teacher’s instruction every student had to write her general understanding of the podcast she
listened to beforehand and write at least one paragraph as a summary about her listening comprehension.
 The teacher suggested to the students to reflect on the topic and recall their feeling or personal experience
toward that podcast and its content.
 The teacher asked the individuals to state their understanding of the topic and created a free discussion
regarding to the podcast they had listened to.
 Students engaged in multi-task activities each session.
The treatment took 20 listening sessions. All groups had the same materials and time of instruction. Five lessons of New
Interchange 1 were taught to the participants; in each session the half of the lesson was taught by the researcher. Before
teaching each lesson, the researcher provided some background knowledge for the learners then she played the CDs for
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 64
them. She wanted the students to listen to the lesson carefully. The technique of interactive feedback strategy was used
for the learners of the experimental groups. For this purpose, the researcher in these groups restated or reformulated the
learners’ incorrect answers in performing the listening comprehension tasks or exercises without mentioning their errors
and letting them find out their errors. The researcher provided comments on the erroneous utterances of the students
through reduction recasts in the experimental groups. However, the control groups were provided with traditional
listening comprehension including question and answer, explanation and class discussion and their errors were directly
corrected by the teacher. The learners performed the related listening comprehension tasks and exercises of the text
book regularly in the control group. The researcher corrected their mistakes directly without providing feedback for
them. In addition, a post-test of listening comprehension was employed after twenty-session treatment to gather data.
After collecting the data, they were analyzed through SPSS software, version 17. Finally the result were analyzed.
In order to analyze the data obtained from the pretest-posttest administrations, the SPSS (1) package was used. It is
important to note that the researcher employed all the formulas with the level of significance set at 0.05
4.1 Descriptive Statistics
Table 4.1 presents descriptive information about pre-test and post-test scores of both experimental and control groups
Table 4.1 Descriptive statistics related to participants' performance on pretest

Groups N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean
Pre-test Control 30 14.7667 1.85106 .33796
Experimental 30 14.6333 2.07586 .37900
Table 4.1 indicates the descriptive statistics of the participants’ performance on listening comprehension in the pre-test.
The mean score of the experimental group is 14.6333 and the mean score of the control group is 14.7667. In order to see
if there is any significant difference between two groups in the pre-test and they have been homogeneous before the
treatment or not, an Independent Samples t-test was run. Table 4.2 shows the results.
Table 4.2 Independent Samples t-Test (pre-test)

Levene's Test t-test for Equality of Means
for Equality of
Variances
95% Confidence
Interval of the
Difference
F Sig. t df Sig. (2- Mean Std. Error Lower Upper

tailed) Difference Difference
Equal variances .369 .546 .263 58 .794 .13333 .50779 -.883 1.14
assumed
Equal variances .263 57.254 .794 .13333 .50779 -.883 1.15

not assumed
Table 4.2 shows that the observed t (.263) is less than the critical t (2.000) with df=58, so the difference between the
pre-test of experimental and control groups is not significant at (p<0.05).
Therefore, the two groups are homogeneous which shows no significant difference between the two groups. So, it can
be claimed that two groups were homogeneous at the beginning of the experiment regarding their prior knowledge.
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 65
Table 4.3 Descriptive Statistics (Post-test)
Groups N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean
Post-test Control 30 14.9333 1.87420 .34218
Experimental 30 16.1667 2.03560 .37165
Table 4.3 reports the descriptive statistics of the participants’ performance in the post-test. The mean score of the
experimental group is 16.1667 and the mean score of the control group is 14.9333. It can be concluded that the using
podcasts had positive effects on the experimental participants' listening comprehension.
Table 4.4 Independent Samples t-Test (post-test)

Levene's Test t-test for Equality of Means
for Equality of
Variances
95% Confidence
Interval of the
Difference
F Sig. t df Sig. (2- Mean Std. Lower Upper
tailed) Difference Error
Differe
nce
Equal .344 .560 -2.441 58 .018 -1.2333 .5051 -2.244 -.222

variances
assumed
Equal -2.441 57.60 .018 -1.233 .5051 -2.244 -.221
variances
not assumed
Table 4.4 shows since the observed t (2.441) is greater than the critical t (2.000) with df 58, the difference between the
two groups is significant (p<0.05). This means that there is significant difference between the means of scores in
experimental and control groups. Thus, the treatment made a significant difference between control and experimental
groups’ posttests. In other words, podcasts developed listening comprehension of the pre-intermediate EFL learners.
Table 4.5 Descriptive Statistics (Control vs. Experimental)

Mean N Std. Std. Error Mean
Deviation
Pair 1 Pre-test Control 14.7667 30 1.85106 .33796

Post-test Control 14.9333 30 1.87420 .34218
Pair 2 Pre-test Experimental 14.6333 30 2.07586 .37900
Post-test Experimental 16.1667 30 2.03560 .37165
Table 4.5 shows the descriptive statistics of participants' performance on pre and post-tests. As this table shows, the
mean score of the experimental group in the post-test is 16.1667 while this amount for the pre-test of the same group is
14.6333. This table also shows that the mean score of the control group in the post-test is 14.9333 whereas this amount
for the pre-test of the same group is 14.7667. Both groups were at the same level of listening in the pre-test but
regarding their performances in the post-test the experimental group did very better. To find out if there is any
significant difference between the pre and post-tests of each group, a Paired Samples t-test was administered. Table 4.6
indicates the results.
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 66
Table 4.6 Paired Samples t-Test (Pre vs. post-tests)
Paired Differences t df Sig. (2-
tailed)
95% Confidence
Interval of the
Difference
Mean Std. Std. Error Lower Upper

Deviati Mean
on
Pair 1 Pre vs. Post- -.166 2.166 .3956 -.9758 .6424 -.421 29 .677
tests-Control
Pair 2 Pre vs. Post- -1.533 .6288 .1148 -1.7681 -1.298 -13.35 29 .000
tests-
Experimental
The above table indicates that the observed t (.421) of the pair 1 (Control group) is less than the critical t (2.0452) with
df 29, so the difference between the pre-test and post-test of the control group is not significant. In contrast, observed t
(13.35) of the pair 2 (Experimental group) is greater than the critical t (2.045); therefore, the difference between the pre-
test and post-test of the experimental group is significant.
4.2 Discussion
The first research question is answered in the following section and the results will be discussed thoroughly as follows:
RQ1. Is there any significant difference between Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners who are users and
nonusers of podcasting in terms of listening ability?
The use of the podcasts with applying some actions was successful in improving the students’ listening skill. That
finding could be inferred from the observations of the teaching and learning process. Besides, it was also supported by
the result of the pre-test and post-test of the students’ listening skill. After collecting and analyzing the data, the results
indicated that performance of the control and experimental groups in the listening pre-test was almost the same.
However, the results obtained from their post-test showed the experimental groups outperformed than the control
groups. It means that the experimental group who received the instruction through using podcasts, performed better in
the post-test in comparison to the control group. It is concluded that using podcast had positive effects on Iranian EFL
learners' listening comprehension. The results proved that podcast helped the participants of experimental group to do
better in the post-test. In the current study, some different podcasts were used. It indicates that the participants who
focused on podcasts learned better than those who did not. In other words, it will be better to use both aspects of
learning to take the best advantage of the educational time to acquire knowledge as much as possible. The obtained
results in chapter four show that using podcasts can enhance the students’ language learning. For instant, the
implementation of listening by podcasts was generally successful in improving the teaching of English listening skill
practices and student’s involvement. Podcast were used to improve the students’ vocabulary skill and made the students
more interested in the class. Most of students were actively engaged in the activities. Based on the researcher’s
observations, those indicated that they were enthusiastic in the activities. The findings might be explained in terms of
Krashen’s (1985) input hypothesis. This study refers to language learners which enhance and advance along the regular
request when they learn second language "input‟ as one stage of phonetic skill. The change in the listening expertise of
the members in the test gathering may be owing to the supplementary information they got which was painstakingly
chosen to be recently past their capability level and subsequently intelligible.
The results of this study are in line with Rezapour, Gorjian, and Pazhakh (2012) who investigated the probable effect of
Podcast versus Moodle as Web-based Language Learning approaches on vocabulary development of Iranian Pre-
intermediate EFL learners. They worked on 90 participants whom they were divided into three groups whose level was
indicated as pre-intermediate. Each group included 30 subjects who were divided into Podcast group, Moodle group,
and Control group. The findings showed that the Podcast group outperformed the other groups while the Moodle group
outperformed the control one (p<.05).
This study also supports the findings of Yeh (2013) who tried to investigate a podcast learning project integrated into an
English speaking and listening class for the purpose of promoting extensive listening and fostering independent
learning. The study was conducted in an English speaking and listening course at a public university in southern
Taiwan. Among the 23 students enlisted for the course, 13 were English majors and 10 were non-English majors. Their
evaluated English capability levels extended from low-halfway to low-progressed. Comes about recommended that
understudies were key in picking podcasts appropriate for their interests and capability levels. By and large, they
discovered gaining from podcasts helpful as well as valuable in improving their dialect capability and world learning.
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 67
Moreover, the results of the study are compatible with Khedidja Kaouter and Mechraoui (2015) who contrasted between
listening with podcasts and the conventional classroom listening strategy and the impact these two modes have on
coincidental vocabulary procurement. To this point, a pretest and posttest exploratory outline was embraced. The
participants were 34 Thai Nursing students at the pre-intermediate level enrolled at the Self-Development Summer
Program offered by the Centre of Foundation Studies, at the International Islamic University, Malaysia. The learners
were assigned randomly to the podcast listening (experimental) and traditional classroom listening method (control)
groups. Each group had 17 students each, they had the same teacher and were taught from the same book; Cambridge
Interchange 2 (Pre-intermediate). The data obtained was analyzed using SPSS package (T-test analysis), and it revealed
that both the experimental and control group showed significant incidental vocabulary gains. However, the
experimental group demonstrated higher progress in comparison to the traditional classroom listening method group.
Furthermore, the results of this study confirm the outcomes of Naseri and Motallebzadeh (2016) who investigated the
effect of listening to podcasts on Iranian upper- intermediate EFL learners’ self-regulation ability and their perception
toward the use of technology. To meet the objectives of the current study, 54 female upper-intermediate EFL learners
from the Bayan Language Institute in Torbat-e Heydarieh were selected among 118 students. According to the findings
of this study, the use of podcasts as an educational technology can significantly influence and foster self-regulation
ability of the learners. Most participants showed a positive perception toward the use of podcast as an educational
technology in language learning.
Finally, results of this study do not agree with those of Davoudi and Rezaei (2016) who examined the influence of
podcasts (POD) on language comprehension of Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners. The participants of this study
consisted of sixty (N=60) male and female university students, ranging in age from 18 to 20, who were in their first
semester. They were all majoring in English teaching in Sari, a city in northern part of Iran. The experimental group
received just the audio file of the POD, and the control group received a different treatment which was the transcript file
of the same audio podcast file of the experimental group. The results of the t-tests revealed that there was no significant
difference in language comprehension scores across the posttest between two groups. After analyzing the data, they
come to a conclusion there was no significant difference in language comprehension scores across the posttest between
two groups.
5. Conclusion
It is clear from the reviews that utilizing podcast is more valuable and accommodating than utilizing the customary
chalk and talk technique. Numerous research studies on podcasts confirm the efficacy of computer applications in
second language learning and teaching contexts, and claim that the integration of podcast in learning can improve
academic performance, enhance motivation, and promote learning. Podcast is also considered a powerful learning
method in many aspects such as culture and history of the areas where the target language is spoke.
Moreover, podcasting innovation could be actualized as a compelling dialect instructing instrument that gives
instructors the upside of amplifying their addresses past as far as possible and permits the learners to get to the dialect
material whenever and in wherever (O’Bryan & Hegelheimer, 2007; Shahramiri, & Gorjian, 2013). The present study
which aimed to examine the effectiveness of podcasting on EFL learners’ listening comprehension indicated that the
type of instructions plays an important role in learners' listening comprehension. As students cannot do well in English
and have difficulty in listening, teachers can take advantage of the study to provide their students with a more
interesting and effective teaching instruction- using podcast. This study shows that using podcast is an effective
technique for teaching and learning English. According to the results of t-test analysis, experimental students’ listening
comprehension improved thanks to podcasting. It can be maintained that the results confirmed the effectiveness of
podcasting users along with non-users. To sum up, the findings of this study may be effective for the students to
develop their listening since the results of this research confirmed the usefulness of applying podcasts, i.e. using audio
in MP3 format in language learning process.
Generally, the findings recommend that dialect learners were certain towards utilizing podcast innovation, and they
were intrigued to utilize podcast innovation into their dialect learning forms. A portion of the explanations behind the
positive discernments incorporated the open door for understudies to learn at their own time, and to listen to particular
materials that they miss or don't comprehend different circumstances. Effects, attitudes, and perceptions towards
podcasts have been investigated and in most cases, positive effects and attitudes towards podcasting are documented.
This study has some implications for teaching and curriculum development in the Iranian EFL context. In the first
place, podcasts as another innovation acknowledged worldwide ought to be given their due consideration in instructing
of language sound-related skills particularly listening. EFL educators are prescribed to present and actualize podcasts in
their classes. This may impact student learning background emphatically. Learners might be more responsible for and
autonomous in improving their listening ability. Podcasts can be utilized by EFL teachers both specifically in the
classroom and out of the classroom as a supplementary apparatus. It can likewise be beneficial for the classroom while
doing some related tasks in the classroom checked by educator, predominantly to spare time. In developing curricula
and listening syllabi, it is better to pay special attention to students' likeliness to take advantage of new technology.
With the growing interest in using internet among young learners, teachers and curriculum developers should try to
bring technology to the classrooms. This not only will give the teachers a useful asset in following their teaching goals
but also will be a motivating factor for students to pursue their learning more meaningfully. However, it should be
mentioned that the implementation of podcasts in EFL classes needs careful planning and adequate training of teachers
IJALEL 6(6):57-70, 2017 68
so that it becomes an effective teaching and learning tool. Moreover, the findings of the current study might be useful
for EFL instructors in terms of the use of podcast lectures in all levels listening courses.
In the course of this study many questions have risen some of which are included here with the hope that they will be
pursued and investigated.
1. It is strongly suggested that a research with the same characteristics of this study including more participants to
be conducted in an attempt to find the obtained results.
2. Similar studies can be done on other proficiency levels, namely elementary, intermediate, upper-intermediate
and advance.
3. This study did not include male students. Due to gender performance, future research on idioms would need to
focus on the EFL learners for male students. Is there a significant comparison between female and male EFL
learners?
4. A future study is essential in which the immediate and delayed post-tests are conducted at different time
intervals to show the effectiveness of using podcasts in shorter and longer periods.
5. Variables other than the ones used in this study can help the investigation of the same issue. For instance, the
same experiment with male or female learners within the same age range is necessary to confirm the result of
this study.
6. The next suggestion for the upcoming researches is to investigate other language skills and sub-skills through
applying podcasting.
7. Similar studies are critically needed in other parts of the Iran in order to see whether the results will be the
same as or different from the results of the present study.
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Do Task Complexity Demands Influence the Learners’

Perception of Task Difficulty?
Nasrin Sanajou (Corresponding author)
University of Mohaghegh Ardebili, Iran
E-mail: n.sanajoo@yahoo.com
Leila Zohali
Shiraz University of Medical Science, Iran
E-mail: Lzohali69@gmail.com
Fateme Zabihi
University of Bojnourd, Iran
E-mail: Fateme.zabihi@yahoo.com

Abstract
This study investigates the effects of cognitive task complexity on EFL learners’ perception of task difficulty. Learners’
perception of task difficulty is measured by a five-item task difficulty questionnaire (as in Robinson, 2001a). The
participants were 76 intermediate learners which were divided into two groups. One group performed a simple task
(single task) and the other group performed a complex task (dual task). Having performed the tasks, the participants
completed the task difficulty questionnaire. In order to see how the participants evaluated task difficulty, their ratings
for each question of the questionnaire in the simple and complex tasks was compared using Mann-Whitney U. The
results indicate that the complex task significantly affected learners’ perception of task difficulty in three items of
difficulty, stress and interest. The results of task difficulty studies can help language educators in designing and
employing more effective language teaching materials.
Keywords: Task complexity, Task difficulty, Single task, Dual task
1. Introduction
For the past 20 years, task-based language teaching (TBLT) has attracted attention of second language acquisition
(SLA) researchers (Branden, 2006). Having used tasks as the basic unit of language courses, a key discussion is on what
criteria tasks should be sequenced and ordered. Cognitive approach is one of the suggested criteria for designing and
sequencing tasks. From information processing perspective to TBLT, cognitive complexity of the task is a very
important feature (Robinson, 2001) which has been concerned with psychological processes learners are engaged in
while doing tasks (Skehan, 2003). Task Complexity (Skehan, 1998) also deals with the impact of manipulating
cognitive task complexity on learners' performance. There are two contrasting views in cognitive approach to task: 1)
Skehan's (1998) Limited Attentional Capacity Model (LAC) and 2) Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis (CH). Skehan
(1998) proposes that attentional resources are limited, and that to attend to one of the aspects of performance
complexity, accuracy, or fluency of language may suffer the other dimensions. For example, much attention being paid
to fluency will increase it; however, other dimensions (accuracy and complexity) might decrease this way. In contrast,
Robinson (2001) believes that attentional resources are not limited and learners can access multiple and non-competing
attentional resources. He also states that complexity and accuracy in a task are correlated since they are each driven by
the nature of functional linguistic demands of the task itself. He says that fluency is in contrast with complexity and
accuracy, which correlate with one another. Following Robinson’s cognition hypothesis which claims that tasks should
be designed and sequenced on the basis of an increase in their cognitive complexity (Robinson, 2001a), a number of
studies have investigated the effects of task complexity, task difficulty, task design, and performance conditions on
learners’ performance (Skehan & Foster, 1999; Ellis, 2004; Kuiken & Vedder, 2007, 2008). Although so many studies
have investigated task complexity and performance conditions, there have been no more than a handful of studies
investigating learners’ perception of task difficulty (Robinson, 2001, 2007; Gilabert, 2007). Therefore, the present study
explores the relationship between task complexity and learners’ ratings of task difficulty.
IJALEL 6(6):71-77, 2017 72
1.1 Task difficulty
Following the use of cognitive task complexity as a criterion for sequencing tasks, several proposals have been made on
task classification (i.e., Brown et al.,’s 1984 classification; Skehan’s 1998 model; Robinson’s triadic componential
framework, 2001, 2005, & 2007). In the earliest classification of task difficulty, Brown, Anderson, Shilcock, and Yule
(1984) suggest to sequence tasks from simple to complex. They distinguish among three different types of tasks. In the
first type, which is known as static task and is the easiest one, all the information to be exchanged is presented to the
speaker in the input and the information does not change during the course of the activity (e.g., a map task in which the
speaker has to give directions to the listener). In the second type, dynamic task, like the first type, the speaker is given
all the information in stimulus materials, except that the elements (characters, events, and activities) change while the
task is being performed (e.g., a story in a comic strip in which characters appear and disappear or change places and
behaviors). In the last and the most difficult type, abstract task, they are given decontextualized elements (the input does
not contain the content to be communicated). Abstract tasks require manipulating, making reference to abstract
concepts, establishing connections between ideas, and providing reasons for certain statements or behaviors (e.g.,
expressing opinions).
In another classification, Skehan (1998) proposes three factors of code complexity including “language required”
(Skehan, 1998, p. 99), cognitive complexity “thinking required” (p. 99), and communicative stress “performance
condition” (p. 99) for a task. Code complexity has to do with two areas of syntactic and lexical difficulty of the tasks
(Skehan, 1996). Cognitive complexity is concerned with content features of input. He makes a distinction between two
aspects of cognition namely: cognitive familiarity and cognitive processing. Cognitive familiarity refers to the “access
to ready-made or pre-packaged solutions” (Skehan, 1996, p. 52). Cognitive processing, in contrast, refers to the "work
out solutions to novel problems" (p. 99). In other words, task completion requires on-line computations and active
thinking (Skehan, 1996). The third factor, communicative stress, is concerned with conditions under which the task
needs to be done. Aspects involved in communicative stress are: (1) time limits and time pressure; (2) speed of
presentation; (3) number of the participants; (4) length of texts used; (5) type of response (modality); (6) opportunity to
control interaction (the influence that participants can have on task in the way that it is done).
Yet, in another task classification, Robinson (2001, 2005, & 2007) proposes the triadic componential framework (TCF)
for sequencing tasks. In this framework, he distinguishes three dimensions of task complexity, task conditions and task
difficulty. These dimensions of complexity are design features of tasks which can be manipulated to increase or lessen
the cognitive demands which tasks make on the learners while they are performing the task. Task complexity refers to
“the intrinsic cognitive demands of the task” (Robinson, 2003, p. 55). Task complexity consists of two types of the
resource-directing variables which “make greater resource demand, but lead learners to use specific features of the
language code” (Robinson, 2005, p. 4) and the resource-dispersing variables which “make greater resource demand
without leading them to use specific features of language code” (Robinson, 2001, p. 31). Task condition is the feature of
tasks which are determined by the situational setting, and conditions in which they take place. This category includes
two components of participation variables (i.e. open/close tasks, one way/ two way tasks) and participant variables (i.e.
same or different gender, extent of familiarity). Task difficulty is "between learners variables" (Robinson, 2001, p. 32)
and is concerned with the learners’ perception of the demands made by the task and the resources learners bring to the
task. Task difficulty in turn consists of two variables: (1) affective variables (i.e. motivation, anxiety) and ability
variables (i.e. intelligence, working memory).
The present study is an attempt to see how the learners evaluate task difficulty along cognitive task complexity which is
manipulated by single and dual tasks. Learners’ perception of task difficulty is measured by a five-item task difficulty
questionnaire (as in Robinson, 2001a) which includes items of difficulty, stress, confidence, interest, and motivation.
Research Question: Is there any significant difference in the learners' perception of task difficulty in single vs. dual
tasks?
Understanding learners’ perception of task difficulty (TD) will assist task designers in designing and employing more
effective language teaching materials. Unfortunately, very little has been done on learner’s perception of task difficulty
which are Nunan and Keobke (1995), Robinson (2001a), and Tavakoli and Skehan (2005). Nunan and Keobke (1995)
are among the first scholars investigating learner’s perception of TD. The participants who were 35 undergraduate
Cantonese-speaking students performed some reading, listening and speaking tasks and were asked to report their
perception of the degree of the task difficulty and the reason of the difficulty of the task. The most important factors
identified by learners were lack of familiarity with task types, confusion over task purpose, and the impact and extent of
cultural knowledge.
Robinson (2001a) examined the effects of the cognitive complexity of tasks on the language production and learners’
perception of task difficulty. He used a speaking task in which participants performed two versions of the direction-
giving map task. In both tasks, the participants were asked to give a direction from point A to point B on a map. The
difference between simple and complex version was that in the former the map covered a small and familiar area, while
in the latter the map covered a large and familiar area. In other words, task complexity was manipulated along the
amount of information and availability of prior knowledge. Learners’ perception of task difficulty was measured by a
five-item task difficulty questionnaire including difficulty, stress, confidence, interest, and motivation. He concluded
that cognitive complexity significantly affected learners’ perception of difficulty in terms of stress and difficulty.
IJALEL 6(6):71-77, 2017 73
In a study, Tavakoli and Skehan (2005) examined the influence of the structure of oral narrative tasks on learners’
perception of TD. The learners were asked to perform four narrative tasks and then a retrospective questionnaire was
used to determine which task was the most difficult one. The results indicated that task structure affected learners’
perception of TD, in a way that the more structured tasks were rated by learners as easier than the less structured tasks.
In another study, Tavakoli (2009) investigated learners and teachers’ perception of task difficulty. The learners and
teachers were given four oral narrative tasks and during a retrospective interview they were asked to identify the most
difficult tasks and the factors that contributed to the difficulty of those tasks. She concluded that several variables such
as cognitive and linguistic demand, the amount of information needed to complete a task, and task structure influenced
the learners and teachers’ perception of TD.
3. Method
This study explores the relationship between task complexity and participants' perception of task difficulty. The
research question is “Is there any significant difference in the learners’ perception of task difficulty in single vs. dual
tasks?” The null hypothesis is “There is not any significant difference in the learners’ perception of task difficulty in
single vs. dual tasks.”
3.1 Participants
The participants of this study were 76 Iranian BA students at the intermediate level. They were majoring in teaching
English as a foreign language (TEFL) in Mohaghegh University in Ardebil, one of the cities in Iran. They were all
between 18 and 29 years old, and were both female and male. Moreover, they were randomly selected from a pool of
118 language learners who were freshmen and sophomores.
3.2 Instruments
Four major instruments were used in this study. The first one was the writing section of the free sample PET (2015)
which was used as a pretest and proficiency test. At the beginning of the study to ensure the homogeneity of the
participants in terms of writing proficiency, just the writing section of the sample PET was administered. The second
and the third instruments were the single and dual tasks. These tasks were narrative tasks which consisted of eight
pictures and were comic strip (Jahanshahi 1978). In the single task (Appendix A), participants were asked to write the
story of the comic strip (at least 100 words) in 15 minutes. In the dual task (Appendix B) pictures of the comic strip
were disordered. So, the participants were asked to first think and find the correct sequence of pictures and then write
the story (at least in 100 words) in 25 minutes (the time limits for performing both the single and dual tasks were
selected based on the pilot study) . The only difference between the single task and the dual one was that the latter was
[+ dual task], i.e. the participants had to both think of the correct sequence, and write a story about it as well (Robinson,
2007). The fourth instrument was difficulty questionnaire (as in Robinson, 2001, Appendix C) which was used to
measure learners’ perception of task difficulty. The task difficulty questionnaire had five questions. The participants
were asked to rate on a nine point scale for each question. The questions were about the difficulty (whether they thought
the task was difficult), stress (whether they felt stress performing the task), ability (whether they felt confident that they
were able to do the task well), interest (whether they thought the task was interesting), and motivation (whether they
wanted to do more tasks like the one they did).
3.3 Procedure
At the beginning of the study, four intact classes including 118 participants who were in their first and second year sat
for the writing section of a sample PET (2015). Using Jacobs et al.’s (1981, cited in Weigle, 2002) Scoring Profile, two
experienced raters scored the writing production of the participants. Each participant’s final score was calculated by
averaging the given scores by the two raters. The inter-rater reliability of scores was checked using Pearson-product
moment correlation coefficient. The results indicated relatively high inter-rater reliability.
Having checked reliability, normality of the distribution of the data was checked via skewedness and kurtosis, the one
sample Kolmogorov Smirnov and the box plot. Then, the descriptive statistics were run to determine the writing
proficiency level of participants. Finally, 76 students at the intermediate level whose score were one SD above and
below the mean were selected as the participants of the study. To conduct the main study, two out of the four classes
were randomly assigned to perform the single task and the other two classes performed the dual task. Right after
performing the tasks, the participants were given the task difficulty questionnaire and were asked to complete. After the
data was collected, five Mann-Whitney U were conducted to compare participants’ ratings on each of the questions of
the questionnaire.
3.4 Design
This study is a quantitative, between-groups design (Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991). There is one independent variable,
cognitive task complexity, with two levels i.e., single vs. dual tasks and one dependent variable (task difficulty) with
five levels i.e., difficulty, stress, confidence, interest, and motivation (which are investigated independently of each
other).
4. Results
In order to see if the participants’ ratings of the questionnaire are different in the two groups or not, descriptive statistics
were run (Table 1). By comparing the mean scores of the first question of the questionnaire, difficulty question, it is
obvious that the mean score of the dual task (X = 3.68) is higher than the mean score of the single task (X = 1.95). This
means that the participants rated the dual task more difficult than the single task. A Mann-Whitney U was conducted for
IJALEL 6(6):71-77, 2017 74
checking the meaningfulness of the difference between the two mean scores. The results of Mann-Whitney U (t = -4.25;
p < 0.05) indicate that the difference between the mean scores is meaningful and statistically significant.
Table 1. Descriptive Statistics of the Participants’ Ratings to the Task Difficulty Questionnaire
N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error of mean
Single task difficulty 38 1.95 1.18 0.19
stress 38 1.53 0.86 0.14
ability 38 5.95 2.56 0.41
interest 38 5.50 2.44 0.39
motivation 38 6.39 2.17 0.44
Dual task difficulty 38 3.68 1.91 0.31
stress 38 2.34 1.64 0.26
ability 38 5.89 2.09 0.33
interest 38 4.29 2.74 0.44
motivation 38 5.18 3.09 0.50
The mean scores of the second question of the questionnaire, which is about the degree of the stress they felt during
performing the task, are different for the two tasks. The mean score of the stress for the dual task (X = 2.34) is higher
than the mean score of the single task (X = 1.53). In order to determine whether the difference between mean scores are
meaningful or not, a Mann-Whitney U was conducted. Based on the results of the Mann-Whitney U (t = -2.39; p <
0.05) the difference between the mean scores of the two groups is meaningful. So, the dual task was rated to be more
stressful than the single task. In other words, the dual task is rated significantly more difficult than the single task.
Regarding the third question of the questionnaire, which checks the participants' perception of their ability level, the
mean score of the single task (X = 5.95) is higher than the mean score of the dual task (X = 5.89), which means that
participants in the single task felt more confident while doing the task than the participants of the dual task. The results
of the Mann-Whitney U (t = -0.31; p > 0.05) indicate that the difference between the mean scores is not meaningful. In
other words, task complexity does not affect the learners' perception of their ability in doing the single vs. dual tasks.
Although the mean score of the single task is higher than the dual task, the difference is not significant.
The fourth question of the questionnaire concerns the participants' interest in doing single vs. dual tasks. The descriptive
statistics of the learners’ rating to their interest in performing the tasks reveals a higher mean score for the single task
(X = 5.50) than the dual task (X = 4.29). The results of the Mann-Whitney U (t = -2.06; p < 0.05) indicates that the
difference between the mean scores of the participants' interest is meaningful. In other words, the participants of the
single task were more interested in doing the task than the participants of the dual task.
Finally, the fifth question of the questionnaire addresses the difference in the motivation of the participants in
performing the single vs. dual tasks. The mean score of the participants' motivation in the single task (X = 6.39) is
higher than the mean score of the participants in the dual task (X = 5.18). The results of Mann-Whitney U (t = -1.62; p
> 0.05) indicates that the difference between the mean scores is not statistically significant. It means that although the
participants in the single task were more motivated in doing the task, the difference was not statistically significant.
5. Discussion
This study explores the effect of task complexity demands on EFL learners’ perception of the difficulty of narrative
tasks. Task difficulty, which deals with the learners’ perception of task demands, is likely to influence production and
learning opportunities that tasks provide. As the results indicate, different cognitive task complexity degrees had an
effect on ratings of the task difficulty. Based on the results, the participants rated the complex task more difficult than
the simple task. This finding is completely in line with Robinson (2001a, 2007) and Gilabert (2007) in which they
reported that the participants rated the complex task more difficult than the simple one. A possible explanation for
rating the dual task (complex task) as the more difficult one maybe that performing two tasks simultaneously puts
higher cognitive load on the learners, and makes the task more difficult for them. Instead, low cognitive load of the
single task makes the task less difficult, which resulted in less difficulty ratings on the single (simple) task.
Regarding the second question, like Robinson’s (2001a, 2007) and Gilabert’s (2007) study the results indicated that the
complex task was rated to be more stressful than the simple task. In the dual task, participants had to perform two tasks
which placed higher processing demands on them. The high cognitive demand of the dual task made the task more
stressful for participants. While cognitive load of the single task was not high due to the fact that the participants had to
perform one task at a time. As a result of less cognitive load the single task was recognized not to be stressful for the
participants.
With regard to the results of the third question, there is no significant difference in the mean scores of the two groups.
Although the mean score of the single task is higher than the dual task, the difference is not statistically significant. The
non-significant result of the question related to stress supports the result of the Robinson’s (2001a) study. But the result
IJALEL 6(6):71-77, 2017 75
does not support the findings of Robinson (2007) and Gilabert (2007) in which they found a significant difference in the
ratings of stress in the two groups. Given high cognitive demands of the dual task, the ability ratings of the dual task are
no more different from the ability ratings of the single task. These unaffected ability ratings can be explained in part by
the fact that unlike speaking, in which the participants are under real-time pressure, in the writing task, they do not have
to perform under real-time pressure. Therefore, given the opportunity of not being under real-time pressure, they have
time to think and do the task, so the dual task participants' confidence in performing the task was not different from
single task participants. To restate, we can conclude that the confidence of the participants of the two groups was not
affected by task complexity.
Unlike the results of Robison (2001a, 2007) and Gilabert (2007) which did not report a significant difference in the
ratings of interest, the results of this study indicated that the participants of the single task were significantly more
interested in doing the task than the participants of the dual task. The low interest ratings of the dual task can be related
to the fact that doing two tasks puts high cognitive demand on them, which made the task difficult for them. As a result
the participants were less interested in performing the dual task. On the other hand, the participants of the single task
were asked to perform one task which places less cognitive demand on them, consequently they were more interested in
performing the task. Although, the participants of single task rated the task more interesting than the dual task, the mean
score of the dual task was not very low. This means that the participants of dual task were not frustrated with the high
processing demands of the dual task.
Finally, the findings of the fifth question was completely in line with the results of Robinson (2001a, 2007) and Gilabert
(2007). The high mean score of the single task suggests that the participants of this task were much motivated in doing
the task than participants of the dual task. Like ratings of interest, the mean score of motivation in the dual task is not
very low, which suggests that increasing the cognitive complexity of tasks does not result in loss of interest and
motivation in performing the task. Building on the results, we can conclude that task complexity did not influence the
participants' motivation in performing the tasks.
All in all, the results suggest that participants’ ratings on difficulty, stress, and interest are higher in the complex task,
while ratings of motivation and ability are not significantly influenced. Therefore, the null hypothesis of the study is
rejected. Overall, the findings of this study regarding participants’ perception of difficulty are in line with Robinson’s
findings.
6. Conclusion
The present study investigates the influence of task complexity, which is manipulated along single vs. dual tasks, on the
participants’ perception of TD. The results show that ratings of overall difficulty, stress, and interest are significantly
higher on the complex task (dual task). While the ratings of ability and motivation do not differ significantly. The
findings of this study support the principles of a cognitive model of TD, as the data suggest that the cognitive demands
of a task perceived by the learners is a significant factor contributing to TD. These findings imply that L2 teachers and
task designers need to consider the cognitive demands of a task while they are choosing and/ or designing L2 teaching
tasks. Teachers and task designers should try to find tasks that have an appropriate level of difficulty.
References
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Cambridge: CUP.
Ellis, R., & Yuan, F. (2004). The effects of planning on fluency, complexity, and accuracy in secong language narrative
writing. SSLA, 26, 59-84. doi: 10.1017/S0272263104261034
Gilabert, R. (2007). The simultaneous manipulation of task complexity along planning time and [+/- Here-and-now]:
Effects on L2 oral production. In M. del Pilar Garcia-Mayo (Ed.), Investigating tasks in formal language learning (pp.
44-68). Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.
Hatch & Lazartan (1991) Hatch, E., & Lazaraton, A. (1991). The research manual: Design and statistics for applied
linguistics. Boston: A devision of wadsworth, Inco.
Jahanshahi, I. (1978). Qessehaye man va babam: Babaye khube man. Tehran: Fatemi Publication.
Kuiken, F., & Vedder, I. (2007). Task complexity and measures of linguistics performance in L2 writing. International
Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 45, 261-284. doi: 10.1515/IRAL.2007.012
Kuiken, F., & Vedder, I. (2008). Cognitive task complexity and written output in Italian and French as a foreign
language. Journal of Second Language Writing, 17, 48-60.
Nunan, D., & Keobke, K. (1995) Task difficulty from the learner’s perspective: perceptions and reality. Hong Kong
Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching 18: 1–12.
Robinson, P. (2001a). Task complexit, task difficulty, and task production: exploring interactions in a componential
framework. Applied Linguistics, 22(1), 27-57.
Robinson, P. (2003). The cognition hypothesis, task design, and adult task-based language learning. Second Language
Studies, 21(2), 45-105.
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Robinson, P. (2005). Cognitive complexity and task sequencing: A review of studies in a Componential Framework for
second language task design. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 43(1), 1-33.
Robinson, P. (2007).Task complexity, theory of mind, and intentional reasoning: Effects on L2 speech production,
interaction, uptake and perceptions of task difficulty. IRAL, 45, 193-213. doi:10.1515/IRAL.2007.009
Skehan, P. (1996). A framework for the implementation of task-based instruction. Applied Linguistics, 17(1), 38-62.
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Skehan, P., & Foster, P. (1999). The influence of task structure and processing conditions on narrative retellings.
Language Learning, 49(1), 93-120.
Skehan, P. (2003). Task-based instruction. Language Teaching, 36, 1-14.
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and task performance in a second language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 239–77.
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Appendices
Appendix 1 The comic strip of the single task
Appendix 2 The comic strip of the dual task

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Questionnaire
Name: …………………………… Semester: …………………..
Dear Participant: Read the statements below. Then, indicate your extent of agreement or disagreement by circling one
of the numbers from one to nine.
1 I thought this task was easy/ I thought this task was hard: 123456789
(1 not difficult, 9 very difficult)
2 I felt relaxed doing this task/ I felt frustrated doing this task: 123456789
(1. no stress, 9. a lot of stress)
3 I didn't do well on this task/ I did well on this task: 123456789
(1. not confident, 9. very confident)
4 This task was not interesting/ this task was interesting: 123456789
(1 not interesting, 9 very interesting)
5 I don't want to do more tasks like this/ I want to do more tasks like this: 123456789
(1 do not want to, 9 would like to)

Orwell's Satirical View of Romantic Love in the Terrorized

World of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Mohammad Hossein Besharati (Corresponding author)
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Yazd University, Iran
E-mail: Abesharati88@gmail.com
Golnar Mazdayasna
Affiliation: Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Yazd University, Iran
Email: Golnarmazdayasna@yahoo.com
Sayed Mohammad Anoosheh

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Yazd University, Iran
Email: sanooshe@yazd.ac.ir

Abstract
The beginning of twentieth century was accompanied with the prevailing current of technology in different aspects of
human life. At first, it incited a positive stimulus which could build a utopian world on the advancement of technology.
However, the bloody World Wars averted this view and the technological utopia was replaced by Orwellian dystopia.
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satirical work which moves against Wells' utopian toward the reflection of a
distorted technological society. Undoubtedly, satire is the best literary mode for dystopic depiction of the world
specifically the one portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston Smith, the central character of this novel, is lower from
his society in terms of intelligence and power of action. Therefore, he is put under rigid controls and brainwashing. And
at last, he awfully rejects his love in favor the principles of the Party. Thus, in this study, we try to investigate Winston's
romantic life in a satiric manner with respect to Northrop Frye's theme of romance which includes the three phase of
agon, pathos and anagnorisis.
Keywords: George Orwell, Satire, Romance, Dystopia, Northrop Frye
1. Introduction
The entire situation in the opening decades of the twentieth century was thus a welter of new and powerful ideas which
not only shook the foundation of the older value-scale world but made the problem of choice extremely difficult by
being antithetical to each other. The result of such move was uncertainties in every sphere of life. H. G. Wells (1866-
1946), who once strongly believed that a utopian achievement of science was possible which was a shift of optimistic
view of life which later became pessimistic. The euphoria did not last for a long time, and he died as a disappointed
man. Initially, wells vehemently held the view that science and education would outlaw war, poverty, and squalor. But
his view remained only a glorious and unrealizable dream. As a new dark age emerged out of the wars the dream was
almost permanently eclipsed.
A group of satirical novelists who were the products of the age of total disenchantment and disillusion, came up and
exposed Well's optimistic scientific liberalism as a sham. Among them were Aldous Huxley, Norman Douglas, Ronald
Firbank, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Anthony Powell, William Golding and many others. Not only did they deny
the march and progress of life but also were fully conscious of the tremendous achievements of the science and
technology. Yet, they were appalled by the application of the technological achievement to life and its potentiality for
evil uses. The new scientific advancement brought about utter disorder and disharmony in its wake. Technological
progress unfolded the possibility of a nightmare world which continually haunted the imagination of these writers.
Behind this nightmare lay an acute crisis of thought.
These novels endeavored to make a proper diagnosis and prescription for the agonized spasms of the disenchantment
and troubled world. To majority of the novelists, satire seemed to be the exact mode through which they could proceed
effectively along their chosen path. Satire as a vehicle to depict the shell nuts of the society has a very formidable and
celebrated tradition in literature. It is a literary mode, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vices are held up to
scorn, derision, or ridicule. It ultimate purpose is to induce a desire to reform society, even though it does so by
exposing vices. Northrop Frye thinks that "the satirist commonly takes a high moral line" (1957: 225). In this sense, the
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satirist tells the truth in order to help his fellowman. By striking a note of warning he makes us think about a way out of
the situation. That satirist has usually a bilineal objective. The optimist in him writes in order to heal; the pessimist in
order to punish. On the one hand, he is a physician; on the other, an executioner (Highet, 1972: 234-237). Highet says
that "all satirists are at heart idealist" (243). A delightful satire requires two elements as essential; one is irony which "is
consistent both with complete realism of content and with the suppression of attitude on the part of the author" (224) the
other is fantasy, "a content which the reader recognizes as grotesque"(224). Fry's illuminating comment on this point is
that "most fantasy is pulled back into satire by powerful undertow often called allegory" (1957, 225).
As a result, the main aim of this paper is not to trace the history of satire as a genre, but to pass references to satire,
simply because the novel that have been taken up for analysis is a satirical pieces clothed in fantasy. Our study is
centered on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as the most discussed dystopian which seem to present an
alternative direction to the society. It is a satirical fantasy of certain contemporary tendencies; it gives us "a prophetic
Wellsian nightmare of events in the future" (Lewis, 1952: 154). The novel tells the story of Winston Smith, the hero
who is cast in the ironic mold. He is obviously inferior to his power of action and intelligence to his society or to the
ordinary reader (Frye, 1952: 34). When the reader looks at such a hero, he has the sense of looking down on a person
impounded in a scene of bondage, frustrated, and absurdity. Therefore, this study aims at studying and commenting
Winston Smith's romantic love through Frye's three phases of agon, pathos and anagnorisis but with a satirical
perspective.
2. Discussion
Fantasy has its roots in primitive mythologies and fairytales. Right from the very earliest times when man started telling
stories, his fecund imagination has led him to create fantasy. Some of the highly imaginative products, such as religious
myths, served to the purpose of binding the community into unity by means of ultimate concerns about his situation and
his final destiny. The other products of imagination and fantasy only aimed at entertainment. Beyond affording thrills
and sensations some of the early fantasy narratives contained no special meaning, that is, in them fantasy was not fully
functional. But in the course of the history of verbal arts, fantasy, as a mode of apprehending reality, has come to
acquire a definite purpose and become one of the most significant elements of the modern novel. Fantastic is only the
very highly imaginative.
Fantasy as a literary mode may be defined as a deliberate and purposeful delineation of human reality in terms of what
is unusual, impossible and apparently impossible under ordinary and familiar circumstances. Fantasy is the creation of a
hypocritical world which is far removed from the existing familiar realities; yet the writer can imbue it with a definite
vision of contemporary life. As means of access to reality, fantasists have often created nightmars which amazingly
prove to be the very world their contemporaries are actually living in. Rudolf B, Schmerl defines fantasy as: "The
deliberate presentation of improbabilities through any one of four methods - the use of unverifiable time, place,
characters, or devices - to a typical reader within a culture whose level of sophistication will enable that reader to
recognize the improbabilities" (1962, 382).
Fantasies have used one or the other or a combination of the four variables- unverifiable time, place, characters and
devices- to project their vision of reality. Fantasy is a phenomenon of very considerable cultural and literary
importance. It is employed today as a technique of satirical exposure, of rendering an apocalyptic vision of society.
E.M. Foster's concept of fantasy as one of the essential aspects of the novel deserves careful attention. He has devoted a
full chapter to fantasy in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Before giving a formal definition of fantasy, Forster
thinks it necessary to find out the sort of demand this mode of writing makes on reader. Fantasy, according to Forster,
has special types of stimulus-response effect over readers "because of the oddness of its methods or subject matter"
(Forster, 1962, 114). This oddness of method or subject makes the readers not acquainted with it "thrilled"; some
readers feel "choked off". Fantasy, therefore, "compels us to an adjustment that is different to an adjustment required by
a work of art, to an additional adjustment" (113). Forster means that fantasy demands something more from the readers
than what may be called ordinary and usual.
It is, therefore, expected that the readers of fantasies should be intelligent and competent enough to recognize and
accept the chain of incredible events in the narrative as well as other allied devices used by the writer to make the
fantasy effective. Fantasy requires the readers to be endowed with a sense of value, well stocked and sharp intelligence.
In a fantasy-based narrative the writer may start on a clear note of plausibility and naturalism. But subsequently he will
proceed to elaborate, exaggerate, and even invert everything in order to reach the point of fantasy, the point where the
reader must mentally accommodate himself in the midst of a set of floridly incongruous associations. In this case, the
writer of fantasy enjoys a greater freedom and has a wider range of choice of selection in front of him, than it would be
the case in regard to a conventional type of narrative. In a fantasy the novelist may introduce fanciful creature of other
territories or even unidentified flying objects and make them believe like human beings and normal appliances of the
modern world the fantastic creature may assume the form of the ordinary living beings of this very earth. Forster has
listed the devices that writers with the fantastic turn of imagination have used:
Such as the introduction of god, ghost, angel, monkey, monster, midget, witch into ordinary life; or the
introduction of ordinary men into no men's land, the future, the past, the interior of the earth, the forth
dimensions; or diving into dividings of personaliy; or finally the device of parody or adaptation. (118)
In this respect, Orwell is digging into future to create a whole new fantastic world to apply his satirical vision of the
world. Orwell saw the dangers of brainwashing, rigid social control, and political blackmail threatening the individual's
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freedom; he placed his nightmare state only thirty-five years into the future. Nineteen Eighty-Four, in spite of its setting
in the future, does not seem to be a mere prophecy of what the world will be like in thievery or forty years' time. It is a
satire on what the world is like now. The element of fantasy is inherent in the structure of the society presented.
"Nineteen Eighty-Four is an attempt to confront and to express specifically and unrelentingly the nature of modern
experience," (Alldritt, 1969: 154) says Keith Aldritt.
Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of Winston Smith, the hero who is cast in an ironic mold. He is evidently inferior in
his power of action and intelligence to his society or to the ordinary reader (Frye, 1957, 34). When the reader looks at
such a hero, he has the sense of looking down on a person impounded in a sense of bondage, frustration, and absurdity.
Though Winston Smith is intelligent as far as his departmental work is concerned, he is, in a way, more helpless than
Julia whom he loves. Julia is smart and quick, assertive and of a devil-may-care type. As against her, Winston in his
supineness becomes glaringly loutish. He often gets himself entangled in a mess; the society in which Winston is placed
is a closed Iron-curtain society. The controlling authority is excessively vigilant; no one can escape its lynx-like
piercing eyes. In this society various means are employed to watch and control every action of the individual. Even the
thoughts of each party member are, as it were, under powerful x-rays. All loopholes are carefully plugged. There is the
Big Brother watching; the telescreen is ever ready to receive and transmit simultaneously all information; the Thought
Police with its invisible omnipresence cannot be given a slip; the microphones are always ready to catch and blare out
every accent of the conversation held at any place or time.
In spite of all these severely restrictive deterrents, Winston and Julia manage to meet secretly, defy the laws of the
party, and make love in an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and repression. The structure of Winston's story is that of an
ironic tragedy. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the story of an individual who suffers the most. Winston Smith is a man of
thirty-nine. He is a member of the Party that is almost synonymous with the state apparatus. Winston finds himself in a
society where there cannot be any love, privacy, of friendship. He has normal human urges and chafes against
constraints. He finds himself in a place where chilling fear, hatred, and pain constantly stalk his path; where there is no
dignity of human emotions, no deep sorrows. Inwardly he nurses a sense of revolt against the well-established
principles of the Party. On the surface, he blindly believes in the coercive measures to gain individual freedom however
he fails and becomes a failure that lacks any courage to defend his love. As a result, his situation can fully expresses the
satirical side of a romantic love.
As already indicated, the structure of romance, according to Frye, has three phases, the agon phase, the pathos phase
and the anagnorisis phase:
Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of
marvelous adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in defeat, is the archetypal theme of
tragedy. Sparagmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to
defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire.
Anagnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero
and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy. (192)
Nineteen Eighty-Four involves a satiric parody of all these three phases. The quest includes a perilous journey in a
demonic world, almost an odyssey in its own parodic way. Various preliminary minor acts of defiance are performed by
Winston Smith as an expression of his disgust and revolt against the Party. Some of these activities are maintaining a
diary, writing atrocious phrases (such as "Down with Big Brother (Orwell, 1970:23)"; "If there is hope it lies in the
proles (89)", meeting the old man in the pub for the proles, who can give him a truthful account of the condition in the
early part of the century.
In this way he gains courage and takes the risk of moving to the room of Mr. Charrington even if it were for a couple of
hours. The room is seedy but comfortable, and best of all, has not been equipped with a telescreen. It becomes the place
for an occasional rendezvous for Smith and Julia. By these minor activities, Winston gains a new vigor, although he is
never very hopeful. Little by little he moves towards taking dangerous steps along with Julia: "Both of them knew-in a
way, it was never out of their minds- that what was happening could not last long" (124). Winston knows the probable
consequences of their actions:
What was happening was only the working-out of a process that has started years ago. The first step had been a
secret, involuntary thought; the second had been the opening of the opening of the diary. He had moved from
thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the
ministry of Love. (130)
In their several meetings, Julia and Winston discuss the Party, express their hatred of its policy, and show their disbelief
in its propaganda. To Julia the much talked of specter of Emmanuel Goldstein and his underground army is simply a lot
rubbish and nonsense: "In some ways she was far more acute than Winston and far less susceptible to Party
propaganda"(125). To Julia all the strategies adopted by the Party are more or less a paper tiger, "just to keep people
frightened". She is rather rash in her statements about the Party as compared with Winston. As an expression of their
freedom, they greedily feed upon real sugar, coffee, milk, jam, bread, tea and chocolate. These have better taste and
flavor that those filthy synthetic stuff supplied by the Party to its members. In Mr. Charrington's room they indulge in
love-making, sleep for a while and enjoy the bliss of having some privacy.
These are very ordinary and simple things with nothing very heroic about them, but they do constitute Winston's
adventure, his perilous journey, which parodistically corresponds to the agon phase of romance. Winston's story is not a
IJALEL 6(6):78-82, 2017 81
romance but a parody of romance, because his power of action is very limited and experiences take place in a perverted
and demonic context.
The agon phase of Winston's story is followed by the pathos phase, the crucial struggle of the hero, his encounter with
O'Brien, the most powerful agent of the Party. Winston is caught reading the book entitled The Theory and Practice of
Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, which the agent gave him to read as a ruse for facilitating Winston's
arrest. Then comes Winston's arrest, and imprisonment in the Ministry of Love where he is brutally tortured. The
Ministry of Love is located in an unknown place where all the enemies of the Party are kept in sever servility in a
concentration camp as it were. The arrested person can never know where he has been brought because there is no way
of making certain about its location.
When Winston Smith is arrested and imprisoned, he presumes, despite the iron-curtain all arouse, that the room where
he is confined might be a part of the Ministry of Love. The building is a terrible windowless fort, heavily guarded and
filled with scientific instruments of torture. There he is kicked, clubbed and bludgeoned for days until he is in the most
abject state of atrophy. He no longer knows what and where he is. He is subjected to weeks of "conferences" with
O'Brian, during which he is given electric shocks, and kept barely alive so that he can confess the error of his rebellion.
O'Brian, however, wants to extort more than a confession. He insists that Winston must be most thoroughly brain-
washed. He (Winston) must realize in the depths of his soul that Big Brother is all powerful and all good, that
individuals have no right to private ideas, and that if the Party says two plus two equals five that should be unhesitantly
accepted as correct. He tells Winston that he himself wrote Goodstein's book as a trap for rebels. After a long, dreadful
and nerve-shocking persecution Winston is completely converted. He is reborn. This again, is ironic parody of the death
and rebirth theme of the romance.
The converted Winston is a new being altogether, one who has lost all his individuality and become more or less a robot
in the hands of the all-powerful Party. He is indoctrinated; he "understands," and lastly accepts the Party. In the
background of this catatonic aftermath one can measure how he struggles and then lost his individual identity which
once he wanted to assert. He wanted to remain human like the poles. The atavistic spirit inspired him. He wanted to
relearn by conscious effort the basic human emotions- love, concern for one another, private loyalties, etc.,: "What
mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying
man, could have valued in itself"(134-135).
The last phase of romance is the exaltation of the hero, the anagnorisis phase. Anagnorisis means discovery; this phase
expresses the hero's self-realization. It is the recognition of the hero truly as a hero even though he may suffer death or
defeat in the course of the crucial conflict. Contrary to this the, structure of Nineteen Eighty-Four parodies the process
of anagnorisis. Winston Smith is degraded; he succumbs and sells off his soul. Yet a streak of humanity is reflected to
the reader from his situation, from the epiphany of the evil which overtakes him. For he still feels, howsoever weakly,
that he has betrayed Julia. The reader can understand that the betrayal is due to his fear of torture. When O'Brian
threatens to let loose the rats on him, Winston cries out: "Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what
you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!" (230).
After this great betrayal, Winston is set free. Many days later he sees Julia, who is in an equally bad shape after having
been beaten up and dulled by her ordeal. The two have nothing to say to each other after they confess that they have
betrayed their love. In the place of exaltation they have a demonic self-discovery of their own weakness. Winston Smith
slips back into the undignified servile existence. Raymond Williams has remarked:
Winston Smith is not like a man at all – in consciousness, in relationship, in the capacity for love and
protection and endurance and loyalty. He is the last of the cut-down figures through whom rejection and defeat
can be mediated. (1971: 81)
3. Conclusion
Northrop Frye is of the opinion that Nineteen Eighty-Four encompasses the satirical and ironical structure which
presents human life in terms of largely unrelieved bondage. Its setting presents prisons, madhouses, lynching mobs, and
places of execution. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most telling portrait of the present day nightmare of social tyranny. It
presents a lurid picture of modern society which diminishes the individual freedom. The novel parodies certain religious
symbols, suggesting some form of Antichrist worship. The parody of religion in the final scenes is very elaborate. There
is a parody of the ritual of atonement, for instance, when Winston is tortured into urging that the torments designed for
him be inflicted on Julia instead. We have an instance of vicarious expiation turned upside down. The lust for sadistic
power on the part of the ruling class is strong enough to last indefinitely, particularly with the aid of modern
technology. The devils of the Christian Hell are eternal. The "telescreen" device brings into irony the tragic theme of
derkou theama, the humiliation of being constantly watched by a hostile or derisive eye.
The central theme of the novel is life under a totalitarian regime, which is a tendency in all technological advanced
societies today. Orwell tries to warn people that a passive submission to the alluring appeal of a repressive government
run by a handful of dictators would irrevocably lead to the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Reading Nineteen
Eighty-Four today, when the year Nineteen Eighty-Four has passed off, one will perceive with dismay the increasing
signs of a deteriorating social condition which Orwell's warning gave a foretaste of. His was a timely alarm-signal in as
much as one may see that "Airstrip One Society" as outlined in Nineteen Eighty-Four has actually emerged in many
parts of the world. Political expediency has given license to projecting lies as truths. When an official communique
states something the underlying idea is just what it professes not to be. Undeclared wars are raging incessantly around
IJALEL 6(6):78-82, 2017 82
the globe. Repressive measures to stifle and emasculate the weaker people are no less hideous that those described in
Nineteen Eighty-Four. The world has fully realized the staggering impact of the emergence of super-powers, the super-
states- competing with the threatening one another, but actually ravaging the weaker peoples of the world.
References
Alldritt, Keith (1969), The Making of George Orwell: An Essay in Literary History. London: Edward Arnold.
Frye, Northrop (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Frye, Northrop (1970), The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Highet, Gilbert (1972), The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Publication Press.
Lee, Robert A (1969), Orwell's Fiction, Indiana: University of Norte Dame Press.
Lewis, Wnydham (1952), The Writer and the Absolute, London: Methuen and Company Ltd.
Orwell, George (1970), Nineteen Eighty-Four, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.
Meyers, Jeffrey (1975), A Reader's Guide to George Orwell, London: Thames and Hudson.
Schmerl, Rudolf B (1962), "The Two Future Worlds of Aldous Huxley", PMLA, Vol. LXXVII, No. 3.
Walsh, Chad (1962), From Utopia to Nightmare, New York: Harper and Row Publishers.
Williams, Raymond (1971), Orwell, London: Fontana/Collins.
Stress assignment in N+N combinations in Arabic

Abdel Rahman Mitib Altakhaineh
English Language Department, Al Ain University of Science and Technology Al Ain, UAE
E-mail: abdelrahman.takhaine@aau.ac.ae

Abstract
The validity of stress as a criterion to distinguish between compounds and phrases has been investigated in many
languages, including English (see e.g. Lieber 2005: 376; Booij 2012: 84). However, the possibility of using stress as a
criterion in this way has not been investigated for Arabic. Siloni (1997: 21) claims that in N+N combinations in Semitic
languages, stress always falls on the second element. However, the results of a study using PRAAT reveal that, in
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), stress plays no role in distinguishing between various N+N
combinations, i.e. compounds and phrases, e.g.ˈmuʕallim lfiizyaaʔ ‘the physics teacher’ vs.ˈbayt lwalad ‘the boy’s
house’, respectively. Analysis shows that the default position of stress in N+N combinations in MSA and JA is on the
first element. There is only one systematic exception, which is phonetically conditioned: in N+N combinations with
assimilated geminates on the word boundary, a secondary stress or perhaps double stress is assigned.
Keywords: stress, Arabic, State Construct (SC), Synthetic Genitive Construction (SGC), phrases, compounds
1. Introduction
Stress has been the focus of a great deal of research in the last two decades, since it has been considered a useful
criterion for distinguishing phrases from compounds in several languages (e.g. Chomsky and Halle 1968 (English);
Bauer 2009: 402 (Danish); Don 2009: 379-380 (Dutch); Kiefer 2009: 531 (Hungarian); Szymanek 2009: 472-73
(Polish); Zamponi 2009: 587, 592 (Maipure-Yavitero) among others). In English, the idea that left-hand stress is often a
mark of compounds, whereas right-hand stress is a sign of phrases was discussed by Chomsky and Halle (1968: 17). For
instance, ´blackboard is considered a compound, while black ´board is a phrase (Booij 2012: 84). If the stress of
blackboard falls on the initial word, as in /ˈblækˌbɔː(r)d/, it denotes ‘a large black or green surface which is fixed to a
classroom wall for writing’. On the other hand, if the stress of blackboard falls on the second word, as in /ˌblæk
ˈbɔː(r)d/, it denotes ‘a board which is painted black’. It has been shown that, in English, there are systematic exceptions
to this simple picture (Plag 2003: 138), but stress assignment remains a potentially useful criterion for making this kind
of distinction.
However, stress as a criterion to distinguish between compounds and phrases has not been investigated in Arabic. In
fact, some studies (e.g. Siloni 1997: 21) claim that stress always falls on the right element of N+N combination in
Semitic languages, including Arabic, without making a clear distinction between compounds and phrases. Therefore,
the examination of stress assignment as a criterion to distinguish compounds from phrases in Arabic remains an area
worthy of further investigation. In doing so, this study identifies the default position of stress within N+N combinations
in Arabic and one exception to this pattern, which is phonetically conditioned.
2. General Background
2.1 The two possible N+N constructs in MSA and JA
Examination of data in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA) suggests that there are two possible
nominal constructs, which exhibit different behaviours (Altakhaineh 2016a). 1 One is the ‘the noun-noun genitive
construct’ (Ryding 2005: 205); it is equivalent to a possessive phrase containing of in English, such as the king of
Jordan. This possessive construct is referred to as the P-construct. The other construct can be considered a type of
compounding. Examples of the two types of construct in MSA are:
(1) bayt-u r-radʒul-i (P-construct)
house-NOM the-man-GEN
‘the man’s house’
(2) ʕaruus-u l-baħr-i (compound)

bride-NOM the-sea-GEN
‘the mermaid’
lit. the sea bride
The most prominent morphosyntactic difference between them with respect to N+N combinations within CS/SGC2 is the
1 Both of these nominal constructs are traditionally grouped under Idˤaafa (see footnote 2).
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presence in MSA versus absence in JA of the morphosyntactic feature of case, as in the following examples:
(3) bayt-u/a/i r-radʒul-i (MSA)
house-NOM/ACC/GEN the-man-GEN
(4) raaʔid-u/a/i l-fadˤaaʔ-i (MSA)

pioneer -NOM/ACC/GEN the-space-GEN
‘the astronaut’
lit. the space pioneer
(5) beet z-zalameh (JA)

house the-man
(6) raaʔid l-fadˤaaʔ (JA)

pioneer the-space
‘the astronaut’
lit. the space pioneer
Note that in the MSA examples (3) and (4), the first element of SGC can be nominative, accusative or genitive
depending on the function of the whole N+N combination in the sentence, but the second element is always genitive. In
contrast, JA examples (5) and (6) do not have case marking. In consecutive speech a default -i appears between the two
elements for phonological purposes, i.e. breaking consonant clusters, but that is not a case marker. Furthermore, some
lexical differences can be found between MSA and JA. For instance, the word man is realised in MSA as rradʒuli ‘the
man’ in (3), whereas it is zzalameh ‘the man’ in JA (see example 5).
On the basis of the most reliable criteria for compoundhood (e.g. Lieber and Štekauer 2009; Bauer et al. 2013,
Altakhaineh 2016b, Altakhaineh 2017 among others), there seems to be two different constructs, i.e. compounds and P-
constructs in MSA and JA. The relationship between the two elements of the construct in (1) is one of possession,
whilst this is not the case in example (2). Regarding adjacency, it seems that an element such as haaða ‘this’ or baʕdˤ
‘some’ can be inserted between the two elements of the construct in (1), whereas such insertion is impossible in (2).
With respect to referentiality, the right element in (1) is referential, whereas the right element in (2) is non-referential
(Altakhaineh 2016a: 134-135, 172).
Having established that there is some prima-facie plausibility to a division of N+N combinations in MSA and JA into
phrases (P-constructs) and compounds, the phonological criterion, i.e. stress is additional evidence to the structural
distinction which examples (1) and (2) already demonstrated above. In particular, it will be interesting to examine stress
placement in these combinations in order to determine whether it can be used to support the idea that they are indeed
two different types of construct.
2.2 Stress assignment at the word level in Arabic
Before outlining the experiment I have conducted, it is important to provide some background on stress assignment in
Arabic. Arabic is a language with word stress, which means that one of the syllables in a content word is seen as
prominent; thus, it receives primary stress (Watson 2002: 80). Four characteristics related to prominent or stressed
syllables have been identified by Spencer (2002: 241). Firstly, a stressed syllable is in general louder than its
neighbours. Secondly, a prominent syllable is longer in duration than its neighbouring unstressed syllables. Thirdly, the
constituent sounds of a stressed syllable, particularly its onset consonants, are usually more clearly or more forcefully
articulated than those in less stressed ones. Finally, a stressed syllable is the crux of pitch movement (accent), reflecting
an intonation contour. This entails that a prominent syllable will usually be one uttered on a particularly high (or
sometimes low) pitch (Spencer ibid).
Explaining stress assignment requires the use of the concept of mora, a phonological unit that determines syllable
weight. Essentially, a short vowel is assigned one mora, long vowels two moras and geminate consonants are assigned
one mora in the underlying representation (Hayes 1989). This is shown in (7):
(7) μ μμ μ (underlingly)
V V G
2 The Construct State (referred to in Arabic as Idˤaafah) is defined as a construct that normally consists of two nouns or
an adjective and a noun where the first element can be nominative, accusative or genitive based on the function of the
whole construct in the sentence, whereas the second element is always genitive (Al-Rajihi 2000: 247). Another
important characteristic of the Construct State is that the first element is always indefinite, whereas the second can be
definite or indefinite (see Fassi Fehri, 2012: 156). In this study, however, I opted for the term Synthetic Genitive
Construction, which contrasts with “analytic genitives,” that is, with the possessive markers, for example, li “for/ of” in
MSA. In fact, the “Construct State” refers to the morphological form of the possessum in a construct, for example, the
lack of nunation and in some Arabic dialects, for example, Jordanian Arabic, the feminine suffix surfacing with a final
/t/, and so on (see Altakhaineh 2016a: 6-7).
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A syllable is either heavy or light based on the number of moras it bears. A monomoraic syllable has one mora, a
bimoraic syllable has two, and although rare, a trimoraic syllable has three (Hayes 1989). The type of syllable, whether
heavy or light, influences the placement of stress (McCarthy 1979). In particular, Hayes (1989, 1995: 52) argues that in
some languages stress falls on syllables that have a long vowel or diphthong (CVV) or those that have a geminate in the
coda (CVG). 3 Syllables characterised by one of these three, i.e. long vowel, diphthong or a geminate, are often regarded
as heavy or bimoraic. Conversely, syllables such as (CV) or (CVC) (if on the right edge of the word) are light or
monomoraic (Hayes 1989, 1995; Watson 2002). This suggests that CVC syllables that are not on the right edge of the
word are considered heavy. Note that syllables in most Arabic dialects are maximally bimoraic and left-dominated. This
means that they usually have trochaic feet (Watson 2002: 87). Trochaic feet are defined by Hayes (1995: 80) as
‘elements contrasting in intensity from groupings with initial prominence’. In other words, in trochaic feet, the first
syllable of the foot is strong, whereas in iambic feet, the last syllable of the foot is strong. Hence, a trochaic foot is left-
dominated, whereas an iambic foot is right-dominated. Iambs are asymmetrical binary feet with a weak followed by a
strong element, whereas trochees consist of elements which differ in intensity that is, they are binary feet with a strong
followed by a weak element (Hayes 1995).
Numerous studies have been conducted on stress assignment at the word level in Arabic, starting with Watson (2002:
81) who argues that a typical peninsular Arabic stress system in the present day follows the following rules:
(8) Stress a final superheavy syllable (i.e. a syllable that has either one of these templates: CVCC or CVVC). An
example of this is da.ˈrast ‘I learned’. That is, when a word has only one heavy syllable, stress falls on it (cf.
CA da.ˈrast ‘I learned’).
(9) Otherwise stress the rightmost non-final heavy syllable (up to the antepenultimate), e.g. ˈmad.ra.sih ‘school’.
(10) Otherwise stress the leftmost light syllable, e.g. ˈka.tab ‘he wrote’. Specifically, primary stress falls on the
antepenultimate syllable when a word has only light syllables.
Stress assignment in JA follows similar rules to (8-10). In particular, Abu Abbas (2008: 15) describes stress in JA as
follows:
(11) Stress the rightmost heavy syllable if it is not separated from the right edge of the word by more than two
syllables. In other words, never stress pre-antepenultimate syllables. This rule is similar to Watson (2002) (see
rule 9).
(12) Stress the antepenultimate syllable in the absence of a heavy syllable. In other words, if the word has only
light syllables, stress falls on the antepenultimate. Note that this rule is similar to Watson (2002) (see rule 10).
(13) Never stress word-final CVC syllables. This rule is mentioned by several phonologists who have studied stress
in Arabic (Hayes 1989, 1995; Watson 2002: 91): the peripheral (rightmost) foot is extrametrical and is thus
invisible to the stress rules.
As a result, it is clear that syllable weight plays an important role in stress assignment in all dialects of Arabic, including
JA (Abu Abbas 2008). Heavy syllables are more eligible to be assigned primary stress in Arabic compared to light
syllables. With respect to geminates and stress assignment, Davis (2011: 845) points out that geminates, e.g. dd, are
different from singleton consonants, e.g. d, in that word-final geminates, but not word-final singletons, attract stress to
the word-final syllable. For instance, in Hadhrami Arabic spoken in Yemen, geminates attract stress onto the last
syllable of the word as in [ʔaˈxaff] ‘lighter’ vs. [ˈʔakbar] ‘greater’ (Bamakhramah 2009 cited in Davis 2011: 845). This
kind of stress attraction onto the final syllable of the word is related to weight representation. Here, it is important to
discuss whether geminates are capable of bearing weight or not. With regard to Lebanese Arabic (henceforth LA),
Khattab and Al-Tamimi (2014: 337) argue that, from the viewpoint of a weight-bearing account, syllables that end in a
geminate are always heavy. This is because, like other varieties of Arabic, LA is a language which is characterised by
being quantity-sensitive, i.e. syllable weight controls stress assignment. Additionally, Bamakhramah (2009) argues that
primary stress usually falls on the rightmost bimoraic syllable in Hadhrami dialect spoken in Yemen.
Taking the previous discussion into consideration, syllables ending in a geminate, which are considered bimoraic, will
definitely be eligible to bear stress in Arabic. This is because geminates are underlyingly heavy or moraic as mentioned
previously. The focus on stress assignment on syllables that have a geminate is particularly important in this experiment
as is discussed later.
2.3 Stress assignment in N+N combinations in Arabic
With respect to stress assignment in N+N combinations in Semitic languages, several views have been proposed. For
example, Siloni (1997: 21), writing about Hebrew, argues that in the construction known as the ‘Nominal State
Construct’ (referred to in Arabic as Idˤafah), stress always falls on the second element, which is marked with the
genitive case, whereas the first element, i.e. the head, remains unstressed. 4Similarly, concerning stress assignment in
3 Although languages such as Leti, Malayalam and Ngalakgan, have syllables ending in a geminate, they are still
considered light (see Hume et al. 1997; Baker 2008; Ringen and Vago 2011).
4 In Arabic, compounding within the Synthetic Genitive Construction (SGC) is predominantly left-headed. The
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MSA, Alexiadou et al. (2007: 248) claim that in examples like (17a, b), stress falls on the possessor radʒul ‘man’, the
genitive element:
(14) a) bayt-u ˈradʒul-i-n (P-construct)
house-NOM man-GEN-a
‘a man’s house’
b) bayt-r ˈradʒul-i (P-construct)

house-NOM the man-GEN
‘the man’s house’ (Alexiadou et al. 2007: 248)
However, these two examples, which are the only ones discussed by Alexiadou et al. (ibid), are insufficient to conclude
that stress in MSA always falls on the right element of N+N combinations. First, examples (17a, b) represent one
specific construct, i.e. the P-construct. Compounds could have a different stress pattern. Second, these scholars have not
addressed stress assignment in all phonological environments of N+N combinations in MSA, e.g. definite vs. indefinite
and geminate vs. non-geminate. Third, there are combinations where stress would appear on the first element of both P-
constructs and compounds, as in (18) and (19):
(15) ˈħaqiibat-u l-fataat-i (P-construct)
bag-NOM the-girl-GEN
‘the girl's bag’
(16) ˈʕaruus-u l-baħr-i (compound)

bride-NOM the-sea-GEN
lit. the sea bride
‘the mermaid’
Thus, it appears that some N+N constructs, like (17a, b), have stress on the second element, while others, like (18) and
(19), do not. Clearly, these observations call for further investigation. In particular, experimental data are needed in
order to determine the position of the stress in N+N combinations in MSA and JA.
In this study, I explore the idea that gemination has an important role in stress assignment in Arabic (see section 4.3).
Thus, I have included in my test material N+N combinations with and without gemination to examine the differences in
stress assignment in both types. In the combinations that include a geminate, I have taken into consideration different
types of geminate, namely, gemination which is part of the lexical specification, as in munassiq ‘coordinator’ and
assimilated gemination accompanied by sandhi which appears when the definite article -l ‘the’ is added to a word that
starts with a coronal sound, as in ʃ-ʃams (underlying ʔal-ʃams) ‘the sun’.
To the best of my knowledge, no prior study has been conducted on stress assignment in N+N combinations in MSA
and JA. The experiment described below will fill this gap, specifically in order to determine whether stress is a criterion
that can distinguish between compounds and P-constructs (phrases) in MSA and JA, by conducting an experiment using
Praat. The following section provides an overview of the hypotheses and the procedures of the experiment.
3. Hypotheses
As far as N+N combinations are concerned, it is hypothesised that stress assignment depends on whether the second
element is definite (i.e. marked with the definite article ʔal) or indefinite (i.e. marked with word-final tanwiin
‘nunation’, the indefiniteness marker -n which is normally dropped pre-pausally). Note that nouns in MSA can be either
marked with the definite article ʔal- or nunation -n, but never both.5 In other words, these are in complementary
distribution. This can be illustrated with the following examples:
(17) a) bayt-u r-raʔiis

house-NOM the-president
‘the president’s house’
b) bayt-u (*r-)raʔiis-i-n
house-NOM (*the-)president-GEN-INDF
‘the/a president’s house’
I formulated the following hypotheses about stress assignment in N+N combinations in both MSA and JA:
1) If the second element is definite, stress falls on the first element or on both elements.
semantic, syntactic, and morphological heads always coincide in Arabic compounds within the SGC (see Altakhaineh
2016c and Altakhaineh 2017).
5 Note that ʔal-bayt is pronounced l-bayt in consecutive speech.
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2) If the second element is indefinite, stress falls on the first element.
The next section discusses the experiment I conducted in order to confirm or falsify these hypotheses.
4. The experiment
In order to determine whether stress can be used to distinguish compounds from P-constructs in MSA and JA, I tested
several adults whose first language is JA. The participants were asked to read a number of compounds and phrases
embedded in two paragraphs of running text (one written in MSA and another in JA). I recorded their voices and
analysed them using Praat software. The procedure is fully explained in the following subsections.
4.1 Pilot study
Before conducting the experiment, I tested the materials on two native speakers of Arabic to validate the text and
methods used. The two participants were asked to read a short paragraph that contained five P-constructs and six
compounds and I recorded their speech. The paragraph comprised four sentences. The results showed that one of the
sentences was problematic. In particular, the stress on the two compounds in that sentence was not clear due to the
presence of contrastive stress. This type of stress is defined as a stress which is assigned to a word or a syllable as
opposed to its normal accentuation (Bolinger 1961: 83). This is done to contrast it with another word or syllable or to
steer the attention towards it. For instance, in the phrase parliament of the people, by the people, for the people, the
stress falls on the normally unstressed word of in order to focus on the contrast between of, by, and for. Note that, in the
above example, two or more items are counterbalanced and a preference indicated for some members of the group
(Bolinger ibid). Bauer et al. (2013: 445) note that contrastive stress may change the normal stress pattern assigned to a
compound, e.g. She meant Park ˈStreet, not Park ˈRoad. Bauer et al. (ibid) suggest that this source of variation is to be
ignored; the normal stress position of compounds is detected in non-contrastive environments.
The English translation of the Arabic sentence which caused problem in data analysis ran as follows:
At our school, the maths teacher, the physics teacher and the arts teacher drink a cup of tea every
morning.
Here, the three compounds, muʕallim rriyaadˤiyyaat ‘the maths teacher’, muʕallim lfiizyaaʔ ‘the physics teacher’ and
muʕallim lfann ‘the arts teacher’ are affected by contrastive stress. To avoid the effects of this type of stress, muʕallim
lfann ‘the arts teacher’ was replaced by mudaqqiq lkurraasah ‘the notes inspector’ while muʕallim lfiizyaaʔ ‘the physics
teacher’ was moved to the second paragraph, so that muʕallim rriyaadˤiyyaat ‘the maths teacher’ and muʕallim lfiizyaaʔ
‘the physics teacher’ are separated by six sentences. Additionally, the pilot study showed that the text contained two
words which are not used in JA, namely, ʔimtiħaan θθaanawiyya ‘the secondary school examination’ and sˤabaaħ
masaaʔ ‘morning and evening’. These two words were replaced by their JA equivalents, i.e. ʔimtiħaan ttawdʒiihi ‘the
secondary school examination’ and sˤubħ wu masaa ‘morning and evening’ (see Appendix 1).
4.2 Sample
Three adults (two female and one male) participated in the experiment, all native speakers of JA. The participants have
a good working knowledge of MSA, since they are proficient users and have studied it in detail for twelve years at
school. They have also taken two or three modules of advanced MSA in their undergraduate degree in Jordan. Even
though the participants are not native speakers of MSA (since MSA has no native speakers), the data collected from
MSA will be of importance in this experiment, since it may help provide a clearer picture of stress assignment in N+N
combinations in Arabic in general.
4.3 Tools and procedure
The participants were asked to read two paragraphs (one written in MSA and another in JA). These two paragraphs
contain a number of compounds (thirteen) and P-constructs (eight) in order to examine whether the position of the
stress differs in the two types of construct.
The compounds and P-constructs in the two paragraphs were chosen according to the hypotheses formulated in section
3. Therefore, the possible effect of definiteness vs. indefiniteness was taken into consideration. In particular, if the
second element is definite, then it is vital to examine the shape of the definite article in the P-constructs or compounds.
It has been proposed that the definite article has an underlying phonological form /ʔal/ (Heselwood and Watson 2013:
34). This form surfaces as [ʔal] when the subsequent word starts with a non-coronal consonant. However, when the
subsequent word starts with a coronal consonant, the /l/ completely assimilates to the following coronal, yielding a
geminate coronal consonant (Heselwood and Watson ibid). For instance, if the definite article is added to bint ‘girl’, it
surfaces as [ʔalbint] ‘the girl’, but if it is added to tˁaalib ‘student’, it surfaces as [ʔatˁtˁaalib].6 These aspects could play
a role in stress assignment in N+N combinations in MSA and JA. Hence, gemination has been taken into account in
selecting the data investigated. Specifically, I have included in my test material N+N combinations with and without
gemination in order to investigate the differences in stress assignment in both types. Furthermore, I have taken into
account that there are two types of geminate, i.e. lexical geminate and assimilated geminate accompanied by sandhi.
Table 1 shows the compounds and P-constructs selected for this experiment based on the above considerations.
6 Note that ʔatˁ-tˁaalib is pronounced tˁ-tˁaalib in consecutive speech

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Table 1. N+N compounds and P-constructs in MSA and JA selected in the experiment
Definite 2nd element
Phonological environment Compound P-construct
N1 non-geminate +  ʔimtiħaan lkiimyaaʔ ‘the chemistry  maqsˁaf lmadrasah ‘the school’s
N2 non-geminate exam’ canteen’
 raʔiis lwuzaraaʔ ‘the prime minister’
 mudiir lqaaʕah ‘the head invigilator’
N1 geminate +  muʕallim lfiizyaaʔ ‘the physics  sayyarat lmudiir ‘the director’s car’
N2 non-geminate teacher’
N1 non-geminate +  ʕaamil nnaaðˤafah ‘the cleaner’  kitaab tˁtˁaalib ‘the student’s book’
N2 geminate  ʔimtiħaan θθaanawiyya 7 ‘the
secondary school examination’
 waziir ttarbiyah ‘the Minister of
Education’
N1 geminate + N2 geminate  muʕallim rriyaadˤiyyaat ‘the maths  xutˁtˁat lmuʕallim ‘the teacher’s
teacher’ plan’
 mudaqqiq lkurraasah ‘the notes
inspector’
Indefinite 2nd element
Phonological environment Compound P-construct
N1 non-geminate +  kaʔs ʕasˁiir ‘juice glass’  kitaab fataah ‘a girl’s book’

N2 non-geminate
N1 geminate +  muʕallim sˁaff ‘primary school  sijill musˁaħħiħin ‘a marker’s
N2 geminate teacher’ record’
N1 non-geminate +  faitˁirat tuffaaħ ‘apple pie’8  qalam muʕallim ‘a teacher’s pen’
N2 geminate
N1 geminate +  munassiq ʕuluum ‘a science  qubbaʕat tˁaalib ‘student’s cap’
N2 non-geminate coordinator’
Table 1 incorporates the two factors which may play a role in stress assignment in MSA and JA, i.e. (in)definiteness and
gemination, as indicated in my hypotheses. In MSA, nunation is the indefiniteness marker, whereas in JA, the absence
of the definiteness marker is a sign of indefiniteness, since nunation is not realised in JA.
The selected compounds and P-constructs were embedded in a sequence of natural sentences, forming a realistic piece
of discourse as a way to reduce the effect of the observer’s paradox (see Labov 1972: 209). I recorded the participants’
voices in a soundproof room to obtain high quality audio. For recording the paragraph in JA, the participants were given
the text in a form where the spelling and diacritics were adapted to JA pronunciation. This was done to avoid the
association of written stimuli with MSA. I made sure that the participants were comfortable and at ease. The
participants were also assured that they could stop the recording at any time.
4.4 Data analysis
The audio-recordings were analysed using the latest version of Praat (5.4.08), which gives an indication of stress
assignment, showing pitch, duration and intensity. This is due that fact that several studies (e.g. Hammond 1999;
Spencer 2002; Odden 2005; Plag et al. 2011: 362 among others) indicate that the pitch, intensity (loudness) and
duration are responsible for assigning stress.
With respect to the acoustic correlates of stress, note that duration is excluded in this study due to the presence of
different segments in the examples of P-constructs and compounds, i.e. the target words in both types of construct are
not the same. Duration can only be used as a criterion if both examples have the same segments, as in the English
phrase black ˈbird and the compound ˈblackbird. Hence, the recordings in this experiment were fed into the software to
examine both pitch (marked with a blue line in the spectrograms) and intensity (marked with a yellow line in the
7 The compound ʔimtiħaan θθaanawiyya ‘secondary school examination’ in the MSA version was replaced in the JA
version by ʔimtiħaan ttawjiihi ‘secondary school examination’, since θθaanawiyya ‘secondary school’ is no longer used
in JA.
8 The compound fatˁiirat tuffaaħ ‘apple pie’ in the MSA version was replaced in the JA version by keekit tuffaaħ ‘apple
pie’, since fatˁiirat ‘pie’ is no longer used in JA.

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spectrograms) in order to determine how they can be used to pinpoint stress, since they are the most reliable acoustic
correlates of stress in this case. I determined if there is a difference between the two types of N+N combination on the
basis of visual inspection of the spectrogram figures together with auditory impression of the recordings. I also asked
four trained native speakers to listen to the recorded items and say where they hear the prominence, then I discarded
tokens for which they disagree.
5. Results and discussion
This section presents a sample of the spectrogram figures used in order to test the hypotheses discussed in section 3.
Based on the acoustic contours of pitch and intensity, the data analysis shows that stress assignment in the target N+N
combinations is the same for all participants in virtually all cases. I have randomly selected some tokens out of 126
tokens (63 for JA and 63 for MSA) to represent the stress patterns.
5.1 N+N combinations marked with definiteness
Since gemination plays a significant role in stress assignment, this section is divided into four sub-sections on the basis
of the presence vs. absence of gemination (see Table 1).
 1st non-geminate + 2nd non-geminate
For this case, three compounds, e.g. raʔiis lwuzaraaʔ ‘the prime minister’, ʔimtiħaan lkiimyaaʔ ‘the chemistry exam’
and mudiir lqaaʕah ‘the head invigilator’, and one P-construct, e.g. maqsˁaf lmadrasah ‘the school’s canteen’ were
tested. The following spectrogram figures represent two of these combinations.
Figure 1. Spectrogram for raʔiis lwuzaraaʔ [ra.ʔii.sil.wu.za.raaʔ]9 ‘the prime minister’ (compound)10, MSA
Figure 2. Spectrogram for maqsˁaf lmadrasah ‘the school’s canteen’ [maq.sˁa.fil.mad.ra.sah] (P-construct), MSA
9 The syllabification given in all spectrograms is performed based on the actual pronunciation of the constructs in the
text. The case marked on the N + N combination in MSA is based on its function in the context. In particular, the first
element can be nominative -u, accusative -a or genitive -i, whereas the second element is always genitive -i. Remember,
however, that the genitive case on the second element is not realised in JA. .
10 The triangles shown in the spectrograms are used to indicate the high values of pitch and intensity, i.e. the red
triangles pinpoint intensity, whereas the green ones indicate the pitch.
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Looking at the pitch and intensity correlates, the spectrograms in Figures 1-2 show that in the absence of gemination,
the stress falls on the first element. This is clear from the fact that in Figures 1 and 2, the values of both the blue (i.e.
pitch) and yellow (i.e. intensity) lines are slightly higher on the first element compared to the second element.
According to Spencer (2002: 241), a stressed syllable can be more stressed than its neighbours. As a result, we do not
need to consider all syllables as either stressed or unstressed. More often than not, in addition to the main stress we will
find other stressed syllables in a word or phrase, but these are not stressed to the same degree as the main stressed
syllable (Spencer ibid). This is known as secondary stress (as opposed to that assigned on the most stressed element,
primary or main stress). Data in Figures 1 and 2 may indicate that the second elements lwuzaraaʔ ‘the minister’ and
lmadrasah ‘the school’ are not completely unstressed. In effect, they could bear secondary stress.
This confirms my hypothesis that in definite N + N combinations, the default position of the stress is on the first
element or both, but not on the second. Note that the position of the stress so far does not provide a clear distinction
between compounds and P-constructs in MSA and JA. In both cases, the stress falls on the first element.
 1st geminate + 2nd non-geminate
For the cases where the first word has a geminate, one compound, e.g. muʕallim lfiizyaaʔ ‘the physics teacher’ and one
P-construct, e.g. sayyarat lmudiir ‘the director’s car’ were included in the experiment. Despite the slight difference in
intensity in Figure 3, the pitch is clearly higher on the first element. In general, the spectrogram Figures 3-4 demonstrate
that these two combinations seem to be assigned stress on the first element as shown below.
Figure 2. Spectrogram for muʕallim lfiizyaaʔ [mu.ʕal.li.mil.fiiz.yaa.ʔi] ‘the physics teacher’ (compound), MSA
Figure 3. Spectrogram for sayyarat lmudiir [say.ya.ra.til.mu.diir] ‘the director’s car’ (P-construct)
Note that in both the compound and the P-construct in Figures 3-4, the first element has a geminate: mu.ʕal.lim
‘teacher’ and say.ya.rat ‘car’. However, the presence of the geminate here does not affect stress assignment. Stress
appears to fall on the first element also in environments in which no gemination occurs on the first element, as
mentioned in the previous section. Even though sandhi also operates in both the compound mu.ʕal.li.mil.fiiz.yaa.ʔi ‘the
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physics teacher’ and the P-construct say.ya.ra.til.mu.diir ‘the director’s car’, it does not have any impact on stress
across word boundary. For this to happen, there has to be an assimilated geminate accompanied by sandhi as shown in
detail in Figures 5-7.
 1st non-geminate + 2nd geminate
For the case in which the first element does not contain a geminate and the second does, I included three compounds,
namely, ʕaamil nnaðˤaafah ‘the cleaner’, ʔimtiħaan θθaanawiyya ‘the secondary school examination’, and waziir
ttarbiyah ‘the minister of education’, and one P-construct, e.g. kitaab tˤtˤalib ‘the student’s book’ in the experiment.
Figures 5-7 below show one compound, i.e. ʕaamil nnaðˤaafah ‘the cleaner’, in both MSA and JA, and one P-construct,
i.e. kitaab tˤtˤalib ‘the student’s book’.
Figure 4. Spectrogram for ʕaamil nnaðˤaafah [ʕaa.mi.lin.na.ðˤaa.fa.ti] ‘the cleaner’ (compound), MSA
Figure 5. Spectrogram for ʕaamil nnaðˤaafah [ʕaa.mi.lin.na.ðˤaa.fah] ‘the cleaner’ (compound), JA

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Figure 6. Spectrogram for kitaab tˤtˤalib [ki.taa.bitˤ.tˤaa.li.bi] ‘the student’s book’ (P-construct), MSA
Figures 5-7 show that in both ʕaamil nnaðˤaafah ‘the cleaner’ and kitaab tˤtˤalib ‘the student’s book’, stress seems to
fall on the first element, characterised by a peak, i.e. one prominent syllable. It is clear that, as shown by the red and
green triangles in the figures above, the first elements ʕaamil ‘worker’ and kitaab ‘book’ have higher pitch (the blue
line) and intensity (the yellow line) than the second elements. Note, however, that there is a tiny decrease in the
intensity contour across word boundaries, making it appear as though the second element is also stressed. The common
factor between the elements of both N + N combinations is that the second element contains a geminate and that the two
elements are connected together by sandhi as mentioned in section 3.4. Specifically, the first consonant of the geminate
in ʕaa.mi.lun.na.ðˤaa.fa.ti ‘the cleaner’ forms the coda of the last syllable of the first element, i.e. lun, whereas the
second consonant of the geminate syllabifies as the onset of the first syllable of the second element, i.e. na. The
syllabification process of ʕaa.mi.lun.na.ðˤaa.fa.ti ‘the cleaner’ is demonstrated in Figure 8 below, in which O stands for
onset, R for rhyme, N for nucleus and C for coda:
σ σ σ σ σ σ σ
O R O R O R O R O R O R O R
N N NC N N N N
ʕ a a m i l u n n a ðˤ a a f a t i
Figure 8. Syllabification of ʕaa.mi.lun.na.ðˤaa.fa.ti ‘the cleaner’
When they are connected by sandhi, i.e. ʕaa.mi.lun.na.ðˤaa.fa.ti ‘the cleaner’ and ki.taa.butˤ.tˤaa.li.bi ‘the student’s
book’, the intensity seems to be affected by the presence of the assimilated geminate, causing the fall at the onset of the
first syllable of the second element to be only very slight, as shown in Figures 5-7. Simply put, the geminate does not
only affect the coda of lun and butˤ, but also the onset of the second syllables na and tˤaa, respectively. The ability of
the geminate to affect both the onset and the coda is not surprising because it is the same segment which appears in the
onset and in the coda; the segment has the same acoustic properties. Consequently, I would suggest that in N + N
combinations with assimilated geminates on the word boundary, a secondary stress or perhaps double stress is assigned.
The presence of a geminate in their examples may explain why Alexiadou et al. (2007: 248) claim that the stress falls
on the second element in N + N combinations such as baytr ˈradʒul ‘the man’s house’. The assimilation of l- to r
creates a geminate in the coda. As explained previously, the geminate is bimoraic; thus, it attracts stress. Therefore,
according to Alexiadou et al. (2007: 248), the second element is assigned the primary stress. However, the experiment I
conducted provides somewhat a more detailed picture of stress assignment in N + N combinations. The gemination
accompanied by sandhi found in such examples affects stress, but it does not shift it completely from the first element.
This argument is supported by the fact that if the second definite element starts with a non-coronal consonant so that
there is no assimilation, and in turn no gemination, the stress clearly falls on the first element only (see Figures 3-4).
The spectrogram figures also show that stress is assigned to the first element in both compounds and P-constructs,
which means that it does not help in differentiating between them.
 1st geminate + 2nd geminate
For this case, one P-construct and two compounds are included in the paragraph which the five participants read,
namely, muʕallim rriyaadˤiyyaat ‘the maths teacher’ and muʕallim ttaariix ‘the history teacher’ (compounds), and
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xutˁtˁat lmuʕallim ‘the teacher’s plan’ (P-construct). Figures 9-10 show the spectrograms for the two items of N+N
combinations.
Figure 9. Spectrogram for muʕallim rriyaadˤiyyaat [mu.ʕal.li.mur.ri.yaa. dˤiy.yaa.ti] ‘the maths teacher’ (compound), MSA
Figure 10. Spectrogram for xutˁtˁat lmuʕallim [xutˁ.tˁa.til.mu.ʕal.li.mi] ‘the teacher’s plan’ (P-construct), MSA
Figure 9 shows that the compound, i.e. muʕallim rriyaadˤiyyaat ‘the maths teacher’ is assigned stress on the first
element. However, the presence of an assimilated geminate together with sandhi means that the intensity contour falls
only very slightly across the word boundary. Figure 10 shows that the P-construct, i.e. xutˁtˁat lmuʕallim ‘the teacher’s
plan’, in which the second element does not start with a coronal sound is assigned stress on the first element with a fall
of both intensity and pitch contours. Although sandhi also operates in the P-construct, i.e. xutˁ.tˁa.til.mu.ʕal.lim ‘the
teacher’s plan’, it does not have an effect on stress across word boundaries. The decisive factor seems to be that there
has to be an assimilatory gemination for stress to be influenced across word boundaries. Hence, stress is assigned to the
default position, i.e. the first element. Similar to the first element xutˁtˁat ‘plan’ in which a geminate is present, the
second element also has a lexical geminate, i.e. lmuʕallim ‘teacher’. Yet, the stress falls on the first element not on the
second.
Even though the position of the stress in the compound in Figure 9 and the P-construct in Figure 10 is on the first
element, there is a subtle difference in the decline of the pitch and intensity contours across word boundary. This
difference is purely a phonological one caused by assimilatory geminate. The examples ʕaamil nnaðˤaafah ‘the
cleaner’, and kitaab tˤtˤalib ‘the student’s book’ represented in Figures 5-7 respectively have a similar stress pattern to
muʕallim rriyaadˤiyyaat ‘the maths teacher’ in Figure 9 due to the assimilatory geminate together with sandhi (the
intensity contour falls slightly on the second element affecting stress across word boundary in both cases). Note that all
other cases show that stress does not differentiate between compounds and P-constructs in MSA and JA.
The paragraph in the test included another compound that has a geminate in the second element but not an assimilated
one, which can be used to check whether muʕallim rriyaadˤiyyaat ‘the maths teacher’ is indeed a special case. Figure 11
below shows this example.
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Figure 11. Spectrogram for mudaqqiq lkurraasah ‘the notes inspector’ [mu.daq.qi.qil.kur.raa.sah] (compound), JA
Figure 11 shows that in the absence of an assimilated geminate, the stress seems to fall on the first element even though
sandhi operates in this example: mu.daq.qi.qil.kur.raa.sah ‘the notes inspector’ (with the position of sandhi shown in
bold). Note that both the P-construct in Figure 9 and the compound in Figure 11 are assigned stress on the first element,
which means that stress cannot be used to make a distinction between the two types of N+N combination.
This section has shown that the first hypothesis about stress assignment in N+N combinations (i.e. if the second element
is definite, stress falls on the first element or on both elements) should be refined: stress usually falls on the first
element, but in N+N combinations with assimilated geminates on the word boundary, a secondary stress or perhaps
double stress is assigned to the second element. The next section provides an examination of stress assignment in
indefinite compounds and P-constructs. The next section provides an examination of stress assignment in indefinite
compounds and P-constructs.
5.2 N + N combinations not marked with definiteness
This section is divided into four sub-sections on the basis of the presence vs. absence of gemination (see Table 1).
 1st non-geminate + 2nd non-geminate
For this case, three compounds were included in the experiment, i.e. layla nahaar ‘twenty four-seven’, sˁabaaħ masaaʔ
‘twenty four-seven’, and kaʔs ʕasˁiir ‘juice glass’ and one P-construct, i.e. kitaab fataah ‘a girl’s book’. The analysis
shows that the stress tends to fall on the first element in all of them. Figures 12-14 below represent this case.
Figure 12. Spectrogram for kaʔs ʕasˁiir (kaasit ʕasˁiir, in JA) [kaa.sit ʕa.sˁiir] ‘juice glass’ (compound), JA
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Figure 13. Spectrogram for sˁabaaħ masaaʔ [sˁa.baa.ħa ma.saa.ʔin] ‘twenty four-seven’ (compound), MSA
Figure 14. Spectrogram for kitaab fataah [ki.taa.ba fa.taa.tin] ‘a girl’s book’ (P-construct), MSA
The three figures above show that the first elements of both the compounds (see Figure 12 and 13) and the P-construct
(see Figure 14) are pronounced more forcefully and clearly. The pitch and intensity contours have higher values on the
first element, which means that the first element is more stressed than the second (see the red and green triangles
above). It is worth pointing out that the intensity and pitch values are slightly high at the end in Figure 12 because of the
presence of a superheavy syllable, i.e. sˁiir, which has the template CVVC (cf. Watson 2002)
 1st geminate + 2nd non-geminate
For the purpose of the experiment, one compound, e.g. munassiq ʕuluum ‘a science coordinator’ and one P-construct,
e.g. qubbaʕat tˤaalib ‘a student’s cap’ were tested. Figures 15-16 below show that stress is assigned on the first element
on both the compound and the P-construct.
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Figure 15. Spectrogram for munassiq ʕuluum [mu.nas.siq ʕu.luum] ‘a science coordinator’ (compound), JA
Figure 16. Spectrogram for qubbaʕat tˤaalib [qub.ba.ʕa.ta tˤaa.li.bin] ‘a student’s cap’ (P-construct), MSA
Even though the first element in both the compound and the P-construct has a geminate, i.e. mu.nas.siq ‘a coordinator’
and qub.ba.ʕat ‘a cap’, this does not have an effect on stress. In environments in which the first element does not
contain a geminate (see the previous section), stress tends to fall on the first element, which means that stress is
assigned by default on the first element. Here too, it is worth pointing out that the intensity and pitch values are slightly
high at the end in Figure 15 (the same was observed in Figure 12) because of the presence of a superheavy syllable, i.e.
luum.
 1st non-geminate + 2nd geminate
For this case, one compound, e.g. fatˁiirat tuffaaħ ‘apple pie’ and and one P-construct qalam muʕallim ‘a teacher’s pen’
were included in the experiment. Spectrograms for the two types of construct are presented in Figures 17-18.
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Figure 17. Spectrogram for fatˁiirat tuffaaħ [fa.tˁii.ra.ti tuf.faa.ħin] ‘apple pie’ (compound), MSA
Figure 18. Spectrogram for qalam muʕallim [qa.la.ma mu.ʕal.li.min] ‘a teacher’s pen’ (P-construct), MSA
The three figures above show that stress tends to appear on the first element in both the compounds (see Figure 17) and
the P-construct (see Figure 18). Despite the fact that the second elements of both constructs contain a geminate, i.e.
tuf.faaħ ‘apple’ and mu.ʕal.lim ‘teacher’, the main stress falls on the first element, rather than on the second. Note,
however, that even if the main stress falls by default on the first element, that does not mean that the second element is
not stressed at all (cf. Spencer 2002). While the main stress clearly falls on the first element (i.e. fatˁiirat ‘pie’ and
qalam ‘pen’ in faitˁirat tuffaaħ ‘apple pie’ and qalam muʕallim ‘a teacher’s pen’), the second element (i.e. tuffaaħ
‘apple’ and muʕallim ‘teacher’) is not unstressed; it is assigned secondary stress.
Again, with regard to this case, it is evident that stress fails to differentiate between compounds and P-constructs in
MSA and JA.
 1st geminate + 2nd geminate
In this case, one compound, i.e. muʕallim sˁaff ‘a primary school teacher’ and one P-construct, e.g. sidʒill musˁaħħiħ ‘a
marker’s record’ were tested. Figures 20-21 represent the two types of construct.
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Figure 19. Spectrogram for muʕallim sˁaff [mu.ʕal.li.ma.sˁaf.fin] ‘a primary school teacher’ (compound), MSA
Figure 20. Spectrogram for sidʒill musˁaħħiħ [si.dʒil.li.mu.sˁaħ.ħi.ħin] ‘a marker’s record’ (P-construct), MSA
The two figures show that both pitch and intensity seem to have higher values on the first element. Therefore, the first
element seems to be more stressed, in both the compound (see Figure 19) and the P-construct (see Figure 20). Hence, in
this case too, stress offers no help in differentiating between compounds and P-constructs in MSA and JA.
6. Conclusion
Examination of spectrogram data shows that stress assignment in Arabic is variable. In particular, data analysis
demonstrates that the default position of the stress in N+N combinations in MSA and JA seems to be on the first
element. However, the presence of an assimilated geminate on the boundary between the two words has been shown to
cause a very slight fall in intensity contour, making it appear as though stress is assigned to both elements. Both
compounds and phrases show similar stress assignment in all cases. This indicates that stress plays no role in
distinguishing between various N+N combinations (i.e. compounds and P-constructs) in MSA and JA. Thus, the second
hypothesis is confirmed (an indefinite second N does not have stress), whereas the first hypothesis is partially
confirmed (a definite second N has secondary stress or perhaps double stress).
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Appendix 1: Information for participants and reading texts in MSA and JA

A) Information for participants
،‫ﺍﻟﺴﻴﺪﺍﺕ ﺍﻷﻓﺎﺿﻞ‬/‫ﺍﻟﺴﺎﺩﺓ‬
،‫ ﺳﺘﻜﻮﻥ ﺍﻟﻤﺸﺎﺭﻛﺔ ﻓﻲ ﻫﺬﻩ ﺍﻟﺪﺭﺍﺳﺔ ﺍﺧﺘﻴﺎﺭﻳﺔ‬.‫ﺃﻭﺩ ﺃﻥ ﺃﺩﻋﻮﻛﻢ ﻟﻠﻤﺸﺎﺭﻛﺔ ﻓﻲ ﺩﺭﺍﺳﺔ ﺗﺘﻤﺤﻮﺭ ﺣﻮﻝ ﻋﻠﻢ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﻑ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻠﻐﺔ ﺍﻟﻌﺮﺑﻴﺔ ﺍﻟﻔﺼﺤﻰ ﻭﺍﻟﻠﻬﺠﺔ ﺍﻷﺭﺩﻧﻴﺔ‬
‫ ﺃﻧﺘﻢ ﻏﻴﺮ ﻣﻄﺎﻟﺒﻴﻦ ﺑﺬﻛﺮ ﺃﺳﻤﺎﺋﻜﻢ ﺃﻭ ﺃﻳﻪ ﻣﻌﻠﻮﻣﺎﺕ ﺷﺨﺼﻴﺔ ﺃﺧﺮﻯ‬.‫ﻓﺒﺈﻣﻜﺎﻧﻜﻢ ﺍﻟﺘﺮﺍﺟﻊ ﺃﻭ ﺍﻟﺘﻮﻗﻒ ﻋﻦ ﺍﻟﺘﺴﺠﻴﻞ ﻓﻲ ﺃﻱ ﻭﻗﺖ ﺩﻭﻥ ﺃﻱ ﻋﻮﺍﻗﺐ ﻭﺩﻭﻥ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﺟﺔ ﻟﻠﺘﻔﺴﻴﺮ‬
‫ ﻗﺪ ﻻ‬.‫ ﺩﻗﺎﺋﻖ‬5-3 ‫ ﺳﺄﻗﻮﻡ ﺑﺘﺴﺠﻴﻞ ﺃﺻﻮﺍﺗﻜﻢ ﻟﻤﺪﺓ ﺗﺘﺮﻭﺍﺡ ﺑﻴﻦ‬.‫ ﺇﻥ ﺍﻟﺸﺨﺺ ﺍﻟﻮﺣﻴﺪ ﺍﻟﺬﻱ ﻟﺪﻳﻪ ﺻﻼﺣﻴﺔ ﺍﻻﺳﺘﻤﺎﻉ ﻟﻠﺘﺴﺠﻴﻼﺕ ﻫﻮ ﺍﻟﺒﺎﺣﺚ ﻓﻘﻂ‬.‫ﺧﺎﺻﺔ ﺑﻜﻢ‬
‫ ﻭﻟﻜﻦ ﻣﺸﺎﺭﻛﺘﻜﻢ ﻗﺪ ﺗﺴﺎﻋﺪ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺗﺤﺴﻴﻦ ﻓﻬﻤﻨﺎ ﻟﻌﻠﻢ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﻑ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻠﻐﺔ ﺍﻟﻌﺮﺑﻴﺔ ﺍﻟﻔﺼﺤﻰ‬،‫ﺗﺴﺘﻄﻴﻌﻮﻥ ﺍﻹﺳﺘﻔﺎﺩﺓ ﺑﺼﻮﺭﺓ ﻣﺒﺎﺷﺮﺓ ﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﻤﺸﺎﺭﻛﺔ ﻓﻲ ﻫﺬﻩ ﺍﻟﺪﺭﺍﺳﺔ‬
.‫ ﻣﺸﺎﺭﻛﺘﻜﻢ ﻓﻲ ﻫﺬﻩ ﺍﻟﺪﺭﺍﺳﺔ ﻣﻬﻤﺔ ﻟﻠﻐﺎﻳﺔ ﻓﻠﻜﻢ ﻣﻨﺎ ﻛﻞ ﺍﻟﺘﻘﺪﻳﺮ‬.‫ﻭﺍﻟﻠﻬﺠﺔ ﺍﻷﺭﺩﻧﻴﺔ‬
‫ ﻓﻼ ﺗﺘﺮﺩﺩﻭﺍ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﺘﻮﺍﺻﻞ ﻣﻌﻲ ﻋﺒﺮ ﺍﻟﺒﺮﻳﺪ ﺍﻻﻟﻜﺘﺮﻭﻧﻲ ﺍﻟﺨﺎﺹ‬،‫ﺇﺫﺍ ﻛﺎﻥ ﻟﺪﻳﻜﻢ ﺃﻳﺔ ﺃﺳﺌﻠﺔ ﺣﻮﻝ ﻫﺬﻩ ﺍﻟﺪﺭﺍﺳﺔ ﺃﻭ ﺇﺫﺍ ﻛﻨﺘﻢ ﺗﺮﻏﺒﻮﻥ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﺤﺼﻮﻝ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻣﻠﺨﺺ ﻟﻠﻨﺘﺎﺋﺞ‬
.tkabd@yahoo.com :‫ﺑﻲ‬
.‫ﺍﻗﺮﺃ ﺍﻟﻔﻘﺮﺍﺕ ﺍﻟﺘﺎﻟﻴﺔ ﺑﺼﻮﺕ ﻭﺍﺿﺢ ﻭﺍﺫﻛﺮ ﺟﻨﺴﻴﺘﻚ ﻓﻲ ﺑﺪﺍﻳﺔ ﺍﻟﺘﺴﺠﻴﻞ‬
IJALEL 6(6):83-100, 2017 100
B) The reading text in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)
ِّ‫ ﻭﻳﻌﻤﻞُ ﻫﻮ ﻟﻴﻞَ ﻧﻬﺎﺭٍ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺗﻄﻮﻳﺮِ ﺧِﻄِّﺔِ ﺍﻟﻤُﻌَﻠِّﻢِ ﻭﻛﺘﺎﺏِ ﺍﻟﻄَّﺎﻟﺐِّ ﺍﻟﺘﻌﻠﻴﻤﻲ‬.‫ﻓﻲ ﻣَﺪﺭﺳﺘِﻨﺎ ﻳﺸﺮﺏُ ﻣُﻌﻠِّﻢُ ﺍﻟﺮِّﻳﺎﺿﻴﺎﺕِ ﺍﻟﺒﻌﻴﺪُ ﺍﻟﻨَّﻈﺮ ﺍﻟﻘﻬﻮﺓَ ﻛﻞَّ ﺻﺒﺎﺡٍ ﻓﻲ ﻣﻘﺼﻒ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔ‬
،‫ ﺇﺿﺎﻓﺔ ﺇﻟﻰ ﺫﻟﻚ‬.‫ ﺗﺒﺤﺚُ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔُ ﺍﻵﻥَ ﻋﻦ ﺳﺠﻞِّ ﻣﺼﺤِّﺢ ﻛﺎﻥ ﻗﺪ ﻓُﻘﺪ ﺍﻷﺳﺒﻮﻉَ ﺍﻟﻤﺎﺿﻲ‬.ِ‫ﻗﺎﺑﻠﺖ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔُ ﺑﻨﺎﺀً ﻋﻠﻰ ﻗﺮﺍﺭِ ﻭﺯﻳﺮِ ﺍﻟﺘَّﺮﺑﻴﺔِ ﻭﺍﻟﺘَّﻌﻠﻴﻢِ ﻭﺭﺋﻴﺲِ ﺍﻟﻮﺯﺭﺍﺀ‬
.ِ‫ ﺗُﺪَﺭِّﺱُ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔُ ﺟَﺪﻳﺪ ﺍﻟﻜُﺘﺐِ ﻓﻲ ﺟﻤﻴﻊ ﺍﻟﻤﺮﺍﺣﻞِ ﺍﻟﺘَّﻌﻠﻴﻤﻴِّﺔ‬.‫ﻣُﻌﻠِّﻢَ ﺻَﻒٍّ ﻟﻴﻌﻤﻞ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔ‬
‫ﻋﺪﻡ‬ ‫ﻣﻦ‬ ِ‫ﺍﻟﻜُﺮَّﺍﺳﺔ‬ ُ‫ﻣﺪﻗّﻖ‬ ‫ﻳﺘﺄﻛَّﺪ‬ ،‫ﺍﻻﻣﺘﺤﺎﻥ‬ ‫ﺑﺪﺍﻳﺔ‬ ‫ﻗﺒﻞ‬ .ِ‫ﺍﻟﻌﺎﻣَّﺔ‬ ِ‫ﺍﻟﺜَّﺎﻧﻮﻳﺔ‬ ِ‫ﺍﻣﺘﺤﺎﻥ‬ ‫ﻓﻲ‬ َ‫ﺍﻟﻨَّﺠﺎﺡ‬ ‫ﻳﺴﺘﻄﻴﻌﻮﺍ‬ ‫ﺣﺘَّﻰ‬
‫ ﻭﺻﻔﺖ ﺍﻟﻄَّﺎﻟﺒﺎﺕُ ﺍﻣﺘﺤﺎﻥَ ﺍﻟﻜﻴﻤﻴﺎﺀِ ﻟﻤﻌﻠِّﻢ ﺍﻟﻔﻴﺰﻳﺎﺀ‬.‫ ﻭﻳُﻨﺼَﺢ ﺍﻟﻄُّﻼﺏُ ﺑﺸﺮﺏِ ﻛﺄﺱِ ﻋﺼﻴﺮٍ ﻭﺗﻨﺎﻭﻝِ ﻓﻄﻴﺮﺓِ ﺗﻔَّﺎﺡٍ ﻗﺒﻞ ﺍﻹﻣﺘﺤﺎﻥ‬.‫ﺇﺣﻀﺎﺭ ﺍﻟﻄُّﻼﺏ ﻷﻳَّﺔ ﻣﻮﺍﺩٍّ ﺇﺿﺎﻓﻴَّﺔ‬
َ‫ ﻭﺟﺪ ﻣﺪﻳﺮُ ﺍﻟﻘﺎﻋﺔِ ﻛﺘﺎﺏ‬،ِ‫ ﺑﻌﺪ ﺍﻧﺘﻬﺎﺀِ ﺍﻻﻣﺘﺤﺎﻥ‬.‫ﻭﺍﻟﺬﻱ ﻳﻌﻤﻞ ﻛﻤُﻨﺴِّﻖِ ﻋﻠﻮﻡ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔ ﺑﺄﻧَّﻪ ﺣﻠﻮٌ ﻣﺮٌّ ﺑﺴﺒﺐِ ﺳﻬﻮﻟﺔِ ﺍﻷﺳﺌﻠﺔِ ﻣﻦ ﺟﺎﻧﺐٍ ﻭﻗﻠَّﺔِ ﺍﻟﻮﻗﺖِ ﻣﻦ ﺟﺎﻧﺐٍ ﺁﺧﺮ‬
.‫ﻓﺘﺎﺓٍ ﻭﻗُﺒَّﻌﺔَ ﻃَّﺎﻟﺐٍ ﻭﻗﻠﻢَ ﻣُﻌَﻠِّﻢٍ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺍﻷﺭﺽِ ﻓﻐﻀِﺐَ ﻭﻃﻠﺐَ ﻣﻦ ﻋﺎﻣﻞِ ﺍﻟﻨَّﻈﺎﻓﺔِ ﺇﺯﺍﻟﺘَﻬُﻢ ﻭﺇﻋﺎﺩَﺗَﻬﻢ ﺇﻟﻰ ﺳﻴّﺎﺭﺓِ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﻳﺮ‬
C) The reading text in Jordanian Arabic (JA)
‫ ﻭﺑﻌﻤﻞ ﻫﻮ ﻟﻴﻞ ﻧﻬﺎﺭ ﻋﺸﺎﻥ ﻳﻄﻮّﺭ ﺧﻄّﺔ ﺍﻟﻤﻌﻠّﻢ ﻭﻛﺘﺐ‬.‫ﻓﻲ ﻣﺪﺭﺳﺘﻨﺎ ﺑﺸﺮﺏ ﻣﻌﻠّﻢ ﺍﻟﺮّﻳﺎﺿﻴﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﻠّﻲ ﻧﻈﺮﻩ ﺑﻌﻴﺪ ﺍﻟﻘﻬﻮﺓَ ﻛﻞَّ ﻳﻮﻡ ﺍﻟﺼّﺒﺢ ﻓﻲ ﻣﻘﺼﻒ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔ‬
‫ ﻭﻛﻤﺎﻥ ﻗﺎﺑﻠﺖ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔ‬.‫ ﺑﺘﺪﻭّﺭ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔ ﻫﺴّﻪ ﻋﻦ ﺳﺠﻞّ ﻣﺼﺤّﺢ ﺿﺎﻉ ﺍﻷﺳﺒﻮﻉ ﺍﻟﻤﺎﺿﻲ‬.‫ﺍﻟﻄﻼّﺏ ﺣﺴﺐ ﻗﺮﺍﺭ ﻭﺯﻳﺮ ﺍﻟﺘَّﺮﺑﻴﺔ ﻭﺍﻟﺘَّﻌﻠﻴﻢ ﻭﺭﺋﻴﺲ ﺍﻟﻮﺯﺭﺍ‬
.‫ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔ ﺗﺒﻌﺘﻨﺎ ﺑﺘﺪﺭّﺱ ﺍﻟﻜﺘﺐ ﺍﻟﺠﺪﻳﺪﺓ ﻓﻲ ﻛﻞ ﺍﻟﺼّﻔﻮﻑ‬.‫ﻣﻌﻠّﻢ ﺻﻒّ ﻋﺸﺎﻥ ﻳﺸﺘﻐﻞ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔ‬
‫ ﻻﺯﻡ ﺍﻟﻄُّﻼﺏ‬.‫ ﻣﺪﻗّﻖ ﺍﻟﻜﺮّﺍﺳﺔ ﺑﻴﺘﺄﻛﺪ ﺍﻧّﻮ ﻣﺎ ﺣﺪ ﺟﺎﺏ ﺃﻱ ﻛﺘﺐ ﺇﺿﺎﻓﻴﺔ‬،‫ ﻗﺒﻞ ﻣﺎ ﻳﺒﻠّﺶ ﺍﻻﻣﺘﺤﺎﻥ‬.‫ ﺑﺪﺭﺱ ﺍﻟﻄّﻼﺏ ﻟﻴﻞ ﻧﻬﺎﺭ ﻋﺸﺎﻥ ﻳﻨﺠﺤﻮﺍ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﺘَّﻮﺟﻴﻬﻲ‬،‫ﻫﺴﻪ‬
‫ ﺣﻜﺖ ﺍﻟﺒﻨﺎﺕ ﻟﻤﻌﻠّﻢ ﺍﻟﻔﻴﺰﻳﺎﺀ ﺍﻟﻠّﻲ ﺑﺸﺘﻐﻞ ﻣﻨﺴّﻖ ﻋﻠﻮﻡ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﺭﺳﺔ ﺍﻧّﻮ ﺍﻣﺘﺤﺎﻥ ﺍﻟﻜﻴﻤﻴﺎ ﻛﺎﻥ ﺣﻠﻮ ﻣﺮّ ﻋﺸﺎﻥ‬.‫ﻳﺸﺮﺑﻮﺍ ﻛﺎﺳﺔ ﻋﺼﻴﺮ ﻭﻳﻮﻛﻠﻮﺍ ﻛﻴﻜﺔ ﺗﻔَّﺎﺡ ﻗﺒﻞ ﺍﻹﻣﺘﺤﺎﻥ‬
‫ ﻟﻘﻰ ﻣﺪﻳﺮ ﺍﻟﻘﺎﻋﺔ ﻛﺘﺎﺏ ﺑﻨﺖ ﻭﻃﺎﻗﻴّﺔ ﻭﻟﺪ ﻭﻗﻠﻢ ﻣﻌﻠّﻢ ﻣﺮﻣﻴﺎﺕ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺍﻷﺭﺽِ ﻓﻌﺼّﺐ ﻭﻃﻠﺐ ﻣﻦ‬،ِ‫ ﺑﻌﺪ ﻣﺎ ﺧﻠﺺ ﺍﻻﻣﺘﺤﺎﻥ‬.‫ﺍﻷﺳﺌﻠﺔ ﻛﺎﻧﺖ ﺳﻬﻠﺔ ﺑﺲ ﺍﻟﻮﻗﺖ ﻛﺎﻥ ﻗﻠﻴﻞ‬
.‫ﻋﺎﻣﻞ ﺍﻟﻨّﻈﺎﻓﺔ ﻳﻘﻴﻤﻬﻢ ﻭﻳﺮﺟّﻌﻬﻢ ﻟﺴﻴّﺎﺭﺓ ﺍﻟﻤﺪﻳﺮ‬
D) Information for participants and reading text translated into English
1) Information for participants
Dear participants,
You are invited to participate in a study about morphological processes in MSA and JA. Participation is entirely
voluntary; you may withdraw your consent or discontinue participation at any time without any consequences or any
explanation. This study will not record your names or other identifying information; participation is therefore
anonymous. Only I will listen to the recordings. Participation will take up approximately 3 to 5 minutes of your time.
You may not benefit directly from taking part in this study, but your participation may help to improve our
understanding of how some morphological processes operate in MSA and JA. Your participation is highly appreciated
and is required for completion of this study.
If you have any questions about this study or you would like to have a summary of the results, please feel free
to contact me at tkabd@yahoo.com.
Please read the following paragraphs in a clear voice and mention your nationality at the beginning of the
recording.
2) The reading text
At our school, the far-sighted maths teacher drinks coffee every morning in the school’s canteen. He is working day and
night to develop the teacher’s plan and the student’s educational book in accordance with the regulations issued by the
Minister of Education and the Prime Minister. At present, the school is looking for a marker's record which was lost last
week. Also, the school has already interviewed a primary school teacher to work at the school. The school only teaches
the new (of the) books at all stages.
At this time of year, students study twenty-four seven (day and night) in order to pass the secondary school
examination. Before the exam starts, the notes inspector makes sure that the students have not brought any extra
material with them. The students are advised to drink a glass of juice and to have an apple pie before the exam. Female
students described the chemistry exam to the physics teacher, who works as a science coordinator of the school, as
bittersweet due to the ease of the questions on the one hand, and the lack of time on the other. Following the exam, the
head invigilator found a girl’s book, a boy’s cap and a teacher’s pen on the floor so he was angry. Consequently, he
asked the cleaner to remove them and return them back to the head invigilator’s car.
Essential of Cultural (literature, Art, Music, customs …)

Negotiation as a Resources of Smart and soft Power in
Age of Globalization
Mohammad Khosravishakib
Department of Persian Language and Literature, Human Science Faculty, Lorestan University, I. R. Iran
E-mail: M.khosravishakib@gmail.com

Published: 01-11-2017 doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.6p.101 URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.6p.101
Abstract
One imperative form of public negotiation and soft authority is cultural negotiation so that contains of concepts, facts,
art and additional facets of culture between people in way to shared understanding. The determination of cultural
negotiation is for external country to cultivate a considerate of the population's principles and organizations in
determination to shape expansive maintenance for financial and administrative aims. Cultural negotiation could reveal
the depth of a public; with the intention of in other opportunity generates encouragement and effects. It can suppose that
cultural negotiation flask and does a significant character in accomplishing general security purposes. This cultural
diplomacy conventionally has helped to accomplish affairs between positions and other gatherings by instructing and
modeling external strategy, so as to eventually organizes and acquires detailed condition and benefits in the global
ground. This paper will study the process of cultural cooperation witch has been developed to increase lenient control
and take how cultural negotiation has improved to the contemporary world and also encourage greater association
within the peoples of other countries.
Key words: Culture, Literature, Negotiation, Soft power
1. Introduction
Nye (2004) believed that "Cultural assistance just now has predictable as reformed contemplation around the world on
or after governments, cultural overall specialist, and investigators as proceeds to understand, inform, take in, and
incentive nationwide and common addressees". Cultural negotiation is observed by way of creating universal
connections and communications, recognizing systems and authority purviews in beliefs and surpassing general and
national restrictions. Based on Cummings (2003) research, smart and soft power mixes general art, music, and literature
plus knowledge, conviction, ethics and several other competences and customs shaped by a civilization from side to
side of existence technologies. Baudrillard declared that standing of community negotiation has been developing
meanwhile smart and soft power has budding out of art, music, and literature, out of national standards and strategies,
and out of external procedure. (Baudrillard; 1988, 52) It appeals the important character of national negotiation as
prerequisite of public negotiation. Richard (2003) in the book The First Resort of Kings perceived that cultural
negotiation is a total operative training in view of its products and impressions on global connections among nation
state. (Richard; 2005. 34) The analysis demonstrates that cultural negotiation assistances generate an underpinning of
conviction with additional publics, which strategy creators can shape on to extent administrative, financial, and
struggling arrangements. Havanjung supposed (2011) cultural negotiation cheers new populate to provide the
population the advantage of the hesitation on detailed strategy subjects or requirements for association, meanwhile there
is a supposition of common attention. Cultural negotiation furthermore proves nationwide standards and generates
connection through publics, so that tolerate alterations in administration. Additionally, cultural negotiation can spread
effective associates of external civilizations who cannot be touched over old delegation purposes. Belanger (1999)
supposed that it could make available a helpful program for assistance regardless of strategy transformations, generates
an unbiased policy for nation to nation connection, and helps such as a bendable, generally putative means of
transportation for method with nations where political relationships have been stressed or are preoccupied. (Belanger;
1999, 3) By way of contemporary time, a novel approach of announcement in an Internet has been shaped and
industrialized together with quickly developing facts machineries. This novel method of connection affords original
prospects for cultural strategy creators to widen their goal audience and to endorse culture level further generally with
its fresh mass media podiums. Equally, "cultural negotiation by means of facts technologies will expansion and
reinforce smart and soft control if national strategy creators make practice of original announcement skills successfully
and deliberately". (Beardworth; 2010. 51). To completely comprehend the importance of cultural negotiation, it is
valuable to principal describe the vital concepts; Art, music, and literature as culture, Culture in Political affairs and
IJALEL 6(6):101-105, 2017 102
Culture in Community Peacekeeping. Culture could be defying as multifaceted entire containing awareness, acceptance,
art, standards, commandments, customs and conventions and every other competences and traditions shaped by people
who is a associate of the world anywhere a crowd of persons is connected to every other over tenacious associations, or
a enormous communal alliance distribution the infrequent ecological or practical region, issue to the identical
administrative power and prevailing cultural opportunities; (Joseph; 2004, 59)Culture in Legislation is to locate culture
in national external strategy such as the manifestation of a general concern, so that donates to the reification of the
domestic personality, conviction organizations, planned philosophies and national character. It causes encouraging and
previously prevailing philosophy in a foreign country also contains a further vigorous role in defensive and mounting
general culture; (Fotopoulos; 2001. 21) Culture in Community Negotiation is a universal performer's effort to endorse
the nationwide culture, to stretch influences on communal thoughts of equivalents and to shape honesty and reliability
over cultural interactions. Brown (2006) says, several methods accessible for working public negotiation for instance
media negotiation, computer-generated negotiation, assistance negotiation, cultural negotiation, sport negotiation and so
on. Therefore, culture in general negotiation suggests that national Negotiation can be accomplished as funds of public
negotiation over the multinational happenings, the art showing, and done by numerous global carnivals.
1.1 Smart & Soft Power
There is a tight connection between culture and public negotiation with the intention that it start in the insight of ability.
Affording to Joseph Nye, who introduced the perception of smart authority, describes authority and power as “the
capability to attain one's determinations or aims” and “the capability to acquire others to do what they else would not
fix. He (2001) differentiates amid lenient power and tough power grounded on the natural surroundings of performance
and palpability of possessions. Permitting to this theory, authority reposes beside the variety includes; Knowledge,
Pressure, Encouragement, Program Background, Magnetism, Supportive Ability. Facility Authority, the aptitude to
alteration what others do, can respite on pressure of incentive. Joseph Nye's (2001) term –soft power- label the
capability to form what others need, can repose on the charm of one's culture and thought or the skill to operate the
program of governmental adoptions in a method that creates performers nosedive to direct particular inclinations since
they appear to be also impractical. Mcguigan announces (1996) places compacted power funds on the understanding
power; although soft power possessions repose on the cooperative power. (Mcguigan; 1996. 12) Hard power is a
nation's financial and armed capability to acquisition and pressure, and soft power is the facility to fascinate over and
done with national and philosophical petition. He (1996) also highlights the connotation of community negotiation
meanwhile lenient power creates out of nation, out of national standards and strategies, and out of external process.
Supplementary he (1996) instructions that superior function for data and official power is like a conversion to a
different period and also he put emphasis on undersized period reactions can be perfected over and done with expending
transmission competences and slender molding on the Internet, therefore upsurge economical in lenient power and
community negotiation is essential to increase a nation's contour. He correspondingly highlights “the most operative
announcement frequently happens not by unfriendly transmission but in uncompromising acquaintances.” (Mcguigan;
1996. 54) It is precarious to be conscious of in what way lenient authority can be castoff by way of community
negotiation. Additional, he (1996) focus on clever authority as the superior constancy of solid power and lenient power
in external policy.
1.2 Cultural Negotiation and its history
Cultural negotiation has turned out to be essential of community negotiation by way of globalization in the common
sense of bonding in financial and national life through the biosphere has been mounting for times. Through an increase
of lenient influence, the word "Cultural Negotiation" has been confronted description misperception with comparable
arguments such as global cultural discussion, cultural community associations, and national collaboration. By way of
observing at standard trainings, cultural negotiation is mentioned to such as connotation from tangible application
arrangement. Milton Cummings (2003), believes that cultural negotiation has been determined in place of “the
discussion of thoughts, data, art, literature, music and additional facets of principles between countries and their
populates with the purpose of nurture related considerations.” (cumming; 2003, 34) This one describes cultural
negotiation is in traditional happenings that a nation's impression of themself is finest characterized so as to carry on to
stimulate publics the sphere done notwithstanding governmental dissimilarities and annoyed restrictions. Baudrillard
expresses that cultural negotiation is to conversation thoughts, facts, arts, painting, literature, sculpture, music and dance
and also culture to encourage reciprocated considerations between residents or dissimilar republics. (Baudrillard; 1988,
54) She emphasizes (1988) that cultural negotiation ought to be measured equally multifaceted viewpoints to escape
one sided culture strategy for instance compulsion of employing philosophy and strategy to the realm as complete or
public associations merely to stimulate its languages development. Brown (2006) likewise others delineate cultural
negotiation such as self-absorption approaches of external procedure preferred by means of a country's cultural benefits.
He accentuates it requirements to be measured from side to side stereoscope revelations for the reason that
miscellaneous performers like administration figures, non-organizational establishments and characters are capable to
comportment cultural negotiation. Cultural negotiation historically has concentrating on fortification and marketing of
the particular general culture in the development of intercontinental altercation. "On the other hand lower than the
specified pronunciation of globalization, the attention cannot be established exclusively on the concentration of states
some extra". (Brown; 2006, 71) In opposition, universal traditional altercation cannot be disconnected from national
benefits either one. Consequently, the inspiration of community, secluded and provincial performers in the
understanding of actual cultural altercation sequencers is uncertainty increasing. Likewise the prerequisite for an
improved appointment in persons-to-persons negotiation end to end with a cavernous appreciative of global cultural
IJALEL 6(6):101-105, 2017 103
altercation has always been additional noteworthy. Brown pronounces (2006) the connection concerning culture and
government has changed later 1940s. He also says that France, Britain and Germany engrossed on cultural growth
through cultural relationships sequencer previously 1914s. Quickly extra nations monitored the tendency, Great Britain
recognized the British Assembly for Relationships with additional nations in 1934 and the United States shaped the
Agency on Assistance with the additional American Nations in 1938 and set of connections the Separation of Cultural
Associations in the Department State satisfactory to encounter the necessity for general understanding. (Brown; 2006,
64) For the duration of the Cold War, the United States administration maintained altercation platforms for scholars and
performers in the 1936 Agreement for the Advancement of American Cultural Associations, the perfect for the several
altercation packages fundamental community negotiation. It supported the extent of American information, abilities,
and thoughts in the combat of thoughts by Soviet Union. Particularly the Data and Instructive Altercation Act of 1948
was fruitful cultural negotiation strategy to encourage healthier appreciative of the United States. On the other hand,
afterward of Cold War, cultural negotiation stopped to be a main concern up until 1960s. In 1975s, external program
has altered significantly as viewpoint has been measured as well-organized implements of negotiation. Cummings
(2003) portrays the traditional negotiation by telling it is fundamentally complicated consolidation a republic's cultural
inspiration by backing artist's journey or by encouraging the learning of the nation's language and art, music, and
literature in universities in a foreign country. (Cummings; 2003, 22) At what time the Age of Information has attained
researchers lay emphasis on the prominence of the intercontinental cultural agenda for the reason that cultural harvests
are progressively removed into the trans-national announcement and financial currents instigated by globalization. Finn
also (2003) stressed that "to be traditionally authoritative or even culturally noteworthy in today's world, a nation need
to work out to regulator in excess of these currents” (Finn; 2003, 19) which specifies cultural negotiation can be
demarcated as the consciousness rising of culture by external strategy.
2. Discussion
2.1 Constructions of Cultural Negotiation
Cultural strategy architects must consider procedure bases cross management containing cultural conventions such as
broadcasting procedure, training, official document and suppression regulation, overtax. Correspondingly they had
better expedite Investigation and Expansion Centers to explore and shape up natural and original information and to
successfully conjoin with native folks. Cultural procedure creators also must intemperance prejudiced feelings when
distributing extraordinary art and general art. Art, literature, painting, dancing and culture of all diverse categories and
forms can be prevalent or detested. Cultural strategy should not be constructed on prejudices around which art formulas
are well intentioned of public maintenance, but on cultural standards that can noticeable themselves in numerous
conducts, through several methods and categories. The cultural replacement projects must not be exaggerating to
precise districts and nations, and it would promote national transaction sequencers with national atmospheres of each
district and republic. Gienow and Dofried (2010) believe that cultural procedure creators must moderate needless
administrative methods that disturb culture, art, music, and literature. (Gienow, Donfried; 2010, 65) Numerous
performers and cultural administrations are reserved by contact to suitable organization, like settings and functioning
planetary, in addition to absence of principal. The aptitude to fix in place strategy surroundings that permit them to
accomplish, contemporary and create with boundless principal is further significant and operative in guaranteeing their
accomplishment than straight subventions. In conclusion, national strategy manufacturers should contemplate
inaugurating corporation with backing linkages that have chief purposes of emerging national negotiation and
consolidation intercontinental stalemates. Cultural strategy requests to progress the manufactured organization method
for mollification of the whole thing global cultural substitution, increase commercial sustenance, spread countless
cultural subjects and impetus forward with miscellaneous packages for mutual cultural substitution out of one-sided
cultural transaction.
2.2 Cultural Individuality & Globalization
Cultural strategy creators can make an essential reclassification of the cultural uniqueness, not to national authority but
the individuality of cultures to manage with massive influences on culture instigated by globalization. Globalization
could distinguish paraphernalia on rudimentary standards and principles. (Plavsak; 2002, 31) Such as an outcome of the
financial and cultural sound effects of globalization, composed with the impression of mass media such as cable TV, the
Internet and portable phones, contemporary culture is confronted with amalgamation individualities. General public
mature an intelligence of be appropriateness to a international art, music, and literature, by accepting observes,
panaches, and data that are fragment of the international culture, which then generates a worldwide individuality. On
the other hand, societies carry on to grasp their native individuality additionally, constructed on their societal to their
indigenous beliefs. Therefore, distinct individuality is predisposed by equally a native and worldwide individuality. As
a result, for national strategy it is vital that creators preserve a national individuality by possession national standards,
social crowd, and general individuality persistent. Cultural individuality can be measured a lenient and smart power
benefit for the reason that it developments its standards, philosophy and standpoints into World Wide Web.
Developing technologies will create it calmer to mixture cultural accomplishments with old-fashioned political effort by
increasing the prospects for associates among populate. Latour believes (2005) that consequently cultural strategy
creators must contemplate social reserve and functioning measures to mature national individuality finished industrial
enhancement and invention. (Latour; 2005, 23) The world remains opening to distinguish the prominence of national
negotiation equally the resources of lenient influence, and it stands significant to contrivance and accomplish
miscellaneous national interactions and unindustrialized operative announcement over and done with facts machineries
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meanwhile the Internet has been quickly developing and it currently touches our everyday exists in particular manner
and communal broadcasting facilities and transporting countries and persons faster self-possessed. It is tough to
separate national strategy after the accessible atmosphere; henceforward strategy creators essential to smear additional
exertion in emerging operative approaches of endorsing national negotiation done evidence machineries laterally with
calculated national strategy structures.
2.3 Cultural Negotiation in World Wide Web
Information technology (IT) is modifying negotiation in numerous of the equal methods that they are transmuting
cultures. In harmony with the evolution, national strategy creators can afford innovative exercise and specialized
expansion occasions for community relationships generals taking accountability for community negotiation and social
international relations during their professions, by specific consideration to study, polling, and the practice of original
mass media. Bound declares (2007) to have information technology group's confidential consulates to successfully
answer and gain worldwide friendliness, administrative improvement and commercial occasions specified that ended a
billion of the world's inhabitants have contact to the Internet. (Bound; 2007, 10) The ability of governments at
maintenances can be associated in applied crowds through relations through the world and relate developing knowledge
entirely. The practice of information technology is to assistance comportment intercontinental associations. To progress
connection with markers or ground processes, it is compulsory to employment an extremely cultured, combined and
devoted creation supported broadcastings organization. Furthermore, relations to additional administration subdivisions
and to community systems are essential. Such as, together constituent part and consulate websites have been
industrialized in an appropriate method. An extensive diversity of evidence would be accessible, such as lightweight
advisories, existing investigation and high-profile subjects, in addition to contacts to the continuously increasing and
previously powerful substructure of administration locations and community places.
3. Conclusion
Cultural negotiation suggests give-and-take cultural interactions concerning populates to encourage general beliefs and
assistances. It's supposed that national negotiation would encourage individuals done the world notwithstanding
governmental dissimilarities and national limitations by means of lenient and smart authority would be improved over
and done with cultural negotiation. Additional, it is predictable to improve appointment in societies to societies
negotiation established on mutual considerations of national welfares. Through the appearance of the information
period, information technology is having an extensive impression on in what way national strategy creators would
interrelate through the community. Likewise it affects general individuality for the reason that a fresh beliefs has been
shaped in World Wide Web and together the native and singular individualities are pretentious. Consequently, national
individuality of a country has been mixed in line for swift connecting information technology. Today's information
technology alongside with social strategy creators must have tactical structures for beliefs conversations; mature an
essential national individuality in harmony through globalization and determination national negotiation into World
Wide Web by means of having extremely refined information technology crews. Definitely, national negotiation in the
globalization period would be stimulated to efficiently get used to innovative machineries. Eventually, the aim of
cultural negotiation is to inspiration an external addressees and customs that inspiration, which is constructed up in
excess of the extended period, as a category of respectable will replacement to success provision for strategies. It
pursues to connect the rudiments of nation to persuade outsiders to:
 Consents the administration to generate a grounds of trust and a mutual appreciative that is unbiased and
constructed on people-to-people interaction.
 Preclude, accomplish and alleviate skirmish through the marked population.
 Have an optimistic interpretation of the nation's persons, beliefs and programs.
 Assistance in fluctuating the strategies or party-political surroundings of the marked population.
 Persuade superior collaboration amid the populations from two countries.
 Allegations going from general sanctuary to accumulative tourism and profitable openings.
 Facility to stretch minority, youth and other addressees freestanding of the customary delegation course.
Cultural negotiation correspondingly cans assistance a population superior comprehend the external country it is
promised with and substitute shared considerate and this traditional negotiation could be a technique of shepherding
global relationships deprived of supposing no matter which in reappearance in the approach that customary negotiation
characteristically anticipates. Traditional discussion databases drudgery by way of an average to communicate an
auspicious impress of the extraneous nation with the intention of achievement foreigners' sympathetic and endorsement
in their national observes and accept their communal customs between further nations. Usually, national negotiation is
additional absorbed on the extended period and fewer on precise strategy materials. The determined is to shape up
inspiration done the stretched period for at what time it is desirable by fetching individuals in a straight line. In
summary, cultural negotiation plants the foundations of standards, thoughts, administrative influences, mystical
awareness and an overall interpretation opinion of the realm that might or possibly will not embellishment in an
external population. Cultural negotiation, correspondingly recognized as communal negotiation consequently that
includes the comprehensive environment of old-fashioned community or national negotiation and mentions to the
cultural applies over and done with arithmetical and networked tools, Internet, portable procedures, and social
IJALEL 6(6):101-105, 2017 105
broadcasting stations. The present scuffle in contradiction of multinational extremism is a tussle to gain emotions and
attentions, and the existing overreliance on firm authority on your own is not the pathway to accomplishment.
Community negotiation is a significant implement in the resource of smart power, but profound community negotiation
necessitates a considerate of the characters of reliability, self-deprecation, and domestic civilization in creating soft and
smart power.
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Rethinking and Reconfiguring English Language Education:

Averting Linguistic Genocide in Cameroon
Carlous Muluh Nkwetisama
University of Bamenda, Cameroon
E-mail: muluhcarlous@yahoo.com

Abstract
The over 285 indigenous languages of Cameroon may be crushed by the English language. To ensure a sustainable
linguistic ecological balance whose peace is undoubtedly threatened by the global imperialistic terrors of English
colonialism, an overhaul of ELT practitioners is needed. The English language is taught and learned in Cameroon
against a conflictual linguistic platform of French (the other official language of questionable equal status as English),
Pidgin English and over 285 indigenous languages. Of these local languages, just about 40 are currently being used
(taught) in education at the different levels of education in the country. The aim of this paper was to examine the
English language politics, practices and teaching. It thereafter evaluated English language teachers’ perception of the so
called English Language Teaching Tenets. It also aimed at assessing the functional load of English and it ascertained
the extent to which it was threatening the development of local languages as well as effective access to education in
Cameroon.
Keywords: Cameroon, ELT fallacies, Linguistic imperialism, linguistic genocide, linguistic human rights
1. Introduction
The English language is doubtlessly a solid actively promoted strategic weapon of postcolonial domination. Cameroon
like most third-world countries inherited English from European colonizers and after decolonization, the English
language remained one of the ace instruments that the colonizers use to maintain their hegemony. Tollefson (2000:9)
maintains that in the United States of America and in Australia, the “…preeminent position of English has contributed
to the death of indigenous languages,” thereby depriving the indigenes of the communicative, the emblematic or
identity and security rights and privileges that these local languages endow on their owners. English language and
English Language pedagogy support, spread and promote the political, military, economic and cultural pressures that
the language carries as its functional load in conquering and occupying our minds since colonialism did not end with the
colonial occupation. There is need now to reflect on, question or even reject some of the outdated normative practices
that were adopted from the colonialist assimilationist educational policies. Language policy is the wide range of
governmental and non-governmental measures premeditated to influence language acquisition and language use.
English has projected itself tall in medicine, computer and software development, science, research, mass media and
mass media entertainment, technology, transnational businesses, shipping, aviation, diplomacy, international
organizations, youth culture, sports and educational systems. To exemplify the overbearing and pervasively invading
force of English at all levels of only the Cameroon educational system, we realize that virtually all the State-owned
universities in Cameroon have each a Department of English or units in charge of the teaching of English. Apart from
being the medium of instruction in the English-speaking sub-system of education in Cameroon, English Language is a
compulsory subject in all educational institutions at all levels of the educational system. Entrance into state universities
is conditioned by a pass in English at the ordinary level. This is irrespective of the fact that all the Advanced Level
Subjects that warrant the pass into university are written in English. In other words, a candidate writes and passes
History, Geography, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Economics, Mathematics etc in English; but is obliged to have
passed the English Language paper before s/he could be admitted into any university. In testimony of this distressing
hegemonic role of the English language is this 2016 press release signed by the Vice Chancellor of the University of
Bamenda (a state-owned university) to open undergraduate admissions into the faculties for the 2016/2017 academic
year. Under the rubric of the basic requirements for admission on page 2 of the press release, one reads among others
that
“…Candidates seeking admission into any of these faculties must have: GCE O/L [General Certificate
of Education, Ordinary Level] in at least five (05) subjects including English Language (excluding
religious studies), or Probatoire with a pass in English Language or its Equivalent
IJALEL 6(6):106-114, 2017 107
Basing on the above-mentioned requirements for entry into a state owned university in Cameroon, it is horrible to
ascertain that over 70% of Cameroonian youths are deprived of access to higher education; given that the percentage
pass in the English Language Paper in the General Certificate of Education examination over the past years has not
gone beyond 30%.
It is evidently on the basis of the this embarrassing situation that the same Vice Chancellor of the University of
Bamenda sought Higher Education Ministerial authorization and organized an English Language Proficiency test for
candidates seeking admission into the University of Bamenda but who did not pass in English at the Ordinary Level of
the GCE. This was however, only for the 2016/2017 academic year. This implies that the English Language
requirement policy for admission into state-owned universities in Cameroon remains intact.
In the same way, English-speaking Cameroonians who have studied in English all through their lives are required to
pass the English language proficiency Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) organized by the English before
these Cameroonians could be eligible for the Chevening scholarships which are funded by the Commonwealth Office
and its partner organizations which are mostly university institutions. Meanwhile, Escobar (2004) holds that the
consideration of education as a way of transferring knowledge is synonymous to the perpetuation of global hierarchies
and the justification of the need for First World countries to continue intervening in the less advanced nations of the
world. In the same vein, Phillipson (1992) posits that the configuration of English Language Teaching with middle-of-
the-road goals of development transforms ELT into an industry that sends experts from the Centre to teach in the
Periphery with little attention to social, political and economic contextualisation and in spite of all these criticisms, Toh
(2003) says that ELT goals of carrying across knowledge from TESOL Centres to less developed Peripheries keep
persisting.
However, according to Gary (2015) the necessity for enduring and lifelong learning, for lithe and flexible school leavers
with good quality communication and information and communication skills invariably require competency in English.
This is particularly with regard to dealing with international markets and international transactions
Biloa and Echu (2008) hold that
Though English and French are imported languages originally associated with colonial rule, in the
period since independence they have become so much part of Cameroonian cultural heritage that
many Cameroonians now identify themselves strongly in relation to these languages as being first
and foremost Anglophone or Francophone and only secondly as belonging to a single
Cameroonian nation. This is perhaps most strongly so among the Anglophones who perceive the
dominance of French as a threat to English and to equal Anglophone participation in Cameroonian
life and who have developed a heightened loyalty to English as a direct consequence of this.
This citation from Edmond Biloa and George Echu betrays the brainwashing that Cameroonians have so far undergone:
having to believe that languages parachuted upon them have automatically become part of their cultural heritage.
Instead, these languages came to tear down their cultural heritage.
This paper seeks to find out the extent to which English language practioners are aware that they are programmed by
English in the orchestration of indigenous languages’ genocide in Cameroon. It thereafter attempts to seek how justice
could be done for local languages to live alongside the English practices through multilingual education approaches.
This is in a bid to balance the linguistic ecological discrepancy in the global biodiversity. This is because language is
part of culture and culture is part of man, and man is part of the ecosystem which is part of the planet earth. So
advertently or inadvertently planning to kill languages through exclusive linguistic practices is tantamount to destroying
the planet.
2. The 2016/2017 Anglophone Uprising and the English Language terrorism
The recent November 2016 – January 2017 violent confrontations between the populations of the Anglophone regions
of Cameroon and the Cameroonian forces of law and order were not for the preservation of the English Language
inherited from the British colonizers as some English-speaking politicians and Francophone Cameroonians mistakenly
believed. It was a tussle for the preservation of some of the macro educational, social, legal, health and sanitary,
political and administrative systems, practices and values inherited from their British colonizers. The warm and positive
attitude of Anglophone Cameroonians towards the British ways may be explained from the an English Government
here.’’ Till date, (April 2017 fact that in 1879 and 1881, as quoted by Schneider, (2007: 213) from Schmied 1991a:10–
1, Todd (1982a:6) and Chumbow and Simo Bobda (1996:403), the local kings explicitly sent petitions to the Queen
requesting formal annexation, asking for ‘‘English laws in our towns’’ and ‘‘), the crises persist with the boycott of
education in private Higher Education, secondary and primary school institutions in the Anglophone regions of
Cameroon. This boycott continues in spite of frantic government efforts to cajole, persuade or threaten parents, students
and teachers to resume effective classes.
The earlier mentioned cherished values which spilled over from the British occupation of the Anglophone regions are
felt as being systematically corroded, eroded, corrupted and replaced by the systems, practices and values that the
Francophones inherited from France. This is what they termed the francophonisation of the Anglophones in Cameroon.
The announcement on December 31, 2016 and the creation of the National Commission on the Promotion of
Bilingualism and Multiculturalism on the 23rd of January 2017 by President Paul Biya, president of the Republic of
IJALEL 6(6):106-114, 2017 108
Cameroon aim among others at the fostering of national unity and integration between Anglophones and Francophones
on the one hand, and then the over 250 distinct ethnic and cultural entities on the other. In other words, the Commission
aims at enhancing the living-togetherness of Francophones and Anglophones in Cameroon. According to Nkwetisama,
(2016: 79) this living-togetherness is threatened by:
The socio-historical-political context of Cameroon as well as the fact that people from different ethnicities come
in contact for academic, economic, social, civil service or just for national integration purposes, makes it
common to hear people from different ethnic groups identifying by describing others with words like
‘bamenda’( a gullible, malleable, easily duped or slave-like person), ‘gada mayo’ (a stranger in our land or a
person to whom equal consideration should not be given ), ‘bami (bamileke)’(a tribalistic tight-fisted person
who thinks of everything in terms of money, and are associated with ‘famlaah’(witchcraft), ‘nyangi’, (a
prostitute or highly frivolous girl or woman), ‘wadjo’ ( an uncivilized Muslim or just someone from the north),
‘come-no-go’ (a person from the North West Region working in the South West Region, generally considered
as land-grabbers), ‘nkwah’ (a person from the Centre or South Region, considered as spendthrifts or sometimes
irresponsible), ‘anglo’ (generally a person from North West or South West Region, often regarded as being as
primitive with thoughts and behavior that are contrary to that of the francophone ), ‘frog’ (uncultured,
hypocritical and disrespectful rascals who want everything for them through the easiest possible way). These
conflicted interpersonal, and intergroup, appellations or articulations are linguistic retaliations and counter-
retaliations of grief and anger and sometimes, the feelings of indignation and contempt accompanying them are
so strong as to be able to raise ethnic tensions and sectarianism, and sometimes do ignite open confrontation
among youths or adults in and out of school milieus. They constitute social-behavioural symptoms of conflict
that require serious attention through peace education.
While hailing the putting in place of such a structure, this paper however does not weaken its stance on the terrorist
threats of the English Language on the vulnerable local languages. This is in the case where the Commission does not
make sustainable programmes for the systematic development and use of the Cameroon local languages.
This paper is couched within Gramsci’s critical social theory which has as one of its key tenets, "hegemony."
Hegemony is referred to the experience of meanings, ideas and values as absolute reality. For example, the overbearing
supremacy of the English language is often, taken to be an obvious matter of common sense and as such remains
unquestioned. This uncritical acceptance of the reality of English is a manifestation of the "hegemony" of English; that
is, the uncritical perception that it has achieved a supreme global status.
Fundamental aspects of the domination of English are ideologies of language and the beliefs about language that shape
fundamental views of reality. The realities are constructed through discourses that are principally fabricated to
influence the action and behaviours of others. For instance the ‘standard language ideology’ as opposed to the ‘non-
standard’ is incredibly powerful and pervasive to the extent that they are extensively accommodated as self-evident
"truths" or "common sense,'' and thus basically remote from the sphere of overt debate.
We are made to understand that at the time of colonization, the domination of the local languages of the colonizers was
not only imposed and encouraged, but that the natives were forbidden to use their mother tongues; violation of which
the students were subject to beating, demotion or humiliation. Many people focus on the quasi advantages of the
imposition of English on the local populations. They believe that adopting a foreign language will bridge tribal barriers
and thus enhance national unity and inter-national communication. Mazrui (1973: 66) for example holds that “Learning
English was a detribalizing process” and that anyone who knew English was no more a tribesman and could therefore
help in the detribalization of the African mind; thereby giving it a national dimension.
According to Kirkpatrick (2007), the Congress of Negro Writers and Artists of 1959 opted for the adoption of and
promotion of a Pan African language to be used in all the countries of the continent so as to get rid of the temptation to
take colonizers’ languages which were sources of cultural alienation and psychological amputation. Swahili was chosen
but the project did not succeed beyond countries like Kenya and Tanzania. Ngugi wa Thiongo believed that adopting
English was a final triumph of a system of domination as the dominated embark on the singing of the virtues of the
colonisers’ language.
To Achebe (2005: 171), English language is a historical fact and writers should adopt and adapt and aim “…at
fashioning out English which is at once universal and able to carry [their] personal experience” Achebe’s position is
similar to those who think that standard English should be de-formed and re-formed to suit the thoughts they want it to
convey. Whether we de-form or re-form English, it remains an alien language and more so, what becomes of the life of
local African language? If they are not vitalized and put into active use, they would die.
3. Linguistic human rights
The multidimensional invasion forces of English endangers the cultural and linguistic values of the over 285 indigenous
languages of Cameroon. To ensure a sustainable linguistic ecological balance that is undoubtedly threatened by the
global imperialistic terrors of English colonialism, an overhaul of ELT practitioners is needed. This is because the
periphery and the core are served differently by the English language. As the English language spreads, the core
benefits, whereas, periphery countries are bound to face the supplementary trouble and expenditure of operating
language education programmes, training of teachers, learning English, as well as having to buy materials and text or
coursebooks.
IJALEL 6(6):106-114, 2017 109
Skutnabb-Kangas (1995) and Pennycook (1994b) hold that language policies that favour the spread of English are
thoroughly and intimately connected with asymmetrical political, social, and economic relationships between nations
and institutions.
4. Socio-political dimensions of English language teaching
Phillipson (2012:2) defines language pedagogy as “… the scientific study language learning and language teaching”
and goes forward to hold that it “ … has been isolated from the social sciences for too long, and that ELT (sic) needs to
be situated in a macro-societal theoretical perspective”. Robert Phillipson regrets the fact that in language pedagogy, the
connections between language, military, economic, political and certainly cultural power are not often pursued since
focus is most often on what goes on in the classroom or on related organizational and methodological issues. On his
part, Crystal (2000: 83) holds that in Africa, at least for now, “…none of the 1,200 or so languages indigenous to Africa
is used as a medium of instruction in secondary schools.” This hegemonic status is inextricably connected to neo-
colonial stratifications of the society characterized by the association of success and social mobility with mastery of
English and western models of English.
For Elena Ciprianova and Michal Vanco,
English is not a neutral medium of communication; for people in the Periphery it symbolizes the divisive
line between wealth and poverty both within their home country and between their country and the
Centre. (Ciprianova and Vanco 2010:126)
ELT in Cameroon does not seem to be moving an inch from the obsolete ideologically loaded one-size-fit-all top-down
prescriptions on what, when and how to teach English. It relentlessly pursues colonial education which consists in
assimilating the subaltern local ELT practitioners, students and pupils or just the population as a whole to the Western
ways of thinking and seeing the realities of the world. During my six years as an in-service teacher trainer (inspector of
English language teaching), I, in ignorance promoted the unflinching clinging onto the prescribed ‘modern’ approaches,
methods and techniques of English language teaching. When I became a pre-service teacher trainer, I followed up my
student-teachers to the field during their practicum. While on the field, I realised the difficulty in killing old habits in
the cooperating teachers of my students.
Discussions on ELT in national, regional and divisional level workshops, seminars and conferences; and even lectures
in English Departments of Teacher Training Colleges in private and state-owned universities often centre on micro
pedagogical matters like teaching methods and techniques, use of information and communication technologies, the
“how to’s” in classroom management, discussions on findings in different psychological aspects of effective ways of
learning and teaching. Little attention is often paid on more macro dimensions of ELT like the political, social and
cultural issues which include language policies and their implications in the classroom as well as the crucial role of the
teacher in (re)creating these policies in the classroom. Though these issues may seem intangible and irrelevant than
pedagogical ones, or that they may look peripheral to the immediate duties of the English language teacher, they - the
social, cultural and political dimensions of ELT – are embedded in all the decisions that these teachers make. Kelly and
Eggington (2000) hold that language policies, cultural expectations about the roles of students and teachers as well as
their identities in terms of gender, race, ethnicity and nationality inform and constrain classroom practices. Kelly and
Eggington (2000:1) confirm that
Thus, as important to the development of English language teacher expertise as knowledge of
effective classroom practices may be is our understanding of these more macro dimensions of
pedagogy and how they shape both our roles as teachers and our students' roles as learners.
It is therefore necessary to provoke teachers’ sensibilities, rouse discussions and raise students’ awareness of these
matters. ‘Good pedagogy’ requires that teachers know why they must make the decisions they make everyday.
5. English Linguistic Imperialism in Cameroon
As stated earlier, Cameroon has about 285 indigenous languages, but these multitudes of weapons of the translation and
transmission of her rich cultural diversity are almost utterly veiled by English and French; though the focus of this paper
is English. ‘Language in development’, according to Tangyie Evani (2016: 538),
“…is in a way to look at how language is used to mobilize, motivate and energize people to make use
of available resources in the realization of a common vision of becoming masters of their own
destiny”.
Paradoxically, instead of vitalising and using our local languages, policy makers, citizens, teachers and parents seem to
have been made to believe in the imperialistic tenets of the English language and English language education. Before
delving into a presentation of these dangerous tenets, we have to examine what linguistic imperialism refers to.
Phillipson (2012:47) defines English linguistic imperialism as a state where the “…dominance of English is asserted
and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between
English and other languages.” By structural, Robert Phillipson means material properties like institutions and financial
allocations (the British Council, scholarships to study English, the Cameroon English Language and Literature
IJALEL 6(6):106-114, 2017 110
Teachers’ Association (CAMELTA), English Clubs, Commonwealth Clubs etc), while cultural refers to immaterial or
ideological properties like attitudes and pedagogical principles. This transfer of a dominant language – English – to
other people is an example of linguicism and Phillipson (2012: 47) refers to linguicism as
… ideologies, structures and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce an
unequal division of power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are
defined on the basis of language.
Since the focus of this paper is on the cultural inequalities between English language, English language education and
local languages education in Cameroon, we shall now examine the imperialistic pedagogic principles or English
Language Teaching tenets and then, the attitudes of ELT practioners towards these principles in order to ascertain the
justification for rethinking and reconfiguaration.
6. The English Language Teaching tenets
These tenets constitute part of the hegemonic processes that strive to sustain the domination of English over other
languages. Phillipson (2012:185) considered them false from the bases of research and theory. He redesignated them as
fallacies as we have indicated in the parentheses after each tenet. These tenets of English applied linguistics and
English language teaching methodologies specify that:
 English is best taught monolingually (“monolingual fallacy”)
 The ideal teacher is a native speaker ("the native-speaker fallacy")
 The earlier English is taught, the better the results ("the early-start fallacy")
 The more English is taught, the better the results ("the maximum-exposure fallacy")
 If other languages are used much, standards of English will drop ("the subtractive fallacy").
Other promoters of the hegemony of English over indigenous languages like the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank and English Language Schools maintain intrinsic, extrinsic and functional arguments.
 The intrinsic argument describes the English language as rich, providential, interesting and noble. These
arguments assert what English is and what other language are not.
 The extrinsic arguments highlight that English is solidly grounded and well-established. This implies that it has
many speakers, many trained teachers and quantitatively and qualitatively rich and available teaching and
learning materials.
 The functional arguments underscore the practical usefulness of English as a gateway to the world.
Meanwhile, the ideological function argument says English stands for modernity.
 Other arguments uphold the economic utility of English in that it enables people to efficiently operate
technology. English therefore has the status as a symbol for material advancement and efficiency.
Most of these arguments are themes and slogans that are often found on posters made by the Ministries of Basic and of
Secondary Education during the yearly national Week/days of French/English bilingualism in Cameroon.
7. Attitudes of ELT practionners towards the imperialistic ELT principles
The following data was generated in order to ascertain the justification for rethinking and reconfiguration. The sample
population on which the main instrument for the collection of data – the questionnaire- was administered consisted of
pre-service post-graduate English language teachers and experienced teachers on the field. Data from the experienced
teachers who were examiners of the General Certificate of Education (GCE) was collected during the marking of the
2016 session of the GCE examination in Cameroon. Though randomly selected, their English language teaching
experience range was 5-15 years. On the other hand, the pre-service teachers were contacted at the end of their training.
This was during the defences of their post-graduate dissertations at the Higher Teachers Training College of the
University of Bamenda Cameroon in July 2016. Their ages and sexes were not considered in the analyses of the
information obtained from them.
Table 1. Opinion about English being best taught monolingually

Response Score Total
Frequency Percentage
Strongly agree 27 25.00 56.48
Agree 34 31.48
Disagree 29 26.86 43.52
Strongly disagree 18 16.66
Total 108 100 100
From table 1 it is observed that 25% and 31%, that is, a total of 56.48% of Cameroonian teachers of English gullibly
imbibe the fallacy that English is best taught monolingually. Such a percentage justifies the need for the re-
IJALEL 6(6):106-114, 2017 111
conceptualisation of English language education; as Elgin (2000) upholds the conviction that multilingualism is
desirable for humankind and should be encouraged in every way possible.
Table 2. Opinion about the ideal teacher being an English native speaker
Agree 28 25.93
Disagree 31 28.70 47.21
Total 108 100 100
The information on table 2 reveals that the majority (52.69%) of English language teachers in Cameroon believe that
the ideal English language teacher is the native one. Native-speaker here is not the Anglophone Cameroonian English-
speaker, but expatriates; be them British, Americans or any other white people.
Table 3. Opinion about better results when English is taught earlier

Agree 32 29.63
Disagree 18 16.66 32.4
Total 108 100 100
Data from table 3 indicates that only 32.4% of Cameroonian English language teachers do not subscribe to the early-
start fallacy. In other words, they believe that learners acquire English better when the language is introduced earlier.
This explains why in Cameroon, this language is introduced to children right at the nursery school (kindergarten) levels
of both the French and English-peaking subsystems of education. In the English-speaking subsystem, English serves not
only as the medium of instruction, but is also a subject on the nursery education curriculum. Meanwhile, in the French-
speaking subsystem of education, French is the medium of instruction and English language learning activities occupy
considerable space on the curriculum.
Table 4. Opinion about standard of English dropping if other languages are used much
Agree 35 32.41
Disagree 25 23.14 40.73
Total 108 100 100
59.27% of English language teachers in Cameroon hold that standards of English will drop if too much room is given to
the use of other languages. This implies that local or indigenous languages are considered here as threats to the
standards of English. This translates the reason why on the some doors to offices and on strategic positions on the
campuses of the Universities of Buea and Bamenda one reads notices like “No pidgin here” or “No pidgin on Campus.”
Besides, in most schools, especially in the remote areas (villages) it is often forbidden to use the predominant mother
tongues on the school compounds. In spite of all these stringent measures a Cameroon English is still struggling to
emerge as one will frequently hear or read utterances like:
 Here is the man that the president of ELECAM came to his office
 We have informed VC about the theft on campus last week
IJALEL 6(6):106-114, 2017 112
 Bible says we should love each other
 Be careful, if not you will broke that bottle
 I have ran until, because the rain wanted to fall
 There are ten institutions in The University of Bamenda
 Hello Jemima, how are you? No, I am fine.
 These roads are really bad, not so?
 Smokggling cigarettes is illegal
 Politicians almost hijacked the hangry strike of 2008 in Cameroon
 You are really enjoying abroad, right?
 I am talking about the man that the wife died last week
 You are saying that what?
 You know that my sister’s daughter that is marrying tomorrow?
 During a die-place or cry-die, just like during a bornhouse there is always much white mimbo (white
stuff, matango etc), achu with canda and water fufu and eru. There is equally much corn chaff made
with red oil.
 Many people in Cameroon today like achu-banana porridge.
 My younger ones that they are all in college
 This course now like this is very difficult
 That girl has picked the nail ( i.e. has contracted AIDS)
 Do not forget that tomorrow is country Sunday (i.e. civil disobedience or ghost towns day)
 The annual leave thing is supposed to be automatic
 I am saying that eh, the application is not compulsory.
These utterances are commonly heard or read among university students, businessmen and in church milieu and may be
considered by imperialists as fallen or falling standards of English; meanwhile they are aspects of Cameroon English
forging their way through. Here, it is merely a question of barely standards, meanwhile with our indigenous languages,
it is an issue of eminent life and death of the languages. Such syntactic, orthographic, morphological, lexicological
variations may be deemed deviations and not rightful linguistic behavior.
Table 5. Opinion about better results if English is taught more

Agree 23 21.30
Disagree 18 16.66 35.18
Total 108 100 100
A huge majority of 64.83% of Cameroonian English language teachers concur that better results are obtained if English
is taught more. This justifies why in all the French-speaking and English-speaking learning institutions in the country,
English is supposed to be taught on a daily basis. This equally explains why some authorities of the British High
Commission were very bitter about the extremely poor performances of Cameroonians in the English Language Paper
in the GCE examination over the last three years. This frowning at the poor results in the GCE was expressed on the
“Morning Safari” programme of the Cameroon Radio and Television (CRTV) of Thursday 15th September 2016 at
about 5:40 a.m. (the programme ended that very day after fifteen years of existence).
Table 6. Opinion about English being rich, providential, interesting and noble
Agree 34 31.48
Disagree 19 17.59 36.11
Total 108 100 100
IJALEL 6(6):106-114, 2017 113
It is read on table 6 that 63.89% of English language teachers in Cameroon judge that English is rich, providential,
interesting and noble. These teachers tend to forget that no language is inferior to the other. All languages in the world
carry in the same way the rich, providential, interesting and noble cultures of their owners.
Table 7. Opinion about English being well established (with many speakers, trained teachers, good teaching materials)
Agree 39 36.12
Disagree 25 23.14 38.88
Total 108 100 100
Table 7 indicates that barely 38.88% of English language teacher in Cameroon do not trust the claim that English is well
established; implying that it has many speakers, trained teachers, good teaching materials. This is party lining with half
truths.
Table 8. Opinion about English being for modernity and a gateway to the world
Agree 25 23.14
Disagree 22 20.37 37.03
Total 108 100 100
62.97% of Cameroonian English language teachers of table 8 think that English is for modernity and a gateway to the
world. This implies that they ignore the fact that there are so many other non-English-speaking countries that are
modern and open to the world.
Table 9. Opinion about English having the status as a symbol for material advancement and technological efficiency
Agree 42 38.89
Disagree 18 16.66 32.40
Total 108 100 100
Table 9 shows that 67.60% of the teachers think that English is a symbol for material advancement and technological
efficiency. This is certainly not true because other non-English-speaking countries are materially advanced and
technologically efficient.
8. Conclusion
The aim of this paper was to assess the functional load of English and to ascertain the extent to which it is threatening
the development of local languages as well as effective access to education in Cameroon. It is obvious from the
foregone analyses that the functional load of English in Cameroon encourages its spread and threat. It is equally true
that English is a stumbling block to the educational and intellectual development of Cameroonians and finally that
Cameroonian English language practioners are uncritical and are uninformed of the effects of the propaganda of the
English language teaching tenets. There is need for Cameroonian language educational stakeholders to pay more
attention to the macro dimensions which do not only include the political, social and cultural issues involving language
policies but also their implications in the classroom as well as the crucial role of the teacher in (re)creating these
IJALEL 6(6):106-114, 2017 114
policies in the classroom. These issues may appear intangible and irrelevant than pedagogical ones, or that they may
give the impression of being peripheral to the immediate duties of the English language teacher, they are embedded in
all the decisions that these teachers make. The take home here therefore is that justice be done for local languages to
live alongside the English practices through multilingual education approaches. This will be a proffer to balance the
linguistic ecological discrepancy in the global biodiversity.
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Morpho-phonological Structure of Sound Feminine Plural

Suffix -aat: Revisited
Bassil Mashaqba (Corresponding author)
Hashemite University, Jordan
E-mail: b_mashaqba@hu.edu.jo
Anas Huneety
Hashemite University, Jordan
E-mail: hneety@live.com

Abstract
This work investigates an unusual and intriguing concatenative morpho-phonological process, which occurs in a
Jordanian variety as spoken by Ahl Al-Jabal Bedouin, the native dwellers of North East Badia of Jordan. The work
shows that the voiceless plosive /t/ undergoes deletion if and only if it is part of the sound feminine plural morpheme -
aat. In the pre-pausal position, /t/ deletion is further compensated by the reproduction of the voiceless glottal fricative
[h]. Phonologically, the final voiceless plosive /t/, in the sound feminine plural -aat, undergoes debuccalization by
which it loses its original place of articulation [alveolar] and moves to the glottis to surface as [guttural] [h]. Glottal
closure (glottalization) takes place via a glottal fricative [h] rather than a glottal stop [ʔ]. The results of this paper further
prove that the phonological status of sound feminine pluralization in Ahl Al-Jabal dialect is significantly motivated by
morphology, an interesting piece of evidence that certain morphological patterns operate in the phonological
component, or at least require phonological implications.
Keywords: Sound feminine plural (SFP), Morpho-phonology, Jordanian Arabic, Debuccalization, Glottalization
1. Introduction
Arabic has a systematic productive morphological structure with many interesting and challenging aspects, one of
which is pluralization. Although a structured derivational process that associates specific singular and plural patterns is
not easy to resolve, plurality, in the nominal system of Arabic, can be expressed by the formation of an inflected form
based either on modification according to a morphological template ‘broken plural’ or the affixation of a plural suffix
‘sound plural’ (cf. Ratcliffe, 2008: 440, 445; Mashaqba, 2015: 196). Theoretically, sound plural (SP) is one of the clear
aspects in the literature on Arabic morpho-phonology. Broken plural (BP), by contrast, is one of the most challenging
topics. The challenge stems from how morphology relates singular stems to the plurals in their surface structure by ‘a
series of virtual rather than real time sequence of changes’ (cf. Sakarna, 2013: 48). The body of literature discussing the
implications of the phonological and morphological theory on Arabic confirms that Arabic continues to challenge and
help advance the study of such modern theory (cf. McCarthy, 2008: 305).
The bare noun is either singular or collective. In terms of the grammatical category of number, the mode of noun
inflection is singular (unmarked/default),1 dual,2 or plural. Similarly, Jordanian Arabic dialects exhibit three
realizations of pluralization: SP (external/ inflectional/ purely suffixal), BP (internal/ derivational/ templatic/
rearrangement of vowel melody of the singular),3 and suppletion (involving unrelated patterns with different unrelated
roots, as in: marah ‘wife’, niswaan ~ nisaawiin ‘married women’ (cf. McCarthy, 2008: 303; Weninger, 2011: 164;
Mashaqba, 2015: 195).4
Traditional accounts (e.g. generative approaches, such as Levy, 1971) rely on different specifications to account for
plural formation in Classical Arabic (CA). For example all categories that match with one of the following features [-
Derived], [+Foreign], [+Alphabet Letter], [Adj-aan] take one of the BP patterns. However, such proposals that consider
sound-broken plural asymmetry have been criticized for not proposing a clear principle for BP-SP assignment. Neither
traditional generalizations nor the features proposed in generative model are adequate to predict plural formation in CA
(cf. Abd-Rabbo, 1990: 56-59) (for a more elaborate representation of pluralization in CA, read (Abd-Rabbo, 1990).
1 Being defined as the default does not mean the most frequent plural but rather ‘the plural of last resort’ (Ratcliff, 2008:
440).
2 For details about the behaviour of dual and pseudo-dual in Jordanian Arabic, see Mashaqba, 2015: 195, fn. 78, 198).
3 Plurals that do not end with either -aat or -uun (cf. Abd-Rabbo, 1990: 56).
4 These modes of pluralization are also manifested in Ahl Al-Jabal dialect.
IJALEL 6(6):115-122, 2017 116
Subsequently, recent work has shown that the selection of SP or BP of the noun/adjective depends on its stem
(McCarthy, 2008: 303).
As the name suggests, SP is characterized by a suffix or more precisely by the lengthening of an existing suffix. The BP
patterns are characterized by internal modification of the stem, i.e., syllable structure and vocalism (Ratcliffe, 2008:
439-440).5 Phonologically, the SFP -aat ‘involves lengthening of the feminine suffix vowel itself’, -at > -aat, as in
ʤaamiʕat-(un) ‘university’ ʤaamiʕaat-(un) (cf. McCarthy, 2008: 303; McCarus, 2008: 243 for Modern Standard
Arabic (MSA)).
Sound feminine plural is among the most Arabic inflectional rules of a high degree of productivity as it can combine
freely with almost all nouns and adjectives in the process of plural formation. The process of forming SPs involves a
fairly simple suffixation; the SFP suffix -aat is also the default plural form for most foreign borrowings in all regional
varieties (Wilmsen, 2007: 375).
Although the SP morphemes have gained some ground at the expense of BP patterns, SP receives little attention in the
modern literature on CA, MSA, and modern Arabic dialects simply because it is rule-governed. In the literature, modern
Arabic dialects have lost their declensional system: ‘the sound plural is marked by the oblique ending -iin for masculine
and -aat for feminine nouns’ (Versteegh, 2004: 1749).
The inflectional morphology is predominantly concatenative in the morphological category of number for SP but non-
concatenative for BP (Benmamoun et al., 2014: 94). In CA and MSA (e.g., Haywood & Nahmad, 1965; Abd-Rabbo,
1990; Holes, 2004; Ryding, 2005; Abu-Chacra, 2008, among others), and the great majority of Arabic vernaculars (e.g.
Cowell, 1964 for Syrian Arabic, Watson, 2002 for Cairene Arabic, Abu-Haidar, 1991 for Christian Arabic of Baghdad,
Mashaqba, 2015 for Wadi Ramm Arabic, Huneety, 2015 for Wadi Mousa Arabic, among others), SP employs
suffixation of the masculine -iin (-uun for nominative case in CA and MSA) or feminine -aat to the nominal stem
(nouns and adjectives), basically attested in derived nominals, namely: ‘participles, nouns of profession, and relational
nouns and adjectives’ (cf. Abd-Rabbo, 1990: 56; Watson, 2002; Mashaqba, 2015). 6 The sound masculine plural suffix
-iin is demonstrated where the referent is human male. The SFP pattern is ‘less restricted in use than the sound
masculine plural’ (Mashaqba, 2015: 195-196); it can be affixed to deverbal derivatives as in (1a. and 1b.), loanwords
(as in 1c.), singular nouns ending with a feminine ending -ih, -i (as in 1d.), non-human plural nouns (as in 1c. and 1d.),
substantives that have female referents (as in 1e.),7 or plurals of plurals (as in 1f.). (ibid: 195-198).
(1) a. mašġuul ‘busy’ > mašġuul-aat ‘busy f.p.’
b. saalim ‘being safe’ > saalm-aat ‘being safe f.p.’
c. talafoon ‘telephone’ > talafoon-aat ‘telephones’
d. maxaddih ‘pillow’ > maxadd-aat ‘pillows’
e. ʤaddah ‘grandmother’ > ʤadd-aat ‘grandmothers’
f. Ɂayyaam ‘days’> Ɂayyaam-aat ‘days’
Sound feminine plurals are typically assigned to feminine adjectives marked by -at, as in jaalis ‘sitting m.’, jaal(i)s-aat
‘sitting f.p.’. When adjectives serve an attribute or predicate to a dual/plural substantive, the feminine plural form is
used, as in (2):
(2) a. binteen ḥašmaat ‘two pretty girls’
b. kabšeen/naʕ(a)ʤateen simiinaat ‘two fat rams/ewes’
For words which are ‘defective’ – lacking a third consonant in part of their paradigm – or which have become defective
as a result of sound change, there is a synchronic tendency to realize as tri-consonantal root throughout the paradigm,
e.g. sama > samawaat ‘skies’ from s-m-w.
In Semitic languages, the SFP is represented by two endings that do not constitute any distinguishing feature of the
South Semitic languages. The most common and widely distributed ending, in Arabic as well as in South Semitic
languages, is -(aa)t and its corresponding variants: in Epigraphic South Semitic languages -(V)t; in Geʕez, Tigrinya,
Tigrè -(aa)t/-(o)tat; in Modern South Arabian languages -(V)t/-(V)tə(n); in the southern branch of the Ethio-Semitic
languages (Amharic and others) -očč/-(a)č/-ča (Belova, 2009: 309). Although is rare, the SFP of the noun is attested in
Thamudic8 as in dṣyt > daṣyaat ‘antelopes’ (Knauf, 2009: 480).
In the modern Arabic vernaculars, the SFP is made by suffixing -aat to the feminine nouns or adjectives (cf. Cowell,
1964: 209-215 for Syrian Arabic, Khalafallah, 1969: 52 for Ṣaʕiidi Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Holes, 1984: 25 for
Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, Abu-Haidar, 1991: 74-75 for Christian Arabic of Baghdad, Watson,
2002: 164-6 and Watson, 2009: 113 for Ṣanʕaani Arabic, Al-Saqqaf, 2009: 691 for Waadi Ḥaḍarmawt Arabic, Owens,
2009: 711 for West Sudanic Arabic, among others).
Most interestingly, Northern Najdi (the dialect of the Shammar tribe and the city of Ḥayil) marks ʔimaala of the
feminine plural suffix, changing the final plural morpheme -aat into -aay (e.g., banaat ṭabbaaxaat ‘girls cooking’ >
banaay ṭabbaaxaay) (Bruce, 2009: 126). This remarkable feature distinguishes Northern Najdi from the other local
5 Ratcliffe (1990, 1998) and Idrisse (1997) conclude that SPs are different from BPs not because one involves
suffixation and the other is templatic, but because the former operates outside the stem whereas the latter operates
within the stem.
6 It is referred to as ‘-aat Plural’ in Abd-Rabbo (1990: 56).
7 A few substantives may relate different plural patterns as in: naagah ‘camel’ > nuug ~ nyaag > naagaat (cf.
Mashaqba, 2015: 195-196).

8 This language refers to epigraphically attested Ancient Arabic scripts and languages (Knauf, 2009: 477).
IJALEL 6(6):115-122, 2017 117
variety in Najd (Central Najd) as well as from other regional dialects in Saudi Arabia (namely the Ḥijaz, the Southwest,
and the Eastern region). For more details, see Ingham (1971, 1986a, 1986b, 1994). The early Arabic grammarians refer
to this ʔimaala as a feature of the Ṭayyiʔ tribe, who inhabited the area of Jabal Ṭayy, now known as Jabal Shammar
(Anis, 1995: 99,9 Rabin, 1951: 206 cited in Bruce, 2009: 126).
In Nigerian Arabic, the past tense -t marking the first/second person masculine singular, is deleted word-finally after a
consonant; thus, /taxallas-t/ ‘finish-I’ is pronounced taxallas (Owens, 1998: 22–26 cited in Hoberman, 2009: 118). The
SFP in Maltese has ‘withstood the test of time’ and is being more preferred to BP (Mifsud, 2008: 154). Other than -iin
and -aat, Jewish Baghdadi uses Hebrew suffixes -iim and -ooṯ with Hebrew words: ḥxamim ‘rabbis’, braxooṯ
‘blessings’ (Mansour, 2006: 237).
However, the morphological mapping of SFP in the dialect under investigation involves rather interesting phonological
realizations which are different from other Jordanian Arabic dialects as well as the majority of regional Arabic dialects;
where the predominant SFP ending in most Arabic dialects is -aat, it is aa/aah in Ahl Al-Jabal variety (see sections 4
and 5 below).
3. Material and Methodology
To examine SFP in Ahl Al-Jabal Arabic, the researchers recruited 24 ideal participants, 12 males and 12 females, who
are natives of Ahl Al-Jabal Arabic, and who have spent all their life in Ahl Al-Jabal areas. The ages of participants
range between 35-70 years old. Ahl Al-Jabal tribe consists of the following subtribes: Masaʕiid, ʕḏumaat, Shurufaat and
Zbaid. Six participants are chosen from each tribe to ensure the quality of data; Participants’ level of education ranges
from primary education (17 participants) to secondary education (7 participants). The researchers made sure that all
these participants are healthy, have no speech impediments and are willing to answer all questions that serve this study.
Two methods are employed to examine SFP in the dialect under investigation. The first method involves recording
conversations with 20 participants where researchers raise questions involving plural words. In the second method, a list
of 80 singular words was prepared and given to all participants to use them in a sentence. All data were checked with
two language consultants.
Section one of this study gives a brief overview of the background of the problem investigated; section two is devoted
to review literature on plural system in Arabic. The methodology along with the research outline are presented in
section three. Section four accounts for the results of the current study followed by a detailed discussion of the
behaviour of SFP in Ahl-Al-Jabal dialect. Hereafter, acoustic analysis is given in section five in support of the
examined material. Section six gives a summary of the results and offers suggestions for future studies.
This section examines cases where SFP takes place in Ahl Al-Jabal dialect. Drawing on Watson (2002), the data are
followed by a feature geometric model in an attempt to explain ways of mapping each representation. Then,
spectrographic representations are provided to give a visual explanation for the deletion of the voiceless plosive [t]
where it is part of the SFP morpheme -aat, and how the [t] deletion is accompanied by a fricative noise pre-pausally.
Contrary to CA, MSA (e.g., Haywood & Nahmad, 1965; Abd-Rabbo, 1990; Holes, 2004; Ryding, 2005; Abu-Chacra,
2008), Jordanian Arabic dialects (e.g., Ammani Arabic, Al-Wer, 2007; Mashaqba, 2015 for Wadi Ramm Arabic,
Huneety, 2015 for Wadi Mousa Arabic), as well as most of the modern local and regional Arabic dialects (e.g., Cowell,
1964 for Syrian Arabic, Holes, 1984 for Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, Abu-Haidar, 1991 for
Christian Arabic of Baghdad, Watson, 2002 for Cairene Arabic, Davey, 2013 for Coastal Dhofaarii Arabic), the SFP
suffixation fails to surface as -aat in Ahl Al-Jabal dialect, the target of the present study. Most interestingly, this
remarkable feature also distinguishes Ahl Al-Jabal dialect from Northern Najdi dialect which marks ʔimaala of the
feminine plural suffix, changing the final plural morpheme -aat into -aay (e.g., banaat ṭabbaaxaat ‘girls cooking’ >
banaay ṭabbaaxaay) (cf. Bruce, 2009: 126) (see also section one above).
Interestingly, final voiceless plosive -t deletion is clearly a lexical process as the final /t/ fails to elide if the word-final -
aat does not mark SFP. The examples of final /t/ deletion in (3b) compare with those in (3a) where [t] does take place.
(3a) iybaat ‘he sleeps’ > iybaat
tagtaat ‘she eats’ > tagtaat
tanšaat ‘to be kicked’ > tanšaat
ṣaat ‘to be known’ > ṣaat
maat ‘to die’ > maat
ḏaat ‘one’ > ḏaat
biḏḏaat ‘exactly’ > biḏḏaat
sibaat ‘sleep’ > sibaat
(3b) bint ‘daughter’ > banaa ‘daughters’
mʕallma ‘teacher f.’ > mʕallmaa ‘teachers f.’
farša ‘matrix f.’ > faršaa ‘matrixes’
šanta ‘bag’ > šantaa ‘bags’
sayyaara ‘car’ > sayyaaraa ‘cars’
9 Anis opposes others in this respect; he claims that this is not ʔimaala. Instead, it involves a final consonant elision.
IJALEL 6(6):115-122, 2017 118
Deletion of -t occurs within a morphological domain; Tier Conflation (TC) takes place prior to deletion since the
plosive alveolar /t/ is linearly adjacent and visible to the long guttural [aa] of SFP in order to surface as -aat. On the
other hand, -t deletion occurs iff the neighbouring guttural [aa] is part of the SFP suffix -aat. This confirms that TC
keeps the phonological information for morphemic distinction, whereas, morphological cue is erased. Therefore,
association of the feminine suffix -aat to a preceding singular noun applies in two stages: (i), TC folds the morphemes
nodes together in a linear configuration, as in (4) (after Watson, 2002: 232):
Stage (ii) involves deletion of the root node of the rightmost matrix (the matrix associated with /-aat/) motivated by
specific morphological domain; consider data in (5a.) and (5b.). # marks word-finally in juncture position; {} marks
pause (pre-pausal/utterance-final position).
At this point, total erasure of part of the morpheme nodes takes place, where the output is not subject to post-lexical
phonological representation as the erasure process does not violate extrametricality; thus the vacuum created by the
deletion of the root node is left empty (see grid in 5b.). Notice that all elision examples do not involve any new
resyllabication patterns.
Pre-pausally, the final voiceless plosive /t/ undergoes debuccalization by which it loses its original place of articulation
[alveolar] and moves to the glottis to surface as [h], as in:
(6) - almʕallm-aat ġaaybaat > ammʕallmaa ġaaybaah ‘the teachers f. are absent’
- ʤann al-ban-aat > ʤann al-ban-aah ‘the girls came’
- šift sayyaar-aat ġaaly-aat > šift sayyaar-aa ġaaly-aah ‘I saw expensive cars’
IJALEL 6(6):115-122, 2017 119
This process would not be claimed to be aspiration since aspiration is a puff/ burst of air that accompanies voiceless
plosives. At this point, the debuccalized consonant has been lenited to the point of clear elision. In other words, when
the singular noun/adjective ends with a final vowel, the attached SFP is realised by a pre-pausal glottalization, a glottal
closure is noticed by the glottal fricative [h]. In such environment, association of the feminine suffix -aat to a preceding
singular nominal stem similarly lies in two stages: (i) TC (as represented earlier in the grid in (4) above). Stage (ii)
involves delinking of the root feature [-continuant] and the place feature [coronal] from the voiceless plosive /t/ and
spreading of the root feature [continuant] and the place feature [guttural] from the guttural [aa]; the vacuum created by
deletion of the root node is filled by the glottal fricative [h]; consider the grid in (7) below:
The above grid confirms how the process of [h] production instead of /t/ would not be claimed to be aspiration. To
argue how [h] production takes place in this environment, we claim that the effects of such an environment take place
by spread of the stricture feature [continuant] and the place feature [guttural] from the [guttural] [continuant] vowel /aa/
and delinking of [-continuant] and [coronal], respectively.
At this point, one would recall that, in the literature, final positions may undergo phonological processes word-finally
and utterance-finally (pre-pausal position), e.g., devoicing word-final voiced obstruents and pre-pausal glottalization of
sonorants and voiced and emphatic obstruents in Ṣanʕaani Arabic (cf. Watson & Bellem, 2011, Bellem & Watson,
2014:169-170). However, the deletion of -t from the SFP -aat can be claimed to be a synchronic process in Ahl Al-Jabal
dialect; this is evident from deletion of -t in recently adapted loan words in Ahl Al-Jabal dialect, as in (8):
(8) talafoon talafoonaa ‘telephones’
mobayl mobaylaa ‘mobiles’
baaṣ baṣaa ‘buses’
baaloon baaloonaa ‘balloons’
kundišin kundišinaa ‘air conditions’
dišš diššaa ‘dishes’
kaboon kaboonaa ‘coupons’
Subsequently, one could predict the deletion of the final consonant /t/ as a mere morpho-phonological process (a helpful
one, facilitating pronunciation, or an unfortunate one, obscuring the basic form of the suffix); on the other hand, others
would prefer it as means of identifying the sound feminine suffix as opposed to other sequences. (See Hoberman, 2009:
115 for discussion on sandhi).
5. Acoustic Evidence
This section establishes further visual piece of evidence via spectrographic representations in support of the deletion of
the voiceless plosive /t/ if and only if it is part of the SFP morpheme -aat. We can also prove how the /t/ deletion is
accompanied by a fricative noise pre-pausally. To handle such significant morpho-phonological structures, we analyze
examples from Ahl Al-Jabal dialect and another local Bedouin Jordanian dialect.
Figure (1) is a waveform and a spectrogram of the utterance [ammʕallmaat ġaaybaat] ‘the teachers f. are absent’ as
produced by a female native speaker of Bani Hassan Bedouin (one of the Bedouin Jordanian dialects).
IJALEL 6(6):115-122, 2017 120
Figure 1. Waveform and spectrogram of [ammʕallmaat ġaaybaat] ‘the teachers f. are absent’ by a female native speaker
of Bani Hassan Bedouin
Three acoustic properties characterize the Arabic voiceless plosive /t/ utterance-medially and pre-pausally: (i) closure
and hold phases which can be seen as white blank, (ii) no voicing bar at the bottom of the spectrogram (at low
frequency around 200 hz) denoting voicelessness, and (iii) the release (transient burst) which can be observed as a
strong vertical spike. Consider Figure (1) where the red rectangular refers to the production of utterance-medial
voiceless plosive [t], and the green rectangular which refers to a pre-pausal voiceless plosive [t].
In contrast with Figure (1), Figure (2) is a waveform and a spectrogram of the utterance [ammʕallmaa ġaaybaah] ‘the
teachers f. are absent’, as produced by a female native speaker of Ahl Al-Jabal dialect.
Figure 2. Waveform and spectrogram of [ammʕallmaa ġaaybaah] ‘the teachers f. are absent’, by a female native speaker
of Ahl Al-Jabal dialect
The red rectangular denotes the long vowel [aa]. It can be represented as a periodic noise/signals which has two visual
properties that mark voicing: clear defined dark formant bars and regular vertical striations along the production of the
vowel. The long vowel [aa] is followed by an immediate transitional friction noise representing the consonant [ġ]. At
this point, no any acoustic factors denote or represent any of the phases of the voiceless plosive [t]. The green oval also
refers to the voiceless glottal fricative [h], where its production involves a lesser constriction in the glottis allowing
friction noise to be produced. This can be seen on the spectrogram as a random noise and faint bands (very weak
formants). In other words, the voiceless glottal fricative [h] production does not involve clear voicing bar, instead, it
produces a weak voicing bar in contrast with those produced by vowels. The spectrograms give crystal clear evidence
that [t] in the ‘default’ SFP suffix is deleted in Ahl Al-Jabal dialect, and is further compensated by the voiceless glottal
fricative [h] only in pre-pausal position.
6. Conclusion
To test language loss/change in the area of morphology, SFP formation is elaborated as attested in Ahl Al-Jabal dialect.
Plural formation in Ahl Al-Jabal Arabic is a rather interesting area of morphology, especially when compared with the
morphology of plural in other Jordanian Arabic dialects as well as in many regional Arabic dialects. It shows
synchronic innovations in nominal morphology; thus, where the predominant SFP ending in most modern Arabic
IJALEL 6(6):115-122, 2017 121
dialects is -aat, it is aa/aah in Ahl Al-Jabal variety.
This paper presents data showing that the same singular nominal base derives two different SFP forms in different
dialectal varieties in Jordan. The work is also of serious importance to the morphophonological theories as it
emphasises the weight of how a purely phonological structure/output is significantly visible to morphological
constraints.
Finally, further work should be carried out on other morphophonological aspects to be attested in the Ahl Al-Jabal
dialect, such as the deletion of the first person singular pronominal suffix word-finally.
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"An Eyesore among Eyesores" : The Significance of Physical

Setting in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"
Sura M. Khrais
Department of English Language and Literature, Al-Balqa Applied University, Al Shimisani, Amman, Jordan
E-mail: surakhrais@yahoo.com

Abstract
It is the purpose of this paper to study the significance of the physical setting of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily". The two
main geographical settings are Jefferson Town and the Grierson's house . The researcher will show how Faulkner's
treatment of the details of the house (the microcosmic geographical settings) which include the upstairs bridal chamber,
the crayon portrait, the front door, and window frame leads to a better understanding of Miss Emily's motivations and
actions, and gives us insight to her lonely isolated life. At a certain point, Emily's decaying smelly house is refuge from
the modernised outside world to which she does not belong. Furthermore, the house is the source of Miss Emily's
power. Inside the walls of the house, she is a strong woman, a killer; yet a woman falling in love. Nevertheless,
Faulkner presents another horrifying image of Emily's house. It harbours death and decay. In this sense, the house is
closer to dark setting we read about in Gothic Romance. On the other hand, the town is the macrocosmic setting. It is a
fallen legacy as it becomes a symbol for the fall of the old South which Emily's house still harbours.
Keywords: Faulkner, physical setting, , decaying setting, isolation, confinement, Gothic Romance, fallen legacy,
physically enclosed space
1. Introduction
"A Rose for Emily" tells the story of the spinster Emily Grierson who is left to live alone and lonely after her father and
lover's death in a decaying house in Jefferson town in the late nineteenth-century in the decade following the Civil War.
It is the purpose of this paper to study the significance of the physical setting of the story represented by the town and
the Grierson's house (the macrocosmic and microcosmic geographical settings). Faulkner's treatment of the details of
the house help us to understand Miss Emily's motivations, actions, what she stands for, and gives us insight to her
lonely life. These details are the upstairs bridal chamber where Miss Emily keeps Homer's corpse for forty years, the
front door and the window frame which become symbols of Miss Emily's isolation, and finally the portrait of her father
which reflects dominance and control over her life. Jefferson Town, on the other hand stands as an opposition to
whatever Emily's house stands for. The town rejects the old bourgeoisie and slavery, and it adopts a new social system
which Miss Emily rejects. The researcher will show how the two geographical settings contradict each other and how
such juxtaposition deepens our understanding of the main character.
2. The Macrocosmic versus Microcosmic Settings
The town is the macrocosmic setting. It represents the South in its two historical phases: the old rural South which Miss
Emily's house has become a symbol, and the modern urban South represented by the new generation, "garages and
cotton gins", "gasoline pumps" (119), and paved sidewalks (122). Nevertheless, the town is a fallen legacy as it
becomes a symbol for the fall of the old South which Emily's house still harbours. The town stands as a direct
opposition to Emily's house. Jefferson Town has denounced the old bourgeoisie and slavery to embrace the new
industrial changes. While the macrocosmic setting responds to the fast changes; Emily's house remains static, firm, and
isolated.
Not only does Miss Emily's house harbour slavery (she keeps a Negro -Tobe- to take care of her and the house), but it
also stands as a reminder of the previous class system which has disappeared and been replaced by a more democratic
system incarnated by the new generation. Miss Emily is "a fallen monument" as much as her house is as a symbol of a
fallen legacy (119). While the street where her house is located has once been the most select, it is now encroached and
obliterated. It has become something ugly; "an eyesore" (119). The decaying ugly house of the Griersons with its out of
date structure and furnishing symbolises the decay of the old social system. Among the newer buildings, it is an image
of decay. It is isolated from the other modern buildings as much Emily is isolated inside its walls. In this sense, the
house is an embodiment of Emily's wilful isolation and loneliness. On the other hand, the degeneration of the house into
"an eyesore" justifies Emily's ghastly appearance when she balloons as a drowned corpse. Looking like a corpse, Heller
IJALEL 6(6):123-126, 2017 124
(1972) suggests that Emily's appearance is the result of the same process of decay which has made the house into an
eyesore (86). Heller adds that Emily becomes the sinister heroine or the villainess of Gothic Romance (86). In addition,
Frank Littler, in an essay published in Notes on Mississippi Writers regarding the chronology of the story, writes that "A
Rose for Emily" has been read variously as ". . .a Gothic horror tale…" (83). Faulkner himself suggested in a lecture
delivered in The University of Virginia that "A Rose for Emily" is a "ghost story" (Gwynn and Blotner, 26).
2.1 "A Rose for Emily" as a Gothic Romance
The question is which elements of the house emphasise reading "A Rose for Emily" as a Gothic Romance? How much
does this reading provide an insight to Emily's personality? Gothic Romance deals with desolate settings, mysterious
and grotesque events, the themes of death, alienation and isolation. Events usually take place in gloomy and dark
settings. Gothic Romance introduces sinister characters and unexplained phenomena (Littler, 82). First, we have the
image of Miss Emily as a fat old woman resembling death itself (120). Then, the image of the house itself; the "dim
hall" (119), the dark window (121), a "house filled with dust and shadows" (124), and the upstairs locked bedroom
which no one has seen in forty years. When townsmen broke down the door violently, "[a] thin, acrid pall as of the
tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for bridal" (125). Indeed, the house is tomblike,
dark, damp, and dusty. The stairway ascends into shadow and disappears in the darkness (119). Homer himself is
received "at dusk one evening" (124) and disappears inside the dark house. The narrator tells us "that was the last we
saw of Homer Barron" (124). Emily chooses to live in the darkness. She finds solace and consolation inside her house
which hides her secret desires, a horrifying murder, and more important forty years of isolation and deprivation from a
real human contact.
Another piece of mystery in Faulkner's Gothic story is Emily's iron-gray strand of hair. It is a token of love which is
never really attained and a symbol of a perverse relationship. Turner (2013) suggests that the discovery of the strand of
hair reveals the true personality of Emily both as eccentric, and necrophiliac murderess. Martins (2014) likewise views
the strand of hair next to the decomposing body as an "evidence suggesting she [is] practicing necrophilia.
2.2 The House as a Symbol of Refuge, Safety, and Power
On the other hand, the house is Emily's refuge from the modernised world to which she does not belong and from which
she retreats to a decaying smelly house "filled with dust and shadows" (124). She shuts herself in away from the
surrounding chaos of industrialisation. She is not to be seen outside the front door for years and years. When Emily is
threatened with desertion by Homer, she takes refuge inside the house. We are told that "after her sweetheart went
away, people hardly saw her at all" (120). Her house is her only shelter. It is her safe world where, ironically speaking,
she finds harmony with death. Inside the house, in the upstairs bridal chamber, she embraces Homer's corpse for forty
years. "The body [has] apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace…" (125). Similarly, the old soldiers who
attend Miss Emily's funeral identify and sympathize with Emily's world. "On [Emily's] porch and the lawn," they talk of
Miss Emily as if she is a contemporary of their own "believing that they [have] danced with her and courted her
perhaps" (125). Though narrative suggests that such company is mere hallucination and a confusion of "time with its
mathematical progression" (124) as old people would do, the hints of accepting Emily's world (symbolized by the house
and its porch) and maybe forgiving the hideous crime cannot be overseen.
Furthermore, the house is the source of Miss Emily's power. Inside the walls of the house, she is a strong woman, a
killer; yet a woman falling in love. Outside the house, she is the subject of the townspeople gossip and criticism. In
other words, while the house empowers Miss Emily, the town represented by its people and streets deprives her of the
source of her strength: the class to which she belongs and the power she has inherited from her father.
2.3 The House as a Symbol of Death and Decay
On the other hand, Faulkner presents another horrifying image of Emily's house. It harbours death and decay. The
theme of death is clear in the very first lines of the story, with Miss Emily's funeral outlining the stage of the story.
Death is no more an abstract fact; it has a physical existence symbolised by the Griersons' house. It is the deathbed of
Mr. Grierson, Emily's father, Homer Barron, her so-called lover, and herself. In addition, the house which is the only
thing left for her after her father's death is decaying. "It smell[s] of dust and disuse, a close dank smell," (119), and the
leather covered furniture is also "cracked" (119). Miss Emily finally "[falls] ill in the house filled with dust and
shadows"(124). Despite the harsh effect of Time which "[has] obliterated even the august names of that
neighborhood"(119), the house lifts "its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline
pumps". The house is an ugly scene, "an eyesore among eyesores" (119) and its inhabitant is equally decaying. Miss
Emily looks lifeless. We are told that when a deputation awaits upon Miss Emily, she looks "bloated, like a body long
submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue"(120). Her eyes look like "two small pieces of coal" while her
voice is "dry and cold"(120). Like her own house, Miss Emily has lost all signs of life and turned into a decaying body
struggling with a meaningless life. The bad smell which develops over years in Miss Emily's house is another sign of
death. Though it continues to bother the neighbors, Miss Emily, as much as her "stubborn and coquettish" house which
defeats and ignores modernization, neglects their complaint. In fact, Emily's house is empty, lifeless and ugly. "Instead
of life, laughter, and happiness, she can bear stagnation and emptiness" (Lombardi, 2017).
3. Details of the House
3.1 The Portrait
IJALEL 6(6):123-126, 2017 125
One further element of Emily's house is her father's crayon portrait. In the living room, the portrait of Emily's father
stands as a firm a reminder of the past which Emily cannot let go or live without. Emily refuses to accept the fact of her
father's death; she keeps his body inside the house for three days. She refuses to allow the ministers and the doctors to
dispose the body. Before they resort to force, she breaks down and they bury her father (122). Miss Emily couldn’t keep
her father's body, but she keeps his crayon portrait "on a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace" (119). The portrait is a
reminder of the head of the Aristocratic Grierson family and the glory they enjoyed in the past era of the Confederacy.
It is a symbol of the power- her father has been close to the mayor, Colonel Sartoeis- which Emily believes she still
possesses when she refuses to pay the taxes. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me," she said
(120). Obviously, the Colonel is an extension of her father's power and her sole ally in the town. Emily's father is the
only male figure she holds on before she meets Homer Barron. He has had much power over here as the tableau which
the narrator describes suggests: "Emily a slender woman in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in
the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door" (122).
He controls her as much as he controls a horse. He never allows her to date anyone and turns down all her suitors.
Townspeople now believe that "[n]one of the young men are quite good enough for Miss Emily" (122). Her need for a
male authority in her life motivates the hideous action of killing Homer. She couldn’t keep him as a lover, so she keeps
his body for forty years.
3.2 The Bridal Chamber
Furthermore, the house is the physical setting where the union of the traditional South represented by Emily and the
more modernised North represented by Homer, a Yankee day labourer, takes place. Homer is admitted by Tobe "at the
kitchen door at dusk one evening" (124) and is not to be seen by townsmen anymore. However, the reconciliation of the
thought to be lovers ends tragically. Emily faces Homer's threats of desertion by killing him. She poisons him with
arsenic. Thus, the house is similarly ugly from the inside. It conceals horrifying secrets and weird desires. The upstairs
bridal chamber is a literal tomb where Homer's body rots for forty years. What is left of Homer's body and of his
nightshirt, Emily's iron-gray hair, and "the patient and biding dust" (125) all join on a marital bed in a nightmarish
union which takes place inside the walls of Emily's ghastly house.
3.3 The Window Frame and the Front Door
The last details of Emily's house are the window frame and the front door. They are two concrete elements which
emphasise Miss Emily's Isolation and loneliness. When Emily shuts herself in after Homer deserts her, townspeople can
only see her slender figure from the window frame; an interesting image of confinement. The narrator tells us: "Now
and then we would see her at a window for a moment" (123), and "[n]ow and then we would see her in one of the
downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house. . ." (123). The townspeople think of Miss
Emily and her father as a tableau in which the two of them are "framed by the back-flung front door" (122). After
killing Homer, "the front door remain[s] closed" (124) for forty years save for a period of six or seven years when she
has received her female students of China-painting. When those students grow up, the lessons stop and the "front door
closed upon the last one and remain[s] closed for good" (124). What is then the significance of the frames? Frames are
images of enclosure used to portray the figurative imprisonment (whether forced by her father or chosen by herself as a
style of life) Emily has felt in her life with her father and later.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1984), in their work The Madwoman in the Attic, comment on the use of the
"obsessive imagery of confinement" to portray the dominant force of patriarchy (64). In 'A Rose for Emily', Emily's
father symbolizes this force which has deprived Emily of choosing a life partner and enjoying her womanhood.
Enclosed inside a 'frame', Emily is isolated from the outside world of Jefferson Town. In other words, our female
protagonist is depicted in a physically enclosed space. Nevertheless, Emily's later enclosure which concurred with
poisoning Homer is not an act of social repression. It is an act of defense against desertion and rejection. In this sense,
Emily's closing of the front door until the day of her death, is her own choice. She chooses to live as an 'enclosed'
woman inside a house features by dust and darkness. The latter reflects Emily's feelings of loneliness and her desperate
yearning for love.
4. Conclusion
Physical settings represented by Jefferson Town and the Grierson's house with all its details inspire a better
understanding of Faulkner's heroine, her lonely isolated life, and her pains and dark motivations. At a certain level, the
house is Emily's refuge from the modernised outside world which she rejects, and a source of power. Inside the walls
of the house, Emily is a strong woman falling in love with a Yankee workingman. Nonetheless, the house is featured
by death and decay though it is the physical setting where the union of the traditional South represented by Emily and
the more modernised North represented by Homer, takes place. On the other hand, the town is a symbol for the fall of
the old South which Emily's house still harbours. In other words, the town stands as a direct opposition to Emily's
house. Faulkner's depiction of setting is perceptive as it deepens our understanding of the major character, the social and
historical background of the era, and it definitely enriches the plot.
References
Faulkner, W. (1950). The Collected Stories. New York: Random House, Inc. 119-125.
Gilbert, S. M., and Gubar, S. (1984). The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale University Press.
IJALEL 6(6):123-126, 2017 126
Gwynn, F. L., and Joseph B.. (1965). Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957–
1958. 1959. New York: Random House.
Heller, T. (1972). "The Telltale Hair: A Critical Study of William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily", Arizona Quarterly, 28,
83-90.
Littler, F. A. (1982). "The Tangled Thread of Time: 'Faulkner's A Rose for Emily'". Notes on Mississippi Writers, 14
(2), 80-86.
Lombardi, E. (2017). "'A Rose for Emily': What is important about the Title?"
http:/www.thoughtco.com
Martins, P. (2014). "Emily's Rose: Possible Interpretations for the Symbolism of the Rose in Faulkner's 'A Rose for
Emily"
http://www.academia.edu/7820193/Emilys_Rose_Possible_Interpretations
Turner, T. (2013). "Symbolism: A Rose for Emily."
http://www.shortstoriesanalyzed.com/2013/10/symbolism-rose-for-emily.html
The Effect of Using Online Collaborative Tasks on Incidental

Vocabulary Learning of Impulsive vs. Reflective
Iranian EFL Learners
Khalil Motallebzadeh
English Department, Islamic Azad University, Torbat-e Heydarieh Branch, Iran
E-mail: k.motalleb@iautorbat.ac.ir
Farideh Samadi (Corresponding author)

English Department, Islamic Azad University, Torbat-e Heydarieh Branch, Iran
E-mail: samadi.farideh.86@gmail.com

Abstract
Incidental vocabulary learning is one of the most significant sources of learning vocabulary for language learners
(Laufer & Hulstjin, 2001). This study endeavored to investigate the effect of using online collaborative tasks on
incidental vocabulary learning of impulsive vs. reflective Iranian EFL learners. To this end, Nelson vocabulary
proficiency test was administered to 100 Iranian EFL learners as the homogeneity test and the pretest. Using random
sampling procedure, 75 learners were selected as the main participants for this study. Kember, McKay, Sinclair and
Wong (2008) reflective thinking questionnaire was administered to these learners, based on which they were
distinguished based on their cognitive thinking styles, i.e., impulsivity and reflectivity. The participants were
homogenously distributed into 3 main groups (impulsive experimental group, reflective experimental group, and the
control group). All participants went through 4 weeks of treatment. Experimental groups were conducted using
Telegram software and the control group was conducted in a classroom. The results of t-test after 4 weeks of treatment
revealed that reflective learners benefited from online collaborative groups with regard to incidental vocabulary
learning. The findings of the study are discussed in light of previous research.
Keywords: Online collaborative tasks, incidental vocabulary learning, impulsive learners, reflective learners
1. Introduction
Vocabulary is one of the most intensively studied language subskills. Not only is it a core component of language
learning processes (Wilkins, 1972), but also its role in reading comprehension (Macalister, 2010), writing performance
(Lee, 2003) and English for specific purposes (ESP) (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998) has already been acknowledged.
The intensive research on vocabulary learning has lead scholars to view vocabulary of two types: a) intentional
vocabulary learning as what is deliberately taught to the students and b) incidental vocabulary learning as a by-product
of being involved in a language task such as speaking which is non-vocabulary (Laufer & Hulstjin, 2001). While
intentional vocabulary learning was stressed in many language learning methodologies, of interest to many recent
researchers has been incidental vocabulary learning. The reason may be that more recent research findings have
perpetuated the significance of this type of vocabulary learning as a useful tool to learn new vocabularies (i.e, Richards
& Schmidt, 2002; Brown, Waring & Donkaewbua, 2008). For example, Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008) stated
that incidental vocabulary learning is a more practical vocabulary learning method for EFL learners in lower
proficiency levels and can be gained through reading.
In addition, recent studies in English as a foreign language contexts (EFL) have revealed that vocabulary learning has
interactions with language learners' learning styles. Isazadeh, Makui and Ansarian (2016) reported on the intricacies
between vocabulary learning and extraversion learning styles while using authentic and instructional video materials. In
another study (Mesgarani, 2016), believed that impulsivity and reflectivity can have correlations with vocabulary intake
while using output-based instruction. The focus accorded to vocabulary learning and language learners' learning styles
motivated the researcher to conduct the study on the effect of online collaborative tasks on incidental vocabulary
learning of Iranian impulsive vs. reflective EFL learners.
1.1 Statement of the problem
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Incidental vocabulary learning, though a significant type of vocabulary as noted by (Huckin & Coady, 1999) has been
taken for granted in the EFL context of Iran. Explicit instruction of vocabulary is usually confined to the vocabulary
introduced in the language books. Thus, language learners do not have the chance to learn vocabulary incidentally. This
may result in insufficient knowledge of vocabulary among EFL learners.
In addition, although the wealth of recent literature shows that computer assisted language learning (CALL) can
positively affect learning the foreign language, most language classes are deprived from online language tasks. In the
same vein, collaborative tasks in classes are conducted traditionally and without possible facilitation of online
atmospheres.
Such insufficiencies may result in inadequate knowledge of vocabulary among Iranian EFL learners which, in turn,
affects their speaking, writing and many other areas of language.
1.2 Purpose of the Study
This study aimed at increasing Iranian EFL learners' knowledge of vocabulary learning. To this end, the researcher
endeavored to find out how online collaborative tasks may foster learning of incidental vocabulary. Moreover,
following the procedure presented, this study can provide Iranian language teachers with guidelines to implement online
collaborative tasks in language classes; believing that it may result in providing language learners to produce the
language by getting them involved in it.
The following research questions were proposed for this study:
Q1: Do online collaborative tasks have any effect on incidental vocabulary learning of impulsive Iranian EFL learners?
Q2: Do online collaborative tasks have any effect on incidental vocabulary learning of reflective Iranian EFL learners?
Q3: If the answers to research Questions 1 and 2 are 'yes', which of the reflective or impulsive Iranian EFL leaners
benefit more from online collaborative tasks in terms of incidental vocabulary learning?
1.4 Research Hypotheses
According to the research questions, the following research hypotheses were formed for this study:
H01: Online collaborative tasks do not have any effect on incidental vocabulary learning of impulsive Iranian EFL
learners.
H02: Online collaborative tasks do not have any effect on incidental vocabulary learning of reflective Iranian EFL
learners.
H3: The effect of online collaborative tasks on incidental vocabulary learning of Iranian impulsive and reflective EFL
learners will not be equal.
1.5 Limitations and Delimitations
Notwithstanding the fact that EFL learners’ learning styles vary greatly and are not confined to impulsive and reflective
EFL learning styles, due to the limitations imposed on the study with regard to the number of participants, the
researcher decided to focus only on the aforementioned learning styles, i.e, impulsivity and reflectivity.
Although all participants in this study were adult EFL learners, the results of the study cannot be interpreted with regard
to age. In addition, since the participants’ for this study were be of mixed gender, gender cannot be considered as a
moderator variable. Other factors such as educational and cultural background were not sought as well.
Finally, investigating the effect of online collaborative tasks on EFL learners’ vocabulary learning considering
impulsive and reflective learning styles is a novel study. Therefore, more research is required to prove the external
validity of the findings.
2. Review of the Literature
2.1 Theoretical Background
Online collaborative learning as stated by Gale (2003) emphasized learning through using different sources; a student-
centered activity which is conducted on the web. The key feature of this type of learning is interaction among the
members of the group (Razon et al., 2012). The pinnacle of this type of learning can be traced back to works of
Vygotsky (1978) with regard to social constructivism. In general, Not only does collaborative learning require social
interactions (Zimmerman, 1989), but also use of cognitive, social and motivational processes (pintrich, 2000). Vygotsky
(1978) social constructivism is regarded as the main theoretical framework in this study.
2.1.1 Collaboration and Language Learning
Storch (2005) and Kim (2008) put emphasis on the effect of collaborative leaning by positing that it enhanced students’
critical thinking abilities. Many studies have supported the positive effect on collaboration on language learning.
Kennedy and Miceli (2013), for example, find collaboration an effective factor in EFL learners' perception of wikis and
sense of integration in a community.
Collaboration is often regarded to have a positive effect on learners’ social aspect (Gardner, 1985).It helps learners to
tolerate the rigorous procedure of learning and to accomplish a goal (Dörnyei, 1998). In addition, Razon et al. (2012)
IJALEL 6(6):127-133, 2017 129
considers collaboration to be a vital factor in EFL/ESL learners' success by motivating them to win a prize or achieve a
goal.
2.1.2 Collaboration and Online Tasks

In general it is assumed that there is a relationship between the amount of time students spent on the net learning a
novel issue and their self-regulation ability (Lee & Tsai, 2011). They also believe that the amount of time students
investigate online in a given activity has a direct relationship with their attitude towards technology. Such attitudes
(behaviors in a broader sense) affect students’ willingness to process the information and ideas presented by other
people (Tsai & Tsai, 2013) which can be an important factor in online collaborative tasks. However, it is believed that
online collaboration can reduce the cognitive pressure placed on one’s working memory and help individuals analyze
problem at a faster pace (Storch, 2005). As a result and as stated by Kirschner et al. (2009) in-depth learning occurs by
activating students schemata.
However, many of the studies carried out in order to investigate the effect of online collaborative tasks have had their
focus on qualitative factors such as students’ motivation and not the factors that affect this process. As a result, this
study is considered as a response to the emerging need for investigating the constructs affecting online collaboration
with regard to incidental vocabulary learning
2.1.3 Learning Styles and Language Learning
A significant and recent concept in EFL education has been EFL learners’ learning styles and the importance of
attending to this issue in order to conduct research which can yield more accurate results. Learning style refers to
learners preferred way of learning (Wang, 2008). Learning styles play a crucial role within the lives of learners. Once
students acknowledge their own learning type, they'll be able to integrate it into their learning method (Folse, 2008).
Another advantage of distinguishing learners’ learning style is that it assists language learners in more effective
comprehension. The more the learners know of their learning styles, the more they will learn (Biggs, 2001).
Matching is particularly necessary in order to cope with poor learners as they simply become demotivated at early
stages of learning. In alternative occasions, mismatching can be convenient in order to facilitate learners’ expertise in
using new strategies of learning and accommodate other ways of thinking. However, mismatching ought to be treated
with cautiousness because it could cause learners’ dropouts (Tuan, 2011). This fact, will justify the inordinateness of
analysis meted out with relation to learning styles and homogeneity of language categories.
Two significant cognitive learning styles are impulsivity and reflectivity. Impulsivity refers to the degree to which
learners make hurried choices and guess the answer to questions without properly reflecting on the issue and their
understanding. Reflectivity, on the other hand, refers to language learners’ ability to reflect on questions and think about
them prior to answering them (Folse, 2008).
2.2 Empirical Background
Some scholars have conducted studies to observe the effects of collaboration, online sources and combination of both
on learning the second language. For example, Kessler, Bikowski, & Boggs (2012) posit that in an online environment,
students are more likely to help each other (in terms of strategy use and linguistic knowledge). Although the focus of
their study was on the writing skills, implications of their study may be applicable to learning vocabulary.
Kennedy and Miceli (2013) designed a correlational study to understand whether there are any relationship between
students’ perception of the wikis and positive perception with the sense of community they feel on the net. The findings
of their study (by considering 173 subjects) proved that there are significant relationships between the above mentioned
issues and that the world wide web can help students have a more tangible sense of community.
In a different study, Yang (2011) investigated the effect of social tools on EFL learners’ sense of motivation and their
enthusiasm for learning the new language. The findings of the study carried out by Yang (2011), proved that social web
tools can greatly affect students motivation.
Yet, in another study, Ma and Kelly (2006) proved that there are relationships between the time spent by the student to
accomplish a task and the learning outcomes and students evaluation of the importance of the task. In order to carry out
the study, they observed student actions during the task, considered the time spent by them on tasks and made
comparisons between these issues and the students’ scores on the task as their achievement.
Finally Lee and Tsai (2011), by carrying out a correlation study, concluded that there are significant relationship
between the time students spend on the net and their learning as they find out the quality of learning, self-regulation,
and collaborative learning among these students increases with the increase in time spend on the net, especially in case
the students are involved in an online task such as those in online forums.
3. Methodology
3.1 Design of the study
This study had a true-experimental design due to random sampling procedure used in selecting the participants in the
study (see Mackey and Gass, 2015). The main independent variable in the study was the effect of online collaborative
tasks and the main dependent variable was incidental vocabulary learning of the learners. As the results of the study are
IJALEL 6(6):127-133, 2017 130
based on the observed data, and as stated by Creswell (2013) positivism is the more suitable philosophical paradigm for
the study.
3.2 Participants and Setting

In order to determine the number of required participants for the study, power analysis was conducted. Considering the
results of the analysis, 100 Iranian EFL learners were given Nelson vocabulary test as a proficiency test and the pretest.
By choosing the participants within the range of +/_1SD, 75 EFL learners were chosen as the participants for the study.
After that, the participants were given Kember et al.'s (2008) reflective thinking questionnaire to be homogenized into
reflective and impulsive learners. Based on the result of the questionnaire, 25 more reflective EFL participants formed
experimental Group I, 25 more impulsive EFL participants formed experimental Group II, and 25 participants with
mixed learning styles formed the control group. Table 1 reveals he demographics of the participants.
Table 1. Participants Demographic Data

Group N Gender Experience in Learning Religion Age
English
Reflective- 25 Mixed Between 1 to 2 years Islam 18-22
Experimental
Impulsive- 25 Mixed Between 1 year to 20 Islam 17-31
Experimental months
Control-Mixed 25 Mxed Between 14 months to Islam 19-27
22 months
3.3 Procedure
This study was conducted in 22 sessions over the period of 2 months. The participants in the experimental groups joined
a group on telegram channel. A photo of the conversation was shown to the participants in order to activate the
participants schema by eliciting information about the theme of the conversation (questions and answers were either
typed or sent through audio files). Next, the participants were presented with the conversations audio file and were
asked to listen to the file in order to answer the questions. The teacher also asked questions regarding the conversations
to make sure the students had understood the conversation. Finally, the students were asked to practice making a new
conversation by taking roles in the conversation and by suggesting sentences to continue the conversation. Meanwhile,
the teacher took note of the incidental vocabulary exchange between the students.
A researcher-made posttest was designed by the researcher based on the collection of incidental vocabularies and was
administered after the treatment to both groups.
Same conversations were taught to the participants in the control group in a classroom setting. The conversations were
practiced as mentioned in the interchange series and incidental vocabularies (words other than the ones mentioned in the
book) were considered as the target words to be assessed in the posttest.
4. Data Analysis
In the first phase of the data Analysis assumption of normal distribution of scores was checked for both pretest and
posttest scores as a prerequisite of a parametric study. As revealed in Table 2, normal distribution was observed in all
sets of scores.
Table 2. Test of Normality, All Tests

N Skewness Kurtosis
Statistic Statistic Std. Error Statistic Std. Error
Nelson Vocabulary Proficiency Test 75 .324 .198 .396 .198
Control 25 .078 .464 -.337 .356
Pretest of
Experimental 1 25 .47 .545 .334 .354
Vocabulary
Experimental 2 25 .043 .464 .675 .211
Control 25 .401 .464 .398 .937

Posttest of
Vocabulary Experimental 1 25 .653 .765 .567 .821
Experimental 2 25 .425 .464 .576 .398
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Having distributed the learners into reflective and impulsive EFL learners based on the results of the Kember et al.
(2008) reflective thinking questionnaire, the ANOVA test was carried out. According to Table 3, one-way ANOVA
test, the F value (F3, 96 = 0.667, p = 0.365) indicated that there was not a statistically significant difference among the
groups and they were homogenous in terms of vocabulary knowledge.
Table 3. ANOVA, Pretest of Vocabulary
Between Groups 12.840 3 3.987 .667 .365
Within Groups 487.350 96 5.467
Total 598.110 99
The reliability of Nelson test was gauged using Crombach Alpha formula (α=.78).
4.1 The First Research Question
Do online collaborative tasks have any effect on incidental vocabulary learning among impulsive Iranian EFL learners?
In order to answer the first research question, the results of the control group and the impulsive experimental group
were compared using independent samples t-test.
Table 4. Independent Samples t-test; Impulsive Learners and the Comparison Group
Levene's Tes
t for Equality
of Variances
t-test for Equality of Means
F Sig. t df Sig. Mean Std. Error 95% Confidence
(2-tailed) Difference Interval of the
Difference Difference
Lower Upper
Male_female_pretest Equa
l variances
assumed
.311 .415 .780 49 .654 .5433 .7984 2.5342
Equal
variances
not assumed
.780 48.95 .654 .5463 .7984 2.5362
The results of the independent t-test (t (49) = .780, p = .656, r = .798 represents a week Effect size. Thus, the difference
between the groups was not significant. As a result, the first null hypothesis was supported.
According to Levene’s F = 0.311, p = .415, Equal variances was assumed.
4.2 The second Research Question
Do online collaborative tasks have any effect on incidental vocabulary learning among reflective Iranian EFL learners?
Independent samples t-test was run between the control group and the reflective experimental group in order to seek the
answer to research question 2.
Independent samples t-test results (Table 5) represents that scores were significantly higher for experimental groups (M
= 23.18, SD = 2.985) than for comparison groups (M = 16.18, SD = 2.707), t (98) = 3.825, p < .0005. Then the second
null hypothesis (H02) was rejected. According to Levene’s F = .798, p = .358, “Equal variances assumed” was
reported.
Table 5. Independent Samples t-test; Posttest of Reflective Experimental Group and the Control Group
Levene's Test for
Equality of
Variances t-test for Equality of Means
95% Confidence
Interval of the
Sig. Mean Std. Error Difference
F Sig. t df (2-tailed) Difference Difference Lower Upper
Vocabular Equal
y variances
Post Test assumed .798 .358 3.825 98 .000 5.000 .570 1.049 3.311
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Equal
variances
not assumed 3.825 97.073 .000 5.000 .570 1.049 3.311
In addition as both null hypotheses should have been rejected as the presumption for the third research question and as
research hypothesis 1 was supported, the answer to the last research hypothesis was not investigated.
4.3 Analysis of the posttest
A number of tests were conducted with regard to the researcher-made posttest to investigate its suitability for this study.
as the main issue with regard to construct validity of a test is designing the test items in such a way that represent what
is to be tested (Hatch and Frahady, 1982), and as the incidental vocabularies were collected throughout the courses and
used in the test, the main issue with regard to construct validity of the tests is answered.
Item analysis was run to find out who proper the questions in the test are. , item analysis showed that the item facility of
the test’s items was between 0.5 and 0.8 and discrimination indices were between 0.25 and 0.5, (0.5 < IF <0.8 and 0.25
< DI < 0.5) which are in the acceptable ranges. Then, the test items are not too easy or too hard and the test has the
power to distinguish between different test takers.
5. Discussion
The findings of the study are in some cases congruent with previous studies; at the same time, contrasts are seen with
previous findings which are discussed in this section. Yang (2011) asserted that social tools enhance students'
motivation to learn; therefore, learning is fostered among them. In addition, Linden and Renshaw (2001) noted that
creating the opportunity for the students to interact in form of dialogues enables them to learn. They also asserted that
prompts and online posts by instructors help interactions among the students to occur more naturally. These studies
have had their focus on collaborative learning and mostly online environments; however, language learners learning
styles have not been taken into consideration. This may justify why the findings of this study partially accord with these
studies. In the current study, it was observed that online collaborative tasks can have positive effect on vocabulary
learning of reflective Iranian EFL learners; however, this effect was not observed regarding the impulsive learners.
Hobaugh (1997) asserts that the social dynamics among the group members in online environment can contribute to the
success or failure of education delivered in such atmospheres. One of the main dynamics of online interactions, as
stated by Gunawardena (1995), is text-based interaction. Text-based interaction can make concentration of the
dialogues difficult for some learners. In general, impulsive learners have less concentration and tend to make gambling
guesses at the answers (Wang, Wang, & Huang, 2008). This may justify why the online collaborative tasks had effect
on incidental vocabulary learning of reflective language learners and not the impulsive ones.
Joe (1995) believed that text-based tasks can affect learning of incidental vocabulary by proving visual exposure to the
words. Laufer (1992) also asserted that reading is the main source of vocabulary learning. The current study also
revealed that online collaborative groups have significant effect on incidental vocabulary learning of the reflective
learners which may be due to the fact that the words are observed in form of texts and are read in the online
environment.
Vocabulary learning and learning styles have also been subject of recent investigations in the field. Ellis (2004)
believed that the effect of learning styles on language education is not an established effect and may be different in
various settings. Makui, Isazadeh and Ansarian (2016) who conducted a study with regard to incidental vocabulary
learning of introvert and extrovert language learners, believed that learning incidental vocabulary through video
materials is not different between introvert and extrovert learners also the effect was observed in both groups. Such
conclusion help interpreting the results of this study easier, as they shed light on two main facts: a) learning styles do
not always show interactions with learning vocabulary, b) the effect, if observed, may be tentative. This can, in turn,
justify why reflective learners benefited from incidental vocabulary learning in online collaborative groups while
impulsive learners did not.
6. Conclusion
This study aimed to gauge the effect on online collaborative tasks on incidental collaborative learning of EFL learners
in order to foster learning of incidental vocabulary. The results of 4 weeks of treatment in an online atmosphere and
comparison of the results with the control group revealed that only reflective Iranian EFL learners benefit from online
collaborative tasks, and the effect of this mode of teaching on impulsive learners was not statistically significant. The
results could be beneficial to language teachers who wish to know about the effect of online collaborative tasks on
learning incidental vocabulary. In addition, syllabus designers who implement the educational goals benefit from this
study and design more effective syllables in terms of online collaborative activities. Policy makers can also benefit from
the findings of this study, as the findings of the study reveal that there may be no need to match language classes based
on language learners' impulsive and reflective learning styles.
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Variation of Linguistic Form of News Titles

of Indonesian National Newspapers
Atiqa Sabardila (Corresponding author)
Indonesian Language Education, Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, Indonesia
E-mail: as193@ums.ac.id
I Dewa Putu Wijana

Faculty of Culture Science, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Bulaksumur, Caturtunggal, Yogyakarta, 55281, Indonesia
E-mail: idp_wijana@yahoo.com
Suhandano
Faculty of Culture Science, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Bulaksumur, Caturtunggal, Yogyakarta, 55281, Indonesia
E-mail: suahandano_ugm@yahoo.com

Abstract
This descriptive-qualitative study aims at describing the linguistic form on news title. Related to data classification, this
study uses segmenting immediate constituents technique. This technique is also utilized to separate the elements of the
sentence function. The data is combined based on the similarities of their pattern and category. Furthermore, in order to
classify the similarity of the meaning on the phrase or clause on title, this study provides the paraphrase and substitutes
the constituent position of function in clause to recognize the arrangement. Moreover, in identifying the constituent of
omitted clause, the technique is by inserting or expanding the structure of the title. The variation of the linguistic form is
also based on whether or not the figurative language of the title appears. The news title is written by considering these
several aspects: phonology, lexicon, grammatical, sentence modus, cohesion, and figurative language. Those aspects are
intended to fulfill several functions, such as informing, influencing, preserving the social connection between the server
and the receiver of the information or delivering the response about a phenomenon. Based on these several aspects, the
characteristics of the linguistics of the titles give the practically ease of understanding for those who are learning to
write the straight news discourse.
Keywords: news content, body of the news, principle element of news, reference
1. Introduction
A study about a linguistic form on the straight news in Indonesia has not been finished yet. It is due several problems.
One of them is that there are not many news papers which can be the data source, the unit of the analysis is limited on
the level of clause and sentence. Therefore, the variation of the news title writing of the straight news has not been
patterned. Moreover, the variation of journalistic characteristic has not been identified completely.
The innovative approach of this current study is the description of the characteristics of the linguistic form of titles
which are investigated from the level of phonological and discourse. Then, through this study, the productivity pattern
of Indonesian languages clauses can become the evidence(s).
Further, the findings of this study prove that the variations of the title are pretty much flexible. They receive other
variations to express the process of writing titles. Through the analysis of the findings, this study found its limitation of
the concept of ellipsis. Ellipsis appears on the level of syntax and discourse. In the level of syntax, the constituent which
is omitted can be investigated by its clause (i.e. clauses on titles). Moreover, in the level of discourse, the constituent
that is neglected can be investigated through the clauses in the body of the news. It signs that the study of syntax should
be prolonged to the discourse analysis.
Based on the news title reading, it depicts the genre of the news title that can be developed outside the basic patterns of
Indonesian sentences. Furthermore, the news title is not provided as an example in Tata Bahasa Baku Bahasa Indonesia
‘Book of Indonesian Language Standard Grammar’.
Through the pattern of the news title, it proves the appearance of the productivity and creativity in using the language
that are connected to the new elements of the functions in the clause. The variations of the pattern are developed by
IJALEL 6(6):134-143, 2017 135
sentences in the body of the news. The news title which has several patterns confirms the Indonesian language
capability, such as merging to the local or foreign elements, or amalgamating to the archaic statement.
The problem statement of the current study, generally, is how the relationship between the title and the news content in
the national newspaper. Based on this problem statement, then, it describes the variations of the linguistic form of the
title of the Indonesian national newspapers.
Build upon the explained background of the study, the followings are the theoretical and practical significances of the
study. The theoretical significances of the study covers (1) proving the journalistic variations, especially for the news
writing that experiences the flexibility in taking other variations; (2) proving the productivity of the variation of the
news writing, whether in the form of phonological, lexicon, or grammatical characteristic; and (3) proving the limitation
of the ellipsis in the area of syntax and discourse.
Additionally, this study hopefully yields these practical significances: (1) helping the learners of language who are
difficult to make an effective sentence; (2) proving that newspaper cannot be left behind since it is successful to develop
the variation of the learning function; (3) proving that any utterances are proper to be entitled; and (4) providing
examples of materials of syntax in the teaching-learning process comprehensively, i.e. started from word, phrase,
sentence, and discourse. In addition, to build the readers’ understanding towards this kind of study, this paper also
provides several previous studies such as Sabardila (1997), Sumarno (2005), and Mulyati (2005) which are reviewed as
follows.
Sabardila (2005) found the limited internal structure of clause, such as Subject-Predicate or the variation (Predicate-
Subject), Subject-Predicate-Object, Subject-Predicate-Adverb or the variation, Subject-Predicate-Complement, and
clause with the omission of Subject (S) function. In this article, the title was identified based on the phonological,
lexicon, grammatical and discourse characteristic.
A research conducted by Sumarno (2005) was about the variation of pattern on the functional element of the news title.
Any patterns that appear were due to the application of the syntactical element in a news title. Besides, they were
identified that there were deviations in writing news title from the standard principle of Indonesian language, such as
the deletion of S in the simple sentence, the omission of subordinator and S minor clause, omission of subordinator and
S main clause, subordinator and S minor clause that is not identical to the S main clause (dangling participle/misrelated
participle), omission of S in all clauses of equivalent sentence, omission of S in all clauses of un-equivalent sentence,
omission of subordinator and S of all clauses, and the use of word that is not suitable to its syntactical function.
Mulyati’s (2005) investigation described the title of the news in the newspapers, described the omission, and described
the factors that influenced the omission itself. The title of the news in the newspapers could be in the form of word,
clause, phrase, clause, simple sentence, and broader sentence. The omission could be in the level of affix or word and
phrase. The omission of dominant affix was the omission of affix me(N)- on the word that functions as predicate and it
is a transitive-active verb. The factors that caused the omission were due to the limitation of the area, influence of
conversation, and code-mixing.
Rohadi (2010) explained his research findings about the importance of humor towards human’s life commotion. His
dissertation gave confession about the function of humor that could allay the stressfulness. In his analysis about the
news title, it was connected to the understanding of situation of readers’ psychology, i.e. the provider of the news
wanted to neglect the pressure due to the habitual activity by postulating any severe things easily.
Wijana (2011) investigated the slang language of Indonesian youths. It was concluded that the appearance of the
Indonesian slang gave contribution to the development of Indonesian language generally. The phenomena of linguistic
in newspaper, through utterance on the news title, proved that the development of slang within youths, such as what was
exampled by Wijana himself, did not become any threats towards the Indonesian language standard. Journalist
understands the psychological aspect of the readers that mostly they work extremely. Furthermore, it was necessary to
provide an affluence of the news presentation towards the thoughtful thing (news).
Marliana’s and Puryanto’s (2009) found that newspapers had not been appropriate to the standard Indonesian language
principle. However, this dissertation proved that through the news title, the patterns of vary clauses could be applied in
arranging title.
Moreover, the investigation conducted by Kesuma (2005) about the function of Adverb (A) from categorical and its
semantic role and Baryadi (2007) about the differences of the placement of minor clause in the arrangement of clause
could help to identify the function on the clause of title and on the sentence of the body of the news. In addition,
through the title, it proved whether the appearance of the function signed the appearance of other clauses in the news
title.
The description about the news title that is investigated from the level of grammatical of clause and the variation of the
pattern are investigated by structuralism approach. The level of phrase and clause are the grammatical unit that enables
to be organized as a title. This approach is relevant to describe the variation of the pattern. Therefore, the structure in
the analysis of sentence pattern is used to describe the phonological and lexical characteristic in arranging title,
coherence and cohesion in the relation of title and the body of the news, the description of figurative language, and the
imagery device in the title structure. Another approach is functionalism. This function is correlated to the function of
communication of the newspaper, especially the function of the news and the title of the news. Investigating the
IJALEL 6(6):134-143, 2017 136
correlation between the title and the news content is done by hermeneutic approach. The utterance of the title is
interpreted based on the component formula 5 W + 1 H.
Furthermore, the concept of tagmemic is applied to identify the linguistic form on title. Tagmen is an element from a
grammatical construction which has four dimensions: slot, class, role, and cohesion. On the other level, generally, it is
in the forms of nucleus, and margin. Filler class is a dimension of tagmemic which is the real appearance of slot. This
real appearance can be in the form of morpheme, word, phrase, clause, sentence, paragraph, monolog, dialogue, and
discourse. Class can also be broken down into subclass, such as noun, verb, adjective, noun phrase, verb phrase,
adjective phrase, transitive clause, intransitive clause. Moreover, role is one of the dimensions which are the porter of
the function of tagmen (Pike & Pike, 1977: 489).
To identify whether or not there is a figurative language on title, it is connected to the concept of modern stylistic which
analyzes the formal characteristic, i.e. (a) phonology, such as the patterns of utterance sound, verse, and rhyme; (b)
syntax, such as types of sentence structure, (c) lexical covers abstract and concrete word, relative frequency of noun,
verb, and adjective, and (d) rhetoric, that is the characteristic of using figurative language and parable (Ratna, 2009: 22).
Furthermore, since the title writing is intended to generate the memory, imagination, emotion, etc, it is connected to the
any concept of imagery, i.e. visual imagery, auditory imagery, etc (Pradopo, 1994: 81-87).
According to Turner (1977: 7), the limitation of stylistic is the part of linguistics that concerns to the variation in using
language. It is in accordance to the sentence in the news title, that this is one of the variations in using language.
According to Hartoko and Rahmanto (1980: 138), stylistic that analyzes the formal characteristic belongs to descriptive
stylistic, i.e. gets close to linguistic style as the wholeness of soul expression style that is consisted in a langue, that it
covers morphologically, syntactical, and semantic.
Modus of the sentence is used to investigate the function of reporting. It is used to give information, persuading,
controlling the society, educating and entertaining. The sentence modus is in accordance to the way of how a sentence is
expressed to the hearer (Fairclaugh, 1995). The case that happens to the title writing is that the presenter of the news
states several attitudes, such as stating information to the reader, asking, or highlighting the command from the
interviewee. It can be said as ‘highlighting’ since originally, a command is stated implicitly.
The process of building news titles results the words, phrases, clauses, or collection of clauses. After it becomes a title,
the existence of words, phrases, clauses or collection of clauses can be proposed as the meaning to connect them to the
body of the news. Furthermore, in building titles, there are several things to be the writers’ main consideration. Those
are ellipsis, substituting, reference, etc. Through the evidence of several processes, it can be concluded that a title has
closely relation with the body of the news.
Moreover, on the structure, it can be identified, whether from the form of cohesion or the coherence. Halliday and
Hasan (1992) show the close relation between parts in the discourse. There are two forms of relation: grammatical and
cohesion-lexical. Firstly, it refers to connection of grammatical between parts of discourse; secondly, it refers to
connection of lexical between parts of discourse. It can be described that cohesion-grammatical is reference,
substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. Furthermore, the lexical-cohesion is in the form of reiteration, hyponym,
synonymy, antonym, and collocation.
Those concepts can help to describe or explain the result of building title if it appears the ambiguity, such as the
consequence of ellipsis conjunction on the plural clause structure. Consequently, this current study does not focus in the
description about grammatical or lexical cohesion. However the details of both of those cohesions are used to explain
the process and the result of building title.
This study aims at describing the linguistic form of the news title in the Indonesian national newspaper. The title is
identified by the discourse structure and the linguistic form of the news.
2. Research Method
This descriptive research describes the linguistic phenomenon that appears on the national newspapers. The objects of
this research are affix, word, phrase, and clause on the title of the news and also the reference that is denoted by word,
phrase, or clause of the title itself. Reference that is designated is connected to the element of the news on the formula 5
W + 1 H.
The data sources of this current study are random national newspapers. Those newspapers are Jawa Pos (JP), Kompas
(K), Koran Tempo, (KT), Media Indonesia (MI), and Republika (R) published in 2014. The chosen news is straight news
which provides objective facts, reference on title, the photograph that completes the news, and the subtitle.
This present study can be classified as the descriptive-qualitative study. The description of the variation of the form of
title is based on the level of the title filler, phonological and lexical characteristic. The title is classified based on its
level. In classifying the title, this study uses segmenting immediate constituents technique to identify the level of the
title: level of word, phrase, or clause. The identified title which is in the form of clause, the same technique is also
applied to identify the element of sentence function such as Subject (S), Predicate (P), Object (O), Complement (C), or
Adverb (A). The data is combined based on the similarities of the pattern of clause or phrase. To identify the existence
of the similarities of the pattern, this study applies read-marker technique, i.e. identifying the phonological, lexical, and
grammatical characteristic on the word, phrase, or clause of the title. Moreover, this study uses paraphrase technique to
identify the similarities of the meaning on phrase or clause on the title and also permutation technique to get to know
IJALEL 6(6):134-143, 2017 137
the obstinateof the position of a constituent in a clause structure. Then, in order to identify the element of the omitted
clause filler, this research uses inserting technique and expansion technique, i.e. re-appearing the omitted element itself.
The variation of the linguistic form is also based on whether or not it shows the figurative language on the title.
Therefore, this current study uses read-marker technique and referential identity technique. Since, in identifying the
origin of the word, the data analysis technique is completed by the traditional identity technique. In order to explain the
content of the title, this study uses referential identity technique.
The result of this study is presented formally, i.e. formulating by sign and symbols, and non-formal presentation, i.e.
formulating by general words (Sudaryanto, 1993: 145). The formal presentation seems on the result of the description of
the variation of the news title that is foregrounded by the level, such as SP for Subject-Predicate, PS for Predicate-
Subject, etc.
3. Result and Discussion
The result of the description of linguistic form found its characteristics: (a) phonology, such as pattern of utterance
sound, verse, and rhyme, (b) syntactical, such as types of sentence structure, (c) lexical, such as abstract and concrete
words, noun, verb, and adjective, and (d) rhetoric, such as the characteristic of using figurative language and parable
(Ratna, 2009, p. 22). Furthermore, since the reach of the linguistic form on news title is not limited on the formal
characteristic of the modern stylistic, therefore the researcher combines the other formal characteristics, such as
morphological (e.g. affix) and several markers of grammatical conjunction that signify on reference, ellipsis, and
conjunction. This study also finds these followings imagery on title.
3.1 Phonological Characteristic
This research differentiates between the notion of rhyme and the supra-segmental characteristic. Rhyme is in
accordance to the news writer’s skill in presenting rhymed title. The supra-segmental characteristic is in accordance to
the use of pause, such as punctuation (comma), in order to give stress on the element of clause in front of that
punctuation.
3.2 Rhyme
Even though it is not as potential as the syntactical characteristic, there are several examples which indicate the
phonological characteristic. The characteristic is marked by the appearance of rhyme on the series of words that fill the
news title.
This study proves that the title is prepared to the certain aim, i.e. fluency or ease of uttering.
(1) “Trafik Padat, Izin 12 Feri Tersendat” (BI, 5/2/2014)
In the example (1), the rhyme is in the form of syllable –dat on padat [jam] and tersendat [stagnant]. The rhyme is
intended to be selected. It is understood through the utterance in the body of the news. The utterance is izin belum dapat
diberikan [the license cannot be given]. The utterance has a synonymy to the izin yang tersendat [stagnant license].
Furthermore, the word tersendat [stagnant] means stop, detain, not smooth …’ (KUBI, 1982: 912).
(1a)“Kementerian Perhubungan mengklaim lalu lintas peyeberangan Merak-Bakauheni yang telah dilayani 43 armada
feri merupakan rute padat sehingga penambahan kapal baru masih harus melalui izin terlebih dahulu. … saat ini
ada 12 kapal yang mengajukan permohonan izin, tetapi izin belum dapat diberikan …” (BI, 5/2/2014)
The journalist selects to write an interesting utterance from the source of the news if the journalist does not select it by
him/herself. Example (2) shows this thing.
(2) “Dusun Hilang, Warga Susah Berbilang …” (K, 3/2/2014)
The second syllable (-lang) in hilang [missing] and the third syllable (-lang) in berbilang are actually the same, that
both of them are made of three phonemes, consonant /l-/ - vowel /-a-/ - consonant /-ng/. The journalist does not prepare
their own words for the title, however they use the utterance from the source of the news. The quotation (2a) proves it.
(2a)“Terserah pemerintah saja bagaimana baiknya. Tanah itu milik Perhutani,” KataSrihati, ibu dari enam anak itu
dengan lirih.Ia menambahkan. “Yang jelas dusunkami sudah hilang dan kami pun susah berbilang.” (K,
3/2/2014)
From the example (2) it is understood that there is a verification that the journalist is interested in the interviewee’s
statement which is relevant to be arranged in the title. The utterance originates from the people of that district who are
relocated due to slide of hills. The example is different to the following example (3).
(3) “Berguru Dahulu Sebelum Bergurau” (K, 10/11/2014)
The result of the investigation in the body of the news is that the title is taken from a proverb, such as the following
quotation (3a).
(3a)”Peribahasa “berguru daulu sebelum bergurau” menggambarkan sebagian sisi industry pertahanan Indonesia.
Meskipun panser anoa buatan dalam negeri telah melanglang buana, Indonesia tetap gencar “berguru” teknologi
pertahanan ke negara lain. …” (K, 10/11/2014)
In arranging the title of the news, the journalist or the writer takes into account its rhyme. The title with its fluent
pronunciation makes ease that it can create relaxation. Humor is also arrayed for that reason. The relaxation is needed in
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all events especially for all prepared information that is aimed as the supplement of knowledge. According to Rohadi
(2010) humor is needed in any activity. One of them is that for fading stress.
The journalist needs to understand the readers’ psychic condition so the journalist can help to reduce the stress faced by
the readers. Therefore, the serious things in the news can be presented lightly. The journalist can select the rhymed
word or create it by using the previous text. Both of them do not belong to the research conducted by Sabardila (1997),
Sumarno (2005), and Mulyati (2005).
3.3 Supra-Segmental Characteristic
There is an intention for the writer to give emphasizing towards the topicalized element. For example, on the clause
with the element of S-P which the S or P is topicalized. To give emphasizing, whether S or P, the writer provides a
comma, such as the following example (1). Through the marker, the emphasized part will be clear.
(1) “Disiplin, Kunci Kualitas Hidup Pasien” (K, 23/11/2014)
(2) “Penelitian, Kunci Menjamin Mutu” (K, 24/11/2014)
3.4 Lexical Characteristic
The lexical characteristic is shown by the use of figurative language. The identification shows that there are several
figurative languages: (1) Parable, (2) metaphor, (3) personification, (4) metonymy, (5) hyperbole, (6) irony, (7)
eufemiminsm, (8) dis-feminism, (9) imagery.
(1) “Bangkok bak Kota Hantu Saat Malam” (JP, 25/5/2014)
(2) “Hakim MK Jangan Sampai Mendidihkan Suhu Politik” (K, 22/1/2014)
(3) “PVMBG: Gunung Kelud Sedang Sakit” (R, 12/2/2014)
(4) “Lenovo Tantang Samsung dan Apple” (R, 12/2/2014)
(5) “Dunia Semarak Rayakan Imlek” (R, 1/2/2014)
(6) “Gita WariskanSetumpuk Pekerjaan Rumah (MI, 1/2/2014)
(7) “Hasjrul Harahap, Menteri Penggagas HPH, Wafat” (KT, 2/2/2014)
(8) “Airin Bisa Seret Kasus Chaeri” (KT, 9/2/2014)
(9) “Mengecap Manisnya Laba Es Krim Bercita Rasa Unik” (BI, 26/2014)
3.5 Grammatical Characteristic
The grammatical characteristic covers the device of morphology and syntax. The device of morphology focuses on the
ellipsis of affix; while the device of syntax focuses on the level of the title filler such as word, phrase, clause and
sentence.
3.6 The Ellipsis of Affix
This finding strengthens the previous investigation, such as Sabardila (1997), Mulyati (2005), or Sumarno (2005).
(1) “Jokowi Didesak Bicara Soal Dukungan” (R, 16/2/2014)
(2) “Baru 16 Instansi Umumkan CPNS” (JP, 11/2/2014)
By the ellipsis of affix ber- or me(N), it can be concluded that the variation of news title is close to the conversation
which makes the utterance lighter.
3.7 Syntactical Characteristic
The syntactical characteristic is in accordance to the level of the title filler, the pattern of clause order, the appearance of
certain punctuation, single clause, and plural clause. Example (1) is in the form of word; (2) – (4) are in the form of
phrase; and (5) – (6) are in the form of minor clause. The level of word belongs to the title which is not productive.
(1) “Perdamaian” (KT, 18/11/2014)
(2) “Kisruh Rumah Belanda di Bandung” (KT, 28//1/2014)
(3) “Tentang Presiden dan Rakyatnya yang Sedang Kecewa” (K, 28/9.2014)
(4) “12 Artis dalam Pusaran Wawan” (MI, 17/2/2014)
(5) “Ketika Binatang Ditukar dengan Innova” (KT, 3/2/2014)
(6) “Karena Warnock Tak Beruntung” (KT, 29/12/2014)
The body of the news leads the title. When there is an indistinct title, such as (1) – (6), in the complete body of the news
provides the explanation. Therefore, the strength of a news is when the reader of the news would like to look for
something by searching it on the sentence or paragraph in the body of the news. After searching the information
provided, the reader will get the content of the news.
Title can be in the form of word, phrase, and minor clause. However, they only bring one function. It means that there is
only an element in the title.
If the reader does not find anything in the body of the news, then, the news contains a weakness. Finally, a title is like a
bombastic advertisement that will never show the case that being advertised. It is due to the journalist does not take into
account on writing the news.
From the description above, it can be concluded that the single clause has pattern, i.e. S(Subject) P (Predicate) (O
(Object)/C (Complement) /A1 (Adverb 1) /A2 (Adverb 2) that there are the variations, such as SP (example 7) and the
variation, PS (8), SPO (9), SPC (10), SPA and the variation (11), SPOC and the variation (12), SPA1A2 and the
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variation (13), ASPC and the variation (14), SPOA1A2 and the variation (15). The function of S, in this clause is
obstinate.
(7) “Kesejahteraan Tenaga Kesehatan Terabaikan” (K, 11/1/2014)
(8) “Ada yang Kader Parpol” (K, 10/1/2014)
(9) “Bawaslu Sebut Empat Potensi Kerawanan” (K, 28/1/2014)
(10) “Konsumen Pedagang Kaki Lima Diancam Denda Rp 1 Juta” (KT, 28/1/2014)
(11) “DKI Jakarta Negosiasi Ke Pusat” (K, 8/1/2014)
(12) “Maret, KPPU Jatuhkan Vonis Kartel Bawang Putih” (KT, 1/2/2014)
(13) “Anggoro Diperiksa Intensif Pekan Depan” (KT, 1/2/2014)
(14) “Senin, Tol Cipularang Kembali Normal” (MI, 1/2/2014)
(15) “Polisi Berantas Geng Motor dengan Patroli hingga Subuh (KT, 22/2/2014)
Then, the clause S is omitted and demonstrates the following variations (S)P(O/C/A) with the details of the pattern (S)P
(example 16), (S)P, (S)PO (17), (S)PC (18), (S)PK ( 19), dan (S)POC (20).
(16) “Hanya Didenda” (KT, 4/3/2014)
(17) “Waspadai Dampak Cuaca dari Timur”
(18) “Berharap Ada Obat Kuat bagi Mata Uang Garuda”
(19) “Bersepakat ke Putaran Ketiga”
(20) “Usut Peran M. S. Kaban Lewat Sopir”
The omission of S happens due to avoiding the re-stating of the utterance or the S filler is substituted to the photograph
that is intended to be appeared to complete the news. However, the disappearance of S is not necessary due to that case.
It can be the S filler is intended to be hided in the body of the news. If the readers do not continue their reading the body
of the news, then they will not get the full information provided.
The complex content of the news can be packaged by the plural clause. The variation of the title presentation with the
clause gives the extensive meaning in presenting the content of the news. By this presentation, the simplicity of
bestowing the title will not always be an option.
The equal plural clause is collected based on the obstinateS. Some examples show that the obstinate S filler, whether on
the first clause or the second clause. These are the pattern of the S which belongs to an obstinate S. SPC, SP (21), SPC,
SPC (22), SP, SP (23), SP, SPO (24), dan SPA, SPC (25).
(21) “10 Ditemukan Tewas, 22 Hilang” (K, 28/1/2014)
(22) “Sutan Diduga Melobi, Tri Diduga Membagi” (K, 22/1/2014)
(23) “Rugi Sebentar, Untung Jangka Panjang” (KT, 1/2/2014)
(24) “SBY Datang, Demokrat Panen Pelanggaran” (JP, 19/2/2014)
(25) “Anak Drop Enam Jam, Ayah Terapi Berjalan” (JP, 28/2/2014)
The followings are the findings of plural clause which the S, whether one or both is omitted. The results are the patterns
of them: (S)P, conj. tapi [but] (S) PO (example 26), (S)P, (S)P conj. lalu [then] (S)P (27), (S)P conj. tapi [but] (S)P
(28), (S)PC, SPC (29), SPO conj. kecuali [except] (S) (P) O (30), A(S)P, A(S)P (31), SP conj. hingga [until] (S)P (32),
SP, (S)PA (33), (S)PA, (S)PC (34), (S)P, (S)P, conj. dan [and] (S)P (35), dan (S)P, (S)P (example 36).
(26) “Bukan ditambah, tapi Optimalkan Manfaat (Kontan, 28/2014)
(26a) (Penerapan alokasi anggaran pendidikan sebesar 20% dari total belanja negara) Bukan Ditambah, tapi (kita)
Optimalkan Manfaat(-nya)
(27) “Minta Dikerok, Batuk-Batuk lalu Pingsan” (JP, 2/2/2014)
(27a) (Murry) Minta Dikerok, (Dia) Batuk-Batuk, lalu (Dia) Pingsan
(28) “Tinggi tapi Kurang Berkualitas” (K, 6/2/2014)
(28a) (Pertumbuhan Ekonomi Tahun 2013) Tinggi, tapi (Pertumbuhan Itu) Kurang Berkualitas
(29) “Naik Motor, Perusak Pospol Bertubuh Tegap” (JP, 11/2/2014)
(29a) (Dia) Naik Motor, “Perusak Pospol (Itu) Bertubuh Tegap”
(30) PVMBG Nyatakan Radius 5 KM Aman Kecuali Desa Kuta Tengah” (MI, 12/2/2014)
(30a) PVMBG Nyatakan Radius 5 KM Aman Kecuali Desa Kuta Tengah (Tidak Aman)
(31) “Dulu Merugi, Kini Laba Rp. 4,1 Miliar” (JP, 10/2/2014)
(31a) Dulu (BPR BPK Boyolali) Merugi, Kini (BPR BPK Itu) Laba Rp. 4,1 Miliar
(32) “Korban Saat Bekerja Dibiayai hingga Sembuh” (K, 18/2/2014)
(32a) ‘Korban Saat Bekerja Dibiayai hingga (Mereka) Sembuh
(33) “Potensi Besar, Belum Digarap Serius” (K, 18/2/2014)
(33a) Potensi (Pariwisata Muslim) Besar, (tapi) (Potensi Itu) Belum Digarap (secara) Serius
(34) “Diperiksa 9 Jam, Dicecar 70 Pertanyaan” (JP, 25/2/2014)
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(34a) (Istri Brigadir Jenderal (Purnawirawan) Mangisi Situmorang) Diperiksa 9 Jam, (Dia) Dicecar 70 Pertanyaan
(35) “Diseret, Diikat, dan Digigit” (MI, 25/2/2014)
(35a) (H) Diseret, (Dia) Diikat dan (Dia) Digigit
(36) “Makin Bervariasi, Makin Menarik” (BI, 27/2014)
(36a) (Produk Ammi & Abi) Makin Bervariasi, (Produk Itu) Makin Menarik
Furthermore, the identification of plural level clause develops two assemblies, i.e. the amount of one adverb and two
adverbs. The plural clause which has one adverb is in the form of A (SP), SPC (example 37), A (SP), SP conj. Dan
[and] SP (38), A ((S)PC), (S)PO (39), A ((S)PC), SPO (40), A((S)P), SP (41), A((S)PA), SP (42), A ((S)P), SPC (43), C
(PS), SPA (44), A ((S)(P)O), SPO (45), A(PS), SP (46), A(SPA), SP (47), PS conj sebelum [before] (S)PO(48),
SPA((S)P)(49), A ((S) PC), SP (50), A ((S)PO), SPC (51), A((S)PC), SP (52), A ((S)PO), SP (53), A((S)P), SPC (54),
A ((S)PO), SPO (55), and (S)PA((S)PO) (56).
(37) “Persaingan Ketat, Pileg Jadi Penentu” (K,8/1/2014)
(37a) (Karena) Persaingan Ketat, Pileg Jadi Penentu
(38) Air Bah, 2 Tewas dan 27 Hilang” (K,8/1/2014)
(38a) (Karena) Air Bah, 2 (Orang) Tewas dan 27 (Orang) Hilang
(39) Melawan Arah, Mengorbankan Nyawa” (K, 29/1/2014)
(39a) (Karena) (Faisal Bustamin) Melawan Arah, (Dia) Mengorbankan Nyawa(-nya sendiri)
(40) “Terlilit Utang, Ayah Tikam Anak dan Istri” (KT, 1/2/2014)
(40a) “(Karena) (Dia) Terlilit Utang, Ayah Tikam Anak dan Istri”
(41) “Tidak Banyak Kemajuan, Brahimi Kecewa” (K, 29/1/2014)
(41a) “(Karena) (Pertemuan Itu) Tidak Banyak Kemajuan, Brahimi Kecewa
(42) “Pulang dari Malaysia, Mantan TKI Dibius” (JP, 1/2/2014)
(42a) (Setelah) (dia) Pulang dari Malaysia, Mantan TKI (Itu) Dibius
(43) “Tak Bisa Melaut, Nelayan Terjerat Rentenir” (KT, 3/2/2014)
(43a) (Karena) (Mereka) Tak Bisa Melaut, Nelayan Terjerat Rentenir
(44) “Ada Awan Panas, Pengungsi Takut Pulang” (MI, 3/2/2014)
(44a) (Karena) Ada Awan Panas, Pengungsi Takut Pulang
(45) “Setelah Chaeri, KPK Intai Aset Atut” (KT, 6/2/2014)
(45a) Setelah (KPK) (intai) (Aset) Chaeri, KPK Intai Aset Atut
(46) “Tak Ada Perbaikan, Atap SD Runtuh” (JP, 5/2/2014)
(46a) (Karena) Tak Ada Perbaikan (Atap SD), Atap SD (Itu) Runtuh
(47) “Polisi Saling Baku Tembak di Angkot, Seorang Terkapar” (JP, 18/2/2014)
(47a) (Karena) Polisi Saling Baku Tembak di Angkot, Seorang Terkapar”
(48) “Ada Keluhan sebelum Beri Pujian” (JP,10/2/2014)
(48a) Ada Keluhan (SBY) sebelum (Dia) Beri Pujian
(49) “Kijang KBS Mati karena Kembung” (KT, 14/2/2014)
(49a) Kijang KBS Mati karena (Binatang Itu) Kembung
(50) “Dicegah KPK, Sutan Pasrah” (R, 16/2/2014)
(50a) (Karena) (Sutan) Dicegah KPK, Sutan Pasrah
(51) “Usir Demonstran, Polisi Tewas Tertembak” (JP, 19/2/2014)
(51a) (Karena) (Mereka) (MeN-)Usir Demonstran, Polisi Tewas Tertembak
(52) “Dituduh Terima Rp. 62,7 Miliar, Akil Geram” (BI, 20/2/2014)
(52a) (Karena) (Dia) Dituduh Terima Rp 62,7 Miliar, Akil Geram”
(53) “Beri Keterangan Palsu, Ajudan Rusli Ditahan” (K, 22/2/2014)
(53a) (Karena) (Dia) Beri Keterangan Palsu, Ajudan Rusli Ditahan
(54) “Mual-mual, Adik Atut Batal Disidang” (KT, 25/2/2014)
(54a) (Karena) (dia) Mual-mual, Adik Atut Batal Disidang
(55) “Temui Sekjen PBB, Menlu Venezuela Bahas Demonstrasi” (KT, 4/3/2014)
(55a) (Setelah) (dia) Temui Sekjen PBB, Menlu Venezuela (Itu) Bahas Demonstrasi”
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(56) “Tewas karena Bersihkan Abu Kelud” (JP, 19/2/2014)
(56a) “(Saji) Tewas karena (Dia) (MeN) Bersihkan Abu Kelud”
The patterns are K1(SP), SPK2 (example 57), K(S)P, K(S)PO (58), K 1((S)P(Pel)), SPK2 (59), K 1((S)P(Pel)), SPK2
(60), K 1((S)P(Pel)), SPK2 (61), K1(SPO), SPK2 (62), K(S)P, K(S)PPel (63), K1(S)P(O), dan (S)PK2 (64).
(57) “Banjir Surut, Pengungsi Pulang ke Rumah” (R, 1/2/2014)
(57a) (Setelah) Banjir Surut, Pengungsi Pulang ke Rumah
(58) “Dulu Meratap, Sekarang Pasang Spanduk Selamat Datang Banjir” (JP, 4/2/2014)
(58a) Dulu (Warga Bojonegoro) Meratap, Sekarang (Mereka) Pasang Spanduk Selamat Datang Banjir
(59) “Tergenang, Jalan Terputus Dua Bulan” (JP, 6/2/2014)
(59a) (Karena) (Jalan) Tergenang (Air), Jalan Terputus Dua Bulan
(60) “Karena Kelaparan Mie Disantap tanpa Dimasak” (MI, 19/2/2014)
(61) “Rumah Rusak, Korban Banjir Tinggal di Emperan” (JP, 11/2/2014)
(61a) (Karena) Rumah Rusak, Korban Banjir Tinggal di Emperan
(62) “Idham Tak Bawa Dokumen Asli, Pemeriksaan Ditunda Lagi” (KT, 25/2/2014)
(62a) “(Karena) Idham Tak Bawa Dokumen Asli, Pemeriksaan(-nya) Ditunda Lagi”
(63) “Dulu Merugi, Kini Laba Rp. 4,1 Miliar” (JP, 10/2/2014)
(63a) Dulu (BPR BKK Boyolali) Merugi, Kini (BPR Itu) Laba Rp 4,1 Miliar
(64) “9 Jam Menunggu, Ditemui 10 Menit” (KT, 18/2/2014)
(64a) (Selama) 9 Jam (Narti) Menunggu, (Dia) Ditemui (Selama) 10 Menit
3.8 Sentence Modus
The discourse of a news brings out a main function: communicative function. It means the delivering of information
from the writer to the reader. Besides declarative function, there are two other kinds of modus: command (1) and
question (2).
(1) “Pertimbangkan PT di Bawah Kemristek” (K, 8/2/2014)
(2) “Doping?” (KT, 10/12/2014)
The superiority of commanding is that the title directly gives higher understanding if it is compared to the indirect
command, since it covers many speakers from any realm. An indirect command needs sensitivity. Since, it aims at
covering many readers, therefore, an indirect command is less risky in presenting the message.
The finding shows that the title is developed by the module of question (example 2). Towards the uncertain news, a
journalist must be careful in reporting it by selecting a question sentence. It is based on the content of the news that “the
result of doping test has not been released” as explained in the title of the news, such as (2a).
(2a) “Dari lima yang dipilih untuk melakukan tes doping, hanya saya yang harus memberikan sampel urine dan
darah.Sedikit aneh, bukan?” begitu Messi menuliskan di akun Instagram. ....
”Ada apa dengan Messi? Apakah ini hubungannya dengan kehebatannya dalam ... dia membuat hat-trick ke
gawang Espanyol. ...
”Hasil tes doping belum diketahui hasilnya. ...” (KT, 10/11/2014)
3.9 Cohesion of Title – Body of the News
It has been explained previously that the incomplete news content on the title indicates the title as the terrace of the
news. The completeness of the message is packaged in the body of the news. The following example relates to the
clarity of the news content. Title that contains incomplete information is due to the decision of pronoun. The reference
of pronoun is provided in the body of the news. Therefore, between the title and the body of the news has correlation of
reference, such as (1) – (2). The other cohesion is proved through the conjunction akhirnya [finally], such as in (3).
(1) “Mereka Berkorban Untuk Demokrasi” (K, 2/2/2014)
‘They Sacrifice for Democracy’
(2) “PakHakim, Saya sudah Renta dan Darah Tinggi” (MI, 4/2/2014)
‘Judge, I am already Old and Have High Blood Pressure’
(3) “Akhirnya, Ada Kepastian” (JP, 16/2014)
‘Finally, there is a Certainty’
The readers will rapidly identify the reference if they continue their reading to the body of the news. If the discourse is
completed with photograph, the reference refers to the source of the news in the photograph.
The election of pronoun saya [I] can juxtapose the readers to the source of the news. Otherwise, in using mereka [they]
is positioned as mediator. In the use of first person pronoun, then the existence of the reader is not seen. This variation
is important to avoid the monotony of the presentation.
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The cohesion of title-body of the news is marked by the conjunction akhirnya [finally]. It is different to the previous
titles which show the cohesion through the conjunction karena [because], setelah [after], ketika [when], or [atau], and
dan [and].
The appearance of the conjunction akhirnya [finally] showsh that the text contains the news content about the process
of an event. The report with the marker akhirnya [finally] marks the end of the process, such as the following quotation
(1a).
(1a) ”Dengan adanya kepastian kontrak, membuat lega para penggawa tim yang sudah tujuh kali juara perserikatan
tersebut. ”Kalau sudah jelas seperti ini, sebagai pemain tentu jadi lega. Ini memang yang kita harapkan sejak
dulu, ”ungkap … Tinton Suharto. ” (JP, 16/2/2014).
The writer of the news is like a story writer who presents the story continuously on the next edition. By selecting the
conjunction akhirnya, the journalist wants to explain the exhaustiveness of the news. The completeness of the
presentation becomes the demand of the readers. The conjunction akhirnya gives certainty about the end of the news,
since it is a conclusion of the written news. The title with the marker akhirnya and its synonymy (: maka, jadi, karena
itu, oleh karena itu, etc) (Sidu, 2013: 133) gives the characteristics of the existence of communication intensity between
the writer and the readers.
The syntactical characteristic which is in the form of word, phrase and clause strengthens what Sabardilla (1997),
Sumarno (2005), and Mulyati (2005) have found. From the levels, the element of the news is identified. This finding
highlights the characteristic of straight news which is unadorned and objectively presents the fact based on the element
of 5 W + 1 H.
Furthermore, the sentence modus can explain the attitude of the writer. Also, the analysis of lexicon resulted by the title
which has figurative language will be investigated several functions of title, such as giving information, influencing,
educating, etc. The investigation of title to the body of the news results the cohesion within them. The ellipsis of S on
the single or plural clause proves the correlation.
Therefore, the omission of S is not judged as divergence. This finding is different to what Sumarno (2005) has found
which judged the ellipsis as the form of discrepancy. The function of omitted S on the single clause can be tracked to
the other clauses. In addition, the constituent which is omitted on the title can be found in the body of the news. Hence,
the news content in the body of the news is proper to be built completely so that it can be positioned as the source of the
investigation of the news content.
This current study can be compared to the previous investigations, such as Sabardila (1997), Sumarno (2005), and
Mulyati (2005). Sabardila (1997) utilized the limited newspapers. Further, Sabardila’s (1997) findings did not identify
the source of the news and the utterance resulted. Therefore, her investigation did not result any assessment related ti
the title which is based on the fact or opinion and the ideology of the newspaper(s). Sabardila’s (2016) findings, as has
been written in this article, are based on the five newspapers as the data source. Moreover, it identifies the linguistic
form (title and the structure of the discourse of the news), the position of the news, and the any factors which
foreground the differences of the packaging of the news content.
Sumarno (2005) found the structure of the clause which contained the ellipsis which was judged as the form of
alteration, syntactical instrument, and the existence of the use of the short words. Then, Sabardila’s (2016) research
varies on the structure of the clause since the number of the data which are analyzed. The instrument of the syntax, such
as topicalization, is revealed through the investigation of Sabardila (2016).
Mulyati (2005) found the limited levels (phrase, clause, and sentence) and the ellipsis of affix me(N)- and the phrase.
Several research findings in Mulyati (2005) are such as phrases, clauses, and sentences (: simple sentence and the
complex sentence). This is in accordance to what had been found by Sabardila (1997) and Sumarno (2005). Mulyati’s
(2005) research about the ellipsis was only in the area of the affix me(N)-, words, or the more simple phrases if it is
compared to Sumarno (2005) since the ellipsis in his research found the ellipsis in the area of clause. Sabardila (2016) is
in the form of the straight news, process of the title formation, and the position of the title in the body of the news, the
ellipsis of minor clause and main clause, and the title contained in the important message or just the front cover of the
news. Subsequently, the process of the title formation is based on the level of the phonology, morphology, and word,
semantic, and discourse.
4. Conclusion
JP, K, KT, MI, and R have shown the linguistic form comprehensively: from phonological to the discourse.
Furthermore, they have exposed the sentence modus and cohesion device between the title and the body of the news. It
is due to the fulfillment of any functions, such as giving information, persuading, keeping the relationship between the
journalist and the reader, or giving response to the phenomenon. The variation of the title is inclined to use clause,
whether single or plural clause. The level of clause can give clarity about the content of the news.
The title of the news gives focus on the element of what. It can be explained from the description of the variation of
clause, whether single or plural clause that ellipses the subject. However, the pattern of single clause can be an option in
arranging the title of the news. By its simplicity, the content of the news can be understood easily by the readers.
Furthermore, the presenter of the news can touch it with the sense of humor, so the thoughtful news content can be
delivered lightly.
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The Impact of ESA Elements on Motivation of EFL Learners

to Speak: A Case of Iranian EFL Learners
Hooshang Khoshsima
Chabahar Maritime University, Chabahar, Iran
E-mail: khoshsima2002@yahoo.com
Hadi Shokri (Corresponding author)

Chabahar Maritime University, Chabahar, Iran
E-mail: hadishokri2012@gmail.com

Abstract
Implementing a best course of action to boost English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ motivation to speak has
been a controversial issue among EFL instructors. The present study aims to investigate the probable impact of
Harmer’s ESA (Engagement, Study, and Activate) elements implementation on motivation of EFL learners to speak. To
meet this objective, first, the pre-treatment questionnaire was delivered to 15 EFL learners at the beginning of the term
to measure ‘input motivation’. After collecting information from the pre-treatment questionnaire, the students were
taught for nearly two months by applying ESA elements, and then the post-treatment questionnaire was given to the
same students to gather information of students’ motivation changes, students’ attitudes towards techniques and
activities applied by teachers and their preferences. Additionally, to triangulate the results, a Pearson product-moment
correlation coefficient was run to see if there is any relationship between the learners’ speaking performance and their
motivation to speak. In sum, the results of the questionnaires and correlation analysis proved that the treatment of the
learners via ESA approach was quite influential in boosting EFL learners’ motivation to speak. It is expected that the
findings of the study may significantly contribute to work of EFL teachers, EFL learners, policy makers, supervisors
and researchers.
Keywords: ESA Elements, Motivation, Speaking
1. Introduction
`Motivation is, without question, the most complex and challenging issue facing teachers today.'
(Cited in Dornyei, Z, 2001, p. 1).
The urge to engage learners in learning process seems indispensable and the fact that learner engagement is regarded as
intrinsic motivation cannot be taken for granted. Consequently, learner engagement and L2 success is affected by many
factors such as age, personality, aptitude, motivation and so on. Among these factors, motivation plays a crucial role
(Ellis 1994). For this reason, it was essential to consider learner motivation as an argumentative issue in the present
study. The significance of the studies carried out in this field shows the sheer importance of motivation on success or
failure of learners involved in the process of language learning.
Multitudinous studies and experiments with regard to human learning have proven that motivation is pivotal to learning
in general (Deci 1975, Maslow 1970 and Binalet, C. B., & Guerra, J. M. 2014). Additionally, Gardner and Lambert
(1972) state various studies have found that motivation is very strongly interrelated with learner success and
achievement in the process of language learning. However, it remains questionable as to whether motivation is the
cause of the learner success or achievement or vice versa. Likewise, it should be clarified which of them is the result of
the other. Ur, P (1991) holds that the uncertainty as to which, motivation or success, comes first does not entail any
inadequacy or difficulty in the process of teaching. This means that among other activities done in increasing learner
motivation, strategies should have high priority.
Numerous studies and EFL instructors utilize approaches and strategies to boost learners’ motivation to speak.
However, the problems are not alleviated yet and most of them are inadequate and are unable to meet the learners’
needs. After the implementation of these methods and strategies, it is made clear that they cannot raise learners’
motivation and engagement emotionally, which are the core characteristics of helping the learners to boost their
speaking skill. According to what has been stated above, it worth keeping in mind that in the process of being engaged
in interactions, especially in warm up and presentation process, learners show factors which contribute to their success
IJALEL 6(6):144-157, 2017 145
or failure in language learning. Hence, for teaching and learning speaking skill, the great importance of learner
engagement and learner motivation is not an exception and cannot be taken for granted. As a whole, this study is
significant owing to the fact that it makes a lot of effort to fill a gap in the field of language teaching and learning and
rule out the former studies shortcomings by taking into account student motivation through Harmer’s ESA elements.
2.1 Elements for Successful Language Learning
The present language pedagogy practice commonly attempts to cover most of the language teaching elements and
tenets. Currently, the language teaching practice frequently gives the learners the opportunity to think about how a piece
of conversation is carried out, while at the same time providing for language use in communicative activities. In order to
furnish learners with opportunities to use the language more freely, language experts select some parts of the language
best elements from a number of different ideas and methods (Harmer 2007). Taking into account the fact that learners
need exposure, motivation and opportunities for language use, Harmer (2007) suggests that most teaching sequences
need to have certain features or elements. These elements are engage, study and activate.
2.1.1 Engage
The principal objective of engagement phase requires teachers to elicit learner’s curiosity, engagement, attention,
emotion and interests. In this phase, teachers can utilize a variety of warm up activities including games, interesting
anecdotes, storytelling, recordings, picture descriptions etc. Harmers (2007) state that “unless students are emotionally
engaged with what is going on, their learning will be less effective” (p.66).
2.1.1.1 Student engagement
Student engagement is the current and developmental field of study and the finding are quite challenging. Shulman
(2002) stresses on the nature of student engagement and holds that “learning begins with student engagement” (p.37). In
any learning situation, specifically in classroom setting, any achievement without considering learner engagement
would lead to incomplete conclusions or results. Williams and Milton (2009) divide student engagement into three
levels: behavioral engagement, emotional engagement and cognitive engagement.
The focal attention of behavioral engagement is principally on the tenet of participation and involvement of learners in
social and academic activities required for achieving positive outcomes.
Emotional engagement refers to the learner’s reaction toward the teacher, classmate and the academic course. Learners
participating in class exhibit positive and sometimes negative attitude or reaction. These emotions include: boredom,
happiness, interest, anxiety, stress, etc.
Cognitive engagement is the amount of time, effort, desire, attentiveness and strategies exercised and applied by
learners required for comprehension of complex ideas in carrying out tasks.
Prince (2004) believes that student engagement is associated with positive learning outcomes. In the same manner,
Kinzi (2010) describes the association between student engagement and academic success as follow:
A consequential body of research implies that once students begin studying at a college or university a key factor as to
whether they will put considerable amount of effort and strive to participate in educationally meaningful activities is
largely dependent upon the extent to which they are engaged in academically well-structured environments. Quite
simply, to make certain how many students graduate and make the most of their undergraduate and postgraduate
education, university faculties need to first assure the learning environment offer prolific and educationally mindful
opportunities and subsequently concentrate precisely on promoting student engagement.
Hughes and Pace (2003) studies show that the reason why most learners do not attend or leave university prematurely is
that they are less engaged than their peers. Additionally, Kuh (2001) holds that “student engagement pictures both time
and effort students put in educationally meaningful activities and the potential energy language departments allocate
using productive educational rehearsals.
2.1.1.2 Student Engagement, Motivation and Active Learning
Elizabeth F. Barkley (2010) points out that motivation and active learning elements of student engagement are both
required for meaningful learning. To make her saying understandable, she gives the following example:
A classroom which is full of exuberant, interested and motivated learners is fantastic, but it seems educationally
pointless if the exuberance does not lead to active learning. On the contrary, students who are resolutely engaged in the
process of learning but do so unwillingly and rancorously are not engaged. She further points out that student
engagement is the product of motivation and active learning. To make it more clearly understood, she states that student
engagement does not occur if either element is missing. That is, it does not result from one another, but rather is
generated in the space that resides in the overlap of motivation and active learning.
According to the abovementioned statements, Elizabeth F. Barkley (2010) proposes a definition within the context of a
college classroom and points out that “student engagement is a process and a product that is experienced on a
continuum and result from synergistic interaction between motivation and active learning” (p.8). Bonwell and Eison
(1991) define active learning as “doing what we think and thinking about what we are doing” (cited in Elizabeth,
Barkley, p.6). Elizabeth, F. Barkley (2010) indicates that active learning is the total active engagement of mind. Its
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features involve learners’ dynamic participation in the process of learning. Other features include monitoring and
reflection on the tasks and discussions they are engaged in.
2.1.2 Study
The study phase of ESA mainly focuses on language usage. The tasks at this phase center on forms of the language and
the information about how it is formed. This phase entails focus on learner-led grammar discovery, eliciting grammar
from learners rather than teacher-led presentations. These may include specific intonation patterns, a specific relative
clause or the way a lexical phrase is made or used (Harmer, 2007).
2.1.3 Activate
Regarding activate phase of ESA, learners are engaged in more communicative and meaning-focused tasks. As an
example, communicative tasks are particularly designed to activate the learners’ language competence (Harmer, 2007).
He believes that the more learners have chances to activate the several elements of language they have kept in their
minds, the more autonomous their use of these elements would be. Correspondingly, learners regularly become
autonomous language learners and language users. It means that they can use words and phrases systematically and
fluently without giving it much thought. Harmer believes that successful language learning is heavily grounded on a
sensible integration of subconscious acquisition of language. Activation is the goal of most classroom teachers. Since it
gives information about the learners learning process and the teacher can discover what the students’ problems are and
can give necessary remedial work. A universally used activation technique in teaching is questioning. This technique is
mainly used within the Initiation-Response-Feedback pattern. Some may ask the reasons why a teacher should ask
question in the classroom. Ur, P (1991, P.229) provides various reasons of asking questions used in activating learners’
knowledge:
 To provide a model for language or thinking.
 To find out something from the learners (fact, idea, opinion).
 To check or test understanding, knowledge or skill.
 To get learners to be active in their learning.
 To draw attention to the theme being acquired.
 To provide weak learners with an opportunity to participate.
 To encourage self-expression.
 To get learners to review and practice previously learned material.
Another technique used in activating learners’ language knowledge which is a more valuable tool in oral fluency work
is called ‘group work’. In this type of activity learners carry out a learning task through a group work activity. Ur,
Penny (1991) hold that this type of activity in contrast to other activities like full-class size activity has got several
advantageous; he states that learners in class split into five groups get five times as many chances to speak.
2.2 Motivation
Motivation as an abstract term has no definite definition on its own. Therefore, it is more easy and convenient to think
of it in terms of learner motivation. Ur, P (1991) says that motivated learners are those who are willing or more eager to
invest time and effort to learn new things and progress. Dornyei, Z and Ushioda, E (2011) say that ‘the word motivation
stems from the Latin verb movere holding the sense of ‘to move’. They also state it can be regarded as what encourages
a student to make certain choices, to get involved in action, to put high effort and perseverance in action” (p. 3).
Dornyei and Otto (1998) define motivation in a general sense as:
“the dynamically changing cumulative arousal in a person that initiates, directs, coordinates, amplifies, terminates and
evaluates the cognitive and motor processes whereby initial wishes and desires are selected, prioritized,
operationalized and (successfully or unsuccessfully) acted out (p.65).
Similarly, Brophy (2004) gives another distinctive definition of motivation in the classroom setting, he indicates that
motivation in the classroom is “the level of enthusiasm and the degree to which students invest attention and effort in
learning” (p.4).
2.2.1 Motivation in Classroom Setting
Lightbown and Spada (1999) assert that teachers can make a positive contribution to learners’ motivation to learn by
making their classroom a place where they enjoy attending, because the classroom’s content is more fun, interesting and
relevant to their age and level of their capabilities. In this case, their learning goals are made challenging and clear.
Moreover, this process will make the classroom atmosphere supportive and nonthreatening. Crookes and Schmit
(1991) point out some pedagogical practices for teachers to motivate students in classroom setting:
 Motivating students into the lesson: At the opening stages of lessons, remark teachers make about approaching
activities can result in higher levels of enthusiasm on the part of the students.
 Modifying the activities, tasks and materials: Lessons which invariably comprise of the same procedures, patterns
and format commonly result in a decrease in consideration and an increase in wearisomeness. Modifying the
activities, tasks, and materials can assist to shun this and increase students’ interest to a great extent.
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 Employing co-operative instead of competitive goals: Co- operative learning activities involve activities in which
students have to work together so as to complete a task or find a solution to the problem. These techniques will
promote the self- confidence of students, especially the weak students.
Although practices are effective techniques in motivating students, there are some students who are less engaged and
are unwilling to speak up in the class. Tsui (1996) found out five main factors affecting the unwillingness of the learners
to speak up in class:
 learners’ perceived low proficiency in English
 learners’ apprehensiveness of mistakes and contempt
 instructors’ intolerance of unresponsiveness
 uneven allocation of turns
 incomprehensible input
(Cited in Nunan, 1999, p. 234)
3. Methodology
In order to determine learners’ motivation, quantitative method was utilized. The data collected for the study come from
15 learners participating in the experimental group answering the pre-treatment questionnaire and the same 15 learners
participating in the same group answering the post-treatment questionnaire. In this process, each person’s answers in the
pre-treatment questionnaire will be differentiated with the same person’s answers in the post-treatment questionnaire.
The purpose of distributing these questionnaires is to make sure whether application of ESA approach on tasks is
helpful in developing EFL learners’ motivation to speak.
Additionally, -in order to triangulate the results of the study- the correlation was run to see whether there is a
relationship between the method used and motivation of learners to speak. Correspondingly, after the treatment students
were given a First Certificate in English (FCE) speaking test to examine if there is any relationship between the
learners’ speaking performance and their motivation to speak.
As noted earlier, the design of the study is quantitative in nature and seeks to find out whether implementation of ESA
elements is helpful in improving motivation of EFL learners to speak or not.
3.1 Subjects
In this study, 15 participants both male and female were chosen from Chabahar Maritime University majoring in
English translation. They had the same amount of exposure to English language learning. All of the subjects are
studying English as L2 language and are native speakers of Farsi. Learners received two sessions of study every week;
each session lasted 40 minutes for nearly 12 sessions.
3.2 Data Collection Instrument
For the purpose of the study, before and after the experiment, the researcher distributed motivation questionnaires to the
learners in experimental group to make certain how much the techniques applied in the class were useful in affecting
their motivation to learn.
In conducting the study, the following instruments were used: a pre-post treatment survey questionnaire given to the
experimental group, an FCE speaking test taken from Official Examination Papers from University of Cambridge
English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Examinations (2008).
3.2.1 Pre-treatment Questionnaire
The pre-treatment questionnaire items were taken from LAN (2008) and it had two main parts with 13 questions. Part
one which is the main focus of the study included their opinions about their motivation in learning speaking English.
Students’ motivation was measured with their aptitude, interest, attitude, desire and effort in learning. Part three
attempted to collect the main information about the factors affecting learner motivation in learning speaking English.
3.2.2 Post-treatment Questionnaire
Post-treatment questionnaire comprised 15 questions which were divided into two parts. Part I included 10 questions
which would gather information about students’ motivation alteration after the implementation of ESA approach in
mastering the EFL learners speaking skill. Part II intended to collect information about teacher’s implemented activities
in teaching speaking English and students’ preference of these activities.
3.3 Validity and Reliability of the Questionnaire
The main aim of the study is to determine the extent of ESA elements implementation effect on EFL learner’s
motivation to speak. Correspondingly, in order to meet the objectives of the study prior to the data collection process,
the questionnaire proposed was taken from LAN, L. T. (2008). The adapted questionnaire was given to two teaching
English as a foreign language (TEFL) instructors in Chabahar Maritime University to evaluate the items analytically in
terms of content validity, face validity, comprehensibility of the items and if they fit to measure the objectives of the
study.
Consequently, in order to check the internal consistency of the questionnaire results, a pilot study was conducted in
Tehran language school. The participants involved in the pilot study were not included in the sample during the
IJALEL 6(6):144-157, 2017 148
administration of the final form of the questionnaire. The reliability of the test instrument was tested by Cronbach alpha
method. The calculated Cronbach alpha of the test instruments were 0.71. Thus, the instruments were found to be
reliable to collect data for the main study.
3.4 Procedures
The procedure involved in conduction of this study attempts to see whether utilization of ESA elements in tasks have
significant effect on improving motivation of Iranian EFL learners to speak. To meet this objective, first, the pre-
treatment questionnaire was delivered to students of experimental group at the beginning of the term to measure ‘input
motivation’. After collecting information from the pre-questionnaire, the teacher taught the students for nearly two
months with applying ESA elements on tasks involved in teaching of speaking, and then the post-questionnaire was
given to the same students to gather information of students’ motivation changes, students’ attitudes towards techniques
and activities applied by teachers and their preferences. To analyze the collected data, frequency of both pre and post
treatment questionnaire were differentiated to see whether the treatment has improved their motivation or not.
Significantly, in order to have a better differentiation and analyze carefully the motivation of the EFL learners, a
Pearson’s Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient (PPMCC) between the sores of the learners speaking performance
and post-treatment questionnaire motivation was run to see any significant improvement.
4. Data Analysis
In order to analyze the data, a pre-treatment questionnaire was handed out among the students before the treatment and
the results were shown using the descriptive method and frequencies, then after the treatment the student were given a
post-treatment questionnaire and the data were shown through the descriptive method and frequencies as well to see any
improvement caused by the treatment. The date analysis concerning this research involves 3 stages of conduction. In the
first stage, both pre-treatment and post-treatment results are analyzed using frequencies. In the second stage, students
speaking performance and students post-treatment questionnaire scores are analyzed to see if the scores of the both tests
are reliable to be used in the study. In the third stage, a correlation between the speaking performance scores and the
same students posttreatment questionnaire scores was run too see the extent to which they are relevant or correlate.
4.1 Results from Student’s Pre-treatment Questionnaire
In order to see if the application of ESA elements on tasks has significant effect on motivation of learners to speak, the
study used two types of questionnaire. The first one was handed out at the outset of the study before the treatment and
second one after the treatment. The pre-treatment questionnaire shows the detailed motivation of learners to speak
before the treatment. The data gathered are presented using frequency of the learners.
4.1.1 Students’ motivation in learning speaking English
Q1. Why do you want to learn English speaking?
Students who learn to speak English have distinct types of motivation which vary among them. They include:
integrative, instrumental, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The table below shows the students motivation type.
Table 4.1 Types of motivation

Reasons Students Percentage
To get higher marks 3 20%
Interest in English language, people and culture 4 27%
To sing and listen to English songs 5 33%
For the future job 11 73%
To study abroad 6 40%
Table 4.1 reveals that most of the students wanted to learn English for their future job. That is, 73% of the students have
instrumental motivation, though the reason can be the fact that they are all students of English translation. Nearly 40%
of the students affirmed that they want to learn English in order to be able to get the opportunity to study abroad. Only
about 20% of the respondents claimed that they study English to get higher marks.
4.1.2 Students’ Opinions on Learning Speaking English
Q2. How is speaking skill important to you?
High percentage of students (60%) responded that speaking was quite important. The reason seems that since they are
students of English translation and as noted earlier they are extrinsically motivated. That is, they study to get future
jobs. Only about 27% of the respondents considered speaking skill rather important and 13% of the students claimed the
significance speaking skill as normal.
Q3. How is your aptitude to learn speaking English?
The learner’s responses to their estimated aptitude were quite interesting. 47% of the responses confirmed that the
student’s aptitude level is ok. Nearly about 27% of the respondents claimed that their aptitude level is high, while only
about 20% considered their aptitude level as low. Considering the frequencies, it can be deduced that learner’s aptitude
to learn speaking English is quite normal.
IJALEL 6(6):144-157, 2017 149
Q4. How is your attitude to learn English speaking?
The student’s responses are the strongest proof to state that most of the learners’ attitude toward learning to speak
English is quite normal. Having the abovementioned claim in mind, the frequency of the students who confirmed that
they have very high opinion of learning to speak English is 20% and likewise 20% of them claimed high as well. On the
other hand, 40% percent claimed that their attitude is ok and another 20%% of the learners claimed they have a low
opinion of learning to speak English. Therefore, it can be claimed for sure that the students’ attitude toward learning
speaking English is normal.
Q5. How is your effort in learning speaking?
Regarding the fact that learners confirmed that they have a positive high opinion of the learning speaking, but their
effort in learning speaking did not match their attitude. 40% of the participants agreed that their effort in learning
speaking is ok. And nearly about 27% of confirmed that they have a high tendency to put effort in learning to speak.
20% of the respondents argued that they put a very high effort in learning speaking and only 13% showed low
motivation to put effort in learning speaking.
Q6. How is your desire to learn English speaking?
In this case, 60% of the respondents argued that they have a very high desire to learn to speak English. 27% had high
desire and only 13% claimed ok. Therefore, it can be deduced that they need to put an effort in learning to speak
fluently.
Q7. How much do you feel interested in speaking English in class?
The students’ answers reveal that most of them are very eager to express their ideas in class. That is, 47% had high
interest and 40% of them had rather preferred to speak and only 13% showed normal interest in speaking in class. And
none of them had ticked little or no interest to express themselves.
Q8. How often do you speak English in English class time?
The frequency with which students speak in class time with the frequency of their interest depicts the fact that although
they are highly interested in speaking in class, they are given less time or opportunity to express them. The reason may
determine the fact that that they are less motivated or engaged in tasks or activities carried out in class time during their
speaking course. The frequency of students who always spoke in class time was 13%, those who usually spoke
responded as 20%, 40% responded sometimes and 26% rarely spoke in class time.
4.1.3. Factors Making Students Reluctant to Speak English in Class
Q9. Do you feel reluctant to speak English in class?
Students’ willingness to speak in class was quite interesting, since they were very eager to express themselves freely
without any difficulties. 33% said that they like English very much. 33% other said that they were willing to speak, 20%
responded sometimes and the other 13% responded that they are often unwilling to speak.
Q10. What do you think about the topics discussed in the class?
There is a very strong correlation with students’ willingness as well as interest and the topics discussed in the
classroom. If the students are not interested in the topics, most probably they are not willing to speak up in class time.
The frequency of the responses denotes that 33% of the students found the discussed topics in class boring. 27% said
that the topics were ok. 20% of them found interesting and the other 20% were very interested in the topics.
Q11. What do you think about speaking tasks done in the class?
Speaking tasks are among the factors which give variety to the teaching speaking class. Therefore, the teacher must use
a wide variety of tasks and activities to engage or sometimes get them motivated throughout the whole process of
teaching. It can also be perceived that tasks play a major factor in getting the students engaged, interested, willing and
motivated. Likewise the teachers must rough tune the task difficulty with the students’ level so as not to bore or make
them uninterested in the activities of the task. 47% said that the tasks’ difficulty were ok. 40% claimed difficult. 13%
responded as too difficult and 13% asserted that the tasks very easy to carry out. Therefore, most of the students
confirmed that the tasks done in their class was ok.
4.1.4 Factors Affecting Students’ Motivation in Learning Speaking English
Q12. Which of the following factors make you reluctant to speak English in class?
There are quite unlimited factors that can contribute to the student’s unwillingness to speak. They may range from the
learner and teacher factors to teaching learning conditions. Herby, only the teacher and learner factors will be examined.
Table below depict the frequency of the factor which contributed to the students unwillingness to speak English in class.
Table 4.2 Factors making students reluctant to speak English in class

Factors Students Percentage
Fear of mistakes and derision 10 67%
Low proficiency in English 6 40%
Being not accustomed to speaking English in class 4 27%
IJALEL 6(6):144-157, 2017 150
Uneven allocation of turns 3 20%
Teacher’s boring teaching 8 53%
Teacher’s intolerance of silence 4 27%
The table 4.2 represents the reasons that contribute their unwillingness to speak. The first and foremost significant
factor which must be emphasized is their fear of mistakes and derision. 67% of the respondents claimed that they
wanted to speak, but they feared of making mistakes and get ridiculed. The second factor shows that most of the
students did not approve their teacher’s method of teaching. This may denote the fact that the teachers must use games,
tasks, activities, variety of teaching techniques and methods in their classroom. 53% of the students claimed that their
teachers boring teaching resulted in their unwillingness. As a concluding remark, it is made clear that both the teacher
and learner factor contribute to the learners speaking unwillingness process. Therefore, changes need to be applied for
both the teacher and learners. The teachers must alter their teaching process and the learners must alter the way they
precede learning to speak.
Q13. Which do you think often prevents your speaking English process?
Table 4.3 Factors preventing students’ speaking process
Factors Students Percentage
Unable to find words or structures 9 60%
Unable to find ideas 8 53%
Teacher’s unenthusiasm 3 20%
Teacher’s interruption or anger 4 27%
Too much teacher’s talking time 5 33%
Perceived from the table, it can be argued that most of the learners, which mean 60%, are unable to find words or
structures to get their message crossed. Now, it can be claimed that not only teachers should provide the learners with
each lessons new words and structures, but also they obliged to teach and present some other simple words and fixed
phrases that can assist learners to have more information about the topic and the task they are going to express by
words. Another factor which seems to be rooted in their background knowledge is the extent to which they cannot find
ideas. Therefore the topics discussed in the classroom must be made according to the learners’ interest and need.
In summary, the results and findings of the pre-treatment questionnaire reveal that student’s motivation to speak English
was ok. Clearly, some of them were highly motivated and put effort and time in their learning process. These students
were very conscious about their learning process and controlled all the negative factors that can inhibit their speaking
process. On the other hand, most of the student’s responses denoted the fact that the teachers are responsible for their
learning speaking process. Consequently, quite a large number of students were reluctant to speak English in class time.
Therefore, in order to get the learners more interested, willing and motivated to speak English, students were instructed
a two month period teaching. They were taught by applying Engage, Study and Activate (ESA) elements on tasks in
mastering their speaking skill. It was claimed that this type of treatment would boost their speaking skill proficiency.
Hopefully, the results of the post-treatment questionnaire revealed some positive results. That is, this type of instruction
encouraged learners to speak rather fluently in class.
4.2 Results from Student’s Post-treatment Questionnaire
After concluding the results of the student’s pre-treatment questionnaire, the students were instructed in a two month
period through applying ESA elements in increasing their motivation to speak up in the class. Then, when the treatment
was over, they were given a post-treatment questionnaire to estimate their increase in their motivation to speak. The
post-treatment questionnaire is divided into two parts. The first part investigates student’s motivation in learning
speaking English. And the second part is solely dedicated to investigate the factors that can contribute to the learner’s
motivation as well as their attitude toward the techniques and the strategies applied by the teacher.
4.2.1 Student’s Motivation in Learning Speaking English
Q1. How is speaking skill important to you?
After the treatment, the number of learners who claimed that speaking skill was important increased from 60% to 73%.
However, the percentage of students who considered speaking skill as normal decreased to 7%. Therefore, most of the
students affirmed the significant role of speaking as the prerequisite to their future success in language learning.
Q2. How is your aptitude to learn speaking English?
Surprisingly, the number of students who did not trust in their full potential in learning speaking English before the
treatment increased after the treatment. The students who responded with very high aptitude increased from 7% to 13%.
Likewise, the students who chose high aptitude also increased from 27% to 47% which shows 20% increase in their
aptitude level. Accordingly, students who did not believe in their capability to learn speaking English decreased from
20% to 7% which shows that 13% of the students trusted in their ability to learn speaking English after the treatment.
Q3. How is your attitude to learn speaking English?
IJALEL 6(6):144-157, 2017 151
Students’ stance or feeling toward learning to speak English was quite normal before the treatment. But, after the
treatment their position has changed significantly. The students’ attitude toward learning to speak which was normal
decreased from 40% to 27% while the students with high attitude increased from 20% to 33%.
Q4. How is your effort in learning speaking English?

In terms of endeavor, before the treatment learners attempt to learn speaking was very normal. To a greater extent, it
can be deduced from the first question of pre-treatment questionnaire about their motivation that their effort to learn to
speak English has much common with their instrumental motivation to get a better future job. Noticeably, after the
treatment there was an increase in the frequency of the responses with high effort. It increased from 27% to 33% which
shows that students showed better eagerness in exerting more energy in approaching their schoolwork speaking tasks.
As a concluding remark of this question, it seems needless to state that student engagement in tasks significantly has
boosted their interpersonal relationships.
Q5. How is your desire to learn speaking English?
When it comes to students’ inclination and craving to speak up in class, most of them are very eager to show up and
express their ideas, opinions, and feelings. Before the treatment, 60% of the learners had a very high desire to learn
speaking English and stunningly none of them showed lack desire to speak up in class time. In similar fashion, after the
treatment there was a 13% increase in their longing to learn speaking English with very high desire.
Q6. How much do you feel interested in speaking English in class?
It seems indispensable to state that student’s interest in speaking English is relevant to their desire to learn speaking
English. With regard to the twelfth question of the pre-treatment questionnaire, 53% of the students claimed that their
boredom was the result of the teacher’s boring teaching. However, students’ with very interest in speaking English in
class increased from 47% to 53%. In contrast, there was a 6% decrease from 13% to 7% with regard to students whose
interest was normal.
Q7. How often do you speak English in English class time?
It is undeniable to assert that alterations in students’ interest and desire would lead to the alterations in students’
engagement in class discussion. The frequency of learners who never participated in class discussion, reduced to 13%
from 26% to 13%. On the contrary, the number students who usually were engaged in class discussion increased
noticeably. This alteration increased from 20% to 40%. In addition, the changes also were applied to the frequency of
students who claimed that they sometimes speak in class time decreased from 40% to 33%.
Q8. Do you feel reluctant to speak English in class?
Astonishingly, the number of students who were unwilling to participate in class discussion decreased dramatically after
the treatment. Before the treatment, 13% of the students claimed that they often feel reluctant to speak up in class time.
On the contrary, after the treatment none of the students were reluctant to get engaged in class discussion. Moreover,
before the treatment 33% of the learners affirmed that they like speaking English, but this percentage increased to 40%.
It would also suffice to state that there was a 14% increase in the number of students who said that they speak willingly.
Q9. What do you think about the topics discussed in the classroom?
Making recourse to the questions which estimated learners’ interest, reluctance and desire, it seems logical to hold that
the said factors have much in common with the topics discussed in class. There was a meaningful change in the
students’ responses. Before the treatment, 33% found the discussed topics in class boring. On the other hand, after the
treatment this percentage decreased to 13%. Besides, the number of respondents who were very interested in the topics
increased from 20% to 27%. Likewise, students who found the topics interesting increased from 20%33%.
Q10. What do you think about speaking tasks done in the class?
The number of students who claimed that the speaking tasks were ok remained constant. However, 13% of the learners
found the task done in the class easy before the treatment, but after the treatment 20% claimed that the tasks were easy.
Furthermore, before the study, 26% of the students found the tasks done in their speaking classroom difficult. However,
this number decreased to 13% after the treatment.
4.2.2 Factors Increase Students’ Motivation in Speaking English
Q11. What results have you achieved through the recent lessons?
The findings reveal that the majority of students (53%) agreed on the fact that their speaking proficiency has increased
during the treatment course. Obviously, when the speaking tasks like discussion and decision, dialogues and role play,
questioning- answering and interview, picture and picture story as well as activities like pair and group work were
applied, their engagement required them to activate information-gap, opinion-gap and problem solving abilities which
leaded to better speaking performance of the participants. As a result, students with better performance had many
opportunities to speak up and exchange information with the weaker ones. The superiority of these tasks lies in the fact
that the practicing time and student talking time benefited student to have much opportunity to engage in the
discussions. Noticeably, this was the reason why most learners felt more self-confidant and interested in speaking
English (46%). Another contribution to this fact resulted in students’ eagerness to speak up in class (40%). And the
number of students who realized that speaking English is not difficult changed their mind in a very positive fashion,
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33% and 26% hold that their English knowledge has been broadened. Other students (13%) specified that they need
more time and instruction to improve their speaking proficiency skills.
Q12. Which of the following factors may encourage you to speak English in class?
Table 4.4 Factors encouraging students to speak
Factor Student Percentage
Interesting topics in the textbook 6 40%
Teacher’s good characteristics (enthusiasm, helpfulness, friendliness…) 5 33%
Teacher’s teaching methods 8 53%
Pleasant class atmosphere 4 27%
Various speaking activities 8 53%
High oral marks you may get 2 13%
There is no surprise that most of the students (53%) agreed on teachers teaching methods and various speaking
activities performed during the treatment. Therefore, it can be said for sure why they responded like this. More
probably, the justification accounts for their participation and engagement in tasks and activities applied by the teacher.
It would suffice that the teaching methodology applied in the classroom resolved the inadequacy of the previous studies
to a greater extent. Since in the engagement phase, the student’s total participation and involvement in tasks were made
easier by holding discussion activities and so on. Likewise, in the study phase, students’ accuracy was proofread by
performing inductive and discovery activities designed by the teacher by making recourse to their course book. Finally,
by doing some activation tasks, like questioning, pair and group work, the teacher received feedback about how much
the students have learned and where more instruction was needed. In this case, the teacher monitored the students’
performance and corrected their errors in an unthreatening manner. The correction is done indirectly by providing a
question with a rising tone, giving two alternatives or asking their peers to correct. Most of the students get bored and
uninterested in speaking English when they find the topics boring. As a result, teachers should make use of meaningful
and authentic materials to get them engaged and interested in the topic. Besides, the teachers must also be conscious
about selecting tasks and activities. 40% of the respondents said that interesting topics encourage them to speak English
in the classroom. Students only speak up when they feel calm and confidant. Not only they like to discuss and
communicate with their peers, but also they are eager to express their opinions and feelings with their teacher. This can
be facilitated through the teachers’ enthusiasm, helpfulness and friendliness. 33% confirmed that their teacher’s good
characteristics encouraged them to speak up in the class.
Q13. In speaking lesson, which of the following activities does your teacher often use to motivate you and which do you
feel enjoyable?
Table 4.5 Activities applied by the teachers and students participation
Speaking activities Activities applied by the Activities you enjoyed
teacher
Percentage Percentage
Completing dialogue practice 7% 27%
Role play 87% 67%
Interview 67% 47%
Games 40% 73%
Free discussion and problem solving 67% 93%
Structure-based activities 33% 27%
Making up sentences orally 20% 20%
Question and answer exchanges 80% 67%
Picture description 93% 87%
Ranking exercises 0% 0%
Story telling 0% 7%
Table 4.5 reveals that free discussion and problem solving activities (93%) is preferred by the students as their first
ranking. They enjoyed more from the activities which they can express more thought, opinion, etc. The reason
concealed behind this fact may prove that interpersonal activities like this would boost their social behavior to become
IJALEL 6(6):144-157, 2017 153
part of the society. 87% of the students held that they were interested in visual aids like pictures, maps and so on. In this
case, it seems logical to state that students prefer to get in touch with real life materials and language use, since they
provide realistic situations. Hopefully, 93% of them affirmed the teacher use of this material in the classroom. In terms
of games, 40% of the students held that the teacher did not make use of the games in the class, though they enjoyed
doing very much (73%). The reason lies in the fact that these types of activities are time-consuming and are not
worthwhile to be applied in speaking classes. Role play and question and answer exchanges play the fourth factor in
students’ likening (67%). This preference may be due to the fact that this type of activities does not need teachers more
interference of the task and they can freely communicate with their peers in a very safe situation. Learners chose
interview (47%) as their fifth preferences. Although the first part of the class was dedicated solely to the interview
(67%) due to its occurrence in their final FCE speaking test, they did not approve of it very much. Therefore, it can be
deduced that interviews put students in an uncomfortable situation which gives students stress, anxiety and lack of self-
confidence. Other factors like completing dialogue practice, Storytelling and ranking exercises were rarely preferred
and used by the teacher in the speaking English classroom (27%, 7% and 0% respectively).
As the concluding remarks of the present question, it seems needless to assert that most of the activities and tasks as
well as topics discussed in speaking English classrooms must be presented according to students’ needs and
preferences. Consequently, it can be argued for sure that they enjoy the type of activities in which they can express their
feelings, opinions freely in a very nonthreatening situation where they feel less stress and anxiety. In addition, real life
and authentic materials which portrait the real use of the language is also a motivating factor in students likening to
speak up in English speaking class.
Q14. Which of the following activities do you like most in a speaking lesson?
47% of the students agreed on group work which means they prefer to work on activities which provoke their
engagement in interpersonal relationships and make them as part of the social community taking responsibilities. This
may also be due to some psychological factors. These may entail lack of stress, anxiety, feeling of fear, loneliness,
boredom, reluctance and so on. Role play occupies the second ranking among students’ most likening activities (33%).
As such, the reasons may entail its feature as being the simplest form of activity which consumes less energy and needs
only two participants. In this type of activity students get engaged in question and answer exchanges, role play and task
completion activities. Individual work (20%) is the least favorable type of activity preferred by the students.
Q15. Which of the followings do you think your teachers should do to motivate you to take part in speaking activities?
Table 4.6 what teachers do to motivate students to take part in speaking activities.
Teachers job Percentage
Not interrupting you when you make mistakes 47%
Accepting a variety of your answers 40%
Encouraging you with marks and rewards 27%
Being enthusiastic, friendly and helpful 80%
Creating some interesting games and activities 67%
Creating pleasant class atmosphere 40%
Having clear instructions 33%
Having a quick look over the table 4.6, it is revealed that the majority of the students (80%) came to the terms that
teachers’ enthusiasm, friendliness and helpfulness play a major role in their motivation to get engaged in speaking
activities. Generally speaking, making a convenient and non-threatening situation for students is a must. Having a
meticulous look at the previous tenets of the study as to psychological factors such as anxiety, stress, fear, interest and
so on, there is no doubt to stress the essentiality of the principles of teachers good manner an characteristics. Fun, games
and variety are the indispensable part of any language teaching and pedagogy. These principles are also in line with the
principles of active learning, student engagement and motivation. 67% of the respondents agreed on this. Mistakes and
errors represents that student are learning. They get discouraged when they are interrupted and corrected on the spot
when their total focus is on fluency activities. Therefore, teachers should correct their mistakes indirectly in a very
supporting manner or postpone correcting them during conduction of some accuracy-based activities. 47% of the
respondents agreed on the terms of not being interrupted when they make mistakes.
In short, a meticulous scrutiny over the post-treatment questionnaire findings will reveal some fascinating results.
Certainly, the findings are strictly grounded in the fact that students speaking English and active learning has much to
do with their motivation to learn. Unless, their motivational needs are not met, learning to speaking English would lead
to some inconclusive consequences. Therefore, putting their preferences forward by providing a situation where they
feel their needs are met, can overcome the inadequacies of difficulties in learning to speak English.
Comparison of the pre-post treatment questionnaire confirms that the tenets of the approach being taken in the
classroom, application of ESA elements in boosting speaking proficiency, is in line with the principles of the students
preferences, likening, interests, desires, active learning and motivation. Correspondingly, it also proves that there is a
significant alteration in learning to speak of the students after the treatment.
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4.3 Reliability of Test Scores
In any research conduction, consistency of test scores must be determined in advance. In the same manner, this study
also calculates the reliability of the test scores to make sure that the scores are consistent. Considering the reliability
analysis, the scores of the students’ speaking posttest and post-treatment questionnaire are measured through Cronbach
reliability analysis.
Table 4.7 Reliability Statistics
Cronbach's Alpha N of Items
.847 2
Regarding table 4.7, it reveals that the estimated Cronbach alpha measurement equals .847 which shows that the test
scores of the speaking posttest and post-treatment questionnaire are consistent. Hence, the test scores of the study are
reliable enough to be used in the study.
4.4 Correlation Analysis of learners speaking performance and Motivation
In order to explore whether there is any significant relationship between speaking performance and motivation, a series
of computations and statistical analyses was performed.
In approaching the data analysis, two types of statistics namely descriptive and inferential, were utilized. Regarding the
descriptive statistics of the study mean, SD and standard error of measurement were used. On the other hand,
concerning the inferential statistics a Pearson’s’ product-moment correlation coefficient (PPMCC) analysis was run.
Additionally, in order to validate the use of this parametric correlation, the linearity of both Variables were examined.
4.4.1 Linear Relationship between Variables
To examine the linearity of the relations, a scattergram was generated which is shown in Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1 Scattergram depicting the correlation between ESA approach and motivation
As the figure depicts the link between the scores on speaking test and motivation is linear as the data points muster
around an illusory straight line. Thus, it was appropriate to test for a linear relationship in the data by running a
correlation analysis considering the said presupposition. On that account and as a general rule, the normality of
distribution for speaking test and motivation scores provided evidence for utilizing Pearson’s product-moment formula
to calculate the extent of relationship between the two variables.
4.4.2 Normality of Distribution
In an attempt to examine the normality of the distribution, the descriptive statistics of the data were procured.
Table 4.9 Descriptive statistics of skewness and Kurtosis for speaking test and motivation scores
Std.
N Minimum Maximum Mean Deviation Skewness Kurtosis
Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Std. Error Statistic Std. Error
Speaking test 15 14.00 20.00 16.6000 1.54919 .649 .580 .623 1.121
Motivation 15 11.73 19.81 14.9640 2.63626 .483 .580 -1.154 1.121
IJALEL 6(6):144-157, 2017 155
Std.
N Minimum Maximum Mean Deviation Skewness Kurtosis
Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Std. Error Statistic Std. Error
Speaking test 15 14.00 20.00 16.6000 1.54919 .649 .580 .623 1.121
Motivation 15 11.73 19.81 14.9640 2.63626 .483 .580 -1.154 1.121
Valid N (list
15
wise)
As it is illustrated in the above table, the distribution of the data for speaking test and motivation happened to be
normal. According to the table, skewness ratios for speaking test and motivation are 1.11 and 0.83 respectively and
kurtosis ratios for the two variables equal 0.55 and -1.02 respectively as well. Given that, all the ratios are set well
within ±1.96 limits, suggesting that the departure from normality is not too extreme. Therefore the results prove the
symmetrical distribution of the data being evenly clustered around the mean.
4.4.3 Testing the Null Hypothesis
Having determined that the data concerning both speaking test and motivation scores are evenly distributed, the
Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient (PPMCC) formula can be calculated to determine the degree of
relationship between variables on that ground. The result is illustrated in the following table.
Table 4.10 correlation analysis of speaking posttest and speaking

posttreatment questionnaire scores
Speaking
Posttest Motivation
Speaking test Pearson Correlation 1 .840**

Sig. (2-tailed) .000
N 15 15
Motivation Pearson Correlation .840** 1

N 15 15
**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
According to the table 4.10, correlation is significant at 0.01 level (r = 0.840, p < 0.01). In the same manner, results of
the analysis prove that the expected p value less than 0.01 (p< 0.01) is strong evidence that the null hypothesis is
rejected (0.00<0.01). As a result, findings of the study rightly indicate that the implementation of ESA have a
significant impact on promoting EFL learners motivation to speak.
5. Discussion
This study attempted to explore the possible impact of Harmer’s ESA elements on motivation of EFL learners to speak.
Thanks to the estimated reliability of test scores (r= 0.84) and P value which was less than 0.01, it can be concluded that
implementation of ESA on tasks do have a significant impact on motivation of learners to speak. Consequently, With
regard to the findings of the study obtained from the pre- post treatment questionnaire frequencies and correlational
analysis of the speaking test scores and post-treatment questionnaire scores, it can genuinely be construed that the
decorous implementation of ESA approach on tasks can promote learners speaking in general and their motivation in
particular.
In probing the effect of ESA elements on speaking ability of EFL learners, Khoshsima, H and Shokri, H (2016, 2017)
found out that this type of technique is quite utilitarian in the development of speaking proficiency of EFL learners.
Correspondingly, the findings of the study are in congruence with the findings of the other researchers in this area. The
results of the study are in agreement with the work of Chuang (2014). She described how the development and
implementation of the technology- supported learning environment will be beneficial in student and instructor
engagement and the overall learning motivation. She concluded that this environment can promote greater classroom
engagement and support collaborative learning. The findings of the study are also comparable with the study by torrico
(2015) who utilized drama technique in enhancing motivation of learners to speak. It was found out that drama activities
foster students’ interest in the subject and, consequently improve their speaking abilities. In another study whose results
parallel the findings of this study, Naima (2013) examined the Role of Intrinsic Motivation in Developing the Students’
Speaking Skill. This study utilized two questionnaires submitted to both students and teachers of oral expression. The
analysis of the questionnaire showed that both learners and teachers consider intrinsic motivation as an important factor
IJALEL 6(6):144-157, 2017 156
in enhancing the skill of speaking. In contrast, the findings of the study are in contrast with the work of Rahmany et al
(2013) who found out that extensive reading did not have a significant effect on EFL learners’ motivation for speaking.
6. Conclusion
Taking into account the fact that ESA can be regarded as one of the influential and effective instructional technique in
teaching speaking to EFL learners, it can firmly be argued that proper use of this approach would significantly help
teachers promote EFL learners motivation to speak. By claiming this, the advantageous of using this method will be
unveiled. The first and foremost advantageous would be its ability to emotionally engage learners in teacher-led
discussion tasks and subsequently the learning process. In this case, the content and topic of the lesson would be chosen
according to students’ interest. Therefore, acknowledging learners’ needs seems indispensable in student participation
and involvement in task completion. Additionally utilization of these task activity types invokes more talk, more even
participation, more motivation and enjoyment. Another merit of implementing this type of instruction is its perspective
toward student’s performance. Here, students’ performance is reinforced by doing pair and group work activities during
the activation phase. It is during this phase of teaching where the learners correct their own (self-assessment) as well as
their peers (peer assessment) mistakes in a socially and friendly situation. Inevitably, the teacher by monitoring
students’ performance receives feedback as to how much the learners have learned and where extra instruction is
needed. The last but not the least would be the fact that this type of approach fully takes students motivation into
account. This is accomplished through contextual influences either as a form of instructional context (e.g. task, topic,
materials design and evaluation practices) or Social and cultural influences (e.g. pair and group work activities). As a
result, the whole phase is planned carefully by the teacher to achieve outstanding and productive outcomes leading to
students’ active learning. Taking into account the abovementioned advantageous accruing from ESA, it can firmly be
claimed that ESA approach can be regarded as the most progressive instructional approach in the field of EFL.
Regarding the correlational analysis carried out as to see the relationship between the learners’ motivation and their
speaking performance, the findings of the study obtained from the data analysis indicated that there was a significant
positive relationship between the speaking performance and their motivation. Therefore, it can convincingly be argued
that the employment of ESA elements would significantly influence students’ motivation to speak.
The present research, although limited in scope, is specifically carried out to develop apprehension of employing ESA
technique in promoting EFL learners motivation to speak. On that account, the findings of the study would offer
considerable amount of courses of action and implications sine qua non for EFL teachers, EFL learners, syllabus
designers, supervisors, material producers, textbook writers and researchers.
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Understanding Syntactic and Semantic Errors in the

Composition Writing of Jordanian EFL Learners
Yazan Shaker Almahameed (Corresponding author)
Department of English Language and Translation, Amman Arab University, Jordan
E-mail. Yazan.Shaker@yahoo.com
May Al-Shaikhli
Department of English Language and Translation, Amman Arab University, Jordan
E-mail: may@aau.edu.jo

Abstract
The current study aimed at investigating the salient syntactic and semantic errors made by Jordanian English foreign
language learners as writing in English. Writing poses a great challenge for both native and non-native speakers of
English, since writing involves employing most language sub-systems such as grammar, vocabulary, spelling and
punctuation. A total of 30 Jordanian English foreign language learners participated in the study. The participants were
instructed to write a composition of no more than one hundred and fifty words on a selected topic. Essays were
collected and analyzed statistically to obtain the needed results. The results of the study displayed that syntactic errors
produced by the participants were varied, in that eleven types of syntactic errors were committed as follows; verb-tense,
agreement, auxiliary, conjunctions, word order, resumptive pronouns, null-subject, double-subject, superlative,
comparative and possessive pronouns. Amongst syntactic errors, verb tense errors were the most frequent with 33%.
The results additionally revealed that two types of semantic errors were made; errors at sentence level and errors at
word level. Errors at word level outstripped by far errors at sentence level, scoring respectively 82% and 18%. It can be
concluded that the syntactic and semantic knowledge of Jordanian learners of English is still insufficient.
Keywords: EFL learners, Syntactic errors, Semantic errors. Conjunctions, resumptive pronouns
1. Introduction
Writing is simply a productive skill in a written manner, where a writer generates ideas and thoughts in an organized
and constructed way. Many attempts have been made by researchers to define writing, one of the most working
definitions is that of White and Arndt (1991, p. 3) who state that writing is “a form of problem-solving which involves
such process as generating ideas, discovering a voice with which to write, planning, goal setting, monitoring and
evaluating what is going to be written, and searching with language with which to express exact meanings". Writing is
deemed by many language experts as the most complicated skill for both foreign language learners and native speakers
(Harris and Cunningham, 1994, Rababah, 2003, Alkhresheh, 2010). As it was described by Llach, (2011) writing is a
troublesome skill for any language speakers, specifically for non-native speakers. Based on the figures obtained from
National Assessment of Educational Progress (2002), roughly 69% of eighth graders and 77% of twelfth graders in the
United States of America are not writing well. In addition, the statistics showed that 50% of college students were
unable to produce English sentences without committing errors. The above mentioned figures indicate that writing is a
serious problem encountered by native and non-native speakers on a similar footing. As foreign language learners,
Jordanian learners of English encounter various difficulties in English writing (Rababah, 2001, 2003; Zughoul,1991).
Admittedly, Writing is highly troublesome and challenging for Jordanian English learners, since English is not widely
practiced in the country in addition to the shortcomings of adopted teaching methods, which are solely based on
dictating and instructing. This study highlights errors made by Jordanian English learners in order to determine how
successful in writing they are. Thereby, collective efforts need to be made by language instructors, curriculum designers
and officials at education sector in order to improve students' writing in the first language L1 and the second language
L2 as well.
The difficulty that English language learners confronts, while producing any piece of writing lies in the following facts;
first, writing requires implementing numerous complex tasks at the same time such as planning, translating, reviewing
and monitoring (Hayes, Flower, Schriver, Stratman, and Carcy, 1987). In other words, the process of writing requires
students to think repeatedly before putting their ideas on papers, organizing ideas and looking back and forth at their
writing with a critical eye so as to produce sentences free of errors. Second, students attempting to write must be
IJALEL 6(6):158-164, 2017 159
equipped with various language skills in order to generate sentences with limited errors. Students writing in L2 are
needed to have a good command of the orthographic system of L2, including spelling and punctuation norms. Those
students should be also proficient at the grammatical rules of the target language such as word order and tenses. One
more requirement of writing is having a good semantic competence of L2, which involves building a large stock of
vocabulary and lexical items such as idioms, collocations, proverbs and other utterances. In addition, writing depends
on the genre the writer opts to use; for instance, the style of academic writing is different from that of business writing
or press language. Every style of writing has its distinctive features that students should be aware of before starting the
writing process, such as how to produce a model introduction, body and conclusion with a meaningful topic sentence
and supporting sentences that are synthesized in a coherent manner. All the previously mentioned factors are
contributing significantly to a successful writing if taken into account by L2 learners.
For the purpose of determining L2 learners' errors in writing, different language approaches were advanced. One of the
most influential, practical and ever-lasting approaches is Error Analysis EA. Error Analysis elevated the status of errors
from undesirability to a technique by which L2 learners build the knowledge of target language (Ellis, 1985). Unlike
other L2 approaches such as Contrastive Analysis CA, Error Analysis treats errors as an important factor for teachers, in
which errors inform the teacher about the progress made by students. Similarly, errors are significant for students in that
errors can be utilized as a tool by which learners acquire L2 (Corder, 1967).
As reported by Corder (1974 as Cited in Ellis, 1994, p. 48) when conducting Error Analysis, three main steps need to be
taken into consideration as follows: First, collection of a sample learner language: This involves determining the sample
that will be utilized and collecting the data from that sample. Second, description of errors: This step requires
classifying errors into different categories; omission, addition and substitution. Third, Explanation of errors: This step
involves determining the sources of errors either mother tongue interference or intralingual errors. It is of a paramount
significant to indicate that mother tongue errors are those resulting from first language transfer, whilst, intralingual
errors are those arising from difficulty in the target language itself. Error Analysis makes a distinction between errors
and mistakes. Corder (1967) contends that errors are language deficiencies resulting from lack of knowledge of L2 or
incomplete acquisition of L2, whereas mistakes are language deficiencies arising from memory limitations, fatigue, slip
of tongue or lack of attention. Mistakes seem to be self-correctable when the attention is paid, while errors are not.
The current study attempts to look at English foreign language EFL learners' errors in two main areas of English
language namely; syntax and semantics. In other words, this study investigates syntactic and semantic errors committed
by Jordanian EFL learners when writing a composition. Prior to illustrating on the sub-types of syntactic and semantic
errors examined in this study, it is fitting to have an idea about those two concepts in English language. Syntax is
known as " the branch of grammar dealing with the ways in which words, with or without appropriate inflections, are
arranged to show connections of meaning within the sentence" (Matthews, 1982, p. 1 as cited in Valin, 2001). Based on
the above mentioned conceptualization of syntax, this study examines all errors made by the learners within the context
of word order, inflections, auxiliary, subject-verb agreement and tense. On the other hand, semantics refers to "the
meaning of words and sentences and to the rules or constraints by which the meanings of sentences are built from the
meanings of words" (Allan, 2009, p. 972). With reference to the aforementioned definition, the present study endeavors
to uncover errors relevant to the meanings of words (misuse of words) and meanings of sentences (miss-translation).
Examining one type of errors, e.g. semantic errors would tell half of the story, whilst Placing the emphasis on the two
types of errors would provide a deeper insight into the difficulties encountered by EFL learners while writing English
composition. Thereby both syntactic and semantic errors are considered in this study.
2. Review of Related Literature
Previous studies investigated errors made by L2 learners in writing are diverse. Some studies place their emphasis on
errors from a syntactic perspective, whereas other studies highlight semantic errors. Some more studies unveil errors
related to morphological or phonological use of language. This review of literature highlights research studies examine
all grammatical errors with more emphasis on syntactic and semantic errors among learners whose native language is
Arabic. The goal of this review of literature is to gain additional insight into the nature of writing errors committed by
Arab learners of English in terms of types of those errors and their possible sources.
One of the first efforts to analyze syntactic errors among Arab learners of English is a study conducted by Abdul-Fattah
and El-Hassan (1993). The researchers aim primarily to identify and explain some syntactic errors committed by 15-
year old school children in Jordan with the ultimate goal of developing teaching process at public schools. A total of
320 students take part in the study, covering ten districts in the country. A 100-item test is administered to the
participants, split into two parts with 50 items for each. The study arrives at the following findings; first, transfer from
Arabic is a genuine cause of syntactic errors made by the participants, where 30% of errors can be ascribed to native
language transfer. Second, syntactic errors committed by the participants are varied as follows; errors in the use of
comparative, superlative, tense, word order, prepositions, lexis, interrogatives, pronouns and determiners. It was also
found that errors in the use of tense are the most frequent among respondents with 20%, while errors in the use of
comparative\superlative are the least with only 3.5%. The researchers conclude that the participants performed poorly
nearly in all syntactic categories under investigation, which calls for improving the pedagogical system in Jordan.
Hourani (2008) investigates the grammatical errors in the English writing by third secondary students in Emirates
schools. The study aims chiefly at fulfilling two main objectives; first, exploring the most frequent grammatical errors
made by the respondents and second, determining the sources of these errors. In collecting the required data for the
study, three instruments are employed. First, interview, in which five English supervisors are interviewed to obtain data
IJALEL 6(6):158-164, 2017 160
about students' grammatical skills. Second, a composition, in which the students are asked to write an essay to measure
their English grammatical knowledge. Third, Two-part questionnaire; one part is administered to English teachers,
while the another to students. The sample of the study consists of 115 students aged between 17 and 18 years. The
findings reveal that the Emirati learners of English commit numerous grammatical errors including; passivization, verb
tense and form, subject-verb agreement, word order, prepositions, articles, plurality and auxiliaries. The results further
display that most grammatical errors are owing to intralingual interference rather than interlingual interference. Finally,
the researcher suggests to improve students' writing skill due to their poor performance on the composition test.
Sharing Hourani's results, Al-Shormani and Al-Sohbani1 (2012) explore the semantic errors among Yamani
undergraduates. The study aims at fulfilling two main objectives; first, examining the most common semantic errors
committed by the respondents. Second, looking at all possible sources of these errors. The semantic errors identified in
this study are classified into three broad categories, namely, lexical, collocation and lexico-grammatical. Each of these
categories is further grouped into subcategories depending on the errors identified. Thirty undergraduate Yemeni
students majoring in English language partake in the study. In collecting the needed data for the study, thirty essays are
distributed to the participants. It was found that 1388 semantic errors identified, 251 of which are attributed to deletion
of letters category, constituting the largest portion of errors, scoring 18%, whereas miss-selection of a prefix category is
the lowest, accounting for 0.6% of errors. It was further found that there are two main sources of errors, namely native
language –based errors and second language-based errors. To be more specific, errors resulting from native language
include translating concepts, words and phrases literally from L1, i.e. Arabic into English and applying Arabic linguistic
rules to English. In addition, errors owing to target language include having false concepts about English, insufficient
knowledge of English semantic system and confusion about English vocabulary.
In a similar vein, Alhassan (2013) implements a research paper on the influence of Arabic as a native language on the
writing of Jordanian learners of English. The study aims basically at determining whether fist language transfer is the
chief cause of errors committed by the learners and identifying any other possible sources of errors. Errors made by the
participants are identified and described using Error analysis procedures. For the purpose of achieving the objectives of
the study, essay-writing test and 50-item placement test are utilized. Students' errors are tabulated into three main
categories as follows; grammatical errors, semantic errors and syntactic errors. The results of the study depict that the
participants commit several errors as reported; first, grammatical errors including parts of speech such as prepositions,
articles and adjectives. Second, semantic errors such as literal translation and 3- syntactic errors comprising
coordination, omission of copula and word order. The results of the study further reveal that a considerable amount of
learners' errors are attributable to native language transfer.
In line with Alhassan's study, Al-Khasawneh (2014) carries out a study on errors made in written English paragraph by
Jordanian university students. The researcher seeks primarily to investigate the writing errors committed by Jordanian
EFL learners at Ajloun National University when writing English paragraphs. As a secondary objective, the study aims
to identify the frequency of writing errors made by Jordanian EFL learners at Ajloun National University when writing
English paragraphs. For the purpose of obtaining the required data, 26 undergraduates are asked to write an essay on the
importance of education. The researcher arrives at the conclusion that the students commit several errors such as:
spelling, word order, and subject-verb agreement. The findings additionally show that the most common error made by
the respondents is the faulty usage of English articles.
Based on reviewed literature, one could say that Arab speakers of English confront serious difficulties in English
writing. The results of past studies strongly support the premise that Arab EFL learners commit various errors including
all sub-systems of English language, e.g. syntax, semantics, etc. It has been agreed, there is no one source of those
errors, where some errors arising from first language transfer and other errors arising from second language. In simple
words, both first language and second language work in tandem in the acquisition of the target language. Within the
context of the present study, both syntactic and semantic errors are analyzed thoroughly in order to gain knowledge on
their nature and sources.
3. Statement of the Problem
When acquiring a second language, L2 speakers are required to master the four skills constituting any language;
speaking, writing, reading and listening. One of the most significant skills is writing (Huy, 2010), which is deemed
indispensable requirement for L2 learning. L2 learners, who wish to express themselves well, convey their messages
properly and translate into L2 with an organized manner, should not write poorly. During the course of teaching English
either at schools or universities in Jordan, which extended for ten years, it was noticed that many Jordanian EFL
learners performed poorly in writing. This is in line with Al-Khresheh (2010), who states that although Jordanian
students study English for a long period, extending for twelve years at school, they keep committing errors in their
writing. Some other researchers (Al-Khataybeh, 1992; Rababah, 2001, 2003; Zughoul, 1991, 2003) argue that
Jordanian EFL learners lack the knowledge in all language skills, and writing constitutes the greatest learning difficulty
for those learners. Sharing the same view, Tahaineh (2010) points out that despite the many attempts to tackle writing
difficulties encountered by Arab Jordanian EFL learners, writing is still a problem impedes acquiring the target
language. It is fitting to say that most previous studies, did not examine the two language categories (syntax and
semantics) together, but separately. The present study bridges a gap in literature by placing adequate emphasis on both
syntactic and semantic aspects of language. By so doing, through understanding of the nature of errors can be achieved
and in turn a better explanation of learners’ errors is presented. Thereby, this study provides detailed explanation of all
errors' types together with illustrative examples.
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4. Objectives of the Study

The present study aims at fulfilling the following objectives.
First, investigating syntactic errors encountered by Jordanian EFL learners in composition writing.
Second, investigating semantic errors encountered by Jordanian EFL learners in composition writing.
5. Research Questions
The present study raises the following research questions
Question One: What are the salient syntactic errors encountered by Jordanian EFL learners in composition writing?
Question Two: What are the salient semantic errors encountered by Jordanian EFL learners in composition writing?
6. Methodology
6.1 Design of the Study
According to Riazi (2016, p. 275). " research design refers to how the researchers plan their studies so that they can
obtain answers to the stated research questions using systematic approaches". In the present study, descriptive method is
used in order to gain insight into the nature of syntactic and semantic errors made by the participants. More precisely,
descriptive statistics are employed in which percentage and frequency of syntactic errors are tabulated, then the
percentage and frequency of semantic errors are categorized.
6.2 Participants
A total of 30 Jordanian EFL students at The Hashemite University participated in the study in the fall semester during
the academic year 2016\2017. The participants are all majored in English language and ranging from second to fourth
academic year. The subjects are comprised of both males and females aged between 19-20 years. Factors such as gender
or academic level are not considered in this research study. All participants have studied English for twelve years before
joining the university; therefore, they are exposed to English as L2 at a similar level. The sample is selected randomly
using simple random sampling method in order to guarantee fair chance of participation.
6.3 Instruments
In obtaining the needed data for the current research study, a composition test is utilized. The participants are instructed
to write an essay of no more than one hundred and fifty words on one of the following four topics; 1- Describing the
first house you grew in, 2- Narration on the first day at university 3. Moms' right of granting their nationalities to
children and 3- what will you change in the world if you have the power to do so?. They are asked to conform with the
style of writing a model essay such as splitting the essay into paragraphs and using punctuation marks. Having collected
the essays from the participants, they are analyzed statistically to obtain the results for the purpose of this study.
7. Findings
Errors committed by the participants are detected and then tabulated into two main types; first syntactic errors and
second, semantic errors. Following that, the errors related to each types are further classified into different categories.
This review of findings starts with syntactic errors made by the respondents in order to answer research question one "
What are the salient syntactic errors encountered by Jordanian EFL learners in composition writing?". A total of 172
syntactic errors are committed by the respondents. The errors include the following sub-categories, namely; subject-
verb agreement, tense, auxiliary, null subject, double subject, resumptive pronouns, word order, conjunctions,
superlative, comparative and possessive pronouns. Table 1 below displays the frequency and percentage of syntactic
errors in the writing of Jordanian EFL learners.
Table 1. Syntactic errors made by Jordanian EFL learners.
Item Frequency Percentage
Verb-tense 56 33%
Agreement 48 28%
Auxiliary 17 10%
Conjunctions 12 7%
Word Order 11 6%
Resumptive pronouns 10 6%
Null-subject 9 5%
Double subject 5 3%
Superlative 2 1. %
Comparative 1 0.5%
Possessive pronouns 1 0.5%
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A close look at Table 1 above reveals that the highest proportion of syntactic errors is in the use of verb tense with a
percentage of 33% and a frequency of 56. It is also obvious from this table that lowest proportion of syntactic errors is
in the use of both comparative and possessive pronouns with a percentage, 0.5% and frequency 1. Having depicted the
statistics of syntactic errors, the percentage and frequency of semantic errors are revealed in table 2 below in order to
answer research question two "What are the salient semantic errors encountered by Jordanian EFL learners in
composition writing?". It is of a paramount importance to indicate that semantic errors are split into two main levels; 1-
errors committed at word level, which is also termed as miss-use of words and errors committed at sentence level,
which termed as miss-use of sentence as shown in Table 2 below.
Table 2. Semantic errors made by Jordanian EFL learners
Item Frequency Percentage
Errors at word level 137 82%
Errors at sentence level 29 18%
Based on the results obtained from Table 2 above, one could conclude that a total of 166 semantic errors made by the
participants, 137 of which are at word level, while 29 are produced at sentence level. In addition, the table indicates that
the vast majority of errors are related to miss-use of words with 82%, whereas 18% of errors are associated to miss-use
of sentence .
8. Discussion of Findings
This part of the study discusses with some illustrative examples the syntactic and semantic errors made in the writing of
learners. This discussion of results aims principally at highlighting the errors and analyzing them in terms of their
sources and occurrence.
8.1 Syntactic Errors
As it has been indicated previously, several types of syntactic errors arose when writing in English, progressing from
verb-tense to possessive pronouns. A sample of learners' errors will be analyzed. The beginning will be with verb-tense
errors.
Verb-tense
Example: I met a girl and I talk to her then she becomes my best friend.
In the aforementioned example, two tense errors were committed with the verbs, talk and become. More specifically,
the tense of the sentence is the past, however, the respondent kept using the present tense in referring to the past. This
error could be attributed to intralingual interference or difficulty of the target language itself so that the respondent got
confused due to the various tenses in English .
Agreement
Example: *The house contain a three rooms
In the example above, two types of agreement errors were committed. The first one is subject-verb agreement e.g. *the
house contain, where the respondent dropped the s that marks verbs after singular nouns. The second type is the
addition of indefinite article a with plural noun e.g. a three rooms. Those errors are purely intrallingual in nature as the
agreement system in both English and Arabic is totally different.
Auxiliary
Example: *The Hashemite university very large
This type of error is characterized by the deletion of the auxiliary is from the sentence. Such deletion of auxiliary with
no doubt is attributed to first language transfer as Arabic, respondents' first language does not have auxiliaries in its
system.
Conjunctions
Example: *I woke up early I was very excited.
This type of errors is exhibited by the omission of the conjunction and. When writing a compound sentence, the
conjunction and serves the function of joining two clauses together. This error is intralingual in nature rather than
interlingual .
Word Order
Example: * There are things beautiful in the university
From the above example, it is obvious the respondent misplaced the noun things and the adjective beautiful. It is
generally agreed that in English adjectives modifying a noun placed prior to the noun. The source of this error is Arabic
(first language) due to the fact that, in Arabic nouns precede adjectives.
Resumptive pronouns
Example: *My grandfather house which I save it in my memory.
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This type of errors is best manifested by adding unnecessary pronoun referring to the subject in the sentence. In the
example above, the respondent added the resumptive pronoun it after the verb save making the sentence
ungrammatical. This error can be traced back to Arabic, since the use of resumptive pronouns in Arabic is licit.
Null-Subject
Example: * All my life lived in one house
At first sight, it is evident that the subject in the sentence above is missed, which is ungrammatical in English because
English is a non-null subject language. This type of errors is ascribed to native language as Arabic permits implicit
subject in the sentence .
Double Subject
Example: My first day at the university it was good
The error in this sentence is committed as a result of adding unnecessary subject 'the pronoun it', as the subject my first
day is already mentioned at the onset of the sentence. Double-subject phenomenon is prohibited in English. This error is
intralingual since double subject is disallowed in Arabic either.
Superlative
Example: my sister was the beautiful between us
In the sentence above, the respondent omitted the adverb most, which is normally placed in front of adjectives to
express superlative. The source of this error is difficulty of English itself.
Comparative
Example: It was big house than the house I live in now.
The error in the sentence above was caused by dropping the suffix er following the adjective big when expressing
comparative. This error is intralingual in nature
Possessive pronouns
Example: The third room was me.
Instead of using the possessive pronoun mine, the respondent used the pronoun me which is disallowed. Such error can
be ascribed to intralingual interference. It is of a paramount importance to indicate that the results of research question
one are in agreement with the following previous studies (Abdul-Fattah and El-Hassan, 1993; Hourani 2008; Alhassan
2013; Al-Khasawneh 2014). The results of those studies clearly indicate that the respondents committed all types of
syntactic errors including subject-verb agreement, word order, superlative, comparative, tense, pronouns and
determiners. Those studies also denote that both first language transfer and intralingual interference are responsible for
the occurrenc of errors unevenly.
8.2 Semantic Errors
Two types of semantic errors are noticed in the writing of the participants; namely errors at word level and errors at
sentence level. Those two types of errors result from literal translation into English or mis-analogy between English and
Arabic. Another source of semantic errors could be lack of knowledge of English or what is termed intralingual
interference.
Errors at word level
Example *The bathroom becomes on the left of house.
The error in the above mentioned example is exhibited in the miss use of the verb become. More precisely, instead of
saying the bathroom is located or found on the left, the verb become is used, which is traced back to literal translation
from Arabic.
Example* He reached me to the house
The error in the aforementioned example is in the use of the verb reach. The verb reach was erroneously used to
express the notion of picking up by car or giving ride. This error can be attributed to literal translation from Arabic.
Example *That day was so tired.
Based on the previous example, it is evident that the adjective tired was mistakenly used. In English, Adjectives ending
with the suffix ed are used to describe a feeling or emotions of someone, while adjectives ending with ing are used to
describe the characteristics of things or a situation. The above mentioned example is ascribed to lack of knowledge of
English.
Errors at sentence level
Example * Studying in the same at university.
This sentence appears wrong at both syntactic and semantic levels. When it comes to semantics, the sentence does not
make any sense at all due to using the prepositions in and at inappropriately. This error could be ascribed to lack of
knowledge of English.
Example *I decided suffering from in the university
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A close look at the previously stated sentence shows that the sentence is incomprehensible and meaningless due to
adding some words wrongly such as decided and from. Such poor use of language arising from incomplete acquisition
of English language.
Example* I could not found my class at the first.
It is apparent from this sentence that many errors were made. Precisely, the verb found was used instead of find and at
the first in place of at first. In addition, the findings of research question two are consistent with those of (Al-Shormani
and Al-Sohbani1, 2012; Alhassan, 2013) who point out that semantic errors include mis-use of English words and literal
translation from native language. It was also indicated that both native language (Arabic) and difficulty of second
language (English) are the main sources of errors.
9. Conclusion
To sum up, one could say that Jordanian EFL learners committed numerous syntactic and semantic errors. Syntactic
errors produced by the participants included the following categories; verb-tense, agreement, auxiliary, conjunction,
word order, resumptive pronouns, null-subject, double-subject, superlative, comparative and possessive pronouns. In
contrast, semantic errors included two categories; namely errors at sentence level and errors at word level. As for
syntactic errors, the results of the study revealed that verb-tense errors were the most common, whereas comparative
errors and errors in possessive pronouns were the least. In addition, the results showed that semantic errors at word level
outnumbered by far errors at sentence level. Errors produced by Jordanian EFL learners were discussed and analyzed
thoroughly in this study in order to enhance our understanding of the nature and sources of those errors. That is to say,
both L1 transfer and intralingual interference work in a close connection in shaping the syntactic and semantic
knowledge of Jordanian learners of English.
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The Comparative Effect of Collaborative Strategic Reading

and Content-Based Instruction on EFL Learners' Reading
Comprehension
Mania Nosratinia (Corresponding author)
Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch, Iran
E-mail: mania_nosratinia@yahoo.com
Negin Hooshmand Fateh

Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch, Iran

Abstract
The present study was an attempt to compare the effect of teaching Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) and Content-
Based Instruction (CBI) on the reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. To fullfill this
objective, a group of 90 intermediate female EFL learners, within the age range of 17 to 19, took a piloted sample of the
PET as a pre-treatment proficiency test. Sixty of them were selected as homogeneous learners and were randomly
divided into two experimental groups of CSR and CBI. The CSR group receieved CSR strategy training based on
Klingner, Vaughan, and Schumm's model (2001), while the CBI group receieved CBI-based strategy training, using
Tsai and Shang's (2010) model. At the end of the training, another piloted PET reading test was administered as the
posttest. The pre-treatment reading scores were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney U test whose results confirmed the
pre-treatment homogeneity of the participants. The post-treatment scores were also analyzed using the Mann-Whitney
U test whose results indicated no significant difference in the reading posttest levels of CBI and CSR groups, U = 423.5,
z = -.401, p = .688, r = -.0517. The article concludes with a discussion on the results and presenting some implications.
Keywords: collaborative strategic reading, content-based instruction, reading comprehension, strategy training
1. Introduction
Reading, functioning as a major channel for receiving information, is now widely believed to be one of the most
necessary and vital language skills (Lightbown & Spada, 2013; Nosratinia, Mirzakhani & Zaker, 2013), and testing
reading comprehension is one of the measures for estimating the degree of pedagogical success, stated to be a valid
measure for evaluating EFL learners' overall achievement (Harmer, 2007). Reading is a receptive skill, similar to
listening, "during which readers decode the message of the writer and try to recreate it anew" (Rashtchi & Keyvanfar,
2010, p. 141), and the achievement of this goal enables the reader to engage in a real communication process in which
the writer's intention is understood and the reader is able to integrate the new information into their cognitive structure
(Anastasiou & Griva, 2009).
ELT practice has always been intertwined with attempts in order to discover the components of reading comprehension
and realize how L2 learners can master this skill (Erten & Topkaya, 2009; Mitchell & Myles, 2004). People might
engage in reading for multiple purposes, e.g. for learning or for pleasure (Goodman, 1967); however, like other
language skills, readers' involvement and cognitive engagement is of crucial importance in mastering this skill (Zaker,
2015), and it has been stated that "If the person is not aware of the text, not attending to it, not choosing to make
meaning from it, or not giving cognitive effort to knowledge construction, little comprehension occurs" (Ozgungor &
Guthrie, 2004, p. 199). On the other hand, in the real life, reading comprehension is not developed without involvement
in a social context, highlighting the role of social exchange and communication in the process of mastering this
language skill (Zaker, 2016).
The complexity of learning processes in reading comprehension requires the instructors to pick up various means of
teaching and assessment to gain the best results (Heron, 1988, as cited in Jafari Kardegar, 2014), and it seems that one
of the effective means is using proper reading strategies (Pasquella, Gottardo, & Grant, 2012). Oxford (1990) and
Pasquella et al. (2012) believe that some effective strategies, skills, and assistant tools should be surveyed in order to
facilitate the learners’ reading ability. More specifically, strategy training is considered a highly effective pedagogical
technique for enhancing reading comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000). Moreover, research on reading
development has shown that good readers use strategies that are not used by poor readers (Grabe & Stoller, 2011).
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According to Oxford (1990), strategies are some techniques, mostly used by adult learners, which assist the readers in
carrying out pedagogical and real-world tasks. Among them Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) is a set of
instructional strategies to improve the reading comprehension of students with diverse abilities (Klingner & Vaughn,
2000). CSR has been designed to facilitate reading comprehension for students who have different reading problems
(Klingner &Vaughn, 2000), and it is a useful strategy which employs explicit strategy instruction to improve students'
reading comprehension (Hitchcock, Dimino, Kurdi, Wilkins, & Gersten, 2011).
The strategies included in CSR practice are: (a) preview, (b) click & clunk, (c) get the gist, and (d) wrap-up (Vaughn &
Klingner, 2000). Preview, happening before reading actually begins, intends to kindle readers' interest in reading, to
activate their background knowledge, and make them more focused. Click and clunk, taking place during the reading
process, intends to enable the readers to monitor their own reading performance. Get the gist, also happening during the
reading process, aims to enable the reader to determine the main idea. Finally, wrap-up, as a post-reading activity,
intends to enable the reader to review what they have read and review their understanding.
Besides CSR, since the early 1990s, the popularity and applicability of Content-Based Instruction (CBI) as a strategy
which can be used to develop the process of reading among EFL learners has increased (Stoller, 2002). This strategy, in
which cooperative learning is also incorporated (Crandall, 1993, as cited in Duenas, 2004), is one of the best realistic
strategies for promoting the development of strategic learners within a language-learning curriculum (Grabe & Stoller,
1997, as cited in Pessoa, Henry, & Donato, 2007). CBI has been stated to encourage the development of the strategic
language for the curricular developers (Leave & Stryker, 1989, as cited in Duenas, 2004). Moreover, by using CBI
strategy, learners may be able to construct knowledge through a wide range of ways which may lead them to be more
independent readers (Barfield, 2003, as cited in Balcikanli, 2010).
Considering the abovementioned premises, it seems reasonable to consider CBI a useful tool for developing EFL
learners’ reading comprehension. However, considering the limitation and practical issues in English Language
Teaching (ELT) contexts, it seems to be of outmost importance to draw a comparison among the available set of
strategies for developing reading comprehension among EFL learners. Hoping to address this concern, the present study
attempted to scrutinize the comparative effect of CSR and CBI on reading comprehension of EFL learners. To fulfill
this purpose, the following research question was formulated:
Research Question: Is there any significant difference between the effect of CSR and CBI on EFL learners'
reading comprehension?
2. Method
2.1 Participants
The main participants of this study were 60 female EFL learners within the age range of 17 to 19 who studied English
as a foreign language at intermediate level in Iran Language Institute which is located in Tehran, Iran. These
participants were non-randomly selected and homogenized from among 90 students through employing the Preliminary
English Test (PET). The participants whose scores fell within one standard deviation below and above the mean were
selected. They were randomly assigned into two experimental groups of 30 named CSR and CBI. Moreover, besides
these individuals, a group of 30 students with almost similar characteristics to the target sample were used for the
piloting of PET and reading posttest. Furthermore, besides one of the researchers as a teacher and rater, another trained
rater attended the scoring of writing section of PET based on the General Mark Schemes for Writing.
2.2 Instrumentation
In order to come up with a satisfactory answer to the research question, the researchers employed some tests and the
instructional material. The descriptions of these instruments are as follows:
2.2.1 The Tests
In order to homogenize the language proficiency of the students, the researchers administered a version of PET. It
covers all four language skills -reading, writing, listening and speaking- and knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and
pronunciation. However, it should be noted that the speaking part of the test was not administered because of the
practical issues and not having permission from institute officials to perform this part. To ensure that the two groups
were homogeneous in terms of their reading ability, the scores of the reading section of PET were analyzed in isolation
and were used as the pretest scores of the participants. Moreover, another piloted reading section of the PET was
administered to the participants in the two experimental groups to estimate their reading comprehension at the end of
the treatment phase.
2.2.2 The Instructional Material
The main textbook employed in both of the experimental groups during the instruction was Active Reading 3 (3rd ed.)
by Anderson (2008), published by Asia and Global ELT. This book covers all the language skills of listening, speaking,
reading, and writing with a focus on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. This book contains 12 units. In this study,
the students during an eight-week term dealt with eight units (unit one to eight) whose topics were "Travel", " Fashion",
"Disappearing Animals", "Big Money", " Celebrations Around the World", "It's a Mystery", "Health and Fitness" and
"Space and Flight" respectively.
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2.3 Procedure
To conduct the research, the following steps were taken:
After having the homogenized learners (as explained above), they were divided into two experimental groups, namely
CSR and CBI on a random basis, each group containing 30 participants. The two groups were instructed by the same
teacher (one of the researchers), using the same material. The teacher (one of the researchers) tried to teach the relevant
grammatical points as well as the essential vocabularies alongside the language skills with special focus on the reading
skill. The only difference lay in teaching of CSR to one group and implementing CBI to the other group.
Both of the experimental groups attended their classes twice a week for 16 sessions during eight weeks. Each session
took about 90 minutes. The time of the class was divided into two parts. The first part lasted 55 minutes. During this
part, the course book was taught to both of the experimental groups in the same way except the reading comprehension
sections. After a five-minute break, the second part, which lasted for 30 minutes, was devoted to the treatment of
reading comprehension sections. This part was different in two experimental groups. The following section clarifies the
step by step procedure being performed in each group.
2.3.1 Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR)
In this group, the reading passages in the textbook were taught step by step using CSR strategy based on Klingner et
al.'s model (2001). The teacher explicitly taught the CSR strategies through four sessions. Each strategy was presented
by giving examples. According to Klingner et al. (2001), in CSR, students learn four strategies: (a) preview (before
reading), (b) click & clunk (during reading), (c) get the gist (during reading), and (d) wrap-up (after reading). The
implementation of the strategies was described as follows:
Preview
Preview is a strategy to activate students' prior knowledge, to facilitate their predictions about what they will read, and
to generate interest. Preview consists of two activities: (a) brainstorming and (b) making predictions. It is used only
before reading of the text. Here, the teacher asked students to skim information such as headings, pictures, and words
that are bolded or underlined in order to brainstorm what they already know about the topic and predict ideas they might
learn from the text. In this part, the students should write their brainstormed ideas and predictions about what they
might learn, in their learning logs.
Click-and-Clunk
Click and clunk is a strategy that teaches students to monitor their understanding during reading, and to use fix-up
strategies when they realize their failure to understand text. The teacher described that clicks refer to parts of the text
that you really get and clunks are those words, concepts or ideas that you really don't understand. Then, the teacher read
a short piece of reading text aloud and asked the students to record clunks in their learning logs. Students then work
together, using fix-up strategies to discover what their clunks mean.
Get the Gist
Get the gist is a strategy to help students identify main ideas during reading. The goal of getting the gist is to teach
students to restate the most important points in their own words, to make sure that they have understood what they have
read. The participants in CSR group were expected to write out the gist for each paragraph in ten words or less. This
was then completed for each of the paragraphs and then they worked in groups to compare their gist, for each individual
paragraph. In order to identify the main idea, the participants were asked to answer these questions:
 What is the most important person, place, or thing?
 What is the most important idea about the person, place, or thing?
Wrap Up
The goals of this strategy are to improve the students' knowledge, understanding, and memory of what they have read.
Wrap up consists of two activities: generating questions and reviewing. The teacher suggested the following question
starters: who, what, when, where, why, and how. The teacher also encouraged students to generate questions that ask
about important information in the passage they had just read. Furthermore, the participants were invited to think of
questions they would ask if they were the teacher (pretend as if they were teacher) to find out if their students really
understood what they had read. Other students had to try to answer their peer's questions.
2.3.2 Content-Based Instruction (CBI)
In this experimental group, reading passages were taught through using the CBI framework proposed by Tsai and Shang
(2010). Tsai and Shang (2010) basically proposed a set of steps for attempting to develop EFL learners' reading
comprehension in CBI courses. This is to say that this framework is proposed for EFL courses in which the focus is on
the content of the texts, and learners are mainly required to learn about the general meaning and the order of stated
points and are finally able to re-write/re-state what they have read in their own words. In this regard, at the beginning of
the course, the participants in the CBI group were informed that their performance was going to be assessed based on
what they learn from each topic not necessarily the words and structures presented. Through this briefing to the course,
the teacher provided some example questions, basically inferential and content questions, in order to clarify the issue
further. During each session the framework proposed by Tsai and Shang (2010) was followed whose sections are stated
hereunder:
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Pre-Reading Stage
The purpose of this stage was to stimulate students' interests through identifying their background knowledge and
incorporating it into new information. Activities such as prediction in which the students predicted the content based on
the title were used at this stage.
During-Reading Stage
At this stage, the focus was on helping students to be aware of the meaning of the text. The following activities were
employed for this purpose:
 Parsing exercise: The teacher parsed complicated sentences in each text into simple sentences. This way, the
students could find different types of cues to find the meaning of unfamiliar words.
 Scrambling exercise: The teacher extracted some segments from each text, cut each section into pieces, and
then asked students to put the scrambled sentences in the right order.
Post-Reading Stage
As stated by Tsai and Shang (2010), at this stage, students would try out new knowledge and practice new skills,
supported by the teacher and peer feedback. Tsai and Shang (2010) further recommended using activities such as
watching a movie and role-playing. However, considering the time and institutional limitations, the teacher used role-
plays and summary writing activities after each reading segment. More specifically, after finishing the during-reading
phase, learners were asked to engage in role plays and have a discussion with their partners on the issue presented in
each reading segment. Furthermore, the participants were asked to write down the summary of the text, using their own
words and structures. They were informed that the summaries collected by the teacher would be evaluated regarding
inclusion of main points in the text and exhibiting reasonable knowledge about the topic. The teacher returned the
summaries in the following section with some comments and feedbacks.
3. Results
3.1 Checking the Pre-Treatment Homogeneity of the Participants
The scores of the reading section of the homogenization PET test were considered the pretest scores of the study (Table
1). The obtained scores of the participants in the experimental groups were to be analyzed/compared through running an
independent samples t-test. However, prior to running this test, it was needed to assess the normality of the data in the
two groups separately. To do so, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was run results of which are reported in Table 2.
Table 1. Descriptive Statistics for Reading Pretest Scores

Treatment N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean
Reading Pretest CBI 30 18.0333 4.25468 .77679
CSR 30 18.2667 3.71329 .67795
Table 2. Test of Normality on the Pretest Scores in the Two Groups

Kolmogorov-Smirnova Shapiro-Wilk
Treatment Statistic df Sig. Statistic df Sig.
Reading Pretest CBI .189 30 .008 .935 30 .066
CSR .154 30 .069 .959 30 .291
a. Lilliefors Significance Correction
As reported in Table 2, the Sig. value for the CBI group is smaller than the .05 cut-point (.008). Therefore, the
normality of distribution for the CBI group was not confirmed. As a result, the non-parametric alternative to the
independent-samples t-test, the Mann-Whitney U test was employed for checking the pre-treatment homogeneity of the
participants. Table 3 through Table 5 report the results.
Table 3. The Table of Ranks for the Pretest Scores

Treatment N Mean Rank Sum of Ranks
Reading Pretest CBI 30 30.03 901.00
CSR 30 30.97 929.00
Total 60
Table 4. the Median Scores for the Groups on the Pretest

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Reading Pretest
Treatment N Median
CBI 30 18.0000
CSR 30 18.0000
Total 60 18.0000
Table 5. Mann-Whitney U Test on Pretest Scores

Reading Pretest
Mann-Whitney U 436.000
Wilcoxon W 901.000
Z -.208
Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed) .835
a. Grouping Variable: Treatment
As reported in Table 5, the Mann-Whitney U test revealed no significant difference in reading pretest levels of CBI (Md
= 18 , n = 30) and CSR (Md = 18, n = 30). U = 436, z = -.208, p = .835, r = -.0268 (representing a very small effect
size). Therefore, the pretreatment homogeneity of the participants regarding reading comprehension was confirmed.
Based on the obtained results in this section, it was concluded that the participants in the two experimental groups
demonstrated the same quality in reading comprehension. As a result, the subsequent potential score differences could
be assumed pertinent to the treatments.
3.2 Checking the Assumption of Normality
According to Tabachnick and Fidell (2007), when the sample size is larger than 30, the violation of the assumption of
normality would not cause any major problem. Nevertheless, in order to inspect the normality of the data, the posttest
data were analyzed using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, results of which are reported in Table 6.
Table 6. Test of Normality on the Posttest Scores in the Two Groups

Kolmogorov-Smirnova Shapiro-Wilk
Treatment Statistic df Sig. Statistic df Sig.
Reading Posttest CBI .223 30 .001 .920 30 .026
CSR .201 30 .003 .921 30 .028
a. Lilliefors Significance Correction
As reported in Table 6, the Sig. values for the two groups are smaller than the .05 cut-point (.001 & .003). Therefore,
the normality of distribution for the two groups was not confirmed. As a result, the non-parametric alternative to the
independent-samples t-test, the Mann-Whitney U test had to be employed for answering the research question.
3.3 Answering the Research Question
As mentioned above, in order to accomplish the purpose of this study, one research question was framed. Based on the
design of the study and the characteristics of the variables, the researcher initially opted for an independent-samples t-
test. However, as stated above, the normality of distribution for the two groups on the posttest was not confirmed. As a
result, the non-parametric alternative to the independent-samples t-test, the Mann-Whitney U test was employed for
answering the research question. Table 7 through Table 10 report the results.
Table 7. Descriptive Statistics for Reading Posttest Scores

Std.
Treatment N Mean Deviation Std. Error Mean
Reading Posttest CBI 30 32.1667 1.68325 .30732
CSR 30 32.0000 1.89373 .34575
Table 8. The Table of Ranks for the Posttest Scores

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Treatment N Mean Rank Sum of Ranks
Reading Posttest CBI 30 31.38 941.50
CSR 30 29.62 888.50
Total 60
Table 9. The Median Scores for the Groups on the Posttest

Reading Posttest
Treatment N Median
CBI 30 32.0000
CSR 30 31.5000
Total 60 32.0000
Table 10. Mann-Whitney U Test on Posttest Scores

Reading
Posttest
Mann-Whitney U 423.500
Wilcoxon W 888.500
Z -.401
Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed) .688
a. Grouping Variable: Treatment
As reported in Table 10, the Mann-Whitney U test revealed no significant difference in reading posttest levels of CBI
(Md = 32 , n = 30) and CSR (Md = 31.5, n = 30) groups, U = 423.5, z = -.401, p = .688, r = -.0517 (representing a very
small effect size). Figure 1 demonstrates the reading mean scores of the participants in the two experimental groups,
before and after receiving the treatment. As illustrated, the results suggest significant effect of these two strategies on
EFL learners' reading comprehension.
Figure 1. Pretest and posttest scores in the two experimental groups

4. Discussion
Among the different components of language proficiency, reading, functioning as a major channel for receiving
information, has always been connected with knowledge acquisition, maturation of thoughts, and advancement
(Harmer, 2007). Reading can be considered a conversation between the reader and the writer in which either the
original message or a personal interpretation based on the text is acquired by the reader (Grabe, 2009). Regarding the
pedagogical concerns, testing reading comprehension is one of the measures for estimating the degree of pedagogical
success, stated to be a valid measure for evaluating EFL learners' achievement (Harmer, 2007). Consequently, ELT
practice has always been intertwined with attempts in order to discover the components of reading comprehension and
realize how L2 learners can master this skill (Mitchell & Myles, 2004).
Besides linguistic knowledge, topic familiarity, and general experience, the cognitive skills readers possess and use are
assumed to significantly correlate with their reading comprehension in general (Anastasiou & Griva, 2009). Based on
this premise, ELT programs are now encouraging the use of strategies in mastering language skills, including reading
comprehension (Oxford, 1990). In a similar vein, ELT textbooks now include strategy use for developing reading
IJALEL 6(6):165-173, 2017 171
comprehension (Lehr & Osborn, 2005). Among the strategies applicable to reading, CSR and CBI have been gaining
considerable popularity in the ELT domain (Klingner &Vaughn, 2000; Stoller, 2002).
Rooted in the premises stated above, this study attempted to compare the impact of CBI and CSR on EFL learners'
reading comprehension. After instructing two homogenous groups on using CBI and CSR strategies, the post-treatment
reading performance of the participants were to be analyzed running an independent-samples t-test. However, as stated
above, the normality of distribution for the two groups on the posttest was not confirmed. Therefore, the non-parametric
alternative to the independent-samples t-test, the Mann-Whitney U test, was employed for answering the research
question. As reported in Table 10, the Mann-Whitney U test revealed no significant difference in reading posttest levels
of CBI (Md = 32 , n = 30) and CSR (Md = 31.5, n = 30) groups, U = 423.5, z = -.401, p = .688, r = -.0517 (representing
a very small effect size).
The obtained results, stated above, indicate that the post-treatment reading performance of the participants after
receiving CBI and CSR in the two experimental groups have been similar. This is to say that CBI and CSR have a
similar impact on EFL learners' reading comprehension. There have been numerous studies separately confirming the
positive and significant impact of CSR (Katims & Harmen, 2009; Nosratinia et al., 2013) and CBI (Andrade &
Makaafi, 2001; Yiyu, 2014) on developing reading comprehension among EFL learners. However, no previous study
has compared CBI and CSR in an EFL context while focusing on reading comprehension. Therefore, the results of this
study could not be compared with those obtained from other studies.
Although previous research has confirmed the significant contribution of CBI and CSR to reading comprehension, these
two strategic frameworks do not necessarily recommend similar goals and focuses, the former focusing on mastering
the specific content while the latter focusing on developing reading skills in general. One of the reasons for obtaining
similar results out of these two treatments could be the fact that developing language skills, including reading
comprehension, is significantly affected by language learners' unique peculiarities (Lightbown & Spada, 2013;
Nosratinia & Zaker, 2014, 2015). Moreover, as stated by Taguchi (2004), background knowledge plays an important
role in constructing meaning from texts. Therefore, the similar results in the two experimental groups might have been
resulted from participants' personal differences and different backgrounds, not the treatments on their own. As a result,
CBI and CSR frameworks can be both cognitively profitable and pedagogically effective.
5. Conclusion
In foreign language teaching, reading can be considered the most important skill needed to be honed (Susser & Rob,
1990, as cited in Alyas, 2012). On the other hand, there are many ways to improve and enhance the process of reading
comprehension among students. One of the useful ways is using strategies in English classes. As Oxford (1990) argues,
some effective strategies, skills, and assistant tools should be surveyed in order to facilitate the learners' reading
abilities. In other words, poor readers are those who are not well aware of effective strategies, as a result they are not
good readers (Nokhbeh Rousta & Ghazi Mirsaeed, 2012).
This study was mainly motivated by the desire to highlight the significance of strategies in language teaching and study
the way the new developments in this area can facilitate and promote the process of reading comprehension. Hoping to
address the above mentioned concern, the present study aimed at exploring the comparative effect of CSR and CBI on
EFL learners' reading comprehension. CSR, being a strategic framework, has been defined as "an instructional practice
designed to facilitate reading comprehension" (Klingner et al., 2001, p. 88). On the other hand, CBI is a pedagogic
framework in which "the language becomes the medium through which something new is learned" (Stoller, 2002, p.
109).
There have been numerous studies separately confirming the positive and significant impact of CSR (Katims &
Harmen, 2009; Nosratinia et al., 2013) and CBI (Andrade & Makaafi, 2001; Yiyu, 2014) on developing reading
comprehension among EFL learners. However, no previous study has compared CBI with CSR, a strategic framework
with a pedagogic framework, in an EFL context while focusing on reading comprehension. Consequently, such a
comparison will enable EFL practitioners to come up with a more comprehensible understanding of teaching reading,
the appropriateness of the material, and the options available to the teachers when they are limited to using specific
textbooks.
Based on the abovementioned premises, this quasi-experimental study, with a comparison group and posttest-only
design, regarded the type of training, CSR or CBI, as the independent variable and reading comprehension as the
dependent variable. Comparing the reading performance of the homogenous participants after the treatment phase came
to an end revealed that CSR and CBI, as implemented in this study, have a similar effect on EFL learners' reading
comprehension. This is to say that CBI can be as useful as CSR if the pedagogical practice highlights the value of
cooperation, overall comprehension, and previewing and predicting. Therefore, it seems that EFL teachers can use both
CSR and CBI to make learners have a higher level of reading comprehension.
According to Stones (2002, as cited in Nosratinia et al., 2013), if teachers intend to have effective teaching and
reasonable outcome, they need to go one step beyond the simple and ordinary instructions and processes usually done in
the classroom. Their success mostly depends on their applications of the strategies to develop the learners'
understanding of what they have been exposed to. Familiarity with strategies and properly exploiting them could be
beneficial in all teaching domains. As Oxford (1990) believed strategies are foundations to the effective teaching of any
subject, and it must be at the heart of any professional development program.
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The results of the present study indicated that CSR and CBI can have similar significant effects on EFL learners’
reading comprehension provided that the CBI-based framework for reading as offered by Tsai and Shang (2010) is
implemented. Consequently, EFL teachers are recommended to attempt to study the CBI-based framework of Tsai and
Shang (2010) and the CSR model of Klingner et al. (2001) for instructing reading. More importantly, EFL teachers
should focus on the similarities the two abovementioned reading instruction models share. This is to say that EFL
teachers should:
 attempt to relate the new material to readers’ background knowledge and enable then to make predictions
before going through reading activities,
 focus on developing learners’ overall understanding of the text through employing inferential questions and
skimming tasks, and
 employ cooperative activities and engage learners in group activities.
EFL teachers are also recommended to elaborate on the advantages of active participation in reading activities and,
simultaneously, provide positive feedback and reinforcement when EFL learners demonstrate an acceptable level of
engagement in group activities. Finally, as it is the case with many other pedagogical tasks, EFL teachers should create
an environment in which EFL learners feel comfortable and confident to participate in pedagogical tasks and, in this
case, carry out the reading tasks with a lower level of anxiety and a higher level of concentration.
The current TEFL paradigm considers a major role for EFL learners where they are expected to actively engage in
learning activities (Mitchell & Myles, 2004). Consequently, EFL learners should internalize the idea that active
engagement in learning activities plays a key role in developing L2 proficiency. This premise is quite pertinent to the
findings of the present study in which CBI turned out to be as pedagogically effective as CSR. The significance of
cooperation and active engagement in learning becomes more evident when the CBI and CSR models of Tsai and
Shang (2010) and Klingner et al. (2001) are compared. Based on this comparison and rooted in the findings of the
present study, EFL learners are recommended to:
 try to establish a link between the texts and their own background knowledge through a reflective process,
 try to make predictions about the stated points before going through reading activities,
 try to improve their overall understanding of the text through observing the text and employing skimming ,
 engage in cooperative activities and share their understanding of the text afterwards, and
 employ the strategies proposed with Tsai and Shang (2010), pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading,
when doing extensive reading or studying different topics in their daily lives.
Based on the findings of the present study, a statistically-supported justification is provided for the integration of
cooperative reading tasks in ELT materials and textbooks. Syllabus designers and material developers are also
recommended to present strategy training sections in which EFL learners are encouraged to:
 establish a link between the texts and their own background knowledge through a reflective process,
 make predictions about the stated points before going through reading activities,
 improve their overall understanding of the text through observing the text and employing skimming ,
 engage in cooperative activities and share their understanding of the text afterwards, and
 employ the strategies proposed with Tsai and Shang (2010), pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading,
when doing extensive reading or studying different topics in their daily lives.
A number of recommendations are presented here, hoping that other researchers would find them interesting enough to
pursue in the future.
1. This study was conducted among EFL learners, within the age range of 17 and 19 years old (Mage = 18). The
same study could be conducted among other age groups, making it possible to inspect the way age interacts
with the implementation of CBI and CSR.
2. The present study was conducted on female EFL learners. Therefore, further investigations can include both
male and females.
3. Other studies can replicate this study in a way that the CBI group is only exposed to one specific topic in the
reading tasks.
4. The time allotted to working on reading in both of the groups was 30 minutes in 16 sessions. Other studies can
allot a longer period of time to see if this modification can affect the results.
5. As language learners’ language skills are believed to significantly correlate with their mental capacities, other
studies are recommended to inspect the pre-treatment state of these factors and the way they are affected by the
treatments.
6. Other studies can supplement the obtained data by using qualitative measures, e.g. interviews and observation.
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Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: The Poets’s Passion for

Auden’s Greatness
S.Bharadwaj
Annamalai University, India
E-mail: mithrabharath@yahoo.in

Abstract
The poem “Fern Hill” is interpreted as autobiographical and reminiscent of Dylan Thomas’s boyhood holidays. A
reading of the figurative language of the poem, the process of playing with its tropes can be the basis of right
interpretation independent of the poet’s life or an historical context. As the poem seeks to be persuasive and objective, it
relies more on rhetorics suggesting the sufferings of the fallen poets of the thirties and the war poet of the forties owing
to their wild love of the transcendental art of W.H.Auden’s Poems (1930) considered as touchstone of great poetry and
a hope for self-advancement in life. However, it is the paradoxical poems of Thomas and his vicarious poetical
character that have rehabilitated and revamped the depressed poets. “Fern Hill” reaffirms and reassures the continuation
of the same sceptic poetic tradition and culture which Thomas has cherished in all the preceeding and the succeeding
poems. What this paper, keeping the contemporary poets’s passion for Auden’s greatness and glory, their dreams and
destinations as focal point, strives to convey is the liberating power of Thomas’s moral disinterestedness, his vicarious
comic vision and his poetic process of life-in-death contrasted with the amoral aesthetic disinterestedness of Auden, his
historic tradition and his poetic process of death-in-life.
Keywords: stylistic, nostalgic, transcendence, paradox, juvenile, mutability, and charlatanism
1. Introduction
The fact that the poem “Fern Hill” is written in an adopted style, however perfect, conditions the reader’s response; its
paradoxical structure and its ambiguous language further hinder right appreciation. The experiment with the symbolic
form of paradox -- and the poetry of Dylan Thomas is, indeed, in the nature of an experiment -- still continues to
fascinate critics and poets. Cecil Day Lewis outlines the paradoxical structure and moral disinterestedness underlying
the poem: “Into the crowd of your haunting fancies … the streams, the airs, the dews … the soldier shades and the
solacing heartbeams … you melt, and fame pursues” (Collected Poems 282). He disagrees with the general sentiment
and compliments Thomas on the feat of Audenesque musical structure in “Fern Hill” when he says that “the whole as
gracefully formed and charactered … as a poem of your own,” “that a true poet’s age is truthfully reckoned … not in
years but in song,” “here is a loving-cup made from verse … for verse is your favourite of metals…” (DCP). What
strikes the reader most is the stylistic advance achieved in a remarkably short period, the technical excellence, the
magnificent rhetorical diction and versification that is evident in the poem.
Throughout his poetic career Thomas continues his search for the proper vehicle, and in the later poem Deaths and
Entrances this search is intimately connected with his appraisal of the poetry of the past. His most favourite poem, A.E.
Houseman’s Last Poems, seems to achieve the necessary fusion of largeness and depth, but Thomas still feels an
inward compulsion to attempt the Audenesque manner although his 18 Poems is an indirect repudiation of
W.H.Auden’s elegant art. His renewed study of Auden’s Poems (1930), while conceiving the later poem Deaths and
Entrances, the grandeur “of a hawk’s vertical stooping from the sky” ( Auden, Poems 70 ) to which he responds with
gusto, helps to revive the urge. His speculations on co-existence and fellow-feelings may have re-orientated his ideal
poetic character, but his experiences during the war and the need to extricate himself from the deepening shadows of
depression prompt a return to Auden. Again, as Thomas suggests, he wants at least to try to attain the artistic stature of
Auden even if his poetry is to follow a different direction:
On almost the incendiary eve
Of several near deaths,
When one at the great least of your best loved
And always must leave
Lions and fires of his flying breath…. (Poems 47)
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The question that inevitably arises is whether and how far the germinating conception is modified and alters as a result
of his inward cogitations about his own poetic destiny and by the pressure of events in the intervening months.
Thomas’s imitations of the grave unhurried rhythm, the deep, grand organ tone and the religious tenor are sustained
especially in the first five stanzas of “Fern Hill” “to hold and interpret … rightly” the sound and meaning of Auden’s
musical structure of the early poems, “the ringing pole of summer days” (DCP 216), “a secret look in a landscape’s
eye” (294). Day Lewis comments on the greatness of syntactic structure of “Fern Hill”: “The whole stood up …
antique and clear … as a cameo, from the vale. I swear … it was not a dream” (DCP). The adaptation is brilliant, and a
student of rhetoric and versification would find it a worthwhile exercise to watch the process closely and note where
and how two styles, two contrary minds coalesce. The reader would realize also the force of the struggle through which
the severe magnificence is maintained. The pattern, however, soon breaks and it is finally abandoned. The voice in the
sixth stanza is very much unlike Auden’s. In “Fern Hill,” Thomas is not speaking with his own voice in the first five
stanzas; his own voice may be heard in the isolated last stanza. But does Thomas leave the song structure of Auden
unfinished like the poets of the thirties because of sheer exhaustion, or because the elegant manner of Auden and his
metaphysical framework prove inadequate to his purpose? MacNeice, identifying Thomas with the comic character
Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, establishes Thomas’s greatness as a poet of paradoxical structure:
O master pedlar with your confidence tricks,
Brooches, pomanders, broadsheets and what-have you,
Who hawk such entertainment but rook your client
And leave him brooding, why should we forgive you
Did we not know that, though more self-reliant
Than we, you too were born and grew up in a fix? (Collected Poems 256)
This takes the readers to the perplexing problem of “Fern Hill”: the fellow-poets’s dreaming about Auden’s
aestheticism and their hope for lasting song. Thomas himself answers that his dramatic narrative of a strange
monologue, the Bildungsroman of his desolate contemporaries concludes with the fifth stanza of “Fern Hill”:
And the bird descended.
On a bread white hill over the cupped farm
And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended
Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm
And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended. (Poems 23)
The fellow-poets’s quest for impersonal art and timeless existence reminds the readers of the lines from Houseman’s
Last Poems that has sustained Thomas in moments of distress: “What are those blue remembered hills, / What spires,
what farms are those?” (Houseman 31). Moreover, the very theme underlying the poem “Fern Hill” is identical to that
of Yeats’s lines:
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;
And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn. (Collected Poems 46)
The central focus in Thomas’s “Fern Hill” is the poets’s wild love of the transcendental significance, the song pattern of
Auden “who climbs to his dying love in her high room” (Poems). What Auden concentrates in Poems (1930),
“prolonged drowning shall develop gills” (12), “steps forward, greets, repeats what he has heard … and seen, feature for
feature, word for word” (English Auden 14) and “to destroy the efflorescence of the flesh” is “to intricate play of the
mind, to enforce … conformity with the orthodox bone … with organized fear, the articulate skeleton” (Auden, Poems
66), is the very emphasis that T.S. Eliot has underscored in his early poems and his critical essay: “thoughts of a dry
brain in a dry season” (Waste Land 21), “a continual surrendering before the invaluable,” “a continual self-sacrifice”
(“Tradition” 171) and “the significant emotion” (176). Day Lewis explains Auden’s elegant art of death-in-life, “that is
the land of lost content … shining plain” (AEH ), his art of self-annihilation ascending the heights of aesthetic distance:
: A world seems to end at the top of this hill.
Across it, clouds and thistle-clocks fly,
And ragged hedges are running down from the sky,
As though the wild had begun to spill
Over a rampart soon to be drowned
With all it guards of domesticated ground. (DCP 283)
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In “Fern Hill,” Thomas has defamiliarized the descriptive language by transfiguring the ordinary hill-climbing into a
symbolic pilgrimage of pain leading to salvation and permanence. The figurative title suggests that the impact of the
poem can be attributed to the effective permutation and combination of various dramatic elements into poetic unity,
“farm house in a fold … of fields” (Poems 21). The phrase “fern hill” sheds its facetiousness and receives a new
metaphysical import indicating both exhaustion and spiritual rejuvenation and also the force of the struggle through
which the architectural structure is climbed to attain greatness. The Metaphysical poet John Donne sings: “To stand
inquiring right, is not to stray; / To sleepe, or runne wrong, is. On a huge hill, / Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and
hee that will / Reach her, about must, and about must goe…” (50).
During the thirties, Auden’s contemporaries, Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice are passionate towards
Auden’s art song “year after year” but they “never have fathomed what instinct rides them … round heaven’s dome like
a frozen pond.” Day Lewis portrays the ordeal of their passion, their pains and tears of mortality:
They are earth-souls doomed in their gyres to unwind
Some tragic love-triangle wherein they had mortally pined,
When you hear those phantom, famishing cries.
But birds are birds. No human key
Of fond frustration unites the haunting three. (DCP)
In Poems, the Second World war poet Prince seems to be equally steeped in Auden’s poems, as it is a common practice
among the war poets to quote Auden’s aesthetic distance of Poems as touchstone of great poetry, “your judgement …
just” and “your opulence in promises” (Prince 13). For him, Auden’s Poems is almost a sacred text, “pale stone tablets”
both esoteric and human, offering guidance, inspiration and comfort, and answering his deepest questions in moments
of crisis. The young war poet dreaming of eternal poetry under Auden’s poetic design, “like smouldering fuse, anxieties
… blindwormed his breast,” and “like a premature memory prising … through flesh” (DCP 286) tries to reassure
passionately, “warm the winter’s cold,” Auden’s riven heart and thoughts, “horror and scorn and hate and fear and
indignation” (AEH 10). Day Lewis points out the “bond” of “good wishes” between Auden and Prince:
It was silent here on the slope of the hill.
But now, now, as if the wild grass
And the wild sky had found their voices at last
And they were one voice, there comes a shrill
Delirious mewing, thin as air,
A wraith-like rumour, nowhere and everywhere. (DCP)
Tempted between “joy” and “guilt,” “craving the sensation” and “ignoring the cause,” “self-reflection” and “some great
suffering,” “prayer” and “evil,” “form” and “force,” and “the happy morning” and “the night of agony,” Prince cries
“machines to keep in repair … irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem … from insignificances” (Auden,
Collected Poems 308).
Auden also offers a parallel to the dying moments of Prince, his struggles to climb the aesthetic transcendence.
Commenting on a poet’s “brief moment of intersection” of “the positive and negative ways through time,” Auden
explains:
And the shabby structure of indolent flesh
Give a resonant echo to the Word which was
From the beginning, and the shining
Light be comprehended by darkness. (New Year Letter 188)
Thomas underlines “the conversation of prayer” between Auden and Prince, “dying love” and dreaming love:
The conversation of prayers about to be said
By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs
Who climbs to his dying love in her high room,
The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move
And the other full of tears that she will be dead…. (Poems 126)
Of the many paradoxes that characterize the literary efforts of the poets of the thirties, one is, as MacNeice points out in
the poem “The Drunkard,” the tendency to compose art song to achieve Auden’s glory. The introspectiveness that the
readers note in much of their what may be called romantic poetry conflicts with Auden’s musical and objective ideals,
and turns their socio-political poems into interior monologues: “Instantly and it would be permanently / God was
uttered in words and gulped in gin.” Again, during the forties the war poet Prince is also haunted by visions of Auden’s
structural art, “whose tongue feels around and around but cannot taste … that hour-gone sacrament of drunkenness”
(MCP 258). Thomas’s huge canvases of “Fern Hill” are, as it were, symbolic of an urge that the most creative poets of
the thirties and the forties exhibited in varied media. MacNeice comments on Thomas’s singular, kindred spirit, his
empathy with the poets’s passion for Auden’s impersonal greatness and their sufferings:
And he is separate too, who had but now ascended
IJALEL 6(6):174-194, 2017 177
Into the panarchy of created things
Wearing his halo cocked, full of goodwill
That need not be implemented; time stood still
As the false coin rang and the four walls had wings
And instantly the Natural Man was mended. (MCP)
So it is Thomas’s moral disinterestedness and his comic vision, the “art of minding one’s own business
magnanimously” (DCP 41), the “human key” that “unites” the “fond frustration” of the poets of the thirties and the
forties; their “lust … becoming” his “love,” his “Fern Hill.” Day Lewis explains:
Something touched him. Always the scene
Was to haunt his memory—
Not haunt—come alive there, as if what had been
But a flowery idea took flesh in the womb
Of his solitude, rayed out a rare, real bloom.
I know, for I was he. (DCP)
In “Fern Hill,” an art song, there is a bond of poetic empathy that effects a fusion between the “rising” poet Thomas and
the fallen poets’s anxieties, “fretting” and “gaunt regretting,” there is a felicitous coincidence with the articulate rule
and energy of Thomas’s preceeding poems and the defeated contemporary poets “consuming in youth’s slow ordeal,”
the “undying fall” and “broken years.” So, “Fern Hill” is “a full gamut of setting and rising” ((DCP) according to Day
Lewis.
Just as Thomas’s early volume 18 Poems is misread as a musical song of Christian vision of Creation, so his later
volume Deaths and Entrances, especially “Fern Hill” is misinterpreted as musical structure seeking Christian Salvation
for his early sacrileges. Day Lewis recasts this speculative theory:
Love enmeshed in his own folly—
Mischance or folly—
Expiates a deed for ever undone,
Weeps for all that it could have won
Of living together wholly. (269)
What is unmade and undone in the early poems is no longer regretted in the later poem. There is no paradox of wonder
or surprise in the later poem but it is “a heavenly fact,” according to Day Lewis, that in “Fern Hill” Thomas has “neither
invoked nor faked … any church in the air … and little I care” (DCP) for the Christian parable of suffering and
salvation. Contrarywise, what Thomas has made and done in the later poem Deaths and Entrances is a persevering
quest for the redemption of his fellow-poets which has been the persistent focal point of his early and transitional
poems, The Map of Love, 25 Poems, and 18 Poems. Thomas makes it clear: “In the fire of his care his love in the high
room” (Poems). In Deaths and Entrances especially in “Fern Hill,” he reaffirms his faith in what he has cherished the
poetic tradition of Thomas Hardy, W.B.Yeats and A.E.Houseman: a relentless pursuit of parable of personal salvation
and moral disinterestedness.
2. Reviews, Methods and Objectives
Literary critics approach “Fern Hill” with a certain hesitancy and mental reservation as the poem is a specimen of
paradoxical structure, rhetorical language and a tour de force of the high order. All would share the unanimous verdict
that the poem is “an independent major achievement” (Davies 77), a “major contribution to the development of
technique in English poetry” (Ackerman 122-23), and there is no sharp disagreement over the interpretation that the
poem is autobiographical, nostalgic, and reminiscent of Thomas’s boyhood holidays spent in the Fern Hill, the
farmhouse of his aunt Ann Jones at Laugharne in Carmarthenshire. Davies, considering the poem as “a nostalgic view
of innocent childhood,” “a child’s psychology seems enacted in the … very style,” holds that it suggests “a floating,
merging, and mixing world” (79). Elder Olsen states that Thomas recaptures “in the charming natural world of Wales,
something of the lost Eden and something of a foretoken of Heaven” (20). Pointing out that the theme of the poem is
“the innocence and holiness of Eden, with no consciousness of sin or death,” Ackerman writes on the “pattern of
sounds” (123): “a complex structure of assonance and alliteration, internal rhyme, recurring rhythms, and an elaborate
consonantal harmony, provided the technical framework of the poem” (122). “The entire poem” according to Mary C.
Davidow, “is autobiographical” and “tells … of the physical, emotional, and spiritual development of the artist from
childhood to young manhood” (78). And in a critical analysis, C.B.Cox remarks that in “Fern Hill” “Thomas is
celebrating the divine innocence of a child” (134). On the other hand, the poem can be analysed as a self-contained unit,
a symbol of conflict, ambivalence and instability as it offers simultaneous awareness of two areas of experience, the one
enriching the other by parallelism and contrast, and Thomas’s self-dramatization in the last stanza of the poem gives a
special intensity to the effect. The poem “Fern Hill” is a self-deconstructive verbal icon in which the literal level is
subverted by the figural. A reading of the figurative language of the poem, the process of playing with its tropes can be
the basis of interpretation independent of the “Blue-book knowledge” (“Tradition” 297), the poet’s life or an historical
context. The poet’s meaning is best understood when a reader concentrates on the graphic dimension of the language,
“the seminal adventure of the trace” (Derrida 102), the verbal dexterity having a range of references beyond itself. A
IJALEL 6(6):174-194, 2017 178
text “is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash,” “a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes 149). As the poem seeks to be persuasive and
objective, it relies more on rhetorics suggesting the sufferings of the fallen poets of the thirties and the war poet of the
forties owing to their wild love of the transcendental art of W.H.Auden’s Poems (1930) considered as touchstone of
great poetry and a hope for self-advancement in life. However, it is the paradoxical poems of Thomas and his vicarious
poetical character that have rehabilitated and revamped the depressed poets. “Fern Hill” reaffirms and reassures the
continuation of the same sceptic poetic tradition and culture which Thomas has cherished in all the preceeding and the
succeeding poems. Thus to understand the poem by Thomas, the reader has to have the knowledge of the poets and
works that have influenced Thomas and the poets and poems that have thrown light on Thomas. This study, aiming at
contributing the first metaphorical analysis of “Fern Hill” to the existing literature on Thomas’s poetry, is a movement
forward and backward from the poem, a participation in the movements of the signs under erasure. What this paper,
keeping the contemporary poets’s passion for Auden’s greatness and glory, their dreams and destinations as focal point,
strives to convey is the liberating power of Thomas’s moral disinterestedness, his vicarious comic vision and his poetic
process of life-in-death contrasted with the amoral aesthetic disinterestedness of Auden, his historic tradition and his
poetic process of death-in-life.
3. Analysis and Discussion
The contemporary poets’s glorification of the “structural power” of Auden’s Poems, their wild love of Auden’s
greatness which is the central theme of the poem “Fern Hill” involves a study of poetry of the thirties and the forties,
the irreconcilable warring ideas of realism and art song, subjectivity and objectivity. The first five stanzas cover the
analysis, argument and discussion of the well-documented thesis on Auden’s objective poetic form leading to endless
interpretations of his greatness as an amoral aesthetic poet, his “magnanimities of sound” (YCP 160) and the last stanza,
striking an antithesis, sums up Thomas’s greatness as a poet of paradox and moral disinterestedness, his “deep
considering mind … into the labyrinth of another’s being” (166). The first stanza introduces the working hypothesis of
Prince’s Poems cast in visionary mould, “the apple boughs” promoting the elegant structure of Auden’s Poems, “the
apple towns” (Poems 54) in contrast to the paradoxical structure of Thomas’s 18 Poems, “the lilting house” and its
“play of structure.” Prince, the soldier poet drolling in his loneliness and deriving the necessary comfort in his
intoxicated love of Auden, his “patron” and “Lord” (Prince 16), in the aesthetic structure of Auden’s ambiguous
Poems, persuades the contemporary war poets, “the frozen hold … flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm
house cowl,” to snap out their love of Thomas’s 18 Poems, “the smell of hay in the snow” and his skeptical
disinterestedness, “a simple and indecorous sweetness” (17) to resurrect the fallen spirit of Auden, “the stars falling
cold,” and not “to throw … cypress, somber on the snow … in this timeless grave,” “snap not from the bitter yew …
his leaves that live December through” and warns them “break no rosemary, bright with rime … and sparkling to the
cruel clime … nor plod the winter land to look … for willows in the icy brook … to cast them leafless round him.” A
creative adaptation from Houseman’s Last Poems gives richness of meaning to many of Prince’s poems, specifically a
passage from “Bring, in this Timeless Grave to Throw” serving as a starting post towards all the twenty-four poems of
Prince’s Poems:
--Oh, bring from hill and stream and plain
Whatever will not flower again,
To give him comfort…. (AEH 12)
During the middle phase of his poetic career, Auden becomes more poignant and existentialistic, “fresh loves betray
him,” “to fresh defeats he still must move … to further griefs and greater … and the defeat of grief” (Another Time 16),
“our uneliminated decline … to a vita minima, huddling for warmth,” “just breathing … in a darkness of tribulation and
death … while blizzards havoc the garden” (NYL 186), “the damp tired delta where in her season of glory our …
forefathers sighed in bondage” (ACP 307) and “what we shall become … one evaporating sigh” (341). The greatness of
Auden declines, “his doomsdays crawled” with the emergence of popularity of Thomas, “the most powerful antidote to
Auden” (Henry Treece 107). Day Lewis speaks of Auden’s uncertainty and hopelessness: “All impulse clogged, the last
green lung consumed, / Each outward step required the sweat of nightmare, / Each human act a superhuman strength…”
(DCP 292). Auden’s personal situation is “as depressing as” the warring outside world for there is no ray of hope for
the remembrance of his poetry, “the sea drained off,” “revealing, shrivelling all” and “a stranded time, neap and
annihilation … of spirit” (DCP). However, Prince’s fervent prayer for peace and permanence of Auden’s poetry stands
divided between transcendental art and romantic love, passion for Auden’s aesthetic heights and wildness for his own
eternity, “youth’s brief agony can blaze … into a posthumous joy” (DCP 287).
The opening stanza of “Fern Hill” proclaims the young war poet Prince’s pride of becoming a “groom” of Auden, his
dream of eternal poetry “the night above the dingle starry” under the influence of Auden while his contemporaries
clustering round Thomas’s paradoxical structure of 18 Poems “about the lilting house and happy as the grass was
green” (Poems). But what the romantic reader Prince misses in his contemporaries’s adaptations is their depth of
speculation in Thomas’s 18 Poems. What inspires the war poets is an awareness of high destiny signifying the urgency
and solemnity of the task. From the dreaming perspective Prince a young defender, “… honoured among wagons I was
prince of the apple towns,” of Auden’s “structurality of structure” (Derrida 90) among his peers appears as a comic
counterpart of the band of young war poets, Roy Fuller, Alan Rook, and Keidrych Rhys and it is a piece of dramatic
irony and more comical still is the highfalutin invocation of fame. The rhetoric of pomp and glory, reversed in meaning
and tone, is employed to convey the sense of a noble pursuit:
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Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes…. (Poems)
So it is the fusion of the language of irony and fantasy and the language of metaphors, fancy and fact, “obtuse and old”
and “young and supple” in the opening stanza that modifies and qualifies the meaning to demonstrate the exemplar of
“Life apart from lives” (MCP 245), “the sympathetic pulse” and the syntactical greatness of “Fern Hill” which
MacNeice acclaims as “self-explained, unexplained … the cromlech in the clover field.” The merger and the mingling
of “hands” is not due to “an abstraction” or “a given glory,” “not mere effects of a crude cause … but of themselves
significant … to rule-of-brain recalcitrant.” (246). This is what Allan Tate writes that “good poetry is a unity of all the
meanings from the furthest extremes of intension and extension” (379). It is this kind of “tension,” “a configuration of
meaning” (373), “unified meaning” of the language of complexity and simplicity, the literal and the “littoral” (MCP)
that becomes more and more obvious in the following stanzas of “Fern Hill.”
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the young poets Prince, Fuller, Rook, and Rhys heeding to the verbal
melody and message of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, “… once below a time I lordly had the trees and
leaves,” articulate “a slave’s dream on … bivouac hearth,” autobiographical poems as “emotion recollected in
tranquility,” “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth 180). Day Lewis comments on their
adolescent performance:
But look, the old illusion still returns,
Walking a field-path where the succory burns
Like summer’s eye, blue lustre-drops of noon,
And the heart follows it and freshly yearns…. (DCP 219)
Though conscious of their lack of poetic pattern, their “limited objective” and future, they stand divided between the
modernistic poets Auden and Thomas, “trail with daisies and barley” in choosing their model of perfection. “Lost the
archaic dawn wherein we started, / The appetite for wholeness” (DCP ). The half-satisfied lovers of romanticism remain
“half-hearted” followers of modernism. Day Lewis evaluates their changeover:
Summer burns out, its flower will tarnish soon—
Deathless illusion, that could so relay
The truth of flesh and spirit, sun and clay
Singing for once together all in tune! (220)
After the outbreak of the Second World War Prince’s yearning for freedom, despite his unambiguous choice of Auden’s
historic sense and ironic structure, is between personal love and impersonal art, between “the sighing distances
beyond… each height of happiness” and “the vista drowned … in gold-dust haze.” But his contemporaries confirm their
faith in the paradoxical structure of Thomas’s 18 Poems “as succory holds a gem of halcyon ray…” and prepared
themselves to “cast image” of their joys … beyond” their “senses’ reach” (217). In “Fern Hill,” Thomas reconciles this
dramatic and dynamic movement of the war poets, the conflict of opposite experiences in a picturesque manner: “Down
the rivers of the windfall light” (Poems). Fuller’s The Middle of a War, Rook’s Soldiers, This Solitude, and Rhys’s The
Van Pool and Other Poems mimick the metaphorical patterns of Thomas’s 18 Poems and can see little visuals, their
attempt to glorify Thomas’s poetic “theme” and “his casual gems” makes a mimicry. In Poems, Prince’s desperate
efforts to emulate Auden’s “witty taste” and “urban levities” create a pantomime. Imitating the metrical patterns of the
verbal melody of Auden’s Poems, a legato, Prince can hear just an oral effect of staccato rhythm. Day Lewis’s
paradoxical statement dramatizes the oneness of the war poets’s experience and its diversity, the fusion of
heterogeneous images of verbal sounds and signs: “They are the lisping rushes in a stream-- / Grace-notes of a
profound, legato dream” (DCP).
In the second stanza of “Fern Hill,” a similar transformation of the ludicrous into the sublime is effected in Thomas’s
adaptations of the phrases of Walter de la Mare and Thomas Hardy to render the formative influences of the two
different compositions of music in Auden’s juvenile poems. Thomas triumphs over the apparently conflicting elements
in the experience of the juvenile Auden by unifying them into a new pattern through irony and ambiguity:
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means…. (Poems)
Auden’s juvenile verses are “talking of ” the “aesthetic drills” (EA 194) obliterating all sense perceptions, dying into
life, dissolving one’s self to attain to a higher and richer plane of existence. “So under it stand we, all swept by the rain
and the wind there… (New Verse 5). His earlier poems “Allendale” and “The Carter’s Funeral” repeat the generality
between Hardy’s “world face” and de la Mare’s “Nature … thither” :
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Little enough stays musing upon
The passing of one of the masters of things,
Only a bird looks peak-faced on,
Looks and sings. (NV)
de la Mare confesses that he can scarcely express adequately what he only dimly perceives: “When music sounds, all
that I was I am / Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came…” (199) and to him life on earth is a dream and that death or
extinction of personality is an awakening into reality. Whereas Hardy asserts that he cannot accept the Christian
doctrine, “voices haunting us, daunting us, taunting us,” “hint in the night-time when life beats low,” that man can be
redeemed from his miserable existence only through divine grace as it fails to recognize the positive significance of
human experience and endeavour: “Hold we to braver things, / Wait we, in trust, what Time’s fullness shall show” (
Hardy, Collected Poems 78).
What is in Thomas’s impersonal perception is metaphorically rephrased in the second stanza of “Fern Hill” suggestive
of the juvenile Auden moving in between Hardy’s personal salvation and de la Mare’s Christian salvation, between “the
huntsman and herdsman,” between Nature’s prayer sounds, the Word-centric symbolic sounds and gestures of “the
pebbles of the holy stream,” the slow ringing “sabbath” and the life-centric signs and sounds, the striving and stirring
sounds of huntsman and the activities of actual world figured as the “singing … farm … home,” the singing “calves,”
the “clear and cold” barking of “foxes on the hills” but the essential statement of Auden’s juvenilia is not difficult to
find:
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams. (Poems)
The young Auden emulates de la Mare’s model of poetry as pilgrimage of pain, the ironic motif of death-in-life that is
recurrent in his Oxford poems as well as the subsequent mature poetry in defiance of Hardy’s paradox of life-in-death.
Day Lewis, bringing out the death-centric and aesthetic-oriented juvenile Auden and his needs, portrays him “as a child
setting out to colour a black-and-white picture book, / A priest entering into the spirit of dead ceremonial…” ( DCP
314).
Auden, in Oxford poems written under the influence of de la Mare, “nightly under the simple stars,” devotes himself to
the language of gestures symbolic of the Passion and ironic aesthetic structure, “the owls were bearing the farm away.”
In the third stanza of “Fern Hill,” Thomas depicts the Oxford Auden playing the role of a priest interpreting Christ’s
Crucifixion as an archetype of self-sacrifice, suffering and elegance, a commemorative symbol of prayer and
concentration and persuading his friends aspiring for aesthetic distance and great poetry to consider “climbing the hill”.
The tone of Auden is in common with what de la Mare does in the poem “The Unchanging” pointing to the way out “in
nodding cavalcade … starred deep hill” for perfect poetry:
All that glamour, peace, and mystery
In one grave look.
Beauty hid your naked body,
Time dreamed in your bright hair,
In your eyes the constellations
Burned far and fair. (202)
In the third stanza of “Fern Hill,” Thomas designs the metaphoric symbol, “all the sun long” implicit of Auden’s Oxford
contemporary, Rex Warner’s life-oriented personal freedom in contrast to Auden’s idea of death-oriented impassive
aesthetic freedom, “all the moon long.” He brings out the agony, an ecstasy of an intensely felt personal experience as
suggested in the Oxford poems of Warner:
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass. (Poems)
In “Spring Song” Warner, while sounding the discordant note, reflects on his hope for song pattern transmuting
personal sorrow into joy:
and made me listen to the rattling rhythm
of air in quaking sedge,
see towers of ice
behind the dancers on the first of May.
My reach of hope contracted to a ledge;
mist marred the main: that mist was despair. (Warner 13)
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Warner’s paradoxical song, thus, gives a new bearing to what appears an empty literary flourish in Auden’s irony. The
young poets at Oxford, Day Lewis, MacNeice, and Spender, the admirers of Auden’s transcendental art, “the nightjars
… flying with the ricks,” being inspired by Warner’s spine tingling poem assuring them that they, too, may achieve
freedom to structural art songs, “blessed among stables” become his ardent friends, “the horses ... flashing into the
dark.”
After the failure of the early poem Beechen Vigil and Other Poems (1926), “the birth of the simple light” for “it was all
shining” Day Lewis, “like a wanderer white … with the dew,” while rejecting Auden’s poetic of raving and wailing “in
a most somber suit of black,” “most melancholy Nightingale” and his “vast sorrow,” “music for sorrow’s sake,” “the sill
of words to sweeten despair … of finding consolation” ( de la Mare 190-91), heeds to Warner’s poetic ideal of poetry-
making and self-realization and consequently, his second volume Country Comet (1927) is made a success. He admits:
Later we lit a fire, and the hedge of darkness—
Garnished with not a nightingale nor a glow-worm—
Sprang up like the beanstalk by which our Jack aspired once. (DCP 15)
Spender feels like experiencing the joy of working with a grate in “Come, let us praise the gasworks” (Nine
Experiments 13). The poem “Appeal” is marked by a romantic strain and shows the poet’s gift for the subjective
impression of moods:
Yet not their grief, again
Can beat so hard as I
Upon one stone, sepulchered gate
With dumb temerity…. (8)
In the poem “Poussin,” MacNeice recognizes the impact of Warner’s influence on Auden’s contemporaries at Oxford:
And thus we never reach the dregs of the cup,
Though we drink it up and drink it up and drink it up,
And thus we dally and dip our spoon. (MCP 60)
The fourth stanza of “Fern Hill” is a symbolic glorification of Warner’s parable of personal salvation. Thomas explains:
“In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm / Out of the whinnying green stable / On to the fields
of praise” (Poems). Apart from praising Warner as their spinning man, “the sun grew round that very day” in the poems
published in Oxford Poetry (1927), the young poets Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice place reliance, on the other
hand, on man’s inward strength and affirm their faith in the potential divinity of each individual human being. They
perceive that Warner has not merely a picturesque quality. The sun, the sea and the earth are telescoped in a single
vision of beauty: the sea appears as a mighty minstrel playing hymns of despair of Auden, “the winter chill of what was
hot and hale” before the earth; the music of ocean recalling Warner’s songs dispelling the spine chilling “unmirth” and
“the frozen sleep” of Auden. Warner comments on the glorious rise of “the sun,” “the native of the earth,” the
adolescent poets: “Birth breaks / from dark and pain to light and liquid joy … when all was wonderful and all was good
… wonder is like a swift and flowing bird” (16). However, the sea-hymn and the ocean-music, associated with the
poetry of Auden and Warner respectively, haunt Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice continually. Warner speaks in the
poem “Light and Air”:
even the pale of pearl, clip of dawn
on cold coasts curling over the grey waves,
dim icy glow through scurrying legs of waders…. (19)
The sea reveals the eternal mystery of nature and creation, a mystery recaptured only by Auden, and the continually
beating waves bring back to his contemporaries’s mind the rhythmic richness of the poems of Auden’s Poems.
The fifth stanza of “Fern Hill” is both an illustration of Auden’s concept of Eliotian depersonalization and a
commentary on his contemporaries’s poetic character. It is in this self-projection, this linkage of personal mood or
experience with that of poetic symbols emulated from Eliot that Auden achieves new aesthetic heights in Poems (1930).
Eliot’s The Waste Land brings Auden and his friends at Oxford face to face with a broken world, besides offering a
vision to these poets and showing them how the contemporary sensibility can be expressed in imagery and symbols
derived from the prevailing gloom which has enveloped the war-torn Europe. The supporters of Warner’s life-centred
poetry, Day Lewis, Spender, and MacNeice unheed to Eliot’s voice, “ran” their “heedless ways.” To Auden, Eliot’s new
imagery and rhythm, the conversational tone and free association of verse provide devices for an appropriate expression
of his thoughts and feelings. Thomas sums up collectively the impact of Eliot on the transcendental Auden and his
romantic contemporaries in an impersonal manner:
My wishes race through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace. (Poems)
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In Eliot’s early poems, death the chief intensity, represents a liberation from the ignorance attendant on the mortal
condition and the beginning of a new phase; it marks a rejection of this existential time and also the consummation of
the blisses that the mortal condition can confer only momentarily on man. Auden’s conceptions of depersonalization,
the historic sense of his early poetry, “the keys of morning,” “the answering keys … of hope … and of memories” (de la
Mare), “pale and sweet” emulated from both de la Mare and Eliot are of the feathers of the same wing. He envisages
that “his garden then will be … denser and shadier and greener… greener the moss-grown tree” (103). To perfect his
workmanship and render his vision of contemporaneity he widens the supernatural intensity of de la Mare into the
nature-based impersonality of Eliot: “Then instead of the gnomies there came a red robin / To sing of the buttercups and
dew” ( de la Mare 3).
Auden aiming at perfectibility of his craftsmanship “cared” more for Eliot’s ambiguous impersonal art of the early
poems designing the contemporary reality, “that time allows … in all his tuneful turning.” In the poems of twenties
adjudged as the sacramental symbols of self-dissolution, Eliot’s creative journey is, in the deepest sense of the word, in
the nature of a pilgrimage, and yet it is a “pilgrimage as pain” that ends in uncertainty. In “Gerontion,” Eliot suggests
that individual mind can attain to such heights of hill or discover its aesthetic identity as death or “nothing” only
through crucifixion of the earthly existence:
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing taste and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact? (WL 25)
In the early poems, Eliot grapples with the riddle of existence, “wind, shoveller of seas, shuffler of leaves, wind …
swaying the creaking trunks, puffing the distracted sedge” and “scattering them in smoky cloud like ashes of burnt
paper.” A strain of music conducts Eliot to contemporary reality, “looser of leaves’ luxury, laying a bed for spring …
marrer of miles of dead wood, fanner into fire … heaven’s hound, panting, overrunning the fugitive world.” Warner
explains how Auden is “resistless” in his choice of the early Eliot while his Oxford friends are “restless”:
Listen to bang of shutters, whistle in the iron
of air aiming at lungs, running through rotten timbers,
rocking the roof, whistling a wintry air,
that we may make way for ruin and rebuild
houses to welcome air, ready for the light of spring. (20)
The light and air images, again, in Warner’s poem “Light and Air,” suggest the historic tradition in which Auden’s
uncertain and conflicting mind moves between the contemporaneous sensibility of Eliot and the archaic sensibility of de
la Mare. It is this quality of doubt, this courage to face uncertainties that gives Auden’s quest a strange intensity and
determines the texture and thought of his Oxford collection Poems (1928). Auden’s Poems (1928) conveys no sense of
release and he has to be tutored by Eliot’s early poems to bear the load of contemporary reality and pain to transform
his “sky blue trades” into blue sky research to become a great poet of Poems (1930).
Auden’s Poems (1928) published as a private edition by Spender at Oxford House makes him “honoured” among his
contemporaries. Day Lewis, Spender, and MacNeice whom Thomas images as “foxes and pheasants,” felicitate
Auden’s modernistic ambiguous art, “the new made clouds.” The supporters of Warner’s lyrical structure, “the gay
house” yearn for Auden’s ironic aesthetic structure, “the house high hay.” In “Fern Hill,” Thomas brings out:
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long…. (Poems)
Warner’s phrase “alighting among curlew” in the “perfect formation over the marsh” is suggestive of Auden’s “orderly”
distinctive artistic sensibility different from his Oxford friends’s romantic sensibility:
Squawking they rise from reeds into the sun,
climbing like furies, running on blood and bone,
with wings like garden shears clipping the misty air,
four mallards, hard winged, with necks like rods
fly in perfect formation over the marsh. (12)
The poetic image “this architecture” in Day Lewis’s Transitional Poem is similarly employed in a different context to
indicate Auden’s art of self-annihilation and his intrinsic structure:
Let figs from thistles fall
Or stars from their pedestal.
This architecture will stand. (14)
MacNeice’s phrase “a blue-veiled Madonna” in the poem “Evening Indoors” is, in Auden’s context, points to the
infinite variations of mood that he chooses to assume to please his friends — an oblique reference to the notion that an
ideal poet has no identity:
Like the calm marriage of the sky and sea,
Or a blue-veiled Madonna beaming vacancy,
See that Madonna snuff out the shaded light
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And stroke with soothing hand asleep the night. (61)
In a subsequent poem “River in Spate,” MacNeice adapting Warner’s phrase in “Sonnet” --“fearing for my fellows, for
the murder of man” -- repeats the same idea:
The river falls and over the walls the coffins of cold funerals
Slide deep and sleep there in the close tomb of the pool,
And yellow waters lave the grave and pebbles pave its mortuary. (MCP)
And, in the poem “Ovation for Spring,” Spender is at pains to subordinate romanticism to his awareness of Auden’s
grim vision of art and reality:
She cannot stir me with her sound,
Her light no longer makes me burn.
I only see earth wake and turn
Again in penitential round. (NE 19)
The poems of Warner’s friends responding to Auden’s impersonal pattern, thus, articulate the mixed reactions of love
and fear, yearning and sadness.
Before the publication of Auden’s Poems, Day Lewis, Spender, and MacNeice find a parallel in Warner and they seem
to enact the poetic character of Warner sharing his ecstasy and agony. Warner writes in “Lapwing”:
Leaves, summer’s coinage spent, golden are all together whirled,
sent, spinning, dipping, slipping, shuffled by heavy handed wind,
shifted sideways, sifted, lifted, and in swarms made to fly,
spent sunflies, gorgeous tatters, airdrift, pinions of trees. (17)
But after the emergence of Auden as a poet of art songs, the friends of Warner identify themselves equally or at the
unconscious level with Auden. Warner conveys from the half-serious cogitation Auden’s unchanging “music flow” and
his contemporaries’s wringing an unexpected tenderness from Auden’s aesthetic disinterestedness, their jesting
supplication for “continual uphill journeying”:
See them fall wailing over high hill tops with hue and cry,
like uneasy ghosts slipping in the dishevelled air,
with ever so much of forlorn ocean and wastes of wind
in their elbowing of the air and in their lamentable call. (Warner)
Day Lewis writes from the half-humorous mood:
And think, the first wind rising
Will crack that intricate crown
And let the daylight down. (DCP)
And Spender’s agonized speculations on human suffering and contemporary world weigh very heavily on his
consciousness:
Walking beside a stenchy black canal,
Regarding skies obtusely animal,
Contemplating rubbish-heaps, and smoke,
And tumid furnaces, obediently at work. (NE)
MacNeice’s half-jesting thinking suggests:
The spider pendulously waits
Stranded in the unroaded air,
The spider’s belly-mind creates
Thoroughfare on thoroughfare. ( 65 )
The spellbound followers of Warner’s “delight,” subjectivity and architectonic art, are in the process of becoming the
inspired lovers of Auden’s objectivity and architectural art, his “sorrowful … music.” Thomas explains their change of
love:
Turns in the dark on the sound they know will arise
Into the answering skies from the green ground,
From the man on the stairs and the child by his bed.
The sound about to be said in the two prayers
For the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies…. (Poems)
In Auden’s language of music Day Lewis finds a dramatic rendering of his own experience, the parallelism and contrast
giving it both intensity and a relative impersonality in Transitional Poem. For Day Lewis this means a release from
immediate experience and also a heightening of experience. “So from a summer’s height … I come into my peace”
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(DCP 50). Verbal echoes from From Feathers to Iron and The Magnetic Mountain do not have this configurative and
associative richness—the symphony A Time to Dance is an exception—but they show how Day Lewis invariably
recalls Auden’s Poems to express a significant mood or thought:
Is past the clutch of caution, the range of pride.
Speaking from the snow
The crocus lets me know
That there is life to come, and go. (57)
Day Lewis, as it were, lets Auden speak for him for Auden sums up matters of great poetry in an impersonal manner:
“Here’s no meaning but of morning … naught soon of night but stars remaining” (58). Because in Auden alone he
discovers the meaning of his poetic career, of his deepest aspirations, convictions and speculations. “Their spirits float
serene … above time’s roughest … reaches … but their seed is in us and over … our lives they are ever green” (142). In
Overtures to Death, Day Lewis oscillates between buoyancy and depression, a sense of power and an awareness of
limitations, Thomas and Auden:
From the gashed hills of desolation
Our life-blood springs to liberty,
And in the callous eyes we see
The landcape of their dissolution. (175)
Spender attains a glimpse of the mystery of Auden’s art in Poems and his descriptions, metaphorically used, thus
bring out appositely the tension in his mind and his conflicting emotions regarding the worth of his creative endeavour,
the influence of Auden, again, both fascinates and unnerves him:
After continual straining
I should grow strong;
Then the rocks would shake
And I should rest long. (Poems 25)
He reads in Auden’s Poems the strange working of destiny: the mystery that is only grasped by one who has
transcended his temporal plane. Like Auden, Spender employs allegory to express the sense of man’s struggle towards
intellectual advancement. Auden’s patronizing gesture simply sharpens his sensibility but it does not suppress his
essentially romantic temperament which Spender retains throughout his poetic career. The resolution of the poem The
Still Centre is Spender’s acceptance of both Auden and Thomas in the whole circle of the self:
The world, my body, binds the dark and light
Together, reconciles and separates
In lucid day the chaos of my darkness. (78)
MacNeice remembers Auden, “man from his vigil in the wintry chapel … will card his skin with accurate strigil”
(MCP 81) in moments of lonely exile, in joy and in sorrow and he underlines Auden’s fundamental truth about human
existence, the reality of his contemporaries’s poetry, “frivolous and stringent spring … we never come full circle,”
“never remember … self behind self years without number,” and “a series of dwindling mirrors.” In Thomas’s vision of
the dissolving fabric of the pageant, MacNeice finds a dramatic rendering of his own mood:
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palm of one’s hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses. (86)
Auden’s aesthetic structure of Poems appears to Day Lewis, Spender, and MacNeice as a hill that towers above them
and his musical pattern tolls the knell of death to their freedom and fellow-feelings. Commenting on their abject failure
to climb Auden’s transcendental hill, Day Lewis explains their maiden attempts to emulate Auden:
Broods the stone-lipped conqueror still
Abject upon his iron hill,
And lovers in the naked beds
Cry for more than maidenheads. (DCP 177)
Thomas’s lines dramatise the ultimate end of their wild love of Auden’s song structure and the beginning of their
romance for the surrealistic poem 18 Poems offering “poles of promise” to their poetry of pity and their survival: “The
haring snail go giddily round the flower, / A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral” (Poems 73). Day Lewis
explains the falling of Auden’s influence over his friends and the rising of Thomas’s influence over Auden’s enemies:
And, if the truth were told,
You’ count it luck, perceiving in what shallow
Crevices and few crumbling grains of comfort
Man’s joy will seed, his cold
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And hardy fingers find an eagle’s hold. (DCP)
The disenchanted contemporaries of Auden are enchanted by Thomas’s moral disinterestedness in 18 Poems: “The
sound about to be said in the two prayers / For the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies” (Poems). With the
outbreak of the Second World War, however, they are disappointed with Thomas’s refusal to be a poet of pity in the
war poem, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” Thomas rephrases their strictures pointing
out the tone of mutability in his war poem and predicting the death of his poetry:
And the child not caring to whom he climbs his prayer
Shall drown in a grief as deep as his made grave,
And mark the dark eyed wave, through the eyes of sleep,
Dragging him up the stairs to one who lies dead. (Poems)
The time-conscious poets of pity estimate that Thomas is as pitiless as Auden in his war poem which foreshadows the
dissolution of his vicarious mind and his complete identification with the existential suffering of Auden in the next
poem In the Country Sleep. They foresee the possibility of Thomas dissolving his moral disinterestedness and attaining
to the amoral aesthetic disinterestedness of Auden, his forthcoming poem becoming Audenesque, “will be the same
grief flying.”
However, while mutability has been a persistent factor in the poetry of the poets of the thirties and the forties,
immutability has been the salient character of Thomas’s poetry especially his later poem Deaths and Entrances and his
perceptions on the poetry of pity become more transparent during the moments of the Second World War. In the early
poem “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines” of 18 Poems, he compares and contrasts the instability of the poets of pity
and his own stability: “And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads, / The things of light / File through the flesh
where no flesh decks the bones” (Poems 94). In “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” of 25 Poems, he underscores
the rising and falling, “mad and dead as nails” of the sound-conscious poets of the thirties and his own sustenance:
“Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; / Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, / And death shall have no
dominion” (47). In the poem “The Tombstone Told When She Died” as included in The Map of Love, he underlines the
romantic war poets’s dilemmatic poems and his own resolute and independent work of art that rehabilitates and
revamps the fallen poets of the thirties , “my womb was bellowing”: “And I felt with my bare fall / A blazing red harsh
head tear up / And the dear floods of his hair” (132). And in Deaths and Entrances especially in the war poem “A
Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” he sings of the immutable nature of his own moral
disinterestedness and the mutability of the pity-conscious poets of the thirties and the pityless war poets of the forties,
“deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter … robed in the long friends” (Poems 18), in “Poem in October” he
marvels at the perseverance and permanence of his ideal poetical character in the context of the contemporary poets’s
discourse on mortality and their refusal to be active poets of pity: “And the true / Joy of the long dead child sang
burning / In the sun” (116), and in “Fern Hill” he modestly hectors of the persistence of his immutable moral
disinterestedness, “Nothing I cared.” In the altered context even the platitude of the war poet Prince’s vainglorious
justification of permanence and peace for Auden’s poetry and the continuation of immutable vicarious mind of Thomas
in the last poem In Country Sleep empathising with the suffering Auden carry a new depth of focus: “It was my thirtieth
… year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon … though the town below lay leaved with October blood”
(Poems).
Moreover, Thomas’s poetry has obviously manifested the immutability of his inclusiveness of heterogeneity in a
relentless manner: “and earth and sky were as one airy hill” in 18 Poems, “the mounted meadows in the hill corral”
(Poems), “a cock-on-a-dunghill” (74), “and my images roared and rose on heaven’s hill” (75) in 25 Poems, “a hailing
hill in her cold flintsteps” (69) in The Map of Love, and “locked in the lark-high hill” (88) and “fern hill” in Deaths
Entrances. His moral disinterestedness has been continuously unchanged in his poetry: his “vision … of new man
strength” in 18 Poems, “my man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal” (Poems) in 25 Poems, “an upright
man in the antipodes” (40) in The Map of Love, and “the man on the stairs … to-night shall find no dying but alive and
warm” (Poems) in the later poem Deaths and Entrances, especially in “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a
Child in London” and “Fern Hill.” MacNeice brings out:
His last train home is Purgatory in reverse,
A spiral back into time and down towards Hell
Clutching a quizzical strap where wraiths of faces
Contract, expand, revolve, impinge; disperse
On a sickly wind which drives all wraiths pell-mell
Through tunnels to their appointed , separate places. (MCP)
The real forte of his actual poetic character has been a refusal to be an intellectual poet like Auden or a poet of active
pity like the time-conscious poets of the thirties or a poet of passive pity like the war poets of the forties; however he
empathizes with the painful experiences of the fellow-beings and fellow-poets and stands as a distinctive poet of the
Yeatsian empathy, “whatever flames upon the night … man’s own resinous heart has fed” (YCP 181), “the struggle of
the fly in marmalade” because “the rhetorician would deceive his neighbours … the sentimentalist himself” (YCP147).
Prince’s first volume Poems narrates the story of Auden’s falling as well as his own rising poetic self, “there
boyhoood’s sun foretold, retold” (DCP). His dreaming of the architectural design of Auden’s Poems is the soul’s
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adventure amidst great poetry, yearning for a communion with another kindred spirit. His search for “godfather” is no
longer realized as he is close to his own selfhood and settlement in the world. Auden holds that a poet with no historic
Passion or Agony but that of a debating mind, “another to another” or personal experiences, “love’s pleasure and love’s
pain” suffers and “designs his own unhappiness … foretells his own death and is faithless” (Poems 54-55). The war
poet’s dying cry persists in Auden’s memory in The Age of Anxiety:
When the historical process breaks down and armies organize with their embossed debates the
ensuing void which they can never consecrate, when necessity is associated with horror and freedom
with boredom, then it looks good to the bar business. (ACP 345)
The judgement of Auden, the professional critic of poetry of his contemporaries, is relevant to Prince’s Poems that
betrays a lack of inwardness and immutable love.
In contradistinction to the dreams and deaths of wild love of the time-conscious poets of the thirties and Prince of the
forties, their waxing and waning passion for Auden’s aesthetic transcendence and his impersonal stature, Thomas in 18
Poems, while rejecting Donne’s metaphysical pattern “the singing house,” “the light of sound” and “the sound of light”
and defying Auden’s transcendental, musical structure and historic sense, “the stony idiom of the brain,” “the root of
tongues … in a spentout cancer” (Poems 58), “a reverie,” “moments the mightiest pass uncalendered,” “the Absolute …
in backward Time,” “the norm of every royal-reckoned attribute” ( Hardy, 75), “architectural masks” (144), “perfection
of work,” “a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark,” “that old perplexity an empty purse” (YCP 209), chooses “the
deedful word” of Hardy “whereby all life is stirred” and the Yeatsian paradoxical magnanimous structure, “translunar
paradise” (167) and the “deep considering mind.” Influenced by the skeptical poetic tradition of Hardy and Yeats,
Thomas demonstrates in 18 Poems to the poets of metaphysical tradition, “I am dumb to tell the crooked rose … my
youth is bent by the same wintry fever” (Poems127) and persuasively tells “a weather’s wind,” the time-conscious
fallen poets of the thirties, “how time has ticked a heaven round the stars,” “the purposed Life,” and “the spell ... of
inner themes and inner poetries” (HCP 140) for “perfection of life” (YCP). His 25 Poems underscores the value of the
magnanimous Yeatsian empathy, “when the worm builds with the gold straws of venom … my nest of mercies in the
rude, red tree” (Poems ) and justifies how his anti-metaphysical, vicarious, paradoxical mind, “hurried through the
smooth and rough … the fertile and waste … protecting, till the danger past … with human love” (YCP 180) and how
his “memorial,” his sequence of sonnets “Altarwise by Owl-light” won “the world’s heart.”
Then, in The Map of Love “that breaks one bone to light with a judgement clout” he vindicates to the romantic war
poets of the forties how his early objective poems are redemptive and rejuvenating to the fallen poets, “morning smack
of the spade that wakes up sleep …shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat … in the dark of the coffin and sheds dry
leaves” (Poems) and directs them to “sobriety” that “is a jewel … that I do much adore” and “that I may stay a sober
man … although I drink my fill” and “a drunkard is a dead man … and all dead men are drunk” (YCP 268). And in the
later poem Deaths and Entrances, Thomas upholds the continuity of his empathic mind, despite his being estranged
from the poets of the thirties and the forties whom he has been caring:
Of your immortal friends
Who’d raise the organs of the counted dust
To shot and sing your praise,
One who called deepest down shall hold his peace
That cannot sink or cease
Endlessly to his wound
In many married London’s estranging grief. (Poems)
This is what Thomas has reiterated in an emphatic manner in the concluding stanza of the poem “Fern Hill”:
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land. (Poems)
It is evident that the poem is an illustration of the case study of Thomas’s poetry, a symbol of his paradoxical poetry, his
moral disinterestedness and his immutable poetic character.
In the concluding three lines of “Fern Hill,” Thomas reconstructs the phrases of his early paradoxical poems -- “I See
the Boys of Summer in Their Ruin,” ‘When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer,” “A Process in the Weather of the
Heart,” “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” “My Hero Bares His Nerves,” “From Love’s First
Fever to Her Plague,” and “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines” -- of dramatic contexts and symbolic significances to
recall his rejoinder to Auden’s critique of 18 Poems.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea. (Poems)
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In Look Stranger! Auden, while complimenting Thomas’s second volume 25 Poems as highly impersonal and artistic
achievement, a well-accomplished paradox, “cold, impossible,” faults his first volume 18 Poems “the mountain’s lovely
head … whose white waterfall could bless … travellers in their last distress” ( 24), for its adolescent, sentimental and
rhetorical structure:
Sighs for folly said and done
Twist our narrow days;
But I must bless, I must praise
That you, my swan, who have
All gifts that to the swan
Impulsive Nature gave,
The majesty and pride,
Last night should add
Your voluntary love. (60)
Thomas’s counter reply, besides pointing out that his 18 Poems is endowed with the intense maturity and artistic stature
of a paradox, the poetic process of life-in-death, “the womb … drives in a death as life leaks out,” describes it as “twin
miracle” of his art song 25 Poems. He speaks proud of his anti-metaphysical paradoxical 18 Poems and 25 Poems, “the
weather fall” and “man’s footfall” (Poems 73) as works of art influenced by the poetic tradition of Hardy and Yeats:
: I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death’s corridor,
To my man-iron sidle. (Poems)
He justifies his early poem 18 Poems as an “image of images,” “this is the fortune of manhood” “the natural peril … a
steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless … no death more natural” as mature and impersonal as his 25 Poems, “the
natural parallel.” These early poems are also “natural parallel” to Auden’s early poems, Poems (1928), “the
consumptives’ terrace,” and Poems (1930), “the water final”: “Under the skysigns they who have no arms / Have
cleanest hands, and as, the heartless ghost / Alone’s unhurt, so the blind man sees best” (Poems 144).
The last stanza of “Fern Hill” has its significance only in the context of all the shaping forces, positive and negative,
that go to make the poetry of Thomas totally impersonal and magnanimous but taken in isolation, it may sound as
sentimental communication or trite reflections on life. Thomas’s remark is the final commentary on his poetry and the
poetry of his fellow-poets and friends; his skeptical poetic process which, in turn, reveals the process of his
transfiguring mind, “a process in the weather of the heart … turns damp to dry; the golden shot … storms in the
freezing tomb” (Poems 17), his moral disinterestedness that alchemizes the tragic sorrow into tragic joy, “a weather in
the quarter of the veins … turns night to day; blood in their suns … lights up the living worm,..” is in sheer contrast to
the intellectual poets’s poetic process of turning “ghost to ghost,” tragic bitterness into tragic sweetness, “a process in
the weather of the world,” “a process blows the moon into the sun” pulling “down the shabby curtains of the skin …
and the heart gives up its dead,” the historical process of transubstantiation and transmigration. The transfiguring
process of casting out the tragic failure of the fellow-poets as tragic joy which Thomas dramatically demonstrates in
“Fern Hill” has already been accomplished in the early poem “From Love’s First Fever to Her Plague”: “youth did
condense; the tears of spring … dissolved in summer and the hundred seasons … one sun, one manna, warmed and fed.
(Poems 59). In the early poem, Thomas underlines the metaphysical, aesthetic-oriented tragic sorrow of the intellectual
poets, Donne and Auden imaged as “airy hill.”:
From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second
And to the hollow minute of the tomb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
The time for breast and the green apron age
When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,
All the world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk.
And earth and sky were as one airy hill.
The sun and moon shed one white light. (Poems)
Thomas believing that human minds should leave each other in contrary directions, traverse each other in numberless
points, emphasizes the meaningfulness of the creative inquiry and the barrenness of pugnacious dogmatism in his
poetry. Day Lewis points out the poetic process of transformation in Thomas’s poetry: “Into the blue we project / Our
dreaming shadows. And is the hope forlorn / That in them we may be reborn, that our images / More masterful are,
more true” (DCP 274). Dogma is assertive, while creative speculation leaves the mind open to receive experience and
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admits of alternative approaches: “A process in the eye forwarns / The bones of blindness; and the womb / Drives in a
death as life leaks out” (Poems). So, Thomas’s vision of paradoxical poetry and human reality finds faith “in time
alone” in which “may man, full grown, reach out over the void … a rapt, creator’s wing” stands distinguished from
Auden’s vision of ironic poetry and metaphysical reality “Time’s your condition” (DCP).
Vernon Watkins estimates that the poem “Fern Hill” is not nostalgic about Thomas’s childhood or death-centric musical
structure or religion but speaks of the Magnus Annus, the paradox of life-in-death in sharp contrast to his
contemporaries’s pursuit of the paradox of death-in-life, the perfect aesthetic Beauty, the Magnum Opus:
In the churchyard the yew is neither green nor black
I know nothing of Earth or colour until I know I lack
Original white, by which the ravishing bird looks wan.
The mound of dust is nearer, white of mute dust that dies
In the soundfall’s greatest light, the music in the eyes,
Transfiguring whiteness into shadows gone,
Utterly secret. I know you, black swan. (Modern Verse 367)
The poem “Fern Hill” testifies to Thomas’s faith in the vicarious mind and the poetic tradition, the transfiguring mind
of Yeats. “Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. / All men have aimed at, found and lost; / Black out; Heaven blazing into
the head” (YCP 250).
4. Findings and Implications
Thomas has begun the poem “Fern Hill” with the intention of illustrating symbolically the ascent of his creative mind
to fellowship with the mortal poets. Many pre-“Fern Hill” poems, too, recognize the value of friendship as a creative
power that inspires the fellow-poets. Fellowship implies and involves sympathy, understanding, a projection of one’s
self into another. But Thomas is to witness in his later career his dearly cherished values being rudely shaken by petty
bickering among his friends and to discover with pain that moral disinterestedness is a rare virtue. His later poem “Fern
Hill” shows how intensely and sharply he reacts to this atmosphere of quarrelsomeness and antagonism. MacNeice,
distinguishing Thomas’s Yeatsian vicarious impersonality, “this time-bound ladder out of time” and “in haunts of
friendship and untruth” (MCP 234) from Auden’s “fierce impersonality,” “pattern of inhuman good … hard critic of our
thought and blood,” describes Thomas as a paradoxist and Auden a satirist:
He is the pinprick master, he can dissect
All your moods and manners, he can discover
A selfish motive for anything—and collect
His royalty as recording angel. No
Reverence here for hero, saint or lover. (MCP 232)
The poem “Fern Hill” stands as a paragon of magnanimous disinterestedness, a paradoxical structure of harmonization
and reconciliation, “friend by enemy,” “desireless familiar” (Poems 138), by forgetting and forgiving “an army of
mercenaries,” “what God abandoned, these defended … and saved the sum of things for pay” (AEH 16). Thomas
himself comments that the poem is “an essential part of the feeling and meaning of” Deaths and Entrances “as a whole”
(Collected Letters 569).
To reconcile the poetic vision with the frightening spectre of the shrunken mood of the fellow-poets would involve the
telescoping of two different perspectives. This Auden seldom achieves; what is noted chiefly is a juxtaposition of
contraries. His mockery deepens the poignancy of the situation “for few are able to keep moving … they drag and flag
in the traffic” and not just serving as a relief that Thomas accords in the harmonious structure of paradox “for the
example … of living like fugue and moving” (MCP 108). MacNeice, underlining the attitudes of remoteness and
closeness, farness and nearness between Auden and Thomas, compares and contrasts:
High above London, naked in the night
Perched on a board. I peered up through the bars
Made by his fear and mine but it was more than fright
That kept him crucified among the budding stars. (MCP)
Thomas’s paradoxical poem “Fern Hill” comes close to an inclusive vision in which the contrariness is not dissolved,
and the thought-process resembles a flow rather than a cluster.
Auden’s continual ascending of the transcendental hill from the structural principle of de la Mare’s impassivity to
Eliot’s impersonal character, from Nature’s metaphors, “those morning rivers are love-in-a-mist … and the
chimneystacks prayers” to modernistic, dialectic metaphors, “a man of affairs … a seasoned commuter … intent on
perusing … facts and figures” (DCP 293), from “the initiating ceremony” (Poems 70) to “new styles of architecture”
(89), from “fearer to farer” (Orators 116) is not “change of heart” but reinforcement of his conception of impersonal
elegance, “we rebuild our cities” (LS 23) identical with his transitional poetic setting “against the large and dumb …
the timeless and the rooted … his money and his time” (AT 15), “waves of anger and fear … to an apathetic grave” (AT
112). The unstable irony of his earlier phase, the stable irony of his early phase, the “ironic points of light” (115) are
similar to the structural irony, the “ironic breath … turning poverty to song” (124) of his mid-career. His elegant art of
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“timid similarity” of the middle phase recalls his early art of “stating timidly” (18); “the double Man” is none other
than “our double-shadow” (LS 30). If Auden’s early poetry has the pronounced impact of the “metaphysical distress” (
LS 15) of de la Mare and Eliot, his poems of middle phase – Another Time, New Year Letter, “The Sea and the Mirror”
and For the Time Being – “form its ethical resolve … now to suffer and to be” (AT) under the impact of Rilke and
Ernest Toller, and Auden expecting truly great art to have the same “conscious sorrow” (Poems 54) of metaphysics,
mutters: “Beleaguered by the same / Negation and despair, / Show an affirming flame” (AT), “Back to the labyrinth
where either / We are found or lose ourselves for ever” (NYL 186). The existential suffering of his early poetry, “the
sorrow” of his “founders of these starving cities … whose honour is the image of our sorrow” (LS 22) is synonymous
with his transitional poetry believing in the existentialistic suffering of Soren Kierkegaard. Auden admits:
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our lives; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand. (AT 111)
The metaphysical, unified sensibility of the English Auden of the early phase is in common with the cultured but
debilitated sensibility of the European Auden of the middle phase, “that dying where they stand / Image our last and
leave an / Adored light behind (DCP 172). So, it is the identical, symbolic landscape technique of de la Mare, Eliot,
Rilke and Ernest Toller that have shaped Auden’s art of self-annihilation according to Day Lewis: “Through mansion,
lake and lackluster groves / We see the landscape of their dissolution” (173). Auden’s insistence on the “fine tradition”
(LS 17) of sorrow in the early career and on refined sensibility in the world of war and sorrow during his mid-carrier,
“imperialism’s face … and international wrong” (AT 113). “the unmentionable odour of death … offends the September
night” (AT), “existence is believing … grieving” (AT) in Another Time, “let the lips do formal contrition … for
whatever is going to happen” (NYL 87) in New Year Letter, “for my company be lonely … for my health be ill” (ACP)
in “The Sea and the Mirror,” “the Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss” ( ACP 274) in For the Time Being are all
emblematic of his pilgrimage as pain, his climbing up the hill to reach his faith in the religion of sorrow, the symbolic
image of Christian sorrow and salvation. “And I must enter again the round / Zion of the water bead / And the
synagogue of the ear of corn” ( Thomas, Poems 18). Day Lewis also points out the continuous presence of the main
current of historic sense in Auden’s pilgrimage: “Shields and medallions; overshadowing eaves … like studious brows”
and “all’s definitive” (DCP 337).
Moreover, Auden’s inviting to the contemporary poets, “all that we wish for our friends,” to his poetic technique of
irony, “to recall or compose … from “snatches of vision, hints of vanishing airs” (DCP) is an indirect endeavour to
immortalize his poetry and the historic tradition. What Auden suffers for is mainly for his own survival and
immortality, “and yet we know what he knows what he must do” (MCP 235) though apparently conceptual and
dogmatic which is in sharp contrast to Thomas’s suffering for the good of his fellow-mortals, “… though I loved them
for their faults … as much as for their good… (Poems). Thomas narrates their “winter’s tale”:
Once when the world turned old
On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold
Of fields. (Poems)
The problem that Auden’s amoral cultivated, historic sensibility “meditating on … Time’s ruins, and the seven laws”
(Jain 27) confronts with the free joyous Thomas and with the opportunistic Prince is similar to that of Burbank in
Eliot’s poem “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”: “Defunctive music under sea … passed seaward with
the passing bell … slowly” (26). In this context, de la Mare’s poetic lines can be adapted as an objective correlative to
suggest the artistic stature of Auden: “Her dark eyes seem / Dark with a beautiful / Distant dream…” (107).
Day Lewis, throwing light on the inner stresses and uncertainties of the fellow-poets that enrich the texture of Thomas’s
“Fern Hill” and his poetry, 18 Poems, 25 Poems, The Map of Love and Deaths and Entrances, compares and contrasts
Auden’s ironic principle of aesthetic disinterestedness, the Eliotian historic concept of “Datta. Dayadhavam. Damyatta”
(WL 43) and the Yeatsian ideals of “self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting” (YCP) which Thomas has espoused
as his poetic ideals of moral disinterestedness:
Wild natures, kin to all cageless things—
Thistledown, grass and cloud—yet mewing
So ghostly, no prey nor animal need pursuing
In those pure rings and hoverings,
I watch the angelic pastime until
I seem to know what is beyond the hill. (DCP 284)
In Day Lewis’s poem “Buzzards Over Castle Hill,” the original context of “Fern Hill” is not superseded. What is more
significant is transposition to a different context in Houseman’s lyric “It Nods and Curtseys and Recovers” which gives
a metaphoric and symbolic character to a word, phrase or the poetic character of Thomas’s poem compared with other
poems:
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The nettle nods, the wind blows over,
The man, he does not move,
The lover of the grave, the lover
That hanged himself for love. (33)
In contrast with Auden’s language of irony and gestures that structures the symbols of the Passion and Purgation
resurrecting his Weltansicht, his tragic vision of historic sense, Thomas’s “language of paradox” re-creates images of
self-sacrifice and redemption according to his own apprehension and promotes his Weltschmerz, his comic vision of co-
existence, happiness and peace. What Thomas articulates in “Fern Hill” is the language of empathy and life-centric
creative force which has been the language of his poetry rather than the language of death-centred amoral aesthetic.
Cleanth Brooks remarks that “our prejudices force us to regard paradox as intellectual rather than emotional, clever
rather than profound, rational rather than divinely irrational” (292).
The entrances and deaths of romances of the poets of pity of the thirties, their “aspiring … and the renouncing of” their
dreams of pure and timeless poetry can simply be attributed to their greater concern for existence in time, mortal living.
Auden explains: “So many, fearful, took with them their sorrow / Which stayed them when they reached unhappy
cities” (LS). Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice’s continual change of heart from Warner’s personal language of pagan
beauty, “the light … a conjured inlay on the grass” (MCP 236) to Auden’s impersonal language of metaphysical
beauty, “language … a prism … whose rays today are concentrated” results in wild passion, “language grown a
burning-glass.” MacNeice sums up the sum and substance of their pursuit of greatness in vain:
Instantly and it would be permanently
God was uttered in words and gulped in gin,
The bar maid was a Madonna, the adoration
Of the coalman’s breath was myrrh, the world was We
And pissing under the stars an act of creation
While low hills lay purring round the inn. (MCP)
On the whole, the passion of the poets of the thirties for Auden’s greatness as a classic poet is “only a grain of faith” for
the reassurance of their poetry: “And, like ten million others, dying for people” (MCP). Thomas’s pertinently comments
on their identical visionary language and aspiration: “The sound about to be said in the two prayers / For the sleep in a
safe land and the love who dies” (Poems). Their tragic failure, “unluckily for a death” recalls the lines from Eliot’s
poem, “Whispers of Immortality,” “Polyphiloprogenitive … the sapient subtler of the Lord” (Jain, 36), “the masters of
the subtle schools … are controversial, polymath” (37). They understand the meaning of their awful defeat, “thus are we
weaned to knowledge of the Will … that wills the natural but wills us dead” and realized that their “gluttony” for
Auden’s transcendental art “for us was Lenten fare,” their passionate love of Auden’s elegant art, “the tops of topless
towers” crunched “away … the beams of human life” and they “were chill … though cotted in a grill of sizzling air …
striped like a convict—black, yellow and red…” (MCP 218). Thomas perceives that these poets’s irresolute mind
between the temporal and the timeless concerns is the root cause of their tragic failure: “I see the tigron in tears / In the
androgynous dark…” (Poems).
Prince’s shift from the Wordsworthian language of tranquility, “handsel joy” to Auden’s erudite language of intensity,
“accredited to time and meaning” remains “a timeless” passionate dream. His approach is not that of “some atavistic”
scholar, nor does he have recourse to a regular critic’s tools and methods. He makes a distressing attempt at imposing
mechanical standards from without on his fellow poets. He is “a fossil …mind in its day both its own king and castle…
(MCP). MacNeice is not sure whether Auden knows that Prince who castles him and soldiers on his cause is a
connoisseur, a soldier of fortune full of inward feelings and thoughts building castles in the air:
And thence conceive a vague inaccurate notion
Of what it meant to live embroiled with ocean
And between moving dunes and beyond reproving
Sentry-boxes to have been self-moving. (MCP 251)
MacNeice notes in Prince a want of taste for self-annihilation, “time to descend … where Time will brief us briefed
himself to oppress” (MCP), leading to a confusion of issues, a refusal to yield up to the spell and mystery of Auden’s
art. Prince’s approach is an almost unpardonable temerity and opinionatedness where only passive receptivity can open
up the secret, “living thoughts coagulate in matter,” “an age of mainlanders, that dare not fancy … Life out of
uniform…” (MCP). Moreover, his incarnation of Auden as god is a process for his own incarnation. To quote Harold
Bloom is more apt to explain the context:
All poetic odes of incarnation are … Immortality odes, and all of them rely upon a curious divinity that the
ephebe has imparted successfully, not to himself, but to the precursor. In making the precursor a god, the
ephebe already has begun a movement away from him, a primary revision that imparts error to the father, a
sudden inclination or swerve away from obligation; for even in the context of incarnation, of becoming a poet,
obligation shines clear as a little death, premonitory of the greater fall down to the inanimate. (220-21)
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Thomas, commenting on Prince’s warring passions between aesthetic love and personal love, “Time” and “the spring
weather,” “that belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn,” correlates to the unholy alliance between a
young man and an old woman in Eliot’s poem “The Portrait of A Lady”:
For the bird lay bedded
In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,
And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,
And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,
The woman breasted and the heaven headed. (Poems)
Thomas’s language of moral disinterestedness emulated from Hardy, Yeats, and Houseman, his “sharper apprehension”
differs from Prince’s sentimental, “affective,” “mass language,” “the fallacy of communication” (Tate). According to
Tate, “mass language is the medium of “communication,”, and its users are less interested in bringing to formal order
what is sometimes called the “affective state” (374). Day Lewis describes Prince “the neurotic,” “this man who turns a
phrase and twiddles a glass … seems far from that pale muttering magician … pent in a vicious circle of dilemmas” and
“wistful, amazed, but more affrighted … gay fluent forms of life wavering around … and dare not break the bubble and
be drowned” (DCP). Prince’s poems “walk a stage where endlessly … phantoms rehearse unactable tragedy” and his
“words cannot ennoble … this Atlas who fell down under a bubble” according to Day Lewis.
Then the romantic war poets, Fuller, Rook and Rhys inspired and “formed” by Wordsworth, “a precocious … image of
spring, too brilliant to be true” (DCP), fail to emulate the moral sweetness of Thomas: “The man who looks and finds
Man human and not his friend / And whose tongue feels around and around but cannot taste / That hour-gone sacrament
of drunkenness” (MCP). Their sensuous love of the various poetic models undergoes frequent changes, from their
impassive love of the Wordsworthian spontaneity and recollection to their split love of objectivity of Auden and to their
passive love of Thomas’s magnanimous art. Their flirting, flowery love discredits them as incommunicado according to
MacNeice:
When we were children Spring was easy,
Dousing our heads in suds of hawthorn
And scrambling the laburnum tree—
A breakfast for the gluttonous eye;
Whose winds and sweets have now forsaken
Lungs that are black, tongues that are dry. (MCP)
The war poets’s rhetorical poems, while displaying their “good wishes” for Thomas’s paradoxical structure of 18
Poems, smack of wild love and exhibitionism. Their perception of the Second World War climate and the world’s
sorrow is rather personal and sentimental according to Thomas:
All love but for the full assemblage in flower
Of the living flesh is monstrous or immortal,
And grave its daughters. (141)
It is understood that the soldier-poets’s dream of emulating Thomas’s moral disinterestedness, their strange,
dilemmatic relationship with Thomas, “moving dunes and beyond reproving,” “the child … unharmed” and “the man
… crying” is simply their passions for eternity and self-advancement in life. Thomas comments: “The conversation of
the prayers about to be said / Turns on the quick and the dead” (Poems).
Day Lewis estimates that the war poets’s passionate love of Thomas’s moral disinterestedness is as affective as
Wordsworth’s love of the Tintern Abbey:
Here’s Abbey Way: here are the rooms
Where they held the chrysanthemum show—
Leaves like talons of greenfire, blooms
Of a barbarous freny, red, flame, bronze…. (DCP)
Wordsworth explains his wild love of nature above Tintern Abbey: “Their colours and their forms, were then to me / An
appetite; a feeling and a love / That had no need of a remoter charm…” (569). And the war poets’s predicament, their
“overwhelming question,” their muttering retreats … of restless nights” (WL 3), their “time yet for a hundred
indecisions … and for a hundred visions and revisions” (4) is identical to that of Prufrock, “politic, cautious, and
meticulous” (7) in Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.”
As a whole, the time-conscious poets’s vain attempt for Auden’s sound pattern as a classic mode of conquering reality
and aesthetic perception, the slow ordeal and bitter memories of Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice, the tragic despair
of Prince for Auden’s musical pattern, and the dreams and deaths, the initiations and struggles of Fuller, Rook and Rhys
for Thomas’s greatness as a paradoxical poet of human love result as “hysterica passio of its emptiness…” (YCP 289)
which is the central focus and concerns of Thomas’s “Fern Hill” according to Day Lewis:
Such is the tenant you’ll have beside you,
Often beside you
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Through the spoilt Junes when a gusty rain
Strums fitful arpeggios on the pane
The dawns when light is denied you. (269)
The totally deplorable failure of the poets of the thirties and the forties in climbing up Auden’s aesthetic hill of
greatness evokes the identical theme of the poem The Waste Land: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew
Nothing, / Looking into heart of light, the silence.” (WL 28). However, Thomas has transfigured the tragic fall of these
poets as his poetry: “All all and all the dry worlds couple / Ghost with her ghost, contagious man / With the womb of
his shapeless people” (Poems). So the poem “Fern Hill,” contrary to the interpretations of literary critics focusing on
the romantic subjectivism or the childhood memories of the poet, becomes a participation in the movements of the
poems of his contemporaries and forwards the sceptic poetic tradition of his poetry to the future. What Thomas has
done in the poem is that he deconstructs the existing construct of the fellow-poets and then reconstructs it so as to
liberate them from the influence of Auden, his concept of metaphysics.
In 18 Poems, “the resuffered pain … my genesis in sweat of death” (Poems 66), Thomas suffers for the rejuvenation of
the depressed poets of the thirties, Day Lewis, Spender, and MacNeice, “morning smack of the spade that wakes up
sleep,” in 25 Poems he suffers for the redemption of the fallen poets of the thirties, “shakes a desolate boy who slits his
throat … in the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,” in The Map of Love his suffering is for the salvation of the war
poets, Prince, Fuller, Rook, and Rhys, “that breaks one bone to light with a judgement clout .. after the feast of tear-
stuffed time and thistles … in a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern” (Poems) and in the later poem Deaths
Entrances, especially in “Fern Hill” continuing the cynical concern of his preceeding poems that represent his poetic
tradition “still in the water and singing birds” (116), “for this memorial’s sake, alone … in the shrivelling hours with the
dead,” he sings as a fellow-sufferer though the fellow-poets have turned hostile, “the weather turned around” and
identifies himself with the agony of the poets of the thirties and the forties. Thomas, as he has “aims in common”
throughout his poetry, has been speaking “in the same language” (MCP 228) of moral disinterestedness of his poetic
tradition, his poetic ancestors, Hardy, Yeats and Houseman, “hearts of gold,” and “hands that gave … a grasp to friend
me to the grave” (AEH). MacNeice reveals the truth behind Thomas’s poetic functioning:
But now the sphinx must change her shape--
O track that reappears through slush,
O broken riddle, burst grenade—
And live must be pulled out like tape
To measure something not themselves,
Things not given but made, but made. (241-42)
So, Thomas whom MacNeice has imaged as Viola, a morally disinterested character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has
been the poetic “image” of “other images,” the poetic tradition of Hardy, Yeats and Houseman. He has emulated these
poetic images of moral disinterestedness in 18 Poems, 25 Poems, The Map of Love and Deaths and Entrances, “by
falling stream and standing hill … by chiming tower and whispering tree … men that made a man of me” (AEH 9).
And it is this image of the poet as fellow-sufferer that Thomas cherishes and clings to in his poetry and this is in
common with Yeats’s “last confession”:
And give his own and take his own
And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There’s not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight. (YCP 234).
The poet is seen no longer as a protean personality taking every possible shape and attitude, as a superior being looking
upon the manifold aspects of life as beautiful forms. He perceives that a poet is known “by heart,” “he that sings a
lasting song … thinks in a marrow-bone” and that “men think … in the mind alone” (YCP 243) make songs of “the
lacking sense scene,” “a sad-coloured landscape” as their “self-smitings kill self-joys” (HCP), as they “fasten … their
hands upon their hearts” (AEH 13). This poetic image of protector and redeemer of fellow-poets and fellow-mortals as
revealed in “Fern Hill” has been persistently present in all the preceeding poems as well as the last poem, In Country
Sleep in which Thomas annexes with the “anxiety” and languish of Auden, “a cloud vibrating … in the wash of the
hull-down sun” (DCP 336), and makes a work of art, “the languid strings” of “Over Sir John’s Hill,” a dramatic
rendering of Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, an inferno of spiritual anguish, perplexity and despair, “the tart aroma of
some classic text” (DCP).
Day Lewis interprets the poetry of Auden and Thomas rightly in terms of their faith in Christian sorrow and human
sorrow, existentialistic metaphysical reality and human reality respectively:
When I think how, not twice or thrice,
But year after year in another’s eyes
I have caught the look that I missed today
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Of the church, the knoll, the cedars—a ray
Of the faith, too, they stood for,
The hope they were food for,
The love they prayed for, facts beyond price…. (DCP 295)
What the comic vision of Thomas’s poetry suggests is that the way to salvation is self-effacing moral disinterestedness
serving the cause of fellow-poets and mortal beings than the aesthetic transcendence representing the “superstructure,”
the “structurality” of the central presence symbolizing the logocentric “self-born mockers of man’s enterprise” (YCP
184). “Fern Hill” that vindicates the poetic truth of Thomas’s poetry, the thought of doing good to the fellow-beings
through self-sacrifice and self-immolation reassures the continuation of the same rule and energy in his last poem In
Country Sleep: “O may my heart’s truth / Still be sung / On this high hill in a year’s turning” (Poems). Thomas’s “Fern
Hill,” bearing abundant evidence of his magnanimous disinterestedness identical with the moral functioning of the
sceptical poets Hardy, Yeats and Houseman, anticipates the consummate influence of the world-centric poetic tradition
of William Blake, “until that one loved least … looms the last Samson of your zodiac” (Poems) in the last poem In
Country Sleep.
Day Lewis, comparing the poetic character and functioning of the “two travellers” moving in opposite directions,
Auden and Thomas cherishing amoral aesthetic disinterestedness and moral disinterstedness respectively, speculates on
their future and immortality. If Thomas continually looks forward, he also occasionally looks back and retreads the
ground covered earlier. The process is both accumulative and progressive. In the labyrinth of the intellectual poetry of
Auden, in his movement of advance and recoil, the readers may discover certain important milestones. Day Lewis
comprehends that Thomas’s moral disinterestedness is for the living present, his concern for the fellow-poets, fellow-
beings and paradoxical art justifies and reassures the future life of his poetry in sheer contrast to Auden’s poetry of the
historic aloofness and sarcasm:
What each of them shares
With his fellow-traveller, and which is making the best of it,
And whether this or the other one
Will be justified when the journey’s done,
And if either may carry on some reward or regret for it
Whither he fares. (DCP)
MacNeice also hints at the prospect of “futurity” of Thomas’s paradoxical poetry of vicariousness, “the kind, the
single-hearted … the lads I used to love” that transcends the concerns of “humanity,” “the clock strikes the hour … tells
the time none” (AEH 25) in contrast to the poetry of the Time-conscious Auden and the time-conscious poets of the
thirties and the war poets of the forties:
And though is arid,
We know—and knowing bless—
That rooted in futurity
There is a plant of tenderness. (MCP)
While Thomas’s early poems “Light Breaks Where No Sun Breaks,” “Altarwise by Owl-Light,” and “After the
Funeral” carve out for him the career of a popular poet, the later poem “Fern Hill” acclaimed as chef par excellence
assures the right niche for himself and the last poem “Over Sir John’s Hill,” a chef-d’oeuvre, reassures him of a niche in
the temple of fame.
5. Conclusion
What Thomas has enriched and renewed his perception in “Fern Hill” is that the poet is a crucified man realizing
himself through the world of sorrow, conveying in his poetry the artistic sensibility that transfigures the private agony
of his fellow-mortals into a universal experience of sorrow and the wisdom that sorrow brings. His poems are the
comments on the life of sorrow, “man’s … pain” (HCP), “man’s … cry” (YCP ), and “man’s … sorrow” (AEH) and
they render “the budding” artists a new vision of poetry-making and “a ray of faith” which is in sharp contrast to
Auden’s existentialistic faith in suffering. His poetry is, in a sense, emblematic of Hardy’s transfiguring mind, “serene,
sagacious, free” (HCP) that transmutes “cramps, black humours, wan decay, and baleful blights … distress into
delights” (102), symbolic of Yeats’s magnanimous disinterestedness, “sleepy cry … among the deepening shades”
(YCP), “propinquity had brought … imagination to that pitch where it casts out … all that is not itself” (YCP) and
synonymous with Houseman’s moral disinterestedness, his poetry of “embittered hour” that “should do good to heart
and head … when your soul is in my soul’s stead … and I will friend you … in the dark and cloudy day”(AEH 56).
Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” thus, stands as a symbol of his symbols of poetic tradition, Hardy, Yeats, and Houseman and an
epitome of his paradoxical poetry and magnanimity, a symbolic representation of the immutability of his poetic
character and culture of his poetic oeuvre. It is due to this explicit enunciation of Thomas’s “recalcitrant” (MCP) mind,
his Weltanschuung of “the Beautiful and Damned,” or, what Donald Davie calls “cultivated cries” (Contemporary Verse
324) that the poem “Fern Hill” can be commended as the locus classicus, the poetic testament of his lyric impulse
identical to Yeats’s symbolic poem “Byzantium” which is a paradoxical artefact of moral disinterestedness, an inclusive
vision of Eliot’s phonocentric poetry and Yeats’s graphocentric poetry.
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Qur’an-related Intertextuality: Textual Potentiation in

Translation
Aladdin Al-Kharabsheh
Dept. of English, The Hashemite University, PO box 330186, Zarqa 13133, Jordan
E-mail: alakh22@yahoo.com

Abstract
Qur’an-related intertextuality, envisaged as an enriching communicative act both monolingually and interlingually,
represents a case of semantic complexity that is wired to present inconceivable translation challenges. Drawing on
Derrida’s (1977) dichotomy iterability/citationality, Kristeva’s (1980) vertical intertextuality, Fairclough’s (1992a;
1992b; 1995 & 2011) manifest intertextuality, and Bakhtin’s (1986) double voicing or re-accentuation, the study argues
that Qur’an-related intertextuality is conducive of conceptual densities, the ‘harnessing’ of which requires ‘mobilizing’
those translation strategies that should exceed the lexicographical equivalence (Venuti 2009) to establish intertextual
relations relevant to the form and theme of the foreign text. To resolve the arising translation problems, the study
basically proposes two synthetic approaches: the gist-paratextual and the gist-exegetical. Translation skopos has been
found to be central to the production and reception of intertextuality and to determining which of the two proposed
synthetic approaches to operationalize. Finally, analysis shows that Qur’an proved to be a virtual breeding ground for
textual dynamism and potentiation.
Keywords: Qur’an-related intertextuality, semantic complexity, exegetical translation, gist translation, paratextual
action, translation skopos, registral difference
1. Introduction
Intertextuality (or interdiscursivity) is a semiotic-dialogic concept that has undergone incessant and inflationary
development. Attempting to provide a fine-grained and over-arching definition of intertextuality may be a mammal
task, due to its polymorphic nature. Thus, to talk about intertextuality is possible, but it is also “to enter a minefield of
warring definitions” (Worton, 1986, p. 14). As a field of inquiry, intertextuality has been dealt with from different
perspectives and for different purposes. For instance, intertextuality has been addressed, inter alia, by Literary Theorists
(e.g. Birch, 1986; Clayton and Rothstein, 1991; Bassnett, 2007), Linguistics (e.g. Allen, 2000; Hodges, 2011),
Sociolinguistics (e.g. Gordon, 2003; Tovares, 2005; Tannen, 2006), Semiotics (e.g. Culler, 1981; Orr Leonard, 1986),
Semantics (e.g. Holthuis, 1994; Lemke, 1995), Linguistic Anthropology (e.g. Bauman, 2004 & 2005; Agha and
Wortham, 2005; Semino, 2009), Critical Discourse Analysis (e.g. Fairclough, 1992a; 1992b & 1995; Chouliaraki and
Fairclough, 1999), Translation and Interpreting Studies (e.g. Alexieva, 1985 & 1992; Hatim, 1997; Venuti, 2009),
Education and Pedagogy (e.g. Bernstein, 1990 & 1996), Media and Cinematic Studies (e.g. Reader, 1990; Hanna and
Smith, 2000, Hiramoto and Sung-Yul Park, 2010), Religious/Scriptural Studies (e.g. Fewell, 1992; Barton, 2000;
Fishbane, 2000), and Computer Science (e.g. Bolter, 1991; Riffaterre, 1978 & 1994; Ray, 2006). Obviously, there is no
stable approach to analyze such a complex phenomenon.
Indeed, there is no authoritative definition for either the term or the approaches it may represent. In his discussion of
intertextuality, Allen (2000, p. 2) explicitly states that intertextuality is “one of the most commonly used and misused
terms in the contemporary critical vocabulary”. Resonating originally in the sphere of critical theory, intertextuality
exceeded its boundaries, as various disciplines have adopted and adapted this notion. To this effect, Irwin (2004) points
out that intertextuality has acquired almost as many meanings as users. This diversity has given rise to many
concomitant views and statements, whose detailed discussion falls beyond the scope of this paper. In this paper, we
neither intend to provide a historical review of the notion in question, nor to present the multifarious approaches of a
controversial theory of intertextuality, where there is a consensus only on one aspect, i.e., that intertextuality rests on the
idea of relations between texts (for a detailed account on the historical development of the term, see Hanna and Smith,
2000).
The seminal works of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially that one germane to dialogism, have largely inspired Kristeva to coin
the term intertextuality in the late 1960s, for which Kristeva is openly acknowledged nowadays. Bakhtin (1981 & 1986)
advocates that any use of language is effectively engulfed in a wider dialogue where “the utterance is related not only to
preceding, but also to subsequent links in the chain of speech communion” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 94; for similar ideas, see
IJALEL 6(6):195-207, 2017 196
also Voloshinov, 1973). According to Bakhtin, the text "lives only by coming into contact with another text (with
context). Only at this point of contact between texts does a light flash, illuminating both the posterior and anterior,
joining a given text to a dialogue. We emphasize that this contact is a dialogic contact between texts…behind this
contact is a contact of personalities and not of things" (1986, p. 162).
Obviously, the vantage point here is that when any given text comes into contact with another, such a text somehow
subsumes anterior texts and foresees posterior texts. This dialogic contact between texts is idiosyncratic, as it embraces
all the ways through which any given stretch of language can resonate with other stretches. It is this iterability of texts
that constitutes one of the most powerful bases for the potentiation and production of intertextuality (Bauman, 2004, p.
4). Thus, the basic force of intertextuality is to undermine textual boundaries. In other terms, “texts are always spilling
over into other texts” (Fewell, 1992, p. 23), and the “dialogical space of texts” (Kristeva, 1980, p. 66) is bound to
shatter the autonomy and univocality of any particular text. Kristeva plainly states “any text is constructed as a mosaic
of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another (quoted in Juvan, 2008, p. 11-12). Kristeva
declared that “every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it”
(cited in Culler, 1981, 105; see also Thibault, 1994, p. 1751).
For Holthuis (1994, p. 77), intertextuality is not viewed as “a text-inherent property”; rather, it is “a specific form of
meaning constitution, and therefore as a phenomenon of text processing”. Tannen (2006) handles intertextuality in
terms of “recycling,” “re-keying,” or “reframing” prior texts (see also Gordon, 2003 and Tovares, 2005). However,
reshaping, recycling, re-keying, or reframing a given prior text may not go without alteration, as this process may occur
“with varying degrees of fidelity to its meaning in the originating context” (Hodges, 2011, p. 11). Bazerman (2008, p.
83-84) maintains that “we create our texts out of the sea of former texts that surround us, the sea of language we live in.
And we understand the texts of others within that same sea.” Inspired by all that has been mentioned, this paper will
subscribe to the broad view that Intertextuality, an ubiquitous textual phenomenon that is a “precondition for the
intelligibility of texts” (Hatim and Mason, 1997, p. 219), is basically a linguistic mechanism whereby a text makes a
reference to a previous or anticipated texts explicitly or implicitly, or otherwise triggering meanings expressed in such
texts.
The driving force behind this investigation is the common observation that Qur’anic discourse empowers MSA
(Modern Standard Arabic) in an extraordinary way, and so, Qur’an-related intertextuality, a form of high textual
empowerment, can pose recalcitrant problems in translation, and a mishandling of them would result in considerable
semantic loss. Indeed, this is an uphill translation task since the translator is supposed to provide a translation of the
text, which relays, as part of its communicative intent those intertextual features that are part of the greater textual
fabric. Thus, the unity of the text rests on intertextuality. The underlying premise of this study is that Qur’anic discourse
is very much likely to give rise to a special instance of vertical or manifest intertextuality, which specifically involves
subtle and intricate multi-layered meanings, i.e., Qur’an-related intertextuality represents a case of conceptual density.
This is a challenging concept of intertextuality as Qur’anic features or elements normally reflect a unique, nuanced and
empowering discourse that is extricably bound up to complicate the job of the translator. To put it differently, the
Qur’anic discourse is believed to be a virtual breeding ground for textual dynamism and potentiation, and so Qur’an-
related intertextuality is expected to be a constitutive and complicated component of the total meaning of any given text,
as such a discourse is too specifically set in a particular locale. This entails calling for both the immediate and broader
contexts to be integrated fairly subtly into the text in question.
2. Literature Review: Intertextuality Under the Microscope of Translation
Putting intertextuality under the microscope of translation, it can be said that different scholars have offered different
views that boil down to one overarching statement: translation is an intertextual event since texts, be it SL texts or TL
texts, overlap, intersect, or rather 'clone' each other in one way or another in varying degrees. This is so as the TL text is
the reformulation of the prior text.
To this effect, Schäffner (2010) views translation as ‘intercultural intertextuality’, whereas Farahzad (2009) looks at
translation as an ‘intertextual practice’, i.e., as an ‘intertext’ which bridges a ‘prototext’ (source text) and ‘metatext’
(the target text). On their part, Neubert and Shreve (1992) regards translation as ‘mediated intertextuality’ in light of
their earlier definition of translation as ‘text-induced text production’ (see also Hatim and Mason, 1990; Hatim and
Munday, 2004; Schäffner, 2004 & 2012). Khanjan and Mirza (1386/2008) stress on the crucial role of the theory of
intertextuality in translation theory and practice, bringing to light some issues such as the "uncertainty of meaning and
non-originality of the source text," "putting emphasis on the importance of contextual elements," "raising the translator's
professional position," and "the demand for doing a typological analysis" prior to translation.
For Hatim and Mason (1990, p. 129), “each intrusion of a citation in the text is the culmination of a process in which a
sign travels from one text (source) to another (destination). The area being traversed from text to text is what we shall
call the "intertextual space” (ibid., p. 129). Likewise, Hatim (1997) discusses the notion of intertextuality from a
translational perspective and assesses its status in the process of translation. Hatim points out that in order for the
different types of intertextual relations to be appealing to the translator, “they must be seen within some conception of
translation strategy that captures the complexity of the decision-making process at work” (ibid., p. 29). Couched in the
terms of the semiotic dimension of context, Haitm’s approach for handling intertextuality in translation is a semiotic
one that capitalizes on the close relationship between text and context (ibid., p. 31). “This is to see the intertextual
reference, as underpinned by the way we use texts and elements within texts as signs in responding to the requirements
of one important aspect of context, namely, the semiotics of the communicative act” (ibid., p. 31). Thus, the basis of
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adequacy and appropriateness in translation is not “diction”, but “signs” in social life, which through intertextuality,
galvanise intention and operationalise features of register” (ibid., p. 31).
According to Venuti (2009, p. 158), translation itself is a unique case of intertextuality. For him, intertextual relations
cannot be maintained merely by relaying the words and phrases that make those relations in the foreign text, as such a
relaying is geared to produce a semantic correspondence, but it may not capture the specific cultural significance of a
foreign intertext. In other words, this significance relies not only on the "lexicographical equivalence" (ibid., p. 162),
"but on form, on resemblances among foreign linguistic features, graphemic and acoustic, lexical and syntactical,
stylistic and discursive" (ibid., p. 159). Indeed, the view that the foreign text is not only decontextualized, but also
recontextualized constitutes the point of departure of Venuti's study. The recontextualization process is concerned with
producing another intra-textual context, and another network of intertextual and interdiscursive relations, established by
and within a translation. As a consequence, another context of reception emerges, and translation can be looked at not
as being instrumental, but rather as being hermeneutic, i.e., a translation enacts an inscription that renders only one
specific interpretation of the foreign text (ibid., p. 162).
Venuti elucidates that this specific interpretation can be communicated by applying a "category that mediates between
the foreign language and culture, on the one hand, and the translating language and culture, on the other, a method of
transforming the foreign text into the translation"(ibid., p. 162). Such a category, according to him, consists of
interpretants, which can be either formal or thematic. Formal interpretants include "a concept of equivalence, such as a
semantic correspondence based on dictionary definitions, or a concept of style, a distinctive lexicon and syntax related
to a genre or discourse" (ibid., p. 162), whereas, thematic interpretants include codes such as "specific ideas, beliefs and
representations; a discourse in the sense of a relatively coherent body of concepts, problems, and arguments; or a
particular interpretation of the foreign text that has been articulated independently in commentary" (ibid., p. 163).
Finally, Venuti stresses that it is the translator's employment of "interpretants that recontextualizes the foreign text,
replacing foreign intertextual relations with a receiving intertext, with relations to the translating language and culture
which are built into the translation" (ibid., p. 163).
Alawi (2010) carries out a study where he examines intertextuality in the practices of literary translation between
English and Arabic. He points out that translation studies, literary criticism and linguistics take interest in
intertextuality, which "responds to the contemporary understanding and treatment of texts" (ibid., p. 2440), and which
views a text "as a tissue of relations between signs that are influenced by space and time" (ibid., p. 2440). Alawi echoes
Krestiva's (1980) notion that any given text can be deoriginated to the zero level, i.e., all constituent parts of a text must
have their own origins that can be traced back in already existing texts. Alawi's makes the main conclusion that
translators should be engaged with the translation process on the assumption that every stretch of language (part or
whole) is likely to recur sometime somewhere. This assumption should also lead us to understand that since every
reading of a text is a rewriting of it, then every translation in a sense is a new reading and a new rewriting that is
influenced by the factors of time and place (ibid., p. 2455).
Kuleli (2014) investigates intertextual allusions from a literary point of view and evaluates their translations as well. To
him, intertextuality must not be confined to literature analysis only; rather, it can also be applied to translation analysis.
A skilful translator should be able to deliver satisfaction to the target language audience, as same as that which the
source culture readers obtain from the text (ibid., p. 212). Thus, for an embedded message such as allusion in a source
text, the translator should sanction creating a similar gap in the target language, thereby forcing the target language
readership to try to find the allusion (ibid., p. 212).This in turn would enable them to obtain as much pleasure as
possible from the translated text (ibid., p. 212).
Zhang and Zhao (2015) addresses the effect of intertextual elements, stressing the point that ignoring the translator’s
subjectivity and creativity would put him/her in an awkward position in translation, whereas the theory of intertextuality
drives the translation community to re-define the translator’s role (ibid., p. 158). In a study that attempts to make an
initial quest for a relationship between intertextuality and ideology, Sanatifar (2015) discusses some potential
difficulties that translators may face in the rendition of intertextual references in the context of political speech. The
study also attempts to account for the causes that may give rise to mistranslation in this context, and it offers a number
of concrete guidelines for a more efficient and effective translation of intertextual references in political speech.
3. Methodology
All selected examples are authentic news-headlines that were taken from different media outlets, i.e., from various
electronic news agencies’ websites that will be used to validate the basic premise of the study. Needless to say that the
type of vertical/manifest intertextuality is made through direct quotation in the linearized version of the text referred to.
It should also be pointed out that Picthall’s ([1930] 2015) The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an: Explanatory
Translation will be used for the Qur’anic elements/verses figuring in the selected examples. The aim for having such a
kind of translation is twofold: to give the reader the flavor of religious translation, and to act as a starting point for the
ensuing discussion.
For the purposes of analyzing the obtained data, the present study specifically draws on intertextual relations that can be
captured under Kristeva’s (1980) concept vertical intertextuality, and Fairclough’s (1992a; 1992b & 1995 ) manifest
intertextuality, as these are two different labels to describe the most predominant type of intertextual relations. The
study also draws on Derrida’s (1977) dichotomy iterability/citationality and Bakhtin’s concept (1986) double voicing or
re-accentuation. Indeed, this is the theoretical scaffolding that this study will depend on. Iterability is concerned with
IJALEL 6(6):195-207, 2017 198
the general repetition of texts across different contexts, whereas citationality is concerned with the idea that when a text
is employed in a new context, over attention or special focus is given to the context from which such a text was taken.
As far as double voicing or re-accentuation is involved, Bakhtin (1986, p. 79-80) asserts that texts may not only borrow
elements or conventions from other texts, but may also "double voice" or “re-accentuate” them by, for instance, making
reference to them ironically, parodically or really reverently.
Thus, the intertextual reference in our case can be viewed as involving fairly dynamic concepts, culled from their
original milieu, i.e., the Qur’an, and used in a ‘mainfest’ and/or ‘vertical’ manner. This crucial component of
intertextual practice can be indissolubly linked to Derrida’s (1977) iterability and citationality, and Bakhtin’s (1986)
double voicing or re-accentuation, which are particularly operative in Qur’an-related intertextuality, as the Qur’an is a
sacred document that is always given a special focus and an utmost attention by Muslims, and to which reference is
made reverently.
4. Discussion
As indicated before, the current investigation advocates that Qur’an-related intertextuality is an intractable translation
issue, and so maintaining this particular level in Arabic-into-English translation is a mammal task. Before any
meaningful discussion takes place, it is useful to remind here that the kind of Qur’anic elements employed in MSA
journalistic texts will serve as instances to demonstrate the intricacy of translating Qur’an-related intertextuality. To
give a concrete sense of how Qur’an-related intertextuality works in the context of contemporary media language, let us
take examples. The configuration that will be followed here is that the Qur’anic element figuring in any given news-
headline plus its corresponding translation (i.e. Pickthall’s translation) will be underlined. However, the rest of the
translation, i.e., the non-Qur’anic part will be mine, then this will be followed by a discussion. Let us now consider the
first bunch of examples:
‫ ﻓﻨﺎﺩﻕ ﺍﻟﻘﺎﻫﺮﺓ ﺧﺎﻭﻳﺔ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻋﺮﻭﺷﻬﺎ‬: ‫( ﻭﻭﻝ ﺳﺘﺮﻳﺖ‬1)
Wall Street: Cairo’s Hotels are (now) all ruined on their trellises (Pickthall 2015, p. 91).
!‫ ﻣﺴﺘﺸﻔﻴﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﻌﺮﺍﻕ ﺧﺎﻭﻳﺔ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻋﺮﻭﺷﻬﺎ‬:‫( ﺗﻘﺮﻳﺮ ﺍﺳﺒﺎﻧﻲ‬2)
A Spanish Report: Iraq’s Hospitals are (now) all ruined on their trellises (ibid., p. 91).
‫ ﺃﻧﻔﺎﻕ ﻏﺰﺓ ﺧﺎﻭﻳﺔ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻋﺮﻭﺷﻬﺎ‬.. ‫( ﺑﺎﻟﺼﻮﺭ‬3)
In Pictures: Ghaza’s tunnels are (now) all ruined on their trellises (ibid., p. 91).
The underlined linguistic chunk in the examples above (1-3), i.e., ‫ ﺧﺎﻭﻳﺔ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻋﺮﻭﺷﻬﺎ‬is a semantically-loaded Qur’anic
element that cranks up a vivid vertical intertextual relation between this text and the sacred text, or the natural habitat
from which this Qur’anic element was originally culled. In Arabic, the expression ‫ ﺧﺎﻭﻳﺔ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻋﺮﻭﺷﻬﺎ‬is used quite a lot
both formally and informally as to label any given place with a great deal of dysfunctionality, stagnation, or sometimes,
when such a place is deserted and at a standstill. The iterability of this Qur’anic chunk cannot be understood without
looking into its citationality. Indeed, the expression ‫ ﺧﺎﻭﻳﺔ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻋﺮﻭﺷﻬﺎ‬appeals intertextually to three independent Qur’anic
places or contexts, each of which presents either a didactic story or a didactic lesson. The first context is provided in
Surah 18 Al-Kahf/ Verse 42:
(42/18 ‫ﻭَﺃُﺣِﻴﻂَ ﺑِﺜَﻤَﺮِﻩِ ﻓَﺄَﺻْﺒَﺢَ ﻳُﻘَﻠِّﺐُ ﻛَﻔَّﻴْﻪِ ﻋَﻠَﻰ ﻣَﺂ ﺃَﻧْﻔَﻖَ ﻓِﻴﻬَﺎ ﻭَﻫِﻲَ ﺧَﺎﻭِﻳَﺔٌ ﻋَﻠَﻰٰ ﻋُﺮُﻭﺷِﻬَﺎ ﻭَﻳَﻘُﻮﻝُ ﻳٰﻠَﻴْﺘَﻨِﻲ ﻟَﻢْ ﺃُﺷْﺮِﻙْ ﺑِﺮَﺑِّﻲ ﺃَﺣَﺪﺍً )ﺍﻟﻜﻬﻒ‬
And his fruit was beset (with destruction). Then began he to wring his hands for all that he had spent upon it, when
(now) it was all ruined on its trellises, and to say: Would that I had ascribed no partner to my Lord! (Pickthall, 2015, p. 91)
The above Qur’anic context provides the Qur’anic famous story of two men or two brothers: one is a believer and the
other is a disbeliever. The believer was poor, whereas his brother, the disbeliever, was rich, as he had two big gardens
that are described in detail in the Qur’an. These gardens contain vine trees; they are surrounded by palm trees; streams
and rivers are cutting through them; and, they provide fabulous greenery sceneries. Later, the disbeliever becomes mean
and arrogant, as he starts looking down at his brother, who, in turn, warned him against the way he is acting, as this is
quite displeasing to God. The poor man also explained to his brother that God gave him all of these riches, as he loves
him, and so he should believe in the Day of Judgment. The disbeliever turned a deaf ear to his brother and one morning
he woke up to the catastrophic news that his gardens were devoured by fire, and that they were completely destroyed,
i.e., when it was all ruined on its trellises. The second Qur’anic context is provided in Surah 2 Al-Baqara / Verse 259:
َ‫ﺃَﻭْ ﻛَﭑﻟَّﺬِﻱ ﻣَﺮَّ ﻋَﻠَﻰٰ ﻗَﺮْﻳَﺔٍ ﻭَﻫِﻲَ ﺧَﺎﻭِﻳَﺔٌ ﻋَﻠَﻰٰ ﻋُﺮُﻭﺷِﻬَﺎ ﻗَﺎﻝَ ﺃَﻧَّﻰٰ ﻳُﺤْﻴِـﻲ ﻫَـٰﺬِﻩِ ﭐﻟﻠَّﻪُ ﺑَﻌْﺪَ ﻣَﻮْﺗِﻬَﺎ ﻓَﺄَﻣَﺎﺗَﻪُ ﭐﻟﻠَّﻪُ ﻣِﺌَﺔَ ﻋَﺎﻡٍ ﺛُﻢَّ ﺑَﻌَﺜَﻪُ ﻗَﺎﻝَ ﻛَﻢْ ﻟَﺒِﺜْﺖَ ﻗَﺎﻝَ ﻟَﺒِﺜْﺖُ ﻳَﻮْﻣﺎً ﺃَﻭْ ﺑَﻌْﺾَ ﻳَﻮْﻡٍ ﻗَﺎﻝ‬
َ‫ﺑَﻞ ﻟَّﺒِﺜْﺖَ ﻣِﺌَﺔَ ﻋَﺎﻡٍ ﻓَﭑﻧْﻈُﺮْ ﺇِﻟَﻰٰ ﻃَﻌَﺎﻣِﻚَ ﻭَﺷَﺮَﺍﺑِﻚَ ﻟَﻢْ ﻳَﺘَﺴَﻨَّﻪْ ﻭَﭐﻧْﻈُﺮْ ﺇِﻟَﻰٰ ﺣِﻤَﺎﺭِﻙَ ﻭَﻟِﻨَﺠْﻌَﻠَﻚَ ﺁﻳَﺔً ﻟِﻠﻨَّﺎﺱِ ﻭَﭐﻧْﻈُﺮْ ﺇِﻟَﻰ ﭐﻟﻌِﻈَﺎﻡِ ﻛَﻴْﻒَ ﻧُﻨْﺸِﺰُﻫَﺎ ﺛُﻢَّ ﻧَﻜْﺴُﻮﻫَﺎ ﻟَﺤْﻤﺎً ﻓَﻠَﻤَّﺎ ﺗَﺒَﻴَّﻦَ ﻟَﻪُ ﻗَﺎﻝ‬
.(259/2 ‫ﺃَﻋْﻠَﻢُ ﺃَﻥَّ ﭐﻟﻠَّﻪَ ﻋَﻠَﻰٰ ﻛُﻞِّ ﺷَﻲْﺀٍ ﻗَﺪِﻳﺮٌ )ﺍﻟﺒﻘﺮﺓ‬
Or (bethink thee of) the like of him who, passing by a township which had fallen into utter ruin, exclaimed: How shall
Allah give this township life after its death? And Allah made him die a hundred years, then brought him back to life. He
said: How long hast thou tarried? (The man) said: I have tarried a day or part of a day. (He) said: Nay, but thou hast
tarried for a hundred years. Just look at thy food and drink which have rotted! Look at thine ass! And, that We may
make thee a token unto mankind, look at the bones, how We adjust them and then cover them with flesh! And when
(the matter) became clear unto him, he said: I know now that Allah is Able to do all things. (Pickthall 2015, p. 13).
IJALEL 6(6):195-207, 2017 199
According to this context, another well-known Qur’anic story is given: a man passes by a town thought to be Jerusalem
(according to the vast majority of Qur’an exegetes), which he finds in complete destruction. It is believed that ‫ﻧﺒﻮﺧﺬ ﻧﺼّﺮ‬
(i.e. Nebuchadnezzar II) is the one who destroyed Jerusalem in bid to defeat the Israelites, who had rebelled against
their king and killed him, as the king had given the Babylonians hostages. The hostages were then killed and
Nebuchadnezzar II made his way to Jerusalem. He ravaged the town and flattened its houses, i.e., a township which had
fallen into utter ruin. God makes this man dies for a hundred years, then God brings him back to life as to enable him to
see that everything has changed and that the town has been re-built and restored. God gives this man some pieces of
water-tight evidence as to prove to him that he died for a hundred years, such as the bones of his donkey and the rotten
food and stuff that he had with him before entering the one-hundred hibernation stage. The third and last Qur’anic
context can be found in Surah 22 Al-Haj / Verse 45:
(45 /22 ‫ﻓَﻜَﺄَﻳِّﻦ ﻣِّﻦ ﻗَﺮْﻳَﺔٍ ﺃَﻫْﻠَﻜْﻨَﺎﻫَﺎ ﻭَﻫِﻲَ ﻇَﺎﻟِﻤَﺔٌ ﻓَﻬِﻲَ ﺧَﺎﻭِﻳَﺔٌ ﻋَﻠَﻰٰ ﻋُﺮُﻭﺷِﻬَﺎ ﻭَﺑِﺌْﺮٍ ﻣُّﻌَﻄَّﻠَﺔٍ ﻭَﻗَﺼْﺮٍ ﻣَّﺸِﻴﺪٍ )ﺍﻟﺤﺞ‬
How many a township have We destroyed while it was sinful, so that it lieth (to this day) in, and (how many) a
deserted well and lofty tower! (Pickthall 2015, p. 105).
In this Qur’anic context, God addresses prophet Mohammed by saying to him that We (i.e. God) have wrecked many
sinful towns. These are sinful towns as they diverted from the path of God, a mischievous act that angered their Lord,
who, after giving them the chances to repent, has decided to destroy them and so their towns lieth (to this day) in.
Translationally speaking, it is quite obvious that the Qur’anic expression ‫ ﺧﺎﻭﻳﺔ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻋﺮﻭﺷﻬﺎ‬forges a complex intertextual
relationship, owing to the fact that it unfolds three different texts that cannot be captured in one lexicographical
equivalence in the TL. In other words, this is a tripartite intertextual relationship that presents the translator with the
challenging task of communicating it over to the TL. Another aspect that may further complicate the job of the
translator is the fact that this religious discourse is part of the formal register of MSA, whereas it is not part of the
formal register in English. Thus, keeping the source language (henceforth SL) religious tone and register can be
‘intoxicating’ to the target language (henceforth TL) As a result, Pickthall’s translations: when (now) it was all ruined
on its trellises, a township which had fallen into utter ruin, and so that it lieth (to this day) in may not be good options,
as these sound too odd in English. So, with this additional lingua-cultural difference, translators may find themselves in
an awkward position to get a tight grip on such a cultural-intertextual complexity.
No matter what translation strategy that translators may opt for, translation loss is inevitable. Given the registral
difference between Arabic and English, the first translational procedure should involve bridging such a registral rift in
the TL version, simply by attempting to provide a communicative or functional translation. Based on this, the problem
would be partly resolved, i.e., the problem would be resolved only register-wise, but there will remain the focal issue,
the intertextual meaning. In the three examples above (1-3), a possible communicative translation for ‫ﺧﺎﻭﻳﺔ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻋﺮﻭﺷﻬﺎ‬
that may resonate well in the TL may be in tatters or figuratively moth-eaten:
(1) Wall Street: Cairo’s Hotels are in tatters/ moth-eaten
(2) A Spanish Report: Iraq’s Hospitals are in tatters/ moth-eaten.
(3) In Pictures: Ghaza’s tunnels are in tatters/ moth-eaten.
It can be said that the translation options in tatters and moth-eaten may resolve the problem register-wise, but these are
bound up to obliterate the Qur’an-related meaning or the tripartite intertextuality induced by the expression ‫ﺧﺎﻭﻳﺔ ﻋﻠﻰ‬
‫ ﻋﺮﻭﺷﻬﺎ‬. As a consequence, another translational procedure is required as to maintain the intertextual level. Indeed, a
tripartite intertextual relationship like this is likely to give rise to a very complex Qur’an-related intertextuality for
which a synthetic approach incorporating gist translation and paratextual action (henceforth gist-paratextual) can be
proposed in this context. According to this approach, translators can wrap up this three-strata context, i.e. translators can
make a laconic summary of this three-strata context, and then, present it in a footnote or end-note. The latter procedure
is what we term paratextual action, i.e., to take a paratextual action such as footnoting, end-noting or annotating, etc..
Indeed, relegating the tripartite intertexual relationship to an inferior position, i.e., to a paratextual position should be
looked at positively since such a procedure can enable translators to avoid producing very enlarged translations, as for
spatial limitations, it would be quite difficult to include the nitty-gritty of such three lengthy intertextual contexts within
the body of the TL copy.
However, it all depends on the skopos (i.e. purpose/aim/function and targeted audience) of translation, as in certain
contexts, translators may be allowed to enlarge the TLT to great extents. Thus, the translation commissioner has got the
final say on this issue. On the assumption that having a fairly enlarged translation is sanctioned, translators may have, at
their disposal, another tenable solution, i.e., another synthetic approach which involves the merger of gist translation
and exegetical translation (henceforth gist-exegetical). The former, as it has just been indicated, has to do with
producing a laconic summary, whereas the latter is a kind of extended translation allowing a complex meaning of any
given lexical item or expression to be explained at length in the body of the TL version. In short, exegetical translation
is a procedure that would enable translators to incorporate their gist translation within the body of the TLT. The merit
of the latter synthetic approach (i.e. gist-exegetical) is that any given intertextual level of meaning would be invariantly
kept within the TL version, i.e., it would be given the same prominence as that of the SLT, and so, the SLT and TLT
can be said to stand on equal footing, without the prospect of relegating any aspect of meaning to an inferior paratextual
position. In a nutshell, the skopos of translation can be a main factor that can assist translators in determining which of
these two synthetic approaches to operationalize.
IJALEL 6(6):195-207, 2017 200
‫( ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺤﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ ﻭﻇﻬﺮﺕ ﺑﺮﺍﺀﺓ ﻣﻨﺎﻫﺠﻨﺎ ﺍﻟﺘﻌﻠﻴﻤﻴﺔ ﻣﻤﺎ ﺍﺗﻬﻤﺖ ﺑﻪ‬4)
Now the truth is out and our educational curricula are innocent of what they have been accused of (Pickthall 2015, p.
73).
‫؟‬..‫ ﺃﻳﻦ ﺃﻧﺖ ﻳﺎ ﺻﺪﺍﻡ ﺣﺴﻴﻦ‬..‫( ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺤﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬5)
Now the truth is out: Where are you Saddam? (ibid., p. 73)
‫( ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺤﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ ﻭﻛﺸﻒ ﺍﻟﻘﻨﺎﻉ ﻋﻦ ﻧﺴﺐ ﺍﻟﺴﻴﺴﺘﺎﻧﻲ‬6)
Now the truth is out and al-Sistani’s lineage is unveiled (ibid., p. 73).
The underlined linguistic stretch ‫( ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬i.e. Now the truth is out) in the examples above (4-6) is a foreign-
scriptural element that gives rise to a manifest rich Qur’an-based intertextuality that may present an uphill translation
task. Basically, this Qur’anic signifier is also used formally in MSA, and to a lesser extent, informally as simply to
mean that the entire truth has surfaced up and has become so well-known to everyone. The Arabic verb ‫ ﺣﺼﺤﺺ‬means
to know something for sure and beyond any reasonable doubt, or when something is known or figured out in an
unquestionable manner. Indeed, the only word that collocates with the verb ‫ ﺣﺼﺤﺺ‬in Arabic is the noun ‫( ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬i.e. the
truth), a collocational primacy which yields textual potentation. The iterability of this Qur’anic expression in formal
MSA has a semantic and cultural significance that cannot be captured without examining the context where it figures in.
Thus, citationality-wise, the exact Qur’anic context can be found in Surah 12 Yusuf/ Verse 51:
َ‫ﻗَﺎﻝَ ﻣَﺎ ﺧَﻄْﺒُﻜُﻦَّ ﺇِﺫْ ﺭَﺍﻭَﺩﺗُّﻦَّ ﻳُﻮﺳُﻒَ ﻋَﻦ ﻧَّﻔْﺴِﻪِ ﻗُﻠْﻦَ ﺣَﺎﺵَ ﻟِﻠَّﻪِ ﻣَﺎ ﻋَﻠِﻤْﻨَﺎ ﻋَﻠَﻴْﻪِ ﻣِﻦ ﺳُﻮۤﺀٍ ﻗَﺎﻟَﺖِ ﭐﻣْﺮَﺃَﺕُ ﭐﻟْﻌَﺰِﻳﺰِ ﭐﻵﻥَ ﺣَﺼْﺤَﺺَ ﭐﻟْﺤَﻖُّ ﺃَﻧَﺎْ ﺭَﺍﻭَﺩْﺗُّﻪُ ﻋَﻦ ﻧَّﻔْﺴِﻪِ ﻭَﺇِﻧَّﻪُ ﻟَﻤِﻦ‬
َ‫ﭐﻟﺼَّﺎﺩِﻗِﻴﻦ‬
He (the king) (then sent for those women and) said: What happened when ye asked an evil act of Joseph? They
answered : Allah Blameless! We know no evil of him. Said the wife of the ruler: Now the truth is out. I asked of him
an evil act, and he is surely of the truthful. (Pickthall 2015, p. 73).
The foreign-scriptural text and context in the examples above (4-6) indicate that the expression ‫ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬
encapsulates a very well-known and significant Qur’anic story that should be unfolded here. This is the story of prophet
Yusuf (i.e. Joseph) with the wife of the Governor of Egypt, al-Aziz (‫)ﺍﻟﻌﺰﻳﺰ‬. Indeed, this is a very famous story that the
Holy Qur’an depicts in a fabulous and enchanting manner and that every Muslim is familiar with. Given the fact this is
a very detailed and long story, and for spatial limitations, the story cannot be fleshed out here. However, the reader can
consult Surah 12 Yusuf that is devoted for this story.
As far as translating the foreign text above is concerned, it is conspicuous that the expression ‫ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬
constitutes the thorniest constituent in the example, as it offers a complex foreign intertext that ought to be retained in
the target language text (henceforth TLT). Indeed, the three-word structure (i.e. ‫ )ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬stands for a lengthy
story that presents a semantic richness as well as a robust mode of expression. On this basis, a semantic equivalence for
‫ ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬such as the truth is known, or the truth is shining now can ‘purge’ the TLT from the abnormal religious
register originating from the SL, thereby restricting, to a large extent, the translation loss to the intertextual level. In
other words, what is needed is a translation that can double voice or re-accentuate this Qur’anic story in an TL version
that is devoid of the upsetting SL religious discourse. Given the fact that this is a very informative context, which gives
rise to a case of heightened Qur’an-dervied intertextuality, both approaches, the gist-paratextual as well as the gist-
exegetical can be used in parallel. However, the gist-paratextual approach does seem to be more tenable and reliable
than the other: the entire story of prophet Yusuf (in other words, Joseph) with the wife of the Governor of Egypt, al-
Aziz (‫ )ﺍﻟﻌﺰﻳﺰ‬can be wrapped up and inserted in a paratextual tactic such as footnoting, and so it can communicate over
to the TL audience the significance and value of the foreign intertext ( ‫ )ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬.
.‫( ﻗﺼﻮﺭ ﺍﻟﻤﻨﻄﻘﺔ ﺍﻟﺨﻀﺮﺍﺀ ﺗﺒﺎﻉ ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ ﻭﺑـﺎﻟﺘﻘﺴﻴﻂ ﺍﻟﻤﺮﻳﺢ‬7)
Green Zone’s Mansions are sold for a low price and with comfortable mortgages. (Pickthall, 2015, p. 71).
.‫ ﻧﺤﻦ ﻻ ﻧﺒﻴﻊ ﺣﺮﻳﺎﺗﻨﺎ ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬:‫( ﺍﻟﺴﻴﺪ ﺍﻟﺼﺮﺧﻲ ﺍﻟﺤﺴﻨﻲ‬8)
Mr. Al-Sarkhi Al-Husni: We do not sell our freedoms for a low price (ibid., p. 71).
‫ !؟‬..‫ﻋﻨﺪﻣﺎ ﻳﺒﺎﻉ ﻋﺰﻳﺰ ﻗﻮﻡ ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬..‫( ﺍﻟﺴــــــــﻨﻮﺳﻲ‬9)
Al-Senussi: When a man who once had his heyday is sold for a low price (ibid., p. 71).
The underlined Qur’anic segment ‫( ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬i.e. for a low price) in the examples above (7-9) is associated with a vertical
Qur’an-related intertextuality that is extricably bound up to offer a conceptual density that may not be easy to negotiate
to the TL. In fact, this segment entertains a high degree of currency and frequency of use in MSA, i.e., it entertains a
high degree of iterability. It literally means at a very cheap price. As far as citationality is concerned, this particular
linguistic sequence shares the same Qur’anic context and/or story of the previous example (i.e. ‫ )ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬given in
Surah 12 Yusuf. Needless to say, thus, that there is no need to spell out such a presumably well-known context, and so,
the analysis will jump directly to discuss the above examples (7-9). Yet, a mere mention of the verse where this specific
Qur’anic sequence (i.e. ‫ )ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬emerges in the Surah is deemed necessary here:
IJALEL 6(6):195-207, 2017 201
.(20/12 ‫ﻭَﺷَﺮَﻭْﻩُ ﺑِﺜَﻤَﻦٍ ﺑَﺨْﺲٍ ﺩَﺭَﺍﻫِﻢَ ﻣَﻌْﺪُﻭﺩَﺓٍ ﻭَﻛَﺎﻧُﻮﺍْ ﻓِﻴﻪِ ﻣِﻦَ ﭐﻟﺰَّﺍﻫِﺪِﻳﻦَ )ﻳﻮﺳﻒ‬
And they sold him for a low price, a number of silver coins; and they attached no value to him (Pickthall 2015, p. 71).
In reference to the story of prophet Yusuf, the most illuminating thread within such a context is that after the caravan of
merchants had salvaged Yusuf from the well, and after reaching Egypt, they sold him to the slave-traders for a low
price, i.e., for a few silver coins. Of utmost importance in this thread is the sequence ‫( ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬i.e. for a low price).
In example 7 above, the news-headline is about the Green Zone (a common label used for the International Zone of
Baghdad), where mansions are sold for a very cheap price (i.e. ‫ )ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬through affordable mortgages, while example
8 is a news-headline pertinent to a Shia religious authority, Mr. Al-Sarkhi Al-Husni, who delivered a sermon on the
occasion of Eid Ramadan in which he stated that they (i.e. the Shia Muslims) do not sell their freedoms for a very cheap
price (i.e. ‫)ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬. The last example 9 is also a news-headline for an article that talks about Mr. Abdullah Al-Senussi,
a Libyan national who was Head of Libyan Military Intelligence and brother-in-law of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
Known as Gaddafi’s ‘Black Box’, Al-Senussi is notoriously known for having blood-stained hands since the 1970s. In
2012, Al-Senussi fled the country (i.e. Libya), but was arrested at Nouakchott airport in Mauritania, and the Libyan
government instantly requested his extradition. Six months later, the Mauritanian government extradited Al-Senussi to
the Libyan authorities, and he was sentenced to death for atrocities he allegedly committed during the reign of Gaddafi.
The author of this particular article is a Mauritani national, who bitterly slams his government for extraditing Al-
Senussi, and accusing it of accepting to negotiate a dirty deal with the Libyan warring factions, which resulted in
extraditing Al-Senussi; or rather, which resulted in selling him for a very cheap price (i.e. ‫)ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬.
In as much as the translation of ‫ ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬is concerned, it can be said that Pickthall’s translation happen to be an
idiomatic one, free of the tracings of the religious discourse that can produce an odd register in English. Consequently,
in this specific foreign intertext, translators would not have to worry about the registeral problem if they were to adopt
Pickthall’s translation. Equally important is the proposed TL counterpart for a very cheap price which may sound a
better idiomatic translation option, as the word ‫ ﺑﺨﺲ‬in Arabic signifies a sharp sense of under-evaluation and/or
worthlessness, and so, it means not only low; rather, very low or very cheap. Clearly, neither the option for a low price
nor for a very low/cheap price seems to resolve the problem once and for all, as translators would remain grappling with
maintain the intertextual level represented in the long story of Yusuf, as it is a crucial layer of meaning.
Since this example belongs to the same context of the previous one (‫)ﺍﻵﻥ ﺣﺼﺺ ﺍﻟﺤﻖ‬, i.e., since this is another clear case
of heightened Qur’an-related intertextuality, the same solutions can be offered here, i.e., either the gist-paratextual
approach or the gist-exegetical approach. Hence, the skopos of translation requires no further emphasis, as a
determining factor that can enhance translator in the decision-making process relevant to which synthetic approach to
switch to. Indeed, without having a ‘translation brief’ from the commissioner, it can be argued that each of the two
proposed synthetic approaches looks to be a satisfactory translation procedure for this particular example (‫)ﺑﺜﻤﻦ ﺑﺨﺲ‬.
Yet, if choice has to be made, there is an inclination for the gist-paratextual approach, as it can enable a smooth and
untroubled communication of the foreign intertext, compared with the gist-exegetical one, which is bound to
recontextualize and establish such a conceptually-dense foreign intertext within the body of the TL, with the possibility
of producing an enlarged TL version that may deviate from normal patterns of linguistic use.
‫( ﻫﻞ ﺃﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ ﺍﻷﻃﻌﻤﺔ ﺍﻟﻔﺎﺳﺪﺓ؟‬10)
Hath there come unto thee tidings of expired food? (Pickthall 2015, p. 202).
‫( ﻫﻞ ﺃﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﺷﻴﺔ؟‬11)
Hath there come unto thee tidings of rulers’ entourage? (ibid., p. 202).
‫( ﻫﻞ ﺍﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ ﺟﻬﺎﺩ ﺍﻟﻨﻜﺎﺡ؟‬12)
Hath there come unto thee tidings of ‘Sexual Jihad’? (ibid., p. 202).
The underlined linguistic construction, i.e., ‫( ﻫﻞ ﺁﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ‬Hath there come unto thee tidings of…) in the examples above
(10-12) is a foreign-Qur’anic intertext that offers a vertical Qur’an-related intertextuality that is likely to present
translation hurdles. Essentially, this Qur’anic construction is often used in MSA, but it is rarely used informally. In
Arabic, ‫ ﻫﻞ ﺁﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ‬is a linguistic question-making formulae, which literally means Has the talk of…reached you?
Actually, this is a remarkable Qur’anic question-making formulae that catches the attention of the listener or reader, and
which creates an air of suspense in any communicative act. This may explain why this formulae is quite iterable in
MSA. Since this study is attaching a special importance to the context from which such constructions are extracted, i.e.,
a citationality, it is crucially important to grasp the intertextual relations formulated here. Citationality speaking, the
Qur’anic question-making formulae ‫ ﻫﻞ ﺁﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ‬pertains to at least three contexts provided in Surah 88 Al-Gashiya/
Verse 1, Surah 20 Ta-ha/ Verse 9, and Surah 51 Az-Zariyat/ Verse 24, respectively:
(1/88 ‫ﻫَﻞْ ﺃَﺗَﺎﻙَ ﺣَﺪِﻳﺚُ ﭐﻟْﻐَﺎﺷِﻴَﺔِ )ﺍﻟﻐﺎﺷﻴﺔ‬
Hath there come unto thee tidings of the Overwhelming? (Pickthall 2015, p. 202).
(9/20 ‫ﻭَﻫَﻞْ ﺃَﺗَﺎﻙَ ﺣَﺪِﻳﺚُ ﻣُﻮﺳَﻰٰ )ﻃﻪ‬
Hath there come unto thee the story of Moses? (ibid., p. 96).
(24/51 ‫ﻫَﻞْ ﺃَﺗَﺎﻙَ ﺣَﺪِﻳﺚُ ﺿَﻴْﻒِ ﺇِﺑْﺮَﺍﻫِﻴﻢَ ﭐﻟْﻤُﻜْﺮَﻣِﻴﻦَ )ﺍﻟﺬﺍﺭﻳﺎﺕ‬
IJALEL 6(6):195-207, 2017 202
Hath the story of Abraham's honored guests reached thee (O Muhammad)? (ibid., p. 169).
A quick glance at the contexts above can show that this is another tripartite Qur’an-related intertexuality. The most
predominant context is the first (i.e. the one provided in Surrah 88 Al-Gashiya), as the mere mention of ‫ﻫﻞ ﺁﺗﺎﻙ‬
‫ﺣﺪﻳﺚ‬would trigger lay Muslims’ memory to instantly recall the word ‫ ﺍﻟﻐﺎﺷﻴﺔ‬as to fill the gap, or as to complete this
question. The Qur’anic lexical item ‫ ﺍﻟﻐﺎﺷﻴﺔ‬literally means the overwhelming event, while Qur’anically, it is one of the
labels for the Day of Judgment. This can explain why the word overwhelming is capitalized in Pickthall’s translation
above. In this Surah which bears the same title, i.e., ‫( ﺍﻟﻐﺎﺷﻴﺔ‬i.e. The Overwhelming), and for the purpose of reporting on
the Day of Judgment, God addresses Prophet Mohammed in the opening verse of this Surah with this question: Hath
there come unto thee tidings of the Overwhelming? A tantalizing insight on the course of events relevant to this Day is
given throughout the Surah, just right after the inaugural verse.
In short, in most cases, the expression ‫ ﻫﻞ ﺁﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ‬is interxtually reminiscent of ‫( ﺍﻟﻐﺎﺷﻴﺔ‬i.e. The Overwhemling Day)
and of the relevant details revealed in the Surrah 88 Al-Ghashia. This is a point of contact that yields another level of
meaning, i.e., a vertical intertextual level that requires a special care in the translation process. The second context
comes to unfold the story of Prophet Moses. This is another long and exciting story in the Qur’an. The last context, i.e.,
the third, harks back to the story of Prophet Abraham's honored guests. Again, for spatial limitations, the details of The
Overwhelming Surah as well as that of the two stories (i.e. Prophet Moses's and Prophet Abraham's honored guests)
cannot be given here. However, these story can be easily obtained from the Qur'an, or from other well-known Islamic
religious sources. Insofar as the translation of the examples (10-12) is involved, it is quite obvious that translators would
face difficulties in communicating over to the TL the three-layer context, i.e., the rich Qur’an-based intertexulaity. On
the other hand, Picthall’s translation is quite classical and scriptural, for its inclusion of some archaic Middle English
words such as hath, unto and thee. This classical register does not seem to fit modern English, i.e., Pickthall’s
translation is geared towards bringing about an annoying registral rift between the two languages.
Let us now turn to the examples above. Example 10 was taken from Al-Jazeeera News website, which reports on the
renowned Al-Jazeera programme presenter, Faisal Al-Qasim, who host the famous debate show ‫ﺍﻹﺗﺠﺎﻩ ﻭﺍﻹﺗﺠﺎﻩ ﺍﻟﻤﻌﺎﻛﺲ‬
(The Opposite Direction), and who used the example in 10 as an opening utterance for the show, which was devoted to
talking about expired food. As for example 11, this is a news-headline for an article that was written by Dr. Hassan Al-
Ajmi, who talks, in a somehow chronological order, about Muslim rulers’ entourage throughout history. Interestingly
enough, for the title of this particular article, the author employs the word ‫ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﺷﻴﺔ‬which phonically and morphologically
rhyme with ‫ ﺍﻟﻐﺎﺷﻴﺔ‬let alone the employment of ‫ ﻫﻞ ﺍﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ‬as to produce the title ‫( ﻫﻞ ﺍﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﺷﻴﺔ‬i.e. Hath there
come unto thee tidings of the entourage?) which resembles to a large extent the Qur’anic verse ‫( ﻫﻞ ﺍﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ ﺍﻟﻐﺎﺷﻴﺔ‬i.e.
Hath there come unto thee tidings of the Overwhelming?). Indeed, this is not a weird coincidence; rather, this is a
planned linguistic action. Evidently, the author’s purpose is not to take the reader into a spiritual journey to that
overwhelming day (i.e. the Day of Judgment), and its drift of events; rather, it is to empower his language by employing
such a foreign-Qur'anic intertext. Yet, this linguistic utilization of the Qur’an is not without a price: a complication of
meaning.
In the last example 12, the neologism ‘Sexual Jihad’ makes headlines nowadays in many media outlets, as this is a
strange disconcerting concept to all Muslims across the globe. In fact, ‘Sexual Jihad’ is a controversial practice of
women who voluntarily offer themselves in sexual comfort role to men fighting for the establishment of the so-called
Islamic rule or state. It is claimed that this practice originated in Tunisia, which waged war against Al-Qaida, and then,
through Tunisian girls, it has festered in volatile countries such as Syrian and Iraq. In order to attract the greatest
attention to this topic, the author has decided to exploit the same Qur’an-related linguistic equation: ‫ ﻫﻞ ﺍﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ‬as to
produce a very attention-grabbing, yet linguistically and culturally powerful title like the one in example 11 above.
Again, the result is not only restricted to having a robust title, but also to having an intertextual relation, i.e., a semantic
sophistication that is not easy to retain in the TLT.
Based on all that has been said so far, it is self-evident that the classical-religious register used in the authoritative
Qur’anic translations, such as Pickthall’s would cause havoc to the present-day English audience, and so, to obtain a
communicative translation, Pickthall’s religious translation should be modified into an acceptable choice such as: Have
you got the story of…? or Have you heard about…? These suggested translation options seem to capture the basic
textual essence, but undoubtedly, they seem to do injustice to the tripartite intertextual relationship. Obviously, this
example (i.e. ‫)ﻫﻞ ﺍﺗﺎﻙ ﺣﺪﻳﺚ‬, and its all relevant linguistic manifestations represent another case of an intensified Qur’an-
based
exegetical, which, standing on equal footing, can warrant the transfer of such a sophisticated intertextual relationship. It
should be reaffirmed here that the TLT has to go in line with the purpose and intentions of the SLT, with the translation-
commissioner’s policy, and with the TL readership’s expectations, values, and context of use, which may also give
translators the license or liberty to venture down even untrodden paths in this regard.
."‫ ﺍﻟﺤﻜﻮﻣﺔ ﺗﻀﻊ ﺍﻟﺘﻮﻗﻌﺎﺕ ﺍﻹﻗﺘﺼﺎﺩﻳﺔ "ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬:‫( ﻣﺤﻠﻞ ﺍﻗﺘﺼﺎﺩﻱ‬13)
An Economic Analyst: The Government Produces Economic Forecast by Guessing at Random. (Pickthall 2015, p. 90).
!‫ ﻟﻢ ﻳﻜﻦ ﺭﺟﻤﺎً ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬..«‫( ﻣﺤﺎﻭﻟﺔ ﺍﻏﺘﻴﺎﻝ »ﻛﺒﺮ‬14)
Attempt to Assassinate Kubar was not Guessing at Random (ibid., p. 90).
IJALEL 6(6):195-207, 2017 203
‫ ﻣﻠﻴﻮﻥ ﻧﺴﻤﺔ‬34 ‫ ﺳﻜﺎﻥ ﺍﻟﻌﺮﺍﻕ‬: ‫( ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬15)
Guessing at Random: Iraq’s Population Reaches 34 Billions (ibid., p. 90).
The underlined Qur’anic structure ‫( ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬i.e. guessing at random) in the examples above (13-15) emerges to
deliver a manifest Qur’an-related intertextuality that may throw up translation challenges. Basically, this commonly
quoted or used expression literally means unforeseeable, utterly unknown, or in a more religious sense, pre-science
which is always attributable to God. This Qur’anic structure enjoys a high degree of iterability in MSA, and figures only
in one rich Qur’anic context, i.e. in Surah Al-Kahf/ Verse 22, which should be highlighted as to envisage the
intertextual relation engendered by such a structure. Citationally speaking, the following is the original Qur’anic context
where ‫ ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬appears:
َّ‫ﺳَﻴَﻘُﻮﻟُﻮﻥَ ﺛَﻼﺛَﺔٌ ﺭَّﺍﺑِﻌُﻬُﻢْ ﻛَﻠْﺒُﻬُﻢْ ﻭَﻳَﻘُﻮﻟُﻮﻥَ ﺧَﻤْﺴَﺔٌ ﺳَﺎﺩِﺳُﻬُﻢْ ﻛَﻠْﺒُﻬُﻢْ ﺭَﺟْﻤﺎً ﺑِﭑﻟْﻐَﻴْﺐِ ﻭَﻳَﻘُﻮﻟُﻮﻥَ ﺳَﺒْﻌَﺔٌ ﻭَﺛَﺎﻣِﻨُﻬُﻢْ ﻛَﻠْﺒُﻬُﻢْ ﻗُﻞ ﺭَّﺑِّﻲ ﺃَﻋْﻠَﻢُ ﺑِﻌِﺪَّﺗِﻬِﻢ ﻣَّﺎ ﻳَﻌْﻠَﻤُﻬُﻢْ ﺇِﻻَّ ﻗَﻠِﻴﻞٌ ﻓَﻼَ ﺗُﻤَﺎﺭِ ﻓِﻴﻬِﻢْ ﺇِﻻ‬
.(22/18 ‫ﻣِﺮَﺁﺀً ﻇَﺎﻫِﺮﺍً ﻭَﻻَ ﺗَﺴْﺘَﻔْﺖِ ﻓِﻴﻬِﻢْ ﻣِّﻨْﻬُﻢْ ﺃَﺣَﺪﺍً )ﺍﻟﻜﻬﻒ‬
(Some) will say: They were three, their dog the fourth, and (some) say: Five, their dog the sixth, guessing at
random; and (some) say: Seven, and their dog the eighth. Say (O Muhammad): My Lord is best aware of their number.
None knoweth them save a few. So contend not concerning them except with an outward contending, and ask not any of
them to pronounce concerning them (Pickthall 2015, p. 90).
The Qur’anic verse above (22) falls within a broader context of an intriguing Qur’anic narrative of what is widely
known as ‫( ﻗﺼﺔ ﺃﻫﻞ ﺍﻟﻜﻬﻒ‬i.e. the story of The People of the Cave), which is told in the Qur'an in Surah Al-Kahf 18,
verses 9–26. After a brief opening of Surah Al-Kahf, the story of The People of the Cave is narrated in a manner that
exhibits how firm faith can reflect positively on believers, as it would engulf them with comfort and inner peace.
According to Surah Al-Kahf, a number of young men, who believed in God (i.e., a number of believers) were living in a
certain pagan community, where the king would execute anyone who worships anything other than the idols they had.
This repression propelled the young men to seek refuge in a cave. The Qur’an also mentions that a dog was
accompanying those believers. After that God makes them sleep for 309 lunar years, and when they were made to wake
up, they find that the entire world has changed and the community they had fled is no longer a pagan one.
The number of the cave-sleepers is not known for sure, as it is not specified in the Surah. However, the Qur’an reports
that there were two clashing groups who were trying to know their exact number: “(Some) will say: They were three,
their dog the fourth, and (some) say: Five, their dog the sixth” (Al-Kahf 18/22; Pickthall, 2015, p. 90). At this juncture,
the Qur’an employs ‫ ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬to mean that both groups were guessing at random for something that is pre-science or
that is totally hidden or unknown. Thus, the pragmatic bottom-line of ‫ ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬is to put an end to the ongoing process
of the futile guessing the two groups were engaged in, as this is God’s knowledge. This may account for the reason why
MSA employs this Qur’anic expression so heavily whenever there is a situation that is fraught with absolute ambiguity,
or when a person does not have the faintest idea about a something or about doing something, and instead, things are
performed by going in all directions, and by going in endless loops.
The examples above (13-15) come to re-accentuate the use of ‫ ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬in the manner just indicated. Example 13 is a
news-headline that was taken from a Moroccan electronic news website, where the author harshly criticizes his
government for the poor planning; rather, for not having the explicit knowledge, nor the skill to produce the needed
economic forecast, and that the government does this through making guesses and through going in all directions. In
other words, this is a ‫ ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬case. The second example 14 is a news-headline for an article that talks about an
attempt to assassinate the Wali (i.e. Governor) of North Darfur, Mr. Osman Kuber. The author of the article argues that
such an attempt was known to him and to his colleagues, i.e., ‘the battalion’ of writers and columnists who belong to the
same news agency, and who together warned against such an expected attempt. In other words, the author tries to make
the point that such an assassination attempt was not a ‫ ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬case, i.e., it was not guessing-at-random attempt. as
they (i.e. the author himself and his colleagues) had some bits and pieces of information which enabled them to make an
informed conjecturing. The last example 15 is a title for an article that was posted on an Iraqi political website, where
the author contends that at present time there are no reliable sources in Iraq that can enable obtaining the required data
for making a reliable thorough census, and the fact that Iraq’s population is 34 billion is a ‫ ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬case, i.e., this is
not a true figure, as nobody knows how the Iraqi government obtained it, i.e., this is a guessing-at-random census.
This linguistic usage of ‫ ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬can be easily translated into the TL as making guesses, or guessing at random.
Indeed, Pickthall’s translation, guessing at random used in the examples (13-15) appears to be a convenient
lexicographical equivalence that can keep the textual essence, but not the intertextual one. In other terms, Picthall's
translation does seem to be conversant with the normal register of modern English, with no misgivings about the
registral difference. However, neither the choice to make guesses nor Pickthall’s guessing at random can establish an
analogous receiving intertext, as such translational choices do not touch on the cultural significance and value of this
story, i.e., the story of The People of the Cave that lie just underneath the surface of ‫ ﺭﺟﻤﺎ ﺑﺎﻟﻐﻴﺐ‬. Apparently, such non-
saturatable
approach or the gist-exegetical approach exegetical, which can be used in tandem, unless the skopos of translation is
figured out. To reiterate, translation is an intentional communicative act, and a critical understanding of its skopos can
help the translators in deciding on which synthetic approach to resort to, or even about which other appropriate
IJALEL 6(6):195-207, 2017 204
translational procedures to take. Indeed, the skopos of translation can transform translators into TL authors, who are
released from the sort of limitations and constraints imposed on them by a flawed understanding of the concept of
faithfulness or loyalty to the SLT, and who can free themselves from the exigencies of equivalence.
5. Conclusion
The primary concern of this study has been with how Qur’anic discourse is intertextually called upon by actual
elements of such a sacred text, and with how such foreign-scriptural formulations or intertexts should be dealt with from
a translational point of view. The tide of the foregoing discussion has attempted to examine the difficulties and
problems associated with translating into English Qur’an-related intertextuality, featuring in MSA in general, and in the
headlines featuring in news agencies’ websites in particular. The study draws on Derrida’s (1977) dichotomy
iterability/citationality, Kristeva’s (1980) vertical intertextuality, Fairclough’s (1992a; 1992b; 1995 & 2011) manifest
intertextuality, and Bakhtin’s (1986) double voicing or re-accentuation to support the premise that Qur’an-related
intertextuality can be viewed as an enriching interlingual communicative act that is conducive of conceptual densities
that entail ‘mobilizing’ the translation strategies that can assist in building intertextual relations pertaining to the form
and theme of the foreign text. This premise is accentuated by Venuti's (2009, p. 157) view that "intertextuality enables
and complicates translation, preventing it from being an untroubled communication and opening the translated text to
interpretive possibilities that vary with cultural constituencies in the receiving situation".
To resolve the translation problems arising from Qur’an-related intertextuality’, the study proposes two synthetic
approaches: the gist-paratextual approach and the gist-exegetical approach. These two approaches propose three
techniques viz. gist translation (cf. Dickens et al., 2002), exegetical translation (cf. Dickens et al., 2002), and
paratextual action. Gist translation is concerned with giving translators the choice of wrapping up any given lengthy,
detailed, or semantically-loaded text in the form of a synoptic account or laconic summary, whereas, exegetical
translation, a form of extended translation, goes in the opposite directionality, as it is concerned with allowing
translators to explain within the body of the TLT any complex meaning of any given lexical item or expression.
Paratextual action is concerned with relegating any textual material to an inferior position, i.e., to a paratextual position
through taking a paratextual action, such as footnoting, end-noting, annotating, etc.
In a nutshell, the gist-paratextual approach subsumes producing a gist translation, then relegating it to a paratextual
position in the TLT, whereas the gist-exegetical approach, involves producing a gist translation, then incorporating it
within the body of the TLT. Thus, the former approach is associated with giving cases of conceptual density an inferior
position in the TLT, whereas the latter is associated with giving such cases a prominence in the TLT. Preference,
however, is for the gist-paratextual approach, as it can enable smooth communication to take place, compared with the
gist-exegetical one, which is likely to engender enlarged translations that may derail from normal patterns of linguistic
use. Indeed, preference for this particular conclusion and/or approach concurs with Federici's (2007) perspective that
"the translator can decide to add a glossary or to insert footnotes in order to highlight those intertextual references
which are not so clear for the target reader (ibid, p. 153)", and with Neubert and Shreve's view (1992, pp. 117-123) that
the translator ought to "mediate" effectively between the textual and communicative conventions of the ST and TT
languages, i.e., the intertextual properties of both the ST and the TT have to be fully grasped, which makes translation
"an exercise in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic intertextuality" (ibid., p. 123).
The study also concludes that the skopos of translation is central to the production and reception of intertextuality, and
to determining which of the two proposed synthetic approaches to operationalize. The study also stresses that a skopos-
driven perspective, which necessitates not only focusing on the purpose and/or function of the SLT, but also which
entails giving a special attention and care to the TL readership and the translation-commissioner’s expectations and
aspirations, would grant translators a remarkable degrees of freedom and flexibility in translation, and would open up
new horizons for more adequate translation solutions for most forms of intertextuality. In other words, the study
attempts to accentuate the fact that the skopos of translation can release the translators from the kind of limitations and
constraints imposed on them by a narrow-minded understanding of the concept of faithfulness or loyalty to the SLT,
i.e., the skopos can free the translators from the exigencies of equivalence. This conclusion is supported by Farahzad's
(2009, pp. 127-130) viewpoint that the relationship between what she calls "prototext" and its subsequent "metatexts" is
not one of equivalence, but may be accounted for through intertextuality: "metatexts", she argues, makes the
conventional ideas of "equivalence", "source text" and "target text" invalid.
Registral difference between Arabic and English has also been found to provide additional translational turbulences, as
Arabic religious discourse is infused with the normal or formal register of MSA, whereas, it is ‘abnormal’ or
‘intoxicating’ in the formal register of English. This conclusion is substantiated by Farghal (1993 & 1995). As a
corollary, the study suggests that bridging the registral rift, or rather ‘purging’ the TL version from the SL religious
discourse should be the first translational procedure to be taken, before engaging in the painstaking process of rendering
the foreign intertextual aspects of meaning. Finally, the study shows that the Holy Qur’an proved to be a virtual
breeding ground for textual dynamism and potentiation, as any text excerpted from the Qur’an can illuminate any other
non-sacred texts, not because the Qur’anic discourse is mystifying, eloquent, and inimitable, but because it formulates
an empowering language repertoire, or an empowering language inventory, a fact that may account for the heavy
employment of Qur’anic elements in MSA.
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IJALEL 6(6):195-207, 2017 207
Motivation and Attitude of Islamic Azad University’s Faculty

Members toward Learning English
Hamid Gholami (Corresponding author)
Department of ELT, Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran
E-mail: hamidgholami@iauksh.ac.ir

The research is financed by Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran.
Abstract
The study aimed at evaluating the Islamic Azad University's faculty members' attitude toward learning English, their
motivation and its types and also some perceived barriers toward the goal of getting proficient in English as well as
some possible suggestion to make them more motivated. To achieve the aim, some questionnaires were employed and
the results revealed the high interest and motivation of faculty members to learn English. The results also indicated that
the participants highly valued English as the international academic language. Regarding the inhibitory factors, they
mentioned being busy as one of the most important factors. Improper need analysis and consequently lack of
appropriate courses were also reported to be of primary significance. As far as suggestions are concerned, matching the
course content with the needs of different departments was of a significant importance.
Keywords: Motivation, Attitude, Faculty Members
1. Introduction
Motivation to learn a second or foreign language has been given a notable attention, but it wasn’t always this way.
Before mid 1950s there was a common belief that learning a second language involved intelligence and verbal ability.
Affective concepts including attitudes, motivation and anxiety were not of significance to the educators in the field at
all. Nowadays, however, one sometimes thinks of affective variables as the only important ones. To date, a bulk of
research has revolved around individual differences, and the learners’ individual characteristics such as attitudes and
motivation, anxiety, self-esteem, field independence, intelligence, language aptitude, and learning strategies, but some
of these factors might play greater roles. Motivation and attitude can be cases in point. Without some kind of it, the
learner might not deploy a learning strategy, use his intelligence or to put it simply, he will not take a step forward to
learn the second language (Gardner, 2001).
Research indicates that the way motivation can influence language learning outcomes is different from that of language
aptitude (Gardner, 1972; Wigfield & Wentzel, 2007). The other affective factor contributing to language learning is
attitude. According to Latchanna and Dagnew (2009), attitude is an important concept in finding out the impetus for
human behavior and is defined as a mental state that encompasses beliefs and feelings which can predict the success in
language classes. As Lennartsson (2008) states, students’ not believing their own capability of learning a new language
can hinder their learning. He considers positive attitude towards learning a language as a good indicator of one’s ability
to learn a language.
The attitude toward learning a second language and the motives behind such an endeavor are not simple to be found
since the people trying to learn the second language are different and that’s why the results from one study is not
generalizable to other context. Although a lot of studies have been done on the Iranian university students' motivation
and attitude to/toward learning English, no such a study has ever been conducted on the faculty members as the higher
education leaders. The aforementioned reasoning is the impetus for the current piece of research which aims at
investigating the faculty members' attitude toward learning English as a foreign language, their motivation type and
their present knowledge of English. The study’s main focus however would be suggesting some possible solutions to
encourage the faculty members to take English courses that can boost their academic knowledge.
As Moiinvaziri (2008) claims to teachers and the researchers motivation is one of the factors that can determine the rate
and success of second/foreign language learning. Motivation provides the essential incentive to start learning the second
language and later the propelling force to continue the long and demanding learning process.
IJALEL 6(6):208-213, 2017 209
Lack of enough motivation can lead even the most capable to not achieve the long-term goals, and neither an
appropriate curriculum nor the best teaching practices can be enough to guarantee achievement. However, high
motivation can cover remarkable shortcomings both in the individual's language aptitude and learning environment.
Gardner and Lambert (1972) consider language aptitude as an important factor in explaining individual but they
emphasize that motivation can nullify the aptitude effect. They support this by exemplifying bilingual social settings in
which many people master a second, mostly official language, regardless of their aptitude differences.
Gardner and Lambert (1972) classify motivation into two types of integrative and instrumental. The integrative one
implies learning the language with the aim of engaging the culture of its people. Instrumental motivation , on the other
hand, suggest that a learner is acquiring the language not because of his love for the language, culture or native speakers
of that language but for a purpose related to getting a job or a further useful motive. Cook (2000) believes that the
integrative and instrumental motivations are the primary drives for someone learning a second language.
Crookes and Schmidt (1991) believe that the dominance of the social-psychological approach has caused the
failure to distinguish between the concepts of attitude, especially attitude toward the target language culture and
motivation. In their view, "much of the work on motivation in SL learning has not dealt with motivation at
all;" instead, the authors offer a definition of motivation "in terms of choice, engagement, and persistence, as
determined by interest, relevance, expectancy, and outcomes" (p. 502).
Attitudes toward learning a second language the second language community have received considerable investigation.
Direct measures of attitudes can take different forms involving diaries, questionnaires, and interviews; however,
Gardner's Attitude and Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) which is a self report consisting of a series of
statements to which the learners respond on a five-point Likert scale (from "strongly agree" to "strongly
disagree") is the most frequently-used direct measure of attitudes
With such a background, this study aimed at answering the following question:
1. What are the faculty members’ attitudes towards learning English?
2. What are the motivation levels of the faculty members’ towards learning English ?
3. What are some inhibitory factors toward leaning English?
4. What are some practical solutions to increase the faculty members motivation toward learning English?
3. Method
3.1 Participants
The research participants for the present study included 50 male and female faculty members in Islamic Azad
University of Kermanshah. The age range of the participants was between 31 to 45 and they had been faculty members
for more than 2 years. They were either PhD holders or PhD candidates in different fields who had passed the
comprehensive exam which requires passing a standard English proficiency test.
3.2 Instruments
The data collection instruments used in this study included a translated version of a questionnaire developed by Gardner
to investigate motivation and attitude. The instrument was believed to be valid and reliable. It took about an hour for a
participant to answer the questionnaires. The questionnaire had a likert scale and the data were analyzed based on the
participants' answers in each item.
The other instrument used was a semi structured interview the questions of which were developed by the researcher
after piloting interviews with three faculty members who were not included in the study. The interview took up to
twenty minutes depending on the interviews responses.
3.3 Data Collection Procedure
The study was quantitative and one shot in design since there was no intervention on the part of the study. The first step
was asking the participants to take the questionnaires. The participants were teaching at the university so the researcher
provide the questionnaires in their free time and gave the questionnaires in different time sections that is the motivation
section of the questionnaire on one day and the attitude one on the other. Sometimes it was possible to hold the
interview following the attitude questionnaire and sometimes on another occasion
In order to answer the first research question, the translated and modified version of the questionnaire was administered.
The investigation was done on attitude and motivation. To collect the data, the researchers employed a questionnaire
adopted from Gardner's (1985). Integrative and instrumental orientation scales of the original 6-point Likert Scale
format of Gardner's Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) were used, ranging from ‘Strongly Agree’ to
‘Strongly Disagree’. the questionnaire covered the following 7 domains representing motivation orientations
(instrumental and integrative) and the attitudes of faculty members regarding the language, speech community and
its culture:
1-Interest in Foreign languages
2. Degree of Integrativeness
3. Degree of Instrumentality
IJALEL 6(6):208-213, 2017 210
The results of the items on the first domain are as follows:
Domain 1: Interest in Foreign Languages

The following table is a summary of the participants’ interest in different aspects of English language learning.
Table 1. Frequencies, Percentages and mean scores for Items of Domain

Item # N Minimum Maximum Mean SD
11 50 4 5 4.55 .96
12 50 3 5 4.3 1.05
14 50 3 5 4.72 1.08
15 50 4 5 4.65 .73
20 50 3 5 4.30 .95
22 50 4 5 4.32 .65
27 50 2 5 3.89 1.36
33 50 3 5 4.21 1.03
36 50 3 5 3.89 1.27
43 50 4 5 4.65 .65
This table shows the interest of faculty members in foreign languages. As can be seen in the table the mean score of the
participants is 4.35 implying that they have a strong desire in foreign languages. In accordance with the figures, the
majority of respondents stated that they wish they could speak many foreign languages perfectly (item 14). Looking at
item 27 with the lowest mean score, it can be discerned that studying foreign language is enjoyable for them as well,
however, with a lower mean as compared with other items.
In contrast, as can be inferred from item 36, contributors prefer to see a TV program dubbed into our language than in
its own language with subtitles. To summarize, on the basis of the data gathered in relation to the faculty members’
interest in foreign languages, most, if not all, of them showed interest in foreign languages.
Domain 2: Degree of Integrativeness
This section of the questionnaire sought to identify the subjects’ degree of integrativeness in foreign languages.

4 50 3 5 4.25 .99
5 50 3 5 4.31 1.12
9 50 4 5 4.62 1.01
26 50 4 5 4.53 .93
Overall 4.43
mean
The overall computed mean score of 4.43 clearly implies that respondents have a high degree of integrativeness in
English. Based on the faculty members’ response to item 9 with highest mean score, almost all of them agreed that
studying English is important because it will allow them to meet and converse with more and varied people. On the
contrary, item 4, asking whether there would be a great loss if Iran had no contact with English-speaking countries has
the least mean score, compared with other items of the table.
Domain 3: Degree of Instrumentality
3 50 3 5 4.01 1.15
8 50 3 5 3.95 1.27
10 50 3 5 4.21 1.14
16 50 2 5 3.27 1.32
Overall 3.86
mean
IJALEL 6(6):208-213, 2017 211
The third domain, regarding the first research question, dealt with the degree of instrumentality of English to faculty
members. Looking at the total mean score, 3.86, it can be inferred that they have an integrative orientation in English
rather than merely considering it as an instrument. Item 16, with the lowest mean, which was based on their perception
of English as an instrument to further their education clearly elaborates on why English doesn’t enjoy instrumentality
for faculty members. As all the faculty members are PhD holders or candidates, English is not useful for them
furthermore to continue their education. In general, in all the eight questions surveyed, the number of respondents with
an integrative orientation toward a foreign language is higher than that of subjects in favor of instrumental orientation.
The second research question dealt with the faculty members’ attitude toward learning English. The attitude was
investigated from three different perspectives namely; attitudes towards learning English, attitudes toward English-
speaking people and desire to learn English.
Domain 1: Attitudes towards Learning English
Considering the question, the following results were observed.
Table 4. Attitudes towards Learning English

7 50 4 5 4.55 .96
28 50 3 5 4.30 1.05
31 50 3 5 4.72 1.08
38 50 4 5 4.32 .65
39 50 3 5 4.30 .95
41 50 2 5 3.89 1.36
42 50 4 5 4.65 .65
44 50 4 5 4.65 .73
45 50 3 5 4.21 1.03
46 50 3 5 3.89 1.27
This table demonstrates the respondents’ attitude towards learning English. The overall computed mean of 4.45 can be
interpreted as the positive attitude of faculty members toward learning English. On one hand, according to the item 31,
the majority of respondents strongly believed that the development of their country is possible mainly by educated
people who know English well proving their positive attitude towards learning English. On the other hand, responses to
the item 46 with the lowest mean score reflects that they don’t think English is an essential part of school curriculum.
Likewise, base on the item 41, they agreed that teaching of English should start at the very first grade in the Iranians
schools. Moreover, as can be inferred from item 7, subjects asserted that learning English is not a waste of time.
Therefore, the results in the table are a clear indication that the participants assume learning English as a valuable goal.
Domain 2: Attitudes toward English-speaking People
This table represents faculty members’ attitudes toward English-speaking people. As depicted in the table, it is obvious
that the respondents mostly do not have positive views on English-speaking people.
Table 5. Attitudes toward English-speaking People

6 50 2 5 3.56 1.28
1 50 2 5 3.55 1.21
13 50 2 5 3.25 1.36
25 50 2 5 3.20 1.25
32 50 3 5 4.20 1.12
34 50 3 5 3.82 1.46
37 50 2 5 4.32 1.27
40 50 3 5 4.30 1.12
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In all the seven items investigated subjects’ attitude, with total mean score of 3.7, four items have lower means. With
regard to items 6, it can be deduced that most of them do not consider native English speakers as kind and very
sociable. Nonetheless, based on item 37, most respondents were reported that they wish they could have many native
English speaking friends; overall results of the table did not reveal favorable attitudes toward English-speaking people.
Domain 3: Desire to Learn English

Information regarding faculty members’ desire to learn English can be obtained in table.6.
Table 6. Desire to Learn English

2 50 2 5 3.21 1.32
17 50 2 5 3.25 1.37
18 50 2 5 3.21 1.22
19 50 2 5 3.85 1.56
21 50 2 5 3.26 1.09
23 50 2 5 3.12 1.10
24 50 2 5 3.12 1.41
29 50 2 5 3.65 1.49
30 50 2 5 3.19 1.23
35 50 3 5 3.92 1.63
From total mean score, 3.38, it can be deduced that respondents did not express keen desire to learn English as a foreign
language. It is worthy to note that, of a total of 10 questions, merely three items, 19, 29 and 35, have higher mean that
total mean score. Considering item 35, with the highest mean, 3.92, participants stated that they wish they were fluent in
English. It is inferable from items 23 and 24 that subjects are losing their desire to know English compared to the past
and thinking about quitting English. Summing up the results, it can be concluded that faculty members’ desire to learn
English is fairly poor or, at least, used to have strong desire than the present time.
The study showed that the faculty members were highly motivated both integratively and instrumentally to learn
English. Results revealed a high instrumental but a moderate integrative motivation. Although there has been no study
to consider faculty members as the participants but the results of the study is in line with many studies conducted in
Iranian context; Ali Akbari and Ahmadi (2014) is a case in point. Their study investigate female English students’
integrative and instrumental motivation in intermediate level in Ilam, Iran. The results indicated a high instrumental
as well as a moderate integrative motivation.
In another study, Mehrpour and Vojdani (2012) found that the technological, sociological and scientific changes in the
globalization process had a great impact on Iranian EFL learners’ who were mainly instrumentally motivated to learn
the second language. Challak and Kassaian (2010) investigated the various socio-psychological orientations of
Iranian undergraduate students to learn English. They studied the motivation orientations of the students and their
attitudes towards the target language and its related community. The study indicated that the Iranian
undergraduates learn the English for both ‘instrumental’ and 'integrative' reasons and their attitudes towards the
target language community and its members were highly positive.
Regarding the attitude toward learning English, it was found that the faculty members think highly of the target
language community and its members. Mahdavi-Zafarghandi and Jodai (2012) studies the attitudes toward English and
English learning at an Iranian military university. They found that the participants had a positive attitude toward
learning English and the English community.
5. Conclusions and Implications
Knowing English as the most used language in the academic world is an essential skill for everyone in every field. The
essentiality is even more evident for faculty members as people more involved in academic work. Since motivation is
the primary trigger for people to start something, the study aimed at investigating faculty members’ motivation and also
their attitude toward learning English. It also aimed at finding the barriers to learn English and also providing some
suggestions to overcome the barriers. The results indicated the high motivation and also the positive attitude of the
faculty members toward the English speaking people and also the societies they live in them. Regarding the barriers,
time and the appropriateness of the courses were the most effective ones. Most of the faculty members consider
language learning as a time consuming and boring process, an opinion which lies in the English teaching system in
Iranian context. Accurate need analysis seems to be the key to motivate the faculty members to devote some time to
learning English. As found based on the questionnaire most of the participants were interested in short term survival
courses rather than long term but more rewarding courses.
IJALEL 6(6):208-213, 2017 213
The results of the study have some implications for university deans. The results suggest that the deans should run some
short term courses, of course based on need analysis, to make the faculty members more proficient in English. It is
recommended that the ability to speak and write in English should be a prerequisite to learning English since no
international conference can be attended without the ability to speak in English and no article can be written without
mastering writing skill.
The fact that the participants had a positive attitude toward English and are highly motivated to learn it is in contrast
with the data acquired based on the personal information questionnaire since despite their high motivation, the faculty
members didn’t want to attend an English course. Most of them reported themselves to be week in English especially in
writing and speaking English while they were highly motivated to learn the skills but this motivation seemed to be of a
kind that cannot trigger any action on their part.
The results of the study can be inspiring to the Islamic Azad University policy makers in that they have to find ways to
motivate the faculty members to learn English as the most widely used language in all the academic fields. It can also
be fruitful to syllabus designers to devise a course plan that works best for such a target population.
Acknowledgements
This study has not been possible without the help of my dear colleagues in Islamic Azad University who accepted to fill
out the questionnaires and thereby provided the main data for the study. I should also acknowledge the sponsorship
provided by the Islamic Azad University of Kermanshah Research and Technolgy Center.
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IJALEL 6(6):208-213, 2017 214
Apology Strategies Used by EFL Undergraduate Students in

Indonesia
Payung Cedar (Corresponding author)
Faculty of Humanities, Naresuan University, Phitsanulook 65000, Thailand
E-mail: payungp@nu.ac.th

The research is financed by Naresuan University No. *R2560C078*
Abstract
Interlanguage speakers, regardless of proficiency level, often experience problems in communication due to their
limited knowledge of how speech acts are commonly performed in the target language. The current study attempted to
investigate the effects of English proficiency level on the apology strategy use by Indonesian EFL (English as a Foreign
Language) learners from two English proficiency levels. The study employed a DCT (Discourse Completion Task)
questionnaire and involved 21 A2 students and 21 B1 students majoring in English in their first-year period from an
Indonesian university. Utilizing the apology strategy framework from Olshtain & Cohen (1983) and Blum-Kulka,
House & Kasper (1989), the findings demonstrated no significant difference between the two subject groups in the
overall use of apology strategies, whereas differences were noted at an individual strategy level. Nonetheless, the B1
group made more frequent use and a wider range of apology strategies than the A2 group. In addition, the study found
two forms of pragmatic transfer made by the subjects and a new apology strategy.
Keywords: apology, speech acts, discourse completion task, EFL learners
1. Introduction
The English language used by people from different first languages and cultures plausibly leads to communication
breakdown, misunderstanding or even offense. This is made possible as people carry certain intentions in their
communicative practices that are often intricately realized and interpreted in different ways across speech and cultural
groups (Bowe & Martin, 2014). Meanwhile, interlanguage speakers have a tendency to utilize their first language (L1)
pragmatic conventions in their second language (L2) production due to their limited knowledge on how to carry out
particular acts in the target language properly. Interestingly, such a phenomenon is not confined to low proficiency
speakers as even EFL learners who gain the advanced level of grammar and vocabulary are frequently confronted with
trouble in creating benevolent and proper apololgies, as well as other speech acts (Tamimi, Sa’ad & Mohammadi, 2014),
owing to their limited pragmatic knowledge (Bardovi-Harlig, Hartford, Mahan-Taylor, Morgan, & Reynolds, 1991). A
Korean driver, for example, apologized to an American driver by saying “I’m sorry. I’ll tell police officer and I’ll give
money for you” (Turgut, 2010, p. 13). In fact, it is not the American cultural norm to offer money in a situation like this
(idem). Accordingly, learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) need to possess not only linguistic knowledge,
but also pragmatic knowledge of the language (Hymes, 1964) to be able to efficiently use the language in both
production and comprehension in a specific socio-cultural context (Fraser, 2010). In other words, it is of great
importance for EFL learners to have the ability to perform speech acts in the target language according to its working
pragmatic conventions.
Speech act has seemingly become the most intriguing area of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). It can be seen from the
fact that speech act is often the major focus of ILP studies, leaving other areas such as conversational structure and
conversational implicature barely touched (Stalnaker, 1972 as cited in Bardovi-Harlig, 2010, p.21). It has been
extensively investigated by researchers around the globe attempting to reveal values and norms of learners’ first
language (L1) culture in their second language (L2) production and aimed ultimately to enhance learners’ pragmatic
competence of the target language. Among the speech acts of primary use by language speakers is apology. Apology is
a speech act which varies cross-linguistically and cross-culturally (Kalisz, 1993; Kachru, 1998; Chakrani, 2007; Meier,
2010) and is used frequently in human life (Salehi, 2014). Different speech and cultural communities can have different
sets of available apology strategies or use particular strategies unique to certain languages depending on the norms and
values they maintain. Members of particular cultures may have different judgments on what events necessitate
apologies and what kinds of apology strategies should be imbued in particular situations.
A number of studies have been conducted to find the realizations of apology involving participants of various cultural
IJALEL 6(6):214-222, 2017 215
backgrounds. In Indonesian context, Wouk (2006), while conducting a study in Lombok, found that Indonesians used
multiple strategies, primarily overt apology, and that there were no significant gender effects in strategy choice. In
addition, she revealed that Indonesians were inclined to provide specific explanations and avoid overt acceptance of
responsibility in their apologies. Meanwhile, Adrefiza (2010), comparing the use of explicit apology strategies between
Bahasa Indonesia and Australian English speakers, found that Indonesians tended to use request for forgiveness while
Australians’ apologies are dominated by expression of regret. Request for forgiveness is a relatively hearer-oriented
strategy, whereas the expression of regret strategy is relatively speaker-oriented. , Furthermore, she added that
Indonesians tended to be more elaborate, less straightforward, and monotonous in their apologies. Qorina (2012), on the
other hand, investigating the use of apology strategies of EFL university students from different semesters (period of
study), showed similar findings to the aforementioned apology studies in Indonesia. She found that Indonesians used
expression of regret most frequently, followed by an alerter (e.g., honorific terms and endearment) and explanation. She
also noticed development in the use of apology strategies from the lowest to the highest semester participants. In
addition, she pointed out some pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfers in the participants’ apology in English.
In addition, apology studies have been carried out to look into effects of various factors. In relation to apology in
English, a number of studies accord with Qorina’s finding that learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) or
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) apologize in the norm of their L1 culture (Olshtain & Cohen, 1983; Suszczynska,
1999; Thijittang, 2010; Qorina, 2012; Parsa, H., & Mohd Jan, 2015). Regarding gender, previous studies showed that
gender (sex) does not have a significant impact on the use of apology strategies (Saleem, Azam & Saleem, 2014;
Hassan, 2014; Ghanbari et al., 2015; Ali Harb, 2015). Concerning proficiency level, many believe that higher
proficiency learners have better performance in apology. This claim is supported by Rastegar and Yasami (2014) who
contended that there were significant differences between learners of higher and those of lower proficiency level in their
apology strategy use. On a similar account, Istifci (2009) and Qorina (2012) added that higher proficiency learners were
inclined to use a wider range of apology strategies and make more complex apology patterns. However, these findings
are opposed by Khorshidi, Mobini and Nasiri (2016) and Mohebali and Salehi (2016) who argued that there were no
significant differences in the use of apology strategies between learners of high and those of low proficiency levels.
Tabatabei and Farnia (2015), in a wider scope, further claimed that there was no positive correlation between
proficiency level and pragmatic competence. These inconclusive findings on the effect of proficiency levels in apology
strategy use clearly prompt a call for further investigation of the effects of proficiency level on the performance of
apology.
The current study was aimed at investigating variations in apology strategy use between Indonesian EFL students of
two different proficiency levels. It is expected that the findings of the study can serve as one basis for teachers in
developing learners’ pragmatic competence. The study is also expected to contribute to the literature of interlanguage
pragmatic studies, particularly the study of apology speech act. Lastly, the findings can provide a glimpse of the
practice of apology by Indonesians in English. Therefore, the study attempted to answer the following questions:
1) What are the apology strategies used by the English major students of A2 level and B1 level of English proficiency?
2) Are there any significant differences in the apology strategy use between the A2 students and the B1 students?
2. Theoretical Framework
2.1 Interlanguage Pragmatics
Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) is a relatively new area of study composed of two domains: pragmatics and
interlanguage. Bardovi-Harlig (2010) argues that pragmatics is the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behavior
dealing with contextual meanings. It is the study of the speaker’s meaning vis-a-vis the sentence meaning that bridges
the gap between language system and its use. Therefore, the definition of interlanguage pragmatics should not be far
from the notion of language use in context. Meanwhile, Kasper and Rose (2002 as cited in Schauer, 2009, p.37)
describe interlanguage in association with the non-native speakers’ ability to comprehend and perform acts in the target
language and its development. In other words, ILP can be defined as the study of learners’ second language in use
(Tatsumi, 2012). Despite its broad scope, researchers in the field are often interested in exploring learners’ speech act
performance in a target language aimed at enhancing learners’ pragmatic competence. The current study investigated
the performance of apology speech act by two groups of EFL learners – non-native speakers, in English – the target
language, and thus can be thought of as belonging to the study of ILP.
2.2 Pragmatic Competence
Pragmatic competence is a vital component of L2 learning. In order to effectively use language in context,
familiarization with the pragmatic norms and rules of the target language and culture is essential (Schauer, 2009). As
has been widely acknowledged, language is embedded with particular specific cultural values and norms of the
community where the language is spoken. In other words, the language is used with certain pragmatic conventions
maintained by members of the society according to which thoughts and intentions are commonly performed in the
language and this may vary from one culture to another. Consequently, only pragmatically competent learners can take
part in communication using the target language properly.
Pragmatic competence is ‘the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose and to understand
language in context’ (Thomas, 1983, p.92). Similarly, Schauer describes pragmatic competence in relation to
‘appropriate ways of performing speech acts according to the social context’ (2009, p.37). In this point of view, a
pragmatically competent speaker should find no difficulty in expressing his intention in communication. The speaker
IJALEL 6(6):214-222, 2017 216
should show such strong awareness of the social context in which he takes part in that he can conform to the standard
linguistic behavior agreed by the participants. In interlanguage context, the standard of pragmatic reference is that of the
native speakers. Pragmatic competence can be divided into two subgroups: pragmalinguistic competence – ‘the
knowledge of forms and strategies to convey particular illocutions’ and sociopragmatic competence – and
sociopragmatic competence – ‘the ability to use these forms and strategies in a given context’ (Kasper & Roever 2005
as cited in Dippold, 2008, p.131). To put it in another way, pragmatic competence involves two types of judgment: ‘the
basically grammatical assessment of the pragmatic force of linguistic token and sociopragmatic judgments concerning
the size of imposition, cost/benefit, social distance, and relative rights and obligation’ (Thomas, 1983, p.104). Pragmatic
competence is the key to effective communication for EFL learners. A lack of pragmatic competence may force learners
to use conventions from their L1 in their target language production and comprehension, and consequently
communication breakdown may prevail. This phenomenon is often called pragmatic transfer. While pragmatic transfer
can be positive, it is often negative as it causes interference or communication trouble due to the contrasting properties
of the L1 and the L2 (Leech, 2014).
2.3 Speech Acts
As mentioned earlier, speech act has been commonly perceived as the main focus of ILP studies. It refers to actions
performed via utterance (Yule, 2006). Austin further adds that ‘all utterances, in addition to meaning whatever they
mean, perform specific actions (or do things) through having specific forces’ (Levinson, 1983, p. 236). It is embedded
in them a certain intention of the speaker to persuade a certain response from the hearer. In other words, it is the action
behind the utterance made by the speaker. Moreover, Austin describes speech act as composed of three kinds of action:
locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act (Oishi, 2006; O'Keeffe, Clancy & Adolphs, 2011). Locutionary
act refers to the actual utterance produced by the speaker, while illocutionary act is associated with the act the speaker
intends to perform by means of making the utterance. Perlocutionary act is related to the effects the act has upon the
utterance of a sentence. For example, in responding to an invitation, one speaker may say ‘It’s getting late’, which is
supposed to mean a refusal, rather than to tell about the time. In this case, the act of uttering the sentence in the situation
is the locutionary act while the force upon the utterance of the sentence, that is, refusal, depicts the illocutionary act. In
addition, the effects on the hearer, which could be a feeling of disappointment or a gesture like ‘nodding’, etc., belong
to the aspect of perlocutionary act.
Meanwhile, Searle (1965) emphasizes on the illocutionary act in defining speech act by arguing that all linguistic
behaviors must be performed with a certain intention. Searle posits five basic kinds of action that one can perform in
speaking, by means of five types of utterance (1976 as cited in Levinson, 1983, p.240). They are: representatives
(committing the speaker to the expressed propositions), directives (getting the hearer to do something), commissives
(committing the speaker to some future course of action), expressives (expressing a psychological state), and
declarations (causing immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs. As regards this study, apology falls in the
category of expressives speech act.
2.4 Apology
Apology is a speech act to show recognition of the fact that violation of a social norm has taken place. It is an act used
to express speakers’ mental and emotional state or any sincerity condition of the propositional content (Searle, 1976),
functioning to reestablish the social harmony, trust and conflict resolution (Goffman, 1971; Olshtain & Cohen, 1983), to
give a recompense for the misdemeanor (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984), and to retain a good connection between the
apologizer and the recipient (Brown & Levinson, 1978). Like other common speech acts, apology is subject to cultural
and linguistic differences where speakers of a particular language or members of a particular culture may have their
own unique realization of the speech act of apology. Consequently, many researchers have attempted to identify forms
of apology and developed frameworks of apology strategies that can accommodate the practice of the speech act in
particular language and cultural contexts such as Fraser (1981), Olshtain & Cohen (1983), Blum-Kulka & Olshtain
(1984), House (1988), Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper (1989) and Holmes (1990, 1995).
The current study adopted the apology strategy framework initially proposed by Olshtain & Cohen (1983) and Blum-
Kulka, House & Kasper (1989). It consists of six major strategies and nine sub-strategies distributed as follows:
1. Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices (IFIDs) (e.g., “I’m sorry” “I apologize” “Forgive me”)
2. Explanation of Account (e.g., “The traffic was terrible.”)
3. Taking on Responsibility
3.1 Explicit Self-blame (e.g., “It is my mistake.)
3.2 Lack on Intent (e.g., “I didn’t mean it.”)
3.3 Expression of Self-deficiency (e.g., “I was confused.”)
3.4 Expression of Embarrassment (e.g., “I feel awful about it.”)
3.5 Self-dispraise (e.g., “I’m such a dimwit.”)
3.6 Justify Hearer (e.g., “You’re right to be angry.”)
3.7 Refusal to Acknowledge guilt
3.7.1 Denial of Responsibility (e.g., “It wasn’t my fault.”)
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3.7.2 Blame the Hearer (e.g., “It’s your own fault.”)
3.7.3 Pretend to be Offended (e.g., “I’m the one to be offended.”)
4. Concern for the Hearer (e.g., “Are you all right?)
5. Offer of Repair (e.g., “I’ll pay for the damage.”)
6. Promise of Forbearance (e.g., “It won’t happen again.”)
Source: Olshtain & Cohen (1983) and Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper (1989) cited in Bowe, Martin, & Manns, (2014, p.
83)
3. Method
3.1 Participants
The current study collected data from two groups of Indonesian EFL learners. Each group consisted of 21 first-year
students of English Language Education Major of a university in Indonesia. The participants were selected from a total
of 68 students who were willing to take part in the Oxford Placement Test equivalent and data collection process. They
were selected based on the results of the test and were divided into two groups consisting of 21 students in the A2 and
21 students in the B1 English proficiency levels under the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) of
languages. In order to maintain the participants’ privacy, confidentiality measures were taken.
3.2 Instrument
A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaire was used to collect the data of the study. A DCT is a research tool
built of a set of tasks that contain conversational situations which prompt acts of apology. It was selected due to its
flexibility for socio-cultural variables and ability for large data collection quickly (Golato, 2005). The current study
adapted the DCT used by Thijittang (2010) in her investigation into Thai undergraduate students’ apology in English,
which was modified from Olshtain & Cohen (1983), Cohen, Olshtain, & Rosenstein (1986), and Bergman & Kasper
(1993). The DCT is interesting because it covers sociolinguistic variations in terms of social status, social distance, and
severity of offence and is considered relevant to the objectives of the present study.
The instrument consisted of two parts. Part one was consent and instruction, and part two included scenarios. The
former part contained documents of consent for participation in the study, as well as instructions on how to complete
the questionnaire. The later part comprised fifteen open-ended questions resembling realistic situations to the
participants in which they were asked to identify themselves as an apologizer in the situations and were expected to give
their written reactions to the situations in English.
To maintain the validity, the DCT questionnaire was consulted for expert judgment by two native speakers of English.
The index of Item Objective Congruence (IOC) (Rovinelli & Humbleton, 1976) was also implemented to examine the
questionnaire relevance to the expected data. Then, it was analyzed and revised following the experts’ comments. In
relation to its reliability, a pilot study was conducted involving 15 first-year Indonesian students majoring in English.
This step was aimed to check the clarity of instructions and questions in the questionnaire, effectiveness, and ease and
time of completion. The DCT questionnaire was considered ready for data collection after the pilot study demonstrated
that no further revision was needed.
3.3 Data Collection
The DCT was distributed to the participants together with the English proficiency test. The researcher described the
goals of the study, the risks and benefits of participating and instructions for the questionnaire to the participants. The
researcher also offered the participants the opportunity to inquire about the study. Furthermore, the researcher sought
the participants’ consent to join the study by having them sign the consent form. This document indicated that their
participation was voluntary and that they were free to leave the study at any time. The participants were given 30
minutes to do the English test and 30 minutes to finish the questionnaire, during which they were restricted from
consulting their dictionary, books, their communication devices, and friends.
3.4 Data Coding
After collection, the data were grouped into categories of apology strategy following the framework from Olshtain and
Cohen (1983) and Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989). The framework was chosen as it has been widely used in
previous apology strategies. The framework consists of 6 major strategies, i.e. Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices
(IFIDs), Explanation of Account, Taking on Responsibility, Concern for the Hearer, Offer of Repair, and Promise of
Forbearance. In addition, Taking on Responsibility contains seven subcategories: Explicit Self-blame, Lack of Intent,
Expression of Self-deficiency, Expression of Embarrassment, Self-dispraise, Justify the Hearer, and Refusal to
Acknowledge the Guilt, which is composed of three sub-categories (Denial of Responsibility, Blame the Hearer, and
Pretend to be Offended). In the coding, every occurrence of each strategy either in the same or difference responses was
counted as one.
The coding process was carried out by the researcher, a research assistant, and a native speaker of English. In order to
maintain coding reliability, the researchers were required to work independently while following the same coding
guidelines. In case of disagreement, the researcher and the reviewed guidelines together and discussed the discrepancies
until they reached a complete consensus on the data coding.
3.5 Data Analysis
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After the coding, the occurrence of each strategy was counted and the number was keyed in into the SPSS computer
program. Then, an independent sample t-test was run to find significant differences in the use of apology strategies
between the A2 participants and the B1 participants. After that, the results of the two groups’ apology were compared,
contrasted, and described so as to answer the research questions.
4. Results and Discussions
This section contains the analysis and discussions of the coding results of data elicited from the discourse completion
task (DCT) questionnaire. The results are divided into two parts according to the research questions: the strategies used
by the A2 students and the B1 students, and the significant differences between apology strategies used by the A2
students and the B1 students. The results in Table 1 are responses to the two research questions as described below.
Table 1. The comparison of the apology strategies used by the Indonesian EFL students of A2 level
and those of B1 level
A2 B1 P-Value
No Apology Strategies Students Students T (Sig.)
(F, %) (F, %) 2-tailed
1 Illocutionary Force Indicating 317 (48.40) 360 (46.04) -2.092 0.043*
Devices (IFIDs)
2 Explanation of Account 94 (14.35) 113 (14.45) -1.291 0.204
3 Explicit Self-blame 74 (11.30) 53 (6.78) 1.255 0.217
4 Offer of Repair 59 (9.01) 98 (12.53) -3.048 0.004*
5 Expression of Self-deficiency 52 (7.94) 52 (6.65) 0.000 1.000
6 Promise of Forbearance 24 (3.66) 30 (3.84) -0.830 0.412
7 Concern for the Hearer 18 (2.75) 41 (5.24) -2.517 0.016*
8 Lack of Intent 16 (2.44) 28 (3.58) -1.376 0.177
9 Justify the Hearer 1 (0.15) 1 (0.13) 0.000 1.000
10 Expression of Embarrassment 0 2 (0.26) -1.451 0.162
11 Self-dispraise 0 2 (0.26) -1.451 0.162
12 Denial of responsibility 0 1 (0.13) -1.000 0.329
13 Blame the hearer 0 1 (0.13) -1.000 0.329
14 Pretend to be offended 0 0 0 0
Total and significant value of all 655 (100) 782 (100) 0.791
strategies
4.1 Research Question 1: What are the apology strategies used by the English major students of A2 level and B1 level
of English proficiency?
In relation to the first research question, Table 1 above shows that the A2 and B1 students produced different frequency
counts of both individual and total strategy use, and employed different number of strategies. As presented in the table,
the A2 students made use of the apology strategies for a total of 655 times while the B1 students made a higher
frequency of use of the strategies for 782 times. The B1 students also had higher frequencies of strategy use than the A2
students at nearly all individual strategies, except the Explicit Self-Blame, which was employed for 74 times by the A2
students and 53 times by the B1 students. Moreover, the B1 students adopted more apology strategies than did the A2
students. The former group of students employed almost all of the fourteen strategies available in the framework but the
Pretend to be Offended strategy, which was not used at all by either group. Meanwhile, the latter adopted only nine
strategies which include: Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices (IFIDs), Explanation of Account, Explicit Self-Blame,
Offer of Repair, Expression of Self-Deficiency, Promise of Forbearance, Concern for the Hearer, Lack of Intent, and
Justify the Hearer.
The aforementioned differences seem to suggest that the students’ ability to perform the speech act of apology in
English is parallel to their English proficiency. This finding is consistent with Qorina (2012). Qorina, who investigated
the apology strategies used by Indonesian EFL students at different semesters (study period) at Pekalongan University,
contended that those of higher semester had a higher tendency to produce more elaborate apologies than those of lower
semester. Although there were variations by situations, her study revealed that, in general, students in higher semesters
of study tended to use more strategies as compared to those of lower semesters. Furthermore, this phenomenon is
echoed by Istifci (2009), who found that advanced learners made more complex strategy combinations than learners at
lower stages. Istifci (2009) claimed that students’ apology realizations and selections expanded as they grew more
IJALEL 6(6):214-222, 2017 219
proficient in English. Similar to what was described earlier, the B1 students in this study tended to make more use of
apology strategies and have a higher frequency of use of the strategies than the A2 students.
Regardless of the differences in the frequency and number of the strategy use, both subject groups were inclined to opt
for the same strategy preferences in apology. Table 1 shows that both the A2 and B1 students preferred IFIDs in most of
their apologies, followed by Explanation of Account as their most preferred apology strategy at the second place. The
first strategy uses account for 48.40% and 46.04% while the second form 14.35% and 14.45% of the total strategy use
of both groups, respectively. This finding comes as no surprise as it had been pointed out by researchers in previous
studies investigating Indonesians’ apology in either Bahasa Indonesia or English. Wouk (2006), Adrefiza (2010), and
Qorina (2012) reached similar conclusions in their research. Regarding the use of IFIDs, Adrefiza (2010), comparing
Indonesians’ and Australian English’s apology, found that Indonesians made use of apology terms extensively,
especially Request for Forgiveness. Similarly, Qorina (2012) in her study with Indonesian EFL students revealed that
they opted for IFIDs and Explanation of Accounts most frequently in any situation. Furthermore, a similar account was
reported by Wouk (2006). Her investigation into the apology practice of Indonesians in their native language setting in
Lombok found that Indonesians most regularly used overt apology strategies, or IFIDs, in the form of Requests for
Forgiveness. She also argued that Indonesians were inclined to provide explanations, especially specific explanations,
while attempting to reduce their degree of culpability and the level of personal responsibility. In addition, the finding is
congruent with reports of other apology studies carried out outside Indonesian context that say that IFIDs and
Explanation of account are the most frequently-used apology strategies (Olshtain & Cohen (1983), Istifci (2009),
Alfattah (2010) and Farashaiyan & Amirkhiz (2011) and thus seems to suggest their prominence as universal apology
strategy preference, rather than culture-specific one.
4.2 Research Question 2: Are there any significant differences in the apology strategy use between the A2 students and
the B1 students?
As shown in Table 1, the two subject groups made use of apology strategies differently in terms of both number and
frequency. The B1 students employed more apology strategies and had a more frequent use of nearly all the strategies
than the A2 students. However, these variations in the use of apology strategies between the two subject groups were
not supported by the statistical measure applied. The independent sample t-test resulted in a P-value of 0.791 at level
0.05, which indicates that in general there were no significant differences between the A2 students and the B1 students
in the use of apology strategies. Although there were three strategies regarded to be significantly different between the
two subject groups with P-values less than 0.05, which include IFIDs (0.043), Offer of Repair (0.004), and Concern for
the Hearer (0.016), their number was insufficient to constitute a degree of significance in the overall strategy use of the
two subject groups. Therefore, the finding showed that the relationship between English proficiency level and overall
apology strategy use was minor and the level of English proficiency of the subjects in the current study did not carry
considerable influences on their use of apology strategies.
Previous studies have split in their findings into two opposing claims. Rastegar and Yasami (2014) investigating two
groups of Iranian EFL learners of different proficiency levels found that there were significant differences in the use of
apology strategies between learners of higher and those of lower proficiency level. Their finding showed that the higher
proficiency group was inclined to use more types of apology strategies and produce more complex apologies than the
lower group. Istifci (2009), collecting data from Turkish EFL learners, and Qorina (2012), involving Indonesian EFL
learners, likewise, contended that higher proficiency learners tended to employ a wider range of apology strategies and
make more complex apology patterns. These studies suggest the existence of noticeable effects of proficiency level on
the use of apology strategies. On the other hand, a counter argument was offered by other researchers such as Khorshidi,
Mobini and Nasiri (2016) who reported the absence of significant differences in request and apology speech act
production among English teaching applicants of two different proficiency levels. Similarly, Mohebali and Salehi
(2016), studying the production of request and apology among Iranian EFL university students, found a negative
correlation between language proficiency and knowledge of cross-cultural speech act. In addition, regarding pragmatic
performance in general, Ashoorpour and Azari (2014) and Tabatabaei and Farnia (2015) claimed that there was no
correlation between language proficiency and pragmatic performance. Meanwhile, the current study also found no
significant differences in the use of apology strategies between participants of higher proficiency level and those of
lower proficiency level and thus seems to support the second claim that there is no relationship between proficiency
level and apology strategy use in particular, or pragmatic competence in general.
Regardless of their insignificant values, the three strategies mentioned above indicate that differences between the A2
students’ and the B1 students’ strategy use do exist. Therefore, it seems to be worthwhile to investigate how the three
strategies were employed by the two groups of subjects. The first strategy to discuss is the Illocutionary Force
Indicating Devices (IFIDs) strategy, which was adopted for 317 times by the A2 students and 360 times by the B1
students, making it the most frequently used strategy in either group’ apology. Similar to what Holmes (1990), Istifci
(2009), Qorina (2012), and Parsa & Mohd Jan (2015) found, the strategy was commonly realized through the use of
expressions such as ‘sorry’, ‘apologize’, ‘forgive me’, and ‘excuse me’. As the P-value indicates (0.043<0.05), the B1
students made use of the strategy significantly more frequently than the A2 students. This is in line with Istifci’s (2009)
finding in her study on the apology strategies by Turkish EFL learners of different English proficiency levels that the
advanced learners made use of IFIDs more than the less advanced.
Another strategy with significant difference is Offer of Repair. The strategy was adopted for 59 times by the A2
students and 98 times by the B1 students with a P-value of 0.004 (p<0.01). In addition to the different frequency of use,
IJALEL 6(6):214-222, 2017 220
a thorough investigation into the two subject groups’ use of apology strategies revealed that the B1 students seemed to
have a wider range of situations in which they used the strategy. Olshtain and Cohen (1983) reported that Offer of
Repair is commonly used in situations involving belongings, material damages, and physical injuries that threaten the
recipient’s ‘face’ which implies the need of a compensation from the apologizer in order to decrease his/her remorse
and ‘regain face’. In the current study, the A2 students adopted the strategy mostly in situation 7 (spilled tea on a senior
colleague’s carpet) and 8 (damaged a friend’s camera), involving belongings and material damage. Meanwhile, the B1
students also frequently employed the strategy in other situations with various sizes of offence, higher social status and
wider social distance, indicating their more developed knowledge on social factors influencing the performance of
speech acts, especially apology.
The other significantly different strategy is Concern for the Hearer, which was used for 18 times by the A2 students and
41 times by the B1 students, with a P-value of 0.016 (p<0.01). It is commonly used to show a feeling of concern and
worry about the recipient. Similar to the previous strategy, the Concern for the Hearer strategy was also employed
differently by the A2 students and the B1 students with the latter having a wider area of use. In the A2 students’
apology, the strategy commonly occurred in situation 10 (stepping a waiter’s foot), 13 (bumping into a professor), and
14 (stepping on one student’s foot), which involve physical injuries. On the other hand, the B1 students tended to use it
in wider social contexts, including, for example, when the apologizer was late for an occasion such as in situation 5 (not
visiting a junior colleague at the hospital), 11 (missing the bus and was late to see a classmate), and 15 (being late for
appointment as a manager). These variations seem to indicate the B1 students’ better awareness of social contexts
where the act of apologizing may need to take place and what strategy should prevail.
In addition to the points previously discussed, the current study also yielded three other interesting findings worth
explication, which are likely to offer some cultural insights into Indonesians’ apology practice. Firstly, it was found that
B1 students used honorific terms in their apology in situations where the occurrence of which was commonly not
expected by native English speakers. For instance, in Situation 3 where the apologizer is the head of a department in a
school and s/he has to apologize to a junior teacher for not informing about a meeting, nine B1 students employed
‘Sorry’ followed by honorific terms such as ‘I’m sorry, Sir’ and ‘I am sorry, Ma’am’. The use of such terms in this
context seems to violate the sociolinguistic constraints as these honorific terms are very formal in English and are
commonly used in hierarchical organizations as a sign of respect. Furthermore, they are normally used to speak politely
to a man or woman with social distance (Ma’am & Sir, Merriam-Webster, 2016). Therefore, this appears to show B1
students’ lack of knowledge and understanding of the situational context and is surprising for it was found in B1
students’ data, instead of the A2s. Meanwhile, an alternative approach with more understanding of Indonesian culture
suggests that this phenomenon tends to be an example of transfer of socio-pragmatic convention from Bahasa Indonesia
committed by the students. While the use of honorific terms in the described situation is conventionally unacceptable in
English, such a practice is relatively common among Indonesians communicating in Bahasa Indonesia or other
Indonesian local languages. The word ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’ can be literally translated into Indonesian words ‘Pak and ‘Bu’
respectively. While it is a common practice in English cultures, calling somebody directly by name, especially in adult
discourse regardless of hierarchical order, is often, if not always, considered impolite, or even offensive and arrogant.
Therefore, it is just part of daily discourse that senior teachers call their junior by using ‘Pak’ or ‘Bu’ in Indonesia.
Furthermore, Adrefiza (2010) maintained that the use of addressing terms is also very common among distant speakers
in Indonesia.
Secondly, an instance was found where one B1 student used the IFIDs strategy combined with an expression ‘Oh my
Allah’. This came as a pragmatic transfer influenced by religious beliefs common in Bahasa Indonesia especially among
Muslims, which can be translated into a more familiar English expression ‘Oh my God’. A similar account was also
reported by Qorina (2012) in her study that some Indonesians used a religious-specific expression ‘Astaghfirullohal
‘adzim’, which can literally be translated into ‘God, forgive me’ to seek forgiveness from God, in apologizing in
English. This finding supports a previous claim that sociocultural factors, especially religious beliefs, carry some degree
of influence on the linguistic and pragmatic practices of a society. This indicated that members of that society are likely
to refer to God (Al-Falasi, 2007; Cedar & Setiadi, 2016). Lastly, there is a new strategy called ‘Thanking’, which was
not available in the frameworks and was used in the analysis. The A2 students and the B1 students used the strategy for
3 times respectively. It occurred in responses to Situation 3 and Situation 15 where the apologizer had a higher social
status and power than the recipient. It mainly translates into meanings such as ‘Thank you for reminding me’ and
‘Thank you for waiting for me’. Nonetheless, this strategy seems to be uncommon in other cultures as supportive
literature, to the best of the researcher’s knowledge, can hardly be found.
5. Conclusion
In sum, the study demonstrated that English proficiency levels did not significantly influence the performance of speech
act, especially apology. The statistical measure applied in the study showed that the A2 students and the B1 students did
not use significantly different apology strategies in general. Nonetheless, the A2 students’ and the B1 students’ strategy
use differed to some extent in terms of the frequency and number of strategies used, indicating the B1 students’
superiority over the A2s. Furthermore, the study also revealed some pragmatic transfers from Indonesian pragmatic
convention in the form of the use of honorific terms and religion-associated expressions and a unique apology strategy
used by Indonesian EFL learners, Thanking.
In summary, the study revealed that participants still fall short of pragmatic competence of the English language. It can
be seen from the fact that cases of pragmatic transfer took place in the participants’ apology performance. In addition, it
IJALEL 6(6):214-222, 2017 221
also demonstrated that proficiency level does not warrant learners’ pragmatic competence. The study seems to remind
of the importance of pragmatic competence in addition to linguistic competence. Therefore, it is suggested that the
enhancement of learners’ pragmatic competence should not be relied merely upon the teaching of linguistic competence
since, as the study showed, there is no positive correlation between the two. Moreover, there seems to be a need of more
explicit teaching of pragmatic competence (e.g. discussion of the socio-cultural contexts after watching a piece of
natural language use).
Acknowledgment
The author would like to express deep appreciation to Naresuan University, who financially sponsored this research
conduction, and the dedicated researcher assistants, Asep Setiadi and Pornthep Kotchamat.
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Repetition and Reactance in Graham’s "Underneath" Poems

Roghayeh Farsi (Corresponding author)
University of Neyshabur, Neyshabur, Iran
E-mail: rofarsi@yahoo.com

Abstract
The present paper gives a detailed analysis and interpretation of 16 poems in Jorie Graham's collection, Swarm (2000),
which bear "UNDERNEATH" as their main titles. The poems are marked with different types of repetition such as
graphological repetition, word, phrase, and sentential repetition, semantic repetition, and syntactic repetition. The study
draws on Lakoff and Johnson's theories on metaphor and Brehm and Brehm’s reactance theory. It is argued
"underneath" is a conceptual (orientational) metaphor which signifies a state of being limited, lack of control and
freedom, and loss of power. The paper investigates the speaker's reactant behavior in "Underneath" poems, seeking a
way to restore her lost freedom. Reactance behaviors can be skepticism, inertia, aggression, and resistance. It is
concluded despite her thematic inertia, representing her submission to the oppressed state, her stylistic reactance
reflected in repetitions, innovations, and disruptive diction stands for her attempts to regain her lost control.
Keywords: Graham, repetition, reactance, "UNDERNEATH", poetry
1. Introduction
Freedom and limitation (loss of freedom) have always been main issues of concern among philosophers, poets,
psychologists, politicians, sociologists, etc. Brehm and Brehm (1981) define freedom as the individual's control over a
potential outcome (p. 3). They view freedom as an "expectancy" which "can be held with more or less certainty" (1981,
p. 5). In literature, freedom and its loss can be generally investigated on two levels of theme and style. Either the writer
cherishes or invents a state of freedom or suffers its loss. In both cases, the literary text becomes a space wherein the
psycho-linguistic behavior of the writer can be investigated.
This study picks up the notion of freedom to probe into the realm of poetry. As a case study, the paper chooses 16
poems from Swarm (2000) by Jorie Graham, the American Pulitzer Prize winner of poetry. All of these poems bear
"Underneath" as their main titles; from now on, they are referred to as "Underneath" poems. All the 16 poems are
distinguished from one another either by a name or a number put in parentheses. The title "Underneath" has metaphoric
significance; it conceptualizes spatial position as being down or covered/hidden and thus stands in opposition to being
up or shown/revealed. By way of convention, down has negative connotations. Envisaged through the binary freedom-
slavery, "underneath" is linked to slavery which negates the existence of or access to freedom. The fact that this
conceptual metaphor stands as the title of 16 poems scattered in Graham's collection itself gives a good reason to probe
the significance of the poems. Besides, in the restricted scope of a poem, the repetition of a word may signify emphasis
or hesitation. Stylistically, repeating a word may even be the writer's technical strategy to challenge, undo, or
deconstruct the ideological load of the word.
This study approaches all these possibilities through reactance theory, a psychological lens provided by Brehm and
Brhem (1966 & 1981). Having exerted a great influence on health behavior research, reactance theory has gradually
found its way in other disciplines like education (Dehnad & Farsi, 2016). However, no scholar has to date approached
literature from this lens. Like all other approaches to literary works, reactance theory can be applied both textually (on
the level of characters) or extra-textually (on the level of author and reader). For its concision and verbal economy,
poetry, in comparison, yields much less space and clues for such an analysis. Despite all this, the present paper takes up
this task to investigate the poet’s psycho-linguistic reaction with respect to her conditions.
2. Literature review
Research has displayed the significance and ubiquity of repetition "as a meaning-making strategy" (Tannen, 2007, p.
17). Hymes (1981), Becker (1984), and Bolinger (1961) all accord repetition a primary role not only in creating a
particular discourse but the discourse itself. Wang (2005) speaks of the pervasiveness of repetition “in all types of
everyday language” as well as in literary discourse (p. 532).
Tannen takes repetition as one of the strategies that both literary and non-literary discourses draw upon to create
"interpersonal involvement" (2007, p. 25). She focuses on repetition especially in conversational discourse (2007, p.
25). She distinguishes strategies that work primarily, but not exclusively, on sound from those on meaning and includes
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repetition in the first category (2007, p. 32). By "strategy", she intends simply to "convey a systematic way of using
language" (2007, p. 30).
The first function of repetition is to tie cohesively the different parts of a text together and make it coherent. Tannen
accentuates the contribution of "familiar strategies" like repetition to coherence and involvement and contends meaning
is elaborated through the play of familiar patterns, "the eternal tension between fixity and novelty . . . constitutes
creativity" (2007, p. 29). Similarly, Johnstone (1987) believes repetition is a way of creating categories and of giving
meaning to new forms in terms of old (in Tannen, 2007, p. 57). Gregory Bateson (1972) posits repetition sends a
"metamessage of rapport" between the communicators (in Tannen, 2007, p. 29). Following Dewey, Becker (1982)
develops a notion of an aesthetic response which he defines as an emergent sense of coherence. In his observation, what
makes an aesthetic response possible is the coherence of the text (1979, p. 241). Becker further on refers to the
emotional response that experiencing coherence makes possible (1984).
Repetition has been the core of attention for many literary scholars. It usually appears in the form of recurrent patterns
of sound, words, phrases, or sentences. Finnegan (1977) states, "The most marked feature of poetry is surely repetition"
(p. 90). Many critics celebrate the economy of words in poetry and believe that poetry is maximally effective when it
conveys the most meaning in the fewest words. Referring to this as a function of repetition in "Participation in
sensemaking", Tannen suggests "this makes discourse effective because the more work readers or hearers do to supply
meaning, the deeper their understanding and the greater their sense of involvement with both text and author" (2007, p.
37). Tannen enumerates the main functions of repetition in discourse as production, comprehension, connection, and
interaction (2007, p. 58), all of which contribute to the establishment of coherence and interpersonal involvement. The
present study takes titular repetition in Graham’s "Underneath" poems as a linguistic reactance aimed at restoring some
loss. Therefore, the scope of study on repetition is narrowed down to connection and interaction.
2.1 Connection
Repetition shows how new utterances are linked to earlier ones (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). More subtly, repetition
"evidences a speaker’s attitude, showing how it contributes to the meaning of the discourse" (Tannen, 2007, p. 60). For
Labov (1972), repetition is evaluative in the sense that it contributes to the point. In Halliday’s terms of theme and
rheme, repetition is a way of contributing to the rheme or comment (1967). The paradoxical function of repetition is its
"foregrounding" – Jakobson’s term – both similarities and differences, "By focusing on parallelisms and similarities in
pairs of lines, one is led to pay more attention to every similarity and every difference" (Jakobson & Pomorska, 1983, p.
103)
2.2 Interaction
Repetition is an effective strategy for achieving interaction between participants with each other as well as with the
discourse. Referring to this point, Tannen enumerates some interactive functions of repetition such as "getting or
keeping the floor, showing listenership, providing back-channel response, stalling, gearing up to answer or speak . . .
persuasion . . . linking one speaker’s ideas to another’s . . . " (2007, p. 61). As all these instances reveal, repetition is
ideology-laden since it takes roots in the author/speaker’s perspective.
2.3 "Underneath" as metaphor
As the site of tension, or site of power struggle between participants, ideas, and ratifications, repetition is opened up to
both linguistic (conceptual) and psychological discourses. In Graham’s "Underneath" poems, repetition appears as a
conceptual metaphor since all the 16 poems bear "Underneath" as their shared title. "Underneath" has a cognitive
function; it belongs to orientational metaphors (Kovecses, 2010). In Kovecses’ observation, the cognitive job of
orientational metaphors is to make coherent a set of target concepts in human conceptual system. This kind of
metaphors is called "orientational" because they are based on basic human spatial orientations such as up-down, center-
periphery, back-forth, etc. (2010, p. 40). These orientations are far from being innocent and neutral for they are
evaluation-based and defined by cultural context. Kovecses lists the concepts that are characterized by an "upward"
orientation and those that stand in their opposite position and are featured by a "downward" orientation (2010, p. 40):
More is up; less is down.
Healthy is up; sick is down.
Control is up; lack of control is down.
Happy is up; sad is down.
Virtue is up; lack of virtue is down.
Rational is up; nonrational/emotional is down.
Lakoff and Johnson add (2003, pp. 16-17 & 25):
High status is up; low status is down.
Good is up; bad is down.
Active is up; passive is down. (p. 25)
Unknown is up; known is down. (p.138)
For Knowles and Moon, power is up and powerlessness is down (2006, p.33).
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According to this list, "Underneath" poems signify negative evaluation such as lack of control, virtue, and rationality,
being less, sick, sad.
2.4 Reactance theory
The notion of control and/or freedom metaphorized in Graham's poems serves as the nodal point that opens up the
discourse of reactance theory. Reactance theory emerges out of studying people’s behavioral reactions to changes that
restrict their control and eliminate their freedoms. Brehm and Brehm (1981) refer to freedom and control as "popular
concepts in the behavioral sciences" and use the two terms interchangeably. They define "control" as the individual’s
power to maneuver over each potential outcome (p.3). This comprises the domain of their behavioral and motivational
researches from which their reactance theory has come.
Reactance theory concerns with "motivational consequences that can be expected to occur whenever freedoms are
threatened or lost" (Brehm & Brehm, 1981, pp. 3-4). In general, "the theory holds that a threat to or loss of a freedom
motivates the individual to restore that freedom. Thus, the direct manifestation of reactance is behavior directed toward
restoring the freedom in question" (Brehm & Brehm, 1981, p. 4). Reactance is aroused maximally when a freedom is
eliminated altogether or when the individual loses total control (Brehm & Brehm, 1981, p. 4). When the individual gets
absolutely convinced that there is no way to restore the lost freedom, s/he "gives up" the freedom to attain a particular
outcome; in this state, the individual does not experience reactance and instead reaches the state of "learned
helplessness" (Wortman & Brehm, 1975).
More recent studies on reactance evince an increased interest in giving psychological reactance a personological
orientation (Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Dowd, Milne, & Wise, 1991; Jahn & Lichstein, 1980). The experiments carried out
by Dowd, Wallbrown, Sanders, and Yesenosky (1994) suggest more than a mere situation-specific construct,
psychological reactance is charactological as well as situational in nature (1994, p. 602). Their study shows that reactant
individuals are
less concerned with making a good impression on others, are less likely to follow social norms and
rules and maybe somewhat careless about fulfilling duties and obligations, are less likely to be
tolerant of other’s beliefs and values . . . more inclined to express strong feelings and emotions, and .
. . concerned about problems and the future. (1994, p. 609).
Similarly, Dowd and Wallbrown (1993) have found out reactant people tend to be aggressive, dominant, defensive,
autonomous, and nonaffiliative. The paper investigates if such features can be detected in Graham’s speaker.
As psychologists have searched, reactant individuals display different behaviors when faced with threats to their
freedoms. Matt Fox (2011) refers to inertia (a state of unresponsiveness to change), skepticism (a state of doubt),
resistance (a state of non-acceptance of change), and aggression (a violent reaction against change). Simon Moss (2016)
states that physical features of an environment can also provoke reactance; in this regard, he refers to Levav and Zhu’s
study (2009) that shows confined space encourages individuals to engage in uncommon acts to seek independence
(2016, par. 13). Similar studies (Meyers-Levy & Zhu, 2007) show that in a constrained physical space, individuals feel
encumbered; as a consequence, "they seek independence, manifested as variety" (in Moss 2016, par. 12). The paper
shows how variety is reflected in Graham’s "Underneath" poems.
2.5 "Underneath" poems
"Underneath" poems are scattered through Swarm (2000). Although some of the poems are numbered parenthetically,
their arrangement follows no specific order. The titles are all capitalized and appear in the collection in this way:
(Ellipses show there appear some other poem(s) between the two concerned poems.)
"UNDERNEATH (9)" . . . "UNDERNEATH (UPLAND)" . . . "UNDERNEATH (SIBYLLINE)" . . . "UNDERNEATH
(ALWAYS)" . . . "UNDERNEATH (CALYPSO)" . . . "UNDERNEATH (7)" . . . "UNDERNEATH (1)",
"UNDERNEATH (2)", "UNDERNEATH (3)", "UNDERNEATH (8)" . . . "UNDERNEATH (LIBATION)",
"UNDERNEATH (EURYDICE)", "UNDERNEATH (WITH CHORUS)" . . . "UNDERNEATH (11)" . . .
"UNDERNEATH (SPEZZATO)" . . . "UNDERNEATH (13)"
Baym (2003) contends the exploration of new forms and responses has remained a significant element in the work of
poets like Graham (p. 2618). She attributes the importance of Graham's poetry to her "ability to shape poetic forms in
which disjunctive acts of thinking occur, whether the poem addresses questions of metaphysics, epistemology, or
expression" (2003, p. 2619).
3. Methodology and analysis
The adopted methodology is analytic and interpretive. It is a hybrid approach which mixes Lakoff and Johnson's theory
of conceptual metaphor with psychological theory of reactance behavior. The recurrence of the orientational metaphor
of "Underneath" leads the study to investigate the significance and contribution of repetition in these poems. The
present paper takes titular repetition of "Underneath" as Graham’s linguistic reactance against loss of freedom. As
mentioned above, reactance behavior against confined physical space is variety. Here, the main focus is on the ways
diversity is enacted in "Underneath" poems both stylistically and thematically. It also looks for symptoms of inertia,
skepticism, resistance, and aggression in repetitions that occur all through the poems.
The study starts with a focus on repeated words, phrases, syntactic structures, themes, and situations in all the poems. It
locates sites of tension in each poem, sees how the repeated item expands semantically in each reiteration, what it adds
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to the poem, and how non-repeated items influence the repeated ones. Then all these are approached from a
psychological angle to see which reactance behavior they evince and what characterological dimension they reveal
about the speaker. In addition, the study tries to detect interlinks between all the 16 poems together, reaching a sort of
pattern among them.
Table 1 summarizes the four main types of repetitions that can be detected in "Underneath" poems.
Table 1. Types of repetition and their instances in "Underneath" poems

Type of repetition Instances of repetition
Graphological Spaces, italicization, capitalization, parentheses
Word, phrase, and sentential Underneath, explain, gods, veil, surface, etc.
Syntactic Imperatives, questions, single-word sentences,
causatives, permissive structures
Semantic repetition Catalogue of words, single words, definitional words
3.1 Graphological repetition

In all the 16 poems, there occur some graphological repetitions. These include spaces, italicized words, capitalized
words, and parentheses. Anyone of these adds some significance to the poems which will be discussed respectively.
3.1.1 Spaces
In English, words are separated from one another and thus given autonomy by a space. Simultaneously, the space
interlinks words together like a chain. Therefore, the space between words gives the words a logical sense and order.
All through Graham's poems, there are lines in which spaces between words violate the standard form and thus create a
gap between words. These spaces function as a challenge to the reader. The first impression of such spaces is that they
draw the reader’s attention to themselves. Thus technically, they have a foregrounding effect (Jakobson). Thematically
also, they function as silences that disrupt the words. Or, they bring interruptions in the normal course of words.
Psychologically, the interruption may signify emphasis, hesitation, skepticism, a sudden turn or twist. They may also
stand for the speaker’s inertia; she remains unresponsive to the environment and thus pauses between words, letting her
mind run wildly among various alternatives.
Sometimes, the space may display emphasis:
Believe me I speak now for the sand (2000, p. 12).
The emphasis conveyed by the space is backed up by the verb "Believe" and the imperative tone of the sentence which
has the least hesitation and is authoritative and straightforward. The sentence that follows the space is complete both
syntactically and semantically.
The space may signify hesitation:
Explain two are
Explain not one (2000, p. 10)
The sense of hesitation is manifest in the space which lies between two incomplete parts of a sentence. The verb
"Explain" has a state of syntactic suspension as the doer or agent of the verb is not clear and cannot be concluded either.
Semantically also, it calls for clarification in the form of explanation. Moreover, the words that appear after the space
are not grammatically complete; it seems as if the speaker herself is not clear-minded what she is talking about. The
quantifiers "two" and "one" are not adequately modified. Besides, there appear no punctuation marks after them to
clarify what type of structure they have: they can be part of rhetorical questions or they may belong to simple
statements. If an exclamation mark is put there, they can be interpreted in a different way. Such indeterminacies render
the reader also hesitant about what the speaker has been trying to say.
Spaces may represent the speaker's skeptical outlook:
Gods defeated or perhaps in fact – (p. 23)
In this line, the space adds to the speaker’s skepticism, vacillating between the finality of "in fact" and the
indeterminacy of "perhaps". The space between the two reflects the gap between the two cognitive states: determinacy
and indeterminacy.
Spaces may function as a chance to give the speaker's speech/line of thought a turn:
two rips you keep repairing.
How much left out?
Who tore what's left bitter the I
More bitter yet the sewing back together. (2000, p. 31)
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Read in the light of the preceding and proceeding lines, the spaced line bears almost no logical relation to either one.
"Who tore" may relate to "two rips" which comes in the first quoted line; "what's left" shares the word "left" with the
previous line but it does not secure semantic continuity. The phrase, "bitter the I" bears no logical relation with the
succeeding line, although the word "bitter" recurs there. Therefore, the spaced line comprises three separate chunks of
speech that strike the speaker's mind just out of the blue. Each one of them represents a turn or twist in the speaker’s
mind.
The last function of spaces is reflecting the speaker's unresponsiveness to the environmental stimuli:
Deposit in me my busyness, flesh.
Deposit thirst in me. (2000, p. 68)
In these two succeeding lines, the speaker is receptive of "busyness", "flesh", and "thirst" and the spaces intervening
display her unresponsiveness or psychological inertia to the depositing forces on her.
The other instances of graphological repetition are capitalized and italicized words. Like spaces, capitalization and
italicization attract the reader's attention to themselves and thus have a foregrounding role. Cases of capitalization occur
in titles and subtitles and no (sub)titular word is italicized. Instead, some words are italicized in the texts of the poems.
In a poem like "UNDERNEATH (11)", the italicized sentences like: "Give me the map there" (2000, p.85), "Bloody
wedding!" accord the text of the poem a dialogical tone since they represent the speech of a person other than the
speaker. At times, the italicized statements may be quotations. In the same poem, it seems as if King Lear is the speaker
of the italicized words.
The last form of graphological repetition is parentheses. Like spaces, parentheses are scattered over the 16 selected
poems, in addition to the subtitles that accompany "UNDERNEATH". Therefore, after spaces, parentheses are the most
significant graphological repetition. In a famous letter to Thomas Poole, Coleridge takes the use of parentheses as "the
very drama of thought, which showed the thought growing and ramifying and made of the words on the page a living
process rather than a hortus siccus" (original emphasis; Spiegelman 2005, p. 174). The words put in parentheses play
different roles: they may add, subtract, extend, merely repeat, intensify, or mitigate the force of the included words. For
each case, an example can be referred to here.
3.1.2 Addition
Sometimes the word(s) put in parentheses add(s) to the semantic tension of the whole line:
Up here how will I
(not) hold you. (2000, p.10)
The word "not" intensifies the semantic tension of these lines because it gives the whole sentence a contrastive hue.
"how will I /hold you" shows the speaker's sense of commitment; while the word "not" in parentheses neutralizes that
commitment and marks the stand of the speaker with indeterminacy. The reader also cannot decide if the speaker is
committed or not towards her addressee.
3.1.3 Distraction
The words in parentheses may distract the reader from the main course of thought in the poem. The second part of the
first poem titled "SUMMER" ends in these lines:
And bless. And blame.
(Moonless night)
(Vase in the kitchen) (2000, p.10)
The first quoted line runs between two extreme points of bless and damnation (blame); the second line points to the
time setting; and the third line directs the reader’s attention towards a vase in the kitchen, bearing no semantic or logical
compatibility with either bless or blame.
3.1.4 Repetition
Sometimes the words in parentheses are mere repetition of some proceeding or preceding words. This repetition may
weaken or accentuate the force of the repeated words. The impact depends on the text of the poem.
At the front end, the meanwhile: God's laughter.
Are you still waiting for the true story? (God's laughter)
The difference between what is and what could be? (God's laughter) (2000, p.12)
While in the first line, "God's laughter" has a definitional role, coming after colons, in the second and third lines, it
appears parenthetically and gives the lines a dramatic base. God's laughter is heard while the two questions are being
asked. Thus "God's laughter" recedes to the background against which the speaker's voice raises the questions. The
parentheses in this case weaken and at the same time steady the impression of God's laughter in the context of the poem.
Another example is from "UNDERNEATH (UPLAND)":
As if it would ravage of course but it won't
made precisely to hold back (precisely)
while the creatures are felled, (2000, p. 17)
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The repetition of "precisely" in parentheses followed by a long space accentuates the significance of precision, although
it is a temporal precision while in its first occurrence it signifies physical exactness.
3.1.5 Extension
The words in parentheses extend the scope of the poem by adding some other course to the lines:
Explain accident
after gods
is born
(fall)
(I'll catch)
(you) (2000, p. 64)
Here, the brief words in parentheses extend the scope of the poem with allusion to the Original Fall.
3.1.6 Intensification
The words in parentheses intensify the impression or affect of the line or some words in the line:
have you counted your steps
is crying now
(is crying now)
(is crying now)
begin again (2000, p.65)
The parenthetical repetition of "is crying now" intensifies the gloomy atmosphere of the poem.
3.1.7 Specification
The parenthetical words specify the scope of a word or the whole line to some type, class, or mood, or entity. As an
example, one can refer to this line from "UNDERNEATH (EURYDICE)":
as if the words (spoken) were the one thing growing warmer (2000, p.74)
Here, the word "spoken" specifies the type of words that grow warmer and thus implicitly puts them in contrast to
"written" words.
3.2 Word, phrase, and sentential repetition
Sometimes a single word, a phrase, or a sentence is repeated in "Underneath" poems. Such recurrences not only
function as nodal points that interlink the poems together, but also extend their semantic scope. The new context where
the repeated item reappears brings alternations to the semantic dimension of the item. In "UNDERNEATH (9)", the
word "Explain" occurs 10 times in the poem. The first occurrences of "Explain" are in lines 11, 12, and 13:
Explain the six missing seeds.
Explain muzzled.
Explain tongue breaks thin fire in eyes. (2000, p. 8)
The word is separated from the rest by a long space. The space makes a gap/blank as if some word(s) is missing. The
reader is required to fill in the blanks. Each alternative gives the line a thematic twist:
Explain to me the six missing seeds.
Explain where/when to look for the six missing seeds.
Explain how it feels when one finds the six missing seeds.
Explain how to find the six missing seeds.
Explain what happened to the six missing seeds.
As each case shows, the story of the six missing seeds changes with each option. In the following two-word line,
"Explain" is again separated from "muzzled". The gap accentuates the semantic contrast between the two words. While
"Explain" is an act of speaking, "muzzled" signifies "silenced".
In line 13, there are three spaces/gaps between the words, waiting for the reader to be filled in.
Explain how tongue breaks passionate thin fire aroused in eyes.
Explain when tongue breaks unwanted thin fire lit in eyes.
Explain what happens when tongue breaks red thin fire inflamed in eyes.
Moreover, the speaker's insistence on "Explain" can be taken as her psychological skepticism, a state that craves for
explanation and clarification but never seems satisfied. The same strategy can be applied to the other repeated words
followed by a long space. In the same poem, the word "muzzled" reappears in line 61, subtitled as "WINTER":
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Muzzled the deep.
Fermenting the surface. (2000, p. 11)
By this point, the reader has already experienced the tension between "muzzled" and "Explain". Therefore, the
contrastive relation is the first thing that is brought to this line by the reader. When read in the light of the second line
where "the surface" contrasts with "the deep", the same sense of tension is highlighted. In this way, repetition of a word
yokes to the new context its previous connotations; these connotations may be further backed up in the new context or
may even be challenged. This example shows the supportive relation. As a contrastive relation, one can refer to
"explain" which reappears in "UNDRENEATH (2)" and "(3)". In these two poems, the repeated verb is no longer
capitalized; the space between it and the next word is longer, and the whole line lacks any punctuation. Lack of
punctuation renders the line run-on, depriving it of finality. The longer space gives room to more words improvised by
the reader. The non-capitalized form of the verb deprives it of its authoritative role, and gives it a median status instead
of an initial position. The reiteration of this verb brings onstage all the previous connotations attached to it in the first
poem:
explain calm
explain vision
explain property (2000, p.63)
However the blanks here are filled in, the whole lines lack the totalitarian voice the first capitalized occurrence of
"Explain" used to have. The disempowerment of the verb "explain" in "UNDERNEATH (3)" reaches its extreme point
by the theme of submissiveness the whole poem conveys; the poem starts:
explain given to
explain born of
explain preoccupied (2000, p.65)
The past participles that appear after "explain" imply the passivation of the speaker and it can psychologically reflect
the speaker's inertia.
Significantly enough, the last "Underneath" poem starts with:
needed explanation
because of the mystic nature of the theory
and our reliance on collective belief (2000, p.102)
The beginning lines include "explanation" which reminds the reader of "Explain" in the earlier poems and "explain" in
the later ones. These lines read like sort of justification for her call for "explanation". Here, "explanation" appears after
the long space, unlike other cases; it is modified, changed to a noun. Nominalization deprives it of that authoritative role
it used to have and mitigates its force especially that it stands as the direct object for the verb "needed". The alternations
the verb "Explain" goes through from the beginning up to the end shows the semantic extension it acquires in each
reiteration.
Sometimes a phrase is repeated in the poem. IN "UNDERNEATH (ALWAYS)", the phrase "Not in time" occurs 6
times. Being "in time" denotes "Within an indefinite time or at an unspecified future time"; it thus matches with the
subtitle "ALWAYS" that means almost the same. However, the word "Not" negates this denotation and thus challenges
the subtitle. This challenge accords the poem a central tension as the title of the poem is negated by the body of the
poem. This tension reaches its pinnacle in the penultimate line of the poem where the italicized phrase "Once upon a
time" (2000, p.31) appears and thus does away with the eternal notion of "ALWAYS" and instead anchors the poem in
the past.
Some phrases are definitional for they define a specific entity. "UNDERNEATH (7)" starts with such phrases that
define "Mirror". In the first line, the poet uses a space instead of colons and capitalizes the first word: "Mirror Roll
away/the stone" (2000, p.53). In its second repetition, it gets colons: "Mirror: a thing not free"; in its third occurrence,
the first model is used: "Mirror These are not questions" (2000, p.53). Such vacillations between two forms represent
both similarity and diversity. This implies the arbitrariness of either structure and psychologically may hint at the
speaker's state of hesitation. Such a sense of skepticism is explicitly referred to in this stanza: "The repeated vacancy/ of
touch/begging for real work" (2000, p.53).
Sentential repetition happens when a whole sentence is repeated in the poem. Like in other types of repetition, the new
context where the sentence is repeated accentuates, adds, modifies, alters, or challenges the previous significance of the
sentence. In "UNDERNEATH (WITH CHORUS)", the sentence "What shall I use" appears three times in the first ten
lines of the poem. In the first time, it is part of a definitional phrase, coming after colons: "My sacrifice: what shall I
use/ Face dawn and pour out/ What shall I use" (2000, p.77). The poem is subtitled as "WITH CHORUS" and it starts
with the two key words "Citizen" and "Sacrifice" both of which appear on the first line, are spaced, and capitalized;
therefore, the verb "use" here gets the meaning of putting into service. Besides, the chorus has been a component of
Greek dramas; it consisted of fifty old men or senior citizens of the society, and it used to play the role of separating
scenes from one another in addition to supporting, interpreting, and commenting on the characters' speech. Here, the
repeated sentence separates scenes/acts from one another. The first scene/act is that of sacrifice which is separated from
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the position of "Face dawn and pour out", and is itself separated from "What offering sufficient/Say act/Be called/ What
shall I use" (2000, p.77).
As another example of sentential repetition, one can refer to "and that one does not kill" (2000, p.61) that is repeated
twice with no interruption in "UNDERNEATH (1)". This line is preceded by "what's its name?" and followed by "look
it is dead" (2000, p.61). The indefinite pronoun "it" and the deixis "that" have no referents and this adds up to the
ambiguity of the poem. There can be no resolution nor is there any suggestion for these vague points in the poem. The
ambiguity of the lines increases when the speaker gradually shows her being stifled by the referent of "you". First, she
says "your/teeth and lips holding my /whole ear"; then she states, "your hand over my/ mouth". The poem ends up with
"yr hand now/(actually over) my throat" (2000, p.62). The word "yr" can be taken as the abbreviated form of
"your" or of "year" (signifying “time”); it is a pun because both of these are applicable within the context of the poem.
Moreover, such words as "painful", "hit", "drop", "nervousness", "cries", "hushing", "kill", "dead", "drown", and
"hungry" give the dominant atmosphere of the poem a violent base and render it aggressive.
The feature that singles out "UNDERNEATH (7)" is alliteration of most words. In the first line, "Can call me by name"
(2000, p.90), the first two words have cacophony of /k/ sound repeated in the word "keel" in the second line. This poem
also has sentential repetition: "You never touched a truer stone/than this exile" is repeated after two lines in the form of
"I never touched a truer stone/than this your face" (2000, p.91). The change from "You" to "I" marks the poem with
partial symmetry. Such a symmetrical identification signifies a sense of stoniness which is shared by "you" and "I".
Another instance of partial symmetry occurs in "UNDERNEATH (7)" where the two succeeding lines are: "Reach your
fingers here./Reach your hand here." (2000, p.54). This poem starts with definitional phrases of mirror. In such a
context, partial symmetry destabilizes the complete symmetry a mirror is expected to give of an entity. The
incompatibility between the two types of symmetry renders the poem a site of tension.
3.3 Syntactic repetition
Like word repetition, "Underneath" poems are marked with syntactical repetition. The case of "Explain" mentioned
above is an example of this. Syntactical structures recur either in normal or distorted forms. These include imperatives,
questions, exclamatory phrases, single-word sentences, definitional structures, and statements. The first "Underneath"
poem starts with the obligatory modal "must" that accords the speaker an authoritative role and is compatible with the
repetition of "Explain" all through the poem:
Up, up you go, you must be introduced.
You must learn belonging to (no one) (2000, p.8)
Such a start with its imperative tone makes the reader take all the verbs that are not modified by any subject as
imperative, like:
Learn what the great garden – (up, up you go) – exteriority, exhales: (2000, p.8)
In "UNDERNEATH (8)", two questions have the same syntactic structure, but they differ because of the spaces that
intervene:
What if there is no end?
What if there is no
punishment. (2000, p.67)
The first question is one in the middle of which there occurs a long space. The second question only looks like a
question as it is left unfinished and remains incomplete. Nothing appears after "no"; the reader may ask, "no what?" The
space that comes after that provides no answer; it does not have even a question mark. The only word that appears is
"punishment" which is preceded by a space; that initial space can be filled by a question, a word, or a statement. The
full stop which comes after "punishment" does not encourage the reader to take this word as the missing word of the
question in the previous line.
The other instance is in "UNDERNEATH (8)" where the same syntactical structure occurs:
Make the sore not heal into meaning.
Make the shallow waters not take seaward the mind.
Let them wash it back continually onto the shore.
Let them slap it back down onto the edges of this world. (2000, p.68)
In these lines two syntactical structures recur: causative (the first two lines), and permissive (the second two lines). The
first apparent difference between them is spaces. The causative ones give the reader enough space to intervene, while
the permissive ones impose their uninterrupted structure on the reader. The pronoun "it" in the third quoted line refers
back to "the mind" and thus interlinks the two sets together. Lack of spaces gives the permissive sentences an imposing
hold that is missing in spaced lines. This feature runs in contrast to the permissiveness of the syntactical structure. By
contrast, the causative structure which seems to run non-interruptedly is marked by spaces. Thus syntactic structure runs
in contrast to graphological repetitions. This syntactical tension can be taken as the speaker's syntactic reactance
representing her aggression. This sense of aggression is accentuated further in such verbs as "wash back" and "slap
back".
IJALEL 6(6):223-234, 2017 231
Of all the "Underneath" poems, "UNDERNEATH (LIBATION)" has the most questions. In the fifth line of the poem,
the speaker explicitly states, "Disperse question marks" (2000, p.71). This line foreshadows the 10 questions that
follow. The occurrence of so many questions in a poem stands for the speaker's skepticism, curiosity, or disbelief. In
this poem, they can represent the speaker's doubts about racial identity of her addressee. Each question gives the poem a
new dimension; as an instance, one can refer to the following:
How many syllables is your nation?
How pronounce it?
Who first spoke it?
Is it the third or the other world? (2000, p. 71)
These questions give a politico-racial base to the poem. The fact that these questions do not observe syntactical rules
shows English is alien to the speaker. The last question is: "Who rules the house?" This question leaves no space for the
reader to step in. The question's totalitarian gesture is further backed up by the single-word answer with which the poem
ends: "Persuasion" (2000, p.72). Significantly, this last word is marked by no punctuations; it seems as if "persuasion"
is never ending. The doubtful tone of the poem runs in contrast to religious discourse of the subtitle, "(LIBATION)".
Libation is the drink which is offered to a deity and it thus connotes belief in a god.
3.4 Semantic repetition
Semantic repetition occurs when the same meaning or the nearest meaning is conveyed in the poem. In each recurrence,
some new aspect or dimension is added to the semantic domain of the word; or sometimes, a part of the semantic scope
is omitted, modified, altered, or contradicted in the new context. This is called semantic tension. Semantic tension
happens when words take an ironical tone or when they are challenged by some other word in the poem. Semantic
tensions may be interpreted as linguistic reactance displaying such symptoms as inertia, skepticism, aggression, or
resistance depending upon the text of the poem. Sometimes the subtitle of the poem drags its title into semantic
challenge. Such is the case with "UNDERNEATH (UPLAND)" (2000, p.16) where the contrasts between up and down
gives the repetitive title a semantic tension. In "UNDERNEATH (CALYPSO)", the two words "era" and "period" share
almost the same semantic scope:
Why should the exile return home?
Era? Period? (2000, p.42)
The word "Era" encompasses two or more periods of time; therefore, "period" covers a less scope of time. The long
space between the two words may be interpreted as a quantity-based ranking of the words; what is of significance is that
the previous line also has a space between an "exile" who is far from home and "return home" which is his far-fetched
wish; this space signifies long duration of time and distance between the exile and his home. In both lines, the spaces
accentuate duration and add to the semantic dimension of "Era" and "Period". This lies in line with the first line of the
poem where the speaker states:
Sing to me of time and time again (2000, p.41).
Here, the main theme centers on time and repetition. In the two lines quoted above, time and repetition play an
important role. Another instance of semantic repetition is in "UNDERNEATH (SIBYLLINE)" where the shared
semantic scopes of words cement the seemingly separate lines together:
Burn all the letters.
Look in the ashes with both hands.
Finger in there for any bits intact.
Wrist-deep
in the fine grains, so cold,
feel further round for fragments,
for any last unburnt
piece of
the crashing of mind,
or any promises (so parched) come down through the sentences
to breath,
pushing the few bits back to the tiny fire,
the struck match,
and worrying, and keeping each fragment lit to the very end
by turning it
to every side every last side –
Look you have to lift the match to it again
because this syllable is still intact. (2000, p. 25)
In these lines, words "bit", "fragment", "piece", and "grain" are synonyms and thus interlink the lines together. Words
like "fire", "burn", "unburnt", "match", "struck", "ash", and "lit" belong to the same semantic discourse. Verbs like
"look with both hands", "finger", "wrist-deep", "feel further" share the same semantic domain. A verb like "crashing"
IJALEL 6(6):223-234, 2017 232
matches with "fine grains". The last word with which the poem ends is "intact" which appears once more in the third
quoted line here and runs encounter semantically to all the repeated words abovementioned. The semantic contrast
between the ending word and the previous ones gives the poem a semantic tension. Here the discourses of burning and
crashing are dominant which signify doing violence to mind, language, sentences, and even syllables. In such a context,
the semantic tension displays the speaker's aggressive reactance. This aggression is further backed up by the discourse
of war with which the poem starts (2000, p. 23).
4. Discussion
Among the few critics who have written on Graham's poetry, not necessarily on "Underneath" poems, one can refer to
Nina Baym (2003). In her introductory note on Graham, Baym states, "It is characteristic of Graham's poems to include
the gaps in thought" (p. 2819). The above analysis shows how long spaces that intervene in her lines stand for the gaps
in her thought and bring about such gaps in the reader's thought. Baym also quite briefly speaks of Graham's
"skepticism of any version of reality that claims to be total" and attributes the undermining of her own assertions to this
skepticism (2003, p. 2819). Baym, however, does not show how this skepticism is shown in her poems and what it
actually does both stylistically and thematically. Her short introduction does not give her enough space to focus on the
poet's sense of skepticism from a personological perspective. The above analysis fills in these gaps and addresses these
points in detail. Here, the attempt is to detect sort of pattern among the "Underneath" poems.
Orientational metaphor suggested by "Underneath" marks a state of limitation, lack of control, and powerlessness. The
speaker in Graham's poems shows her linguistic reactance to restore her lost freedoms. One way to detect her strategies
is through repetitive structures that interlink poems across the collection and simultaneously display their differences.
The study detects a pattern, albeit not a straightforward one, from the first poem which starts with "UP, up you go, you
must be introduced" (2000, p.8) to the last poem that offers the addressee to
climb down
presence of world
……………
I am beside myself
you are inside me as history
We exist Meet me (2000, p. 105)
In this pattern, there are nodal points that interlink all poems to the last poem, that is, "UNDERNEATH (13)". These
nodes are words, structures, and phrases of the concluding poem that recur in the previous poems. The motivation for
such a search is already there in the poem as this is what the "Underneath" speaker invites the reader to:
here we are, the forgone conclusion
……………………
do you remember my love my archive
touch me (here)
give birth to a single idea (2000, p. 103)
Among the most repeated words, one can refer to those that imply or explicitly express "explain", "god", "push",
"freedom", "annihilation", "surface", "time", "voice", "word", "touch", "burning", "tongue", and "self". A glance over
the implicit or explicit expressions of these words or their antonyms reveals lack of freedom is implied in "god", "push",
"surface", "annihilation", and "time". Other words like "explain", "tongue", "self", "touch", "word", and "voice" imply
the speaker's reactant outlets to restore her lost freedoms. Those words that are somehow related (either via similarity or
opposition) discoursally together are shown in the following Table.
Table 2. The most frequently repeated key words in all "Underneath" poems
Main entry in "UNDERNEATH (13)" Related words
Word "Explain", "voice", "tongue", "say", "whisper"
Freedom "free" and its opposite "push"
Annihilation "god", "burning", "war"
Time "century", "years", "history"
Touch Body parts
Surface "veil", "cover", "hide"
Self "myself", "my body", "me"
IJALEL 6(6):223-234, 2017 233
Of all the entries, "freedom" and its opposite forms outnumber the others. This feature indicates the speaker's main
concern is freedom since she has been divested of that.
Tracking up the repetition of some words like "god" reveals sort of pattern all through "Underneath" poems. The word
"god" first appears as a capitalized force in "UNDERNEATH (9)", as "Lord" in "UNDERNEATH (UPLAND)", and as
capitalized and pluralized in "UNDERNEATH (SIBYLLINE)". Then, it becomes non-capitalized and modified by
indefinite article "a" in "UNDERNEATH (ALWAYS)". In "UNDERNEATH (2)", it merely becomes "god". It gets
implied in "The tabernacle" in "UNDERNEATH (8)" and in "offer prayers to" in "UNDERNEATH (LIBATION)". It
reappears as "the god" in "UNDERNEATH (WITH CHORUS)" and once again it gets implied in "oracle" in
"UNDERNEATH (11)". Therefore, the further one goes ahead through the poems, the more the concept of god is
exposed to diminishment so that at the end, in "UNDERNEATH (13)", "god" is recognizable only in "god's tiny voices"
(2000, p. 104).
"Underneath" poems target such destructive forces as God, time (history), king, war, language, death, rituals, and the
body as the restrictive agents which deprive Graham's speaker of her freedoms. All through "Underneath" poems the
speaker endeavors to fight back these limitations and restore her lost freedoms. In the first two poems, the main focus is
on God and nature and their indifference toward man's misery. In "UNDERNEATH (UPLAND)", the speaker laments
having the "privilege of /no rights" in the Lord's hall where even the savior has no right to choose (2000, p. 19). War
and language are the main concerns of "UNDERNEATH (SIBYLLINE)", while time is targeted in "UNDERNEATH
(ALWAYS)". In "UNDERNEATH (CALYPSO)", the speaker reveals the plights of mankind all through history,
walking in flames and anguish, "Going broken" (2000, p. 43). Here, the speaker shows resistance as her reactant
behavior, stating "Do not pass through me" (2000, p. 43). "UNDERNEATH (7)" shows the speaker getting aware of
herself; she finds her image in the mirror, "See that it is I, myself" (2000, p. 54). The other destructive force is a history
of oppression which is attended to in "UNDERNEATH (1)". In "UNDERNEATH (1"), "(2)", and "(3)", the speaker
seeks explanation for different entities and concepts and thus craves for re-definition of them all and meanwhile reveals
her skepticism toward the established norms.
"UNDERNEATH (8)" enters the speaker in a new phase of her life; here she repeatedly states, "Deposit in me" and thus
shows her state of inertia, "Refuse/rescue" (2000, p. 69); she finds herself helpless before all the oppressive forces. In
"UNDERNEATH (LIBATION)", she restarts asking many questions as if she is bent on reaching somewhere. In
"UNDERNEATH (EURIDYCE)", the speaker sounds to return to her previous state of inertia, "I like submission to
such untouchable authority" (2000, p. 73) and prefers to resort to silence: "how neatly silence describes the thing"
(2000, p. 76). "UNDERNEATH (WITH CHORUS)" shows her awareness that "Obedience is hard", but still, she seems
involved in justifying her submission: "Do you know why I yield/ When I have heard your reason I will know" (2000,
p. 79). In "UNDERNEATH (11)", she is preoccupied by the tragedy of King Lear, is aware of her inertia, and yet still
insists on her being kept underneath; thus the poem ends thus, "With one law/Cover me" (2000, p. 87).
"UNDERNEATH (SPEZZATO)" shows the speaker in a different phase of her life; she is shown constructing sort of
identity for herself: "Can call me by name" (2000, p. 90); but paradoxically, she remains nameless. Simultaneously
however, she is well aware of her oppression. What differentiates her state here is that she has found a companion,
somebody with whom she shares her miseries: "Both of us hands tied/half-dead from thinking" (2000, p. 92). It is in
"UNDERNEATH (13)" that she decides unification with her companion can help them out of their oppressive state:
I am beside myself
you are inside me as history
We exist Meet me (2000, p. 105)
The poem significantly does not end in any full stop, showing the eternity of her invitation and readiness for restoring
their lost freedoms.
5. Conclusion
The present study starts with the oppressive state metaphorized in the repetitive title of "Underneath" in 16 poems by
Graham. It then enumerates and introduces four main types of repetition. Simultaneously, the study approaches these
repetition-based strategies from a psychological angle and detects the speaker's linguistic reactance with respect to her
oppression. Finally, a sort of pattern emerges from the poems that interconnects all the poems across the volume.
Although Graham at times gives way to inertia and shows to be submissive, her diction, poetic and linguistic
innovations persistently do away with the literary and linguistic norms. This feature renders her poems chaotic and
ambiguous, and concurrently, it epitomizes her incessant linguistic and poetic resistance as her reactance strategy to the
established standards.
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Between Languages and Cultures: Arabic into English

Transliteration in English Travel Literature
Nusaiba Adel Almahameed (Corresponding author)
Department of English Language and Literature, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Ma’an, Jordan
E-mail: n.almahameed@yahoo.co.uk
Renad Mohammad Abbadi

Department of English Language and Literature, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Ma’an, Jordan
E-mail: renad_a@yahoo.com
Atef Adel Almahameed

Department of Arabic Language and Literature, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Ma’an, Jordan
E-mail: atefadel89@yahoo.com

Abstract
This essay aspires to examine the use of transliteration of some words and phrases from Arabic to English in travel
literature books. This has been conducted by exploring the transliterated Arabic words and phrases, and comparing the
different transliterations of the same words and phrases by different writers. It investigates the way that the travel
writers employ in making plural nouns, the use of the definite article (Al) (‫)ﺍﻝ‬, and Al-tashdid (the duplication of a
letter). The conclusion drawn is that travel literature writers resort to transliteration for three reasons; one of the main
reasons is that sometimes there is no one-to-one correspondence; the second main reason suggests that transliteration
avoids the loss of meaning; and the third one stems from the fact that transliteration helps to find transculturation
between cultures. The contributions of this essay would be of concern to scholars, who are interested in Arabic into
English transliteration, specifically in English travel literature. According to the researchers’ knowledge, this essay can
be considered a leading pioneer study in the field that deals with transliteration from Arabic into English in English
travel literature.
Key words: Transliteration, Arabic, English Travel Literature, Culture
1. Introduction
A review of the literature shows that the connection between travel literature and translation has gained currency among
prominent critics and scholars.1 However, scarce literature has been found on the study of Arabic into English
transliteration in English travel literature. Transliteration is also referred to in the translation of religious and literary
texts as a form of transcribing the loan word in the translation (Baker 1992). Along the same vein, George Fragopoulos
(2014) tackles transliteration’s own creative and literary potentialities, which he calls the metaphorical or literary
transliteration. He defines literary transliteration as “the literal act itself but also a more aestheticized, […] poeticized,
version of this process that allows for a multiplicity of cultural, linguistic, and even historical registers to be made
apparent” (140). In his essay, Fragopoulos seeks to show how the poetry and poetics of works of Olga Broumas and
George Economou allow for productive critical excursions into the probabilities that transliteration can bestow some
theories and practices that translation cannot (141).
This essay analyses the use of transliteration of some words and phrases from Arabic to English in five travel literature
books, published by English travel writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The essay is mainly
involved in studying some of the travel literature books that have been abandoned. It examines The Land of Gilead with
Excursions in the Lebanon (1880) by Laurence Oliphant, A. Goodrich-Freer’s In A Syrian Saddle (1905), The Jordan
Valley and Petra (1905) by William Libbey and Franklin E. Hoskins, and Archibald Forder’s Ventures Among the
Arabs (1909) and In Brigands’ Hands and Turkish Prisons 1914-1918 (1920). The substantial reason for choosing these
travel literature books is that all of these books describe regions in Jordan. And as the research is primarily concerned
1See Alison E. Martin and Susan Pickford “Travel Writing and Translation” (2012), Susan Bassnett “Travelling and
Translating” (2008), and Susan Bassnett, “Authenticity, Travel and Translation” (2000).
IJALEL 6(6):235-245, 2017 236
with spelling and pronunciation, it is essential to study the same region and the same dialect in order to easily highlight
the similarities and differences.
According to the researchers’ knowledge, this essay can be considered a leading pioneer study in the field that deals
with transliteration from Arabic into English in English travel literature. It aims to investigate the utilisation of
transliteration of some words and phrases from Arabic to English in travel literature books. This has been conducted
through examining the transliterated Arabic words and phrases, and comparing the different transliterations of the same
words and phrases by different writers. In addition this essay examines the way that the travel writers employ in making
plural nouns, the use of the definite article (Al) (‫)ﺍﻝ‬, and Al-tashdid (the duplication of a letter).
2. Translation versus Transliteration
Shedding light on the differences between translation and transliteration is vitally necessary to recognise the differences
between the two linguistic terms since they have several similarities in common. David Crystal (1991) defines
translation as a process where “the meaning and expression in one language (source) is tuned with the meaning of
another (target) whether the medium is spoken, written or signed” (p. 346). Eugene Nida and Charles Taber (1969)
emphasise that (SL) and (TL) should be equivalent; “[t]ranslating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the
closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style” (p.
12), and “there should be a high degree of equivalence of response, or the translation will have failed to accomplish its
purpose” (p. 24). Similarly, John Catford (1965) defines “translation” as “the replacement of textual material in one
language (SL) by equivalent textual material in another language (TL)” (p. 20). On the contrary, transliteration is
defined by Marshall Hodgson (1974) as “the rendering of the spelling of a word from the script of one language into
another language” (p. 4). This view is shared by Moses Alo (1998) who defines transliteration as “the process whereby
the units of one language, e.g. words, structures, are replaced by those in another” (Alo, quoted from Yeibo, 2011: 204).
Furthermore, transliteration takes place in the form of lexical borrowing or in loan words as a strategy used in
translation when faced with the problem of non equivalence, specifically when faced with translating culture specific
words (Baker, 1992).
From the definitions of both terms, it is clearly seen that while the definition of “translation” is based primarily on
conveying or interpreting the meaning in the source language (SL) by equivalent textual material into the target
language (TL), “transliteration” is made possible by using one system of representing sounds; by the replacement of
letters or writing a word in the characters of another language; i.e. using English alphabet to represent Arabic alphabet.
The difference between “translation” and “transliteration” lies in the fact that in translation the form and content of the
target text should be equivalent to the form and content of the source text, whereas transliteration is not defined by
means of equivalence but it is mainly concerned with formulating words and phrases existing in one language into
another.
In his important essay “Translation, Community, Utopia” (2000), Lawrence Venuti, one of the world’s leading theorists
of translation, highlights the problems that the translator faces throughout the process of translation:
Translation never communicates in an untroubled fashion because the translator negotiates the
linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text by reducing them and supplying another set of
differences, basically domestic, drawn from the receiving language and culture to enable the
foreign to be received there. The foreign text, then, is not so much communicated as inscribed with
domestic intelligibilities and interests (467).
According to Venuti, translation is a complex process because it is difficult for the translator to retain the cultural and
linguistic differences of the “foreign text” and instead s/he reduces these differences and adds a new set of domestic
differences. So it is the “transliteration” process that can permit the transliterator to keep the cultural and linguistic
differences of the “foreign text”. By the same token, Fragopoulos argues that the main distinction between
transliteration and translation, it is that transliteration “makes far more tangible the existence of the source language and
cultural context than the translation” (141). Another complication that can be resolved by transliteration as Venuti’s
argument suggests is by the “inscription of the foreign text” within the values of the receiving culture as he argues:
Can a translation ever communicate to its readers the understanding of the foreign text that foreign
readers have? Yes, I want to argue, but this communication will always be partial, both incomplete
and inevitably slanted towards the domestic scene. It occurs only when the domestic remainder
released by the translation includes an inscription of the foreign context in which the text first
emerged (473).
In his journey around the coast of Britain and Northern Ireland, the American travel writer, Paul Theroux felt relief
from the strictness and the accuracy of language contact as he travels within the same language:
Writing about a country in its own language was a great advantage, because in other places one
was always interpreting and simplifying. Translation created a muffed obliqueness – one was
always seeing the country sideways. But language grew out of the landscape – English out of
England – and it seemed logical that the country could be accurately portrayed only in its own
language (p. 4).
IJALEL 6(6):235-245, 2017 237
Transliteration is contained in Theroux’s words that “the country could be accurately portrayed only in its own
language”, which means that the meanings of certain words and phrases are best conveyed by the language of the
country itself as there are cases in which there is no one to one equivalence, as will be discussed later on. Thus the
shortage of translation in certain cases can only be perceived by transliteration.
From the above definitions of transliteration, it can be summerised that that transliteration is not only rendering one
language’s sound in the alphabets of another, but it also a communicative process through which the ideas and thought
of one culture is transmitted into another culture, or in other words, it is the cultural communication. In this respect,
Michael C. Onwuemene (1999) defines transliteration as
the act of thinking and conceiving in one’s first language but expressing the substance thought or
conceived in one’s second language such that the second-language expressions used contain some
salient linguistic and rhetorical implants from the first language (1058).
3. The transliteration of ‘travel experience’ into ‘travel literature’

Transliteration can be considered as a textual journey that a traveller may commence to introduce foreign words and
phrases into the target language and culture, and then adapt them as a way of finding a cross-cultural contact between
the two cultures, two traditions, and two languages.
Travel writers such as Oliphant, Libbey, Hoskins, Forder, and Goodrich-Freer have great roles in moving between
cultures and languages and introducing a great amount of Arabic transliterated words and phrases to the western culture.
Knowing that they utilise different transliterated words and phrases gives rise to the question: when do these writers
resort to transliteration? Examining the list of the transliterated words and phrases, used by these writers as seen in
(Appendix I), shows that they use transliteration in many cases and for different reasons.
Transliteration is the only effective technique in rendering into English some Arabic names of persons and places, for
example Oliphant uses transliteration for the names of some places such as Moab, Ain el Ghazal, and Arak el Emir, the
place which cannot be translated, although in some cases he provides translation for some place names such as Jebelel-
Aswad (Black Mountain) the Bawwabet Allah (God’s gates). However, he transliterates other place names without
providing any translation even though some part of place names could be partially translated such as Kalat Zerka
(which can be translated into Zarka Castle) and Wady Kefren (which can be translated into Kefren Valley). Oliphant’s
use of transliteration for these names of places, despite the fact that translation can be used in some cases, indicates that
he aims to introduce these places to his culture in order to create transculturation between Arabic and English cultures.
In this respect, Fragopoulos asserts that “[t]ransliteration enacts a simultaneous existence between cultures, languages,
and geographies. It fractures any notion of pure national identity or singular national language” (148). In Libbey and
Hoskins’ book, names of places are also transliterated such as Rubud, El Ajlun, Jerash, Salt, Madeba, Shobek, and
Kerak. Other examples of transliterated names of places can be found in Forder’s books such as Kerak, Moab, Arag,
Negeb, Mecca, and Kaaba. More examples of transliterated names of places can be found in Goodrich-Freer’s In A
Syrian Saddle as Belka, Judaea, Jebel Osha, El Bireh, Jebel ed deek (Hill of the Cock), and Rijal el-‘Amud (Men of the
Columns). Likewise, in the above books, Arabic names of persons are always transliterated such as Said Ibrahim,
Ahmed el Rifai, Ismail el Arkawy, Daud, Abraham, Ishmael, Hagar, Mohammed, Abu Jirius, Caliph Omar, Aboo
George, Abdallah, Moses, Khalil, and Koreish (tribe).
It has been noticed that the use of transliteration for Arabic names of persons and places is inevitable, as transliteration
is the only possible means available for rendering these names into English, since English language is devoid of these
names.
In some cases the synonym is lacked or not lexicalised in English language, which means that a word cannot be
replaced by an equivalent word. In such a case, transliteration becomes the only and the inevitable technique that can
be utilised to avoid the loss of meaning for words that occur in everyday language in Arabic culture. Some of these
examples are some titles that prefix a person’s name such as Sheikh, Imaum, Caliph, Khalif, Khuri, Haj, and Pasha
which have no equivalents or exact meanings in English language.
Transliteration is also used in these books in order to maintain the full meaning of Islamic terms such as Ullah (God),
Muazzin (inviter), Ghuzzu (raiding), Haram (forbidden), Sadaka, Zacat, Hajj, Surat, Hegira, Bismillah (In name of
God) Rumathan (the month observed by Moslems for fasting by day and feasting by night), and Ze el Hadj, (the eighth
day of the Mohammedan month). Ahmed Elimam (2013) argues that
transliteration of terms foreignises the text but possibly preserves the full meaning of the term
(considering that Islamic terms such as zakah, hajj, ‘umrah’ roughly “alms-giving,” “pilgrimage,”
“minor pilgrimage,” are known to “most” readers of the translations of the Quran), while
translating terms domesticates the text but also loses some of the meaning of the respective terms
(p. 34).
Elimam gives an example of the word zakah which is transliterated as “zakat” and translated as “regular charity” and as
“the poor- due”. He adds that the translator Ahmed Ali “opts for transliteration and explanation as follows: “give zakat
IJALEL 6(6):235-245, 2017 238
(the due share of your wealth for the welfare of others)” (p.35). Thus transliteration with explanation is needed when
using Islamic terms as these terms are missing from English language.
Throughout examining the transliterated words that are used by the above travel writers, it has been noticed that some
words do not only lack equivalence in English language, but also do not exist in English culture, that is why they are
transliterated with explanation. These words include kuffeiheh (head covering with a goats hair), akal (rope to keep it in
place), the abeih (Arab cloak), shig (place especially set apart for the entertainment of guest), semen, (this is a
preparation of milk first boiled, then hung, then churned in a sheep-skin by women, who suspend it to a stick, and then
keep pulling it to and fro until it attains the consistency of clarified butter), hasheesh (a form of opium), and tomnbak
(the special tobacco used for the narghil).
As transliteration can be considered a textual journey, it helps travellers not only to survive the journey, but also to
survive the text by introducing it to their own cultures and as a result finding a cross-cultural contact between cultures.
This can be achieved by transliterating the words and phrases of the source language, then providing equivalences in the
target language. Many examples of this process are found in the above books, where the travel writers translate the
Arabic words and phrases and then provide the English equivalences, such examples include: Leben (sour-milk), Zakir:
external observances (the outward), ilBatin: internal feeling (the inward), Mezra’a, Ya ibny (Oh, my son!), Manzul
(Public guest-house), Fakireh (poor), Tezkereh, Yowmel-Jumma (the day of gathering), Kurrey-ya-tayn (two villages),
Kismet (Fate), Mutesarrif (governor), Alhamdul-Illah, (God be thanked), wain es-Sitt? (Where is the Lady?), majnoon
(the name which the Arabs give to the half-crazy men, generally derwishes), iumkin inshallah (Perhaps, if God will),
bookra or baadbookra (to-morrow, or after to-morrow), Ana baraf? Allah baraf (Do I know? God knows), fellahin
(Arab peasants), Dieb (wolf), Lehaf (wadded cotton quilt), Beit (the house), El-Ghor (The Rift), baad wahad saar (after
half-an-hour), baad wahad saa (after one hour), ba’ad nus saa (after half-an-hour), ba’ad chamseh saa (after a quarter
of an hour).
Having explored the cases in which the travel writers employ transliteration, it is important to illuminate some of the
linguistic devices that are commonly and remarkably used by these writers. The remainder of this paper proceeds as
follows: first, it examines the way that these travel writers follow to form the Arabic plural nouns. Next, it looks over
the employment of the definite article (Al) in their travel writings. Finally, it discusses their use of Al-tashdid (the
duplication of a letter).
Before discussing the rule that the travel writers apply in forming plural nouns, it is necessary to light up the difference
between the noun plural system in Arabic and in English. There are two distinct modes of plural formation in Arabic:
the sound plurals and broken plurals. The sound plurals are formed by appending suffixation of masculine +uun or
feminine +aat to the same root (e.g. mudarres → mudarresuun and mudarresaat). Contrastingly, broken plurals
primarily involve internal modification of the singular root (e.g film → aflam). As Karin Ryding (2005) clarifies that
the broken or internal plural “involves a shift of vowel patterns within the word stem itself, as in English ‘man/men,’
‘foot/feet’ or ‘mouse/ mice’. It may also involve the affixation of an extra consonant (usually hamza or waaw)” (p.
144). By contrast, in English, plural nouns are usually formed by adding -s to the end of the word however there are
several exceptions to this rule.
Some of the Arabic plural nouns that are used by the travel writers are as follow: fellaheen (the masculine sound plural
of fellah) and it can be said that it is the only noun that are pluralised correctly, while the other nouns, which need
broken plural, are pluralised by applying the English rule on Arabic words through adding -s to the end of the word
such as Imaum→ Imaums intead of A’emah, Sheikh→ Sheikhs instead of Shoyoukh, Hammams instead of Hamammat,
Babooshes instead of Bawabeej. The conclusion to be drawn from applying the English plural rules on Arabic words are
that either the travel writers are not exposed to or are unfamiliar with the plural forms of these words, or that making
broken plural is a difficult process for non-native Arabic speakers so they add -s to indicate that these words are plural.
The second linguistics device that attention should be paid to is the employment of the definite article (Al) (‫)ﺍﻝ‬. The
definite article in Arabic (Al) (‫ )ﺍﻝ‬is equivalent to the definite English article ‘The’. However in Arabic it never occurs
independently; it is attached to the word and it is used as a prefix.
It has been noticed that the travel writers use different pronunciations of the definite article (Al), and this refers to a
grammatical rule in Arabic language. This rule states that
The nature of the first letter of a noun or adjective determines the pronunciation of /al/. The letters
of Arabic alphabet are divided into two sections, one section whose members assimilate the /l/
sound and another section whose members allow the full pronunciation of /l/ of the definite article
(Ryding, p. 157).
The first section is called Sun letters (Huruuf shamsiyyah ‫)ﺣﺮﻭﻑ ﺷﻤﺴﻴّﺔ‬. When these sounds or letters begin a word,
“they cause laam of the definite article to assimilate or be absorbed into them in pronunciation (but not in writing)”
(Ibid, p. 157). The effect of this assimilation is the duplication of the first letter of the word. That letter is then doubled
and indicated by a shadda or the doubling marker () above it, and is pronounced more strongly. The Sun letters include
the following alphabets:
‫ ﺗﺎﺀ‬, ‫ ﺛﺎﺀ‬, ‫ ﺩﺍﻝ‬, ‫ ﺫﺍﻝ‬, ‫ ﺭﺍﺀ‬, ‫ ﺯﺍﻱ‬, ‫ ﺳﻴﻦ‬,‫ ﺷﻴﻦ‬, ‫ ﺻﺎﺩ‬, ‫ ﺿﺎﺩ‬, ‫ ﻃﺎﺀ‬, ‫ ﻇﺎﺀ‬,‫ ﻻﻡ‬, ‫ﻧﻮﻥ‬
taa’, thaa’, daal, dhal, raa’, zay, siin, shin, saad, daad, taa’ zaa’, laam, nuun
IJALEL 6(6):235-245, 2017 239
To clarify this rule, the table below shows some of the sun letters with examples:
Sun Letters English Arabic Spelling pronunciation
‫ﺗﺎﺀ‬ taa’ Apple ‫ﺍﻟﺘّﻔﺎﺣﺔ‬ Al-tufaha At-tifaha
‫ﺛﺎﺀ‬ thaa’ Clothes ‫ﺍﻟﺜّﻴﺎﺏ‬ Al-theyab Ath-theyab
‫ﺩﺍﻝ‬ daal Bear ‫ﺍﻟﺪّﺏ‬ Al-dub Ad-dub
‫ﺫﺍﻝ‬ dhaal Fox ‫ﺍﻟﺬّﺋﺐ‬ Al-dhaʽlab Adh-dhaʽlab
‫ﺭﺍﺀ‬ raa’ Spring ‫ﺍﻟﺮّﺑﻴﻊ‬ Al-rabiiʽ Ar-rabiiʽ
‫ﺯﺍﻱ‬ zay Oil ‫ﺍﻟﺰّﻳﺖ‬ Al-zait Az-zait
‫ﺳﻴﻦ‬ siin Fish ‫ﺍﻟﺴّﻤﻚ‬ Al-samak As-samak
‫ﺷﻴﻦ‬ shiin Sun ‫ﺍﻟﺸّﻤﺲ‬ Al-shams Ash-shams
‫ﻻﻡ‬ laam Night ‫ﺍﻟﻠّﻴﻞ‬ Al-lail Al-lail
‫ﻧﻮﻥ‬ nuun light ‫ﺍﻟﻨّﻮﺭ‬ Al-noor An-noor
Having examined the use of the definite article (Al) followed by the Sun Letters by the travel writers, it has been
observed that they mix between pronunciation and writing; when they use words that begin with Sun letters, the laam of
the definite article has been assimilated into the Sun letters in pronunciation as well as in writing, for example, instead
of writing Al-salt, Froder lets the laam of the definite article to be absorbed into writing and writes it as Es-Salt and
Jebel ed deek instead of Jebel Al-deek. Similarly, in In A Syrian Saddle, the laam of the definite article has been
assimilated into the Sun letters, Goodrich-Freer writes Ain es-Shech instead of Ain Al-shech, and wain es-Sitt instead of
wain Al-sit. It seems that the travel writers depend upon the accent and the pronunciation of the speakers rather than on
applying the grammatical rule.
The second section of the letters is called Moon letters (Huruuf qamariyya ‫)ﻗﻤﺮﻳّﺔ‬. When the definite article (Al) (‫ )ﺍﻝ‬is
attached to words that begin with Moon letters, the laam of the definite article is not assimilated or is absorbed but it
keeps its pronunciation. The following list of the alphabet is classified according to the Moon letters:
‫ﻫﻤﺰﺓ‬, ‫ﺑﺎﺀ‬, ‫ﺟﻴﻢ‬, ‫ﺣﺎﺀ‬, ‫ﺧﺎﺀ‬, ‫ﻋﻴﻦ‬, ‫ﻏﻴﻦ‬, ‫ﻓﺎﺀ‬, ‫ﻗﺎﻑ‬, ‫ﻛﺎﻑ‬, ‫ ﻣﻴﻢ‬, ‫ﻫﺎﺀ‬, ‫ ﻭﺍﻭ‬, ‫ﻳﺎﺀ‬
hamza, baa’, jiim, Haa’, xaa’, ʽayn, ghayn, faa’, qaaf, kaaf, miim, haa’, waaw, yaa’
Moon Letters English Arabic Spelling pronunciation

‫ﺑﺎﺀ‬ baa’ The door ‫ﺍﻟﺒﺎﺏ‬ Al-bab Al-bab
‫ﺟﻴﻢ‬ jiim The camel ‫ﺍﻟﺠﻤﻞ‬ Al-jamal Al-jamal
‫ﺣﺎﺀ‬ Haa’ The field ‫ﺍﻟﺤﻘﻞ‬ Al-Haqel Al-Haqel
‫ﺧﺎﺀ‬ xaa’ Thursday ‫ﺍﻟﺨﻤﻴﺲ‬ Al-xamiis Al-xamiis
‫ﻋﻴﻦ‬ ʽayn Iraq ‫ﺍﻟﻌﺮﺍﻕ‬ Al-ʽiraaq Al-ʽiraaq
‫ﻏﻴﻦ‬ ghayn The cloud ‫ﺍﻟﻐﻴﻤﺔ‬ Al-ghayma Al-ghayma
‫ﻓﺎﺀ‬ faa’ The butterfly ‫ﺍﻟﻔﺮﺍﺷﺔ‬ Al-farasha Al-farasha
‫ﻗﺎﻑ‬ qaaf The village ‫ﺍﻟﻘﺮﻳّﺔ‬ Al-qarya Al-qarya
‫ﻣﻴﻢ‬ miim The Moon ‫ﺍﻟﻘﻤﺮ‬ Al-qamar Al-qamar
‫ﻳﺎﺀ‬ yaa’ Right ‫ﺍﻟﻴﻤﻴﻦ‬ Al-yamiin Al-yamiin
Concerning the use of the define article (Al) (‫ )ﺍﻝ‬followed by Moon letters, it has been noticed that the travel writers
apply it more correctly than the one followed by the Sun letters, as for instance Arab-el-mudn and Rijal el-‘Amud by
Forder; El Caaba, Ze el Hadj, Jebelel-Aswad, El-Ghor, Ain el Ghazal, Arak el Emir and ilBatin by Oliphant.
Furthermore, in other cases they use the definte article (The) instead of (Al), for example, The Khalif, The khateeb, The
Caliph, the abeih, the Dukkan, the Sultan, and the Sheikh. Moreover, the English define article the is used in some cases
while in fact the Arabic word does not take an article, such as the Bawwabet Allah instead of Bawwabet Allah, here the
English grammatical rule has been applied.
The final linguistics device that has been utilised by the travel writers is Al-tashdid which means:
When a letter is doubled, the mark called tashdῑd, which signifies corroboration, is placed over it.
Thus, in the word ‫ ﺷﺪّﺕ‬shid-dat, where the first syllable ends with ‫ ﺩ‬d, instead of following the
natural mode of writing, as, ‫ﺷﺪﺩﺕ‬, the two dᾱls are united, and the mark indicates this union
(Forbes, 1863, p. 15).
IJALEL 6(6):235-245, 2017 240
With regard to the use of Al-tashdid in travel literature, it seems that the travel writers also face difficulties in
determining how and when to use Al-tashdid. For example, Oliphant uses it correctly in fellaheen, fellah, fellaha,
feddan, hammams, and Dukkan by doubling the letters, however; in Kuffeiheh and kufeiyeh (‫)ﺍﻟﻜﻮﻓﻴّﺔ‬, the same word is
pronounced differently and incorrectly in each time. In the first case, he doubles the (f) letter and in the second one he
does not double any, while the (‫ﻳﺎﺀ‬, yaa’) is the letter which should be doubled (Kufeyyah). The same mistake has been
found in Goodrich-Freer’s book, where Kufeyyah is pronounced as keffeeye. Similar to Oliphant, Forder uses Al-tashdid
correctly in some words such as Mohammed, Mecca, Muazzin, and incorrectly in Ghuzzu and Kurrey-ya-tayn; in
Ghuzzu (‫ )ﻏﺰﻭ‬and Kurrey-ya-tayn (‫)ﻗﺮﻳﺘﻴﻦ‬, where there is no Tashdid and no letters should be doubled. However, he does
not double the /j/ letter in Haj (Pilgrim: ّ‫ )ﺣﺎﺝ‬while it should be doubled. The same word has been pronounced correctly
by Libbey and Hoskins (Hajj Ismail). More interestingly, the word (Mutasarrif: ‫ )ﻣﺘﺼﺮّﻑ‬has been used by three writers;
it is pronounced correctly by Libbey and Hoskins as Mutaserrif and by Goodrich-Freer Mutesarrif, but incorrectly by
Oliphant who doubles /s/ instead of /r/ Mutessarif.
As have been noted above different transliterations can be found for the spelling of the same Arabic words even within
the same book. This may relate to the fact that the travel writers do not follow the grammatical rule of Al-tashdid, but
they depend on the Arabic dialects which differ in pronunciation even within the same county. (See Appendix I for
more examples of different pronunciation of the same word).
4. Conclusion
By way of concluding, it can be suggested that the use of transliteration in travel literature can be used as a
communicative bridge between cultures and languages. As there is no one-to-one correspondence between some of
Arabic and English words and phrases, transliteration solves the problem of translation, and incorporates culturally
significant words and phrases from other languages. Furthermore, some of the concepts are culturally specific, such as
Alsharia or the religious concepts, in addition to some titles that prefix a person’s name. Thus, to avoid the loss of the
meaning, and to capture the full meaning of the text, travel writers resort to transliteration.
Above and beyond all other consideration, transliteration from Arabic into English is a difficult task. That is to conclude
that the multiple transliterations of the same words is due to three reasons; the first one refers to the phonetic
incompatibilities between Arabic and English; the second reason mainly refers to the differences in the sound and
writing systems; and the third reason is primarily concerned with the travel writers’ dependence on the Arabic dialects,
which vary even among the same country, rather than on following and applying the grammatical rules.
5. Recommendations
In the light of the discussion and conclusion, the researchers highly recommend expanding the scope of the study to
include studying transliteration of other Arabic linguistic devices such as Al-hamza (glottal stop semi-consonant) and
Al-mad (a glottal stop /ʔ/ followed by a long /aː/).
It is strongly recommended to investigate whether the travel writers still depend on dialects while transliterating or
apply grammatical rules.
Finally, the present research is but one step on a long road that should aim at studying Arabic to English transliteration
in English travel literature not only in the books, that have been abandoned, but in other genres and throughout different
periods of time.
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(Appendix I)
Laurence Oliphant. (1880). The Land of Gilead with Excursions in the Lebanon.
Transliterated Word / Phrase Explanation Pag
e Number
Sheikh leading man 28
Sheikh xiv
Imaum 9
Imaums 9
Hegira 30
Fellaheen peasants 37
tarboosh 38
kuffeiheh 46
khan 46
chic 53
semen This is a preparation of milk first boiled, then 60
hung, then churned in a sheep-skin by women,
who suspend it to a stick, and then keep pulling it
to and fro until it attains the consistency of
clarified butter.
Minenzil 72
Mutessarif governor 72
the abeih Arab cloak 112
kufeiyeh head-dress 112
Backsheesh it seemed a greater discovery to find a 118
native of Palestine who did not know the meaning
of the word backsheesh than it was to identify the
site of an ancient city.
Leben sour-milk 144
Marhaba They always greeted us with a cordial 190
salutation of ‘Marhaba’
Jebel Ajlun, Place 198
Moab Place 205
Ain el Ghazal Place 236
Kalat Zerka Place 238
Gulf of Akaba Place 239
the Dukkan shops 247
Arak el Emir 279
Wady Kefren 280
fellah 296
fellaha 322
feddan 330
Emir 344
IJALEL 6(6):235-245, 2017 242
Chef 349
khamsin
Sheikh 362
Tarboosh 375
Zakir external observances (the outward)
ilBatin internal feeling(the inward)
Fatimite Khalifs of Egypt 382
the Khalif Haroun al Raschid 383
El Caaba 397
Ze el Hadj the eighth day of the Mohammedan month 397
Jebelel-Aswad Black Mountain 418
the Bawwabet Allah God’s gates 426
hammams 426
khans 426
Sheikh Sheikh Said Ibrahim / Sheikh Ahmed el 434
Rifai
the Sheikh Bedawi 434
the Sheikh el Bedawi 435
babooshes the leather of slippers 456
snowy Jebel 466
Neba-el-Leben milk spring 477
Mezra’a 480
the Sultan 520
William Libbey and Franklin E. Hoskins. (1905). The Jordan Valley and Petra.
Transliterated Word / Phrase Explanation Page
Number
Mutaserrif Mutaserrif of Kerak, to take us down to Petra 5
Ya ibny (Oh, my son!) 94
Manzul Public guest-house 98
Khan It is a large khan, with many rooms for man and 98
beast
Hajj Hajj It is under the care of the family of the Hajj 98
Ismail el Arkawy
Emir the Emir of the Arabs in the Jaulan 99
Sheikhs Several sheikhs 100
salaams May God recompense you (in this sorrow) by your 101
own safety and peace, May God preserve you.
Bedawy Bedawy horsemen 128
Khuri At Tabigha we saw one specimen " the Khuri Daud" 132
Abadiyeh Abadiyeh is a village of mud-brick houses, built on a 137
conical mound
Fakireh poor 138
Sheikh the Sheikh of the village 240
Tezkereh And was The Jordan Valley and Petra forced to ask 282
us outright about our tezkereh
Pasha Nazim Pasha, Rustem Pasha, Muhammad 316
Said Pasha, Rasheed Pasha
Arabah 325
Sultan 326
the Mount of Olives 330
Rubud, El Ajlun, Jerash, Salt, 337
Madeba, and Shobek, then from
Kerak across to the seacoast again at
Gaza. Kerak, with its outpost at
Shobek
IJALEL 6(6):235-245, 2017 243
Archibald Forder. (1909). Ventures Among the Arabs, in Desert, Tent, and Town.
Transliterated Word / Explanation Page
Phrase Number
Kerak 1
Moab 2
Ishmael 2
Medeba 9
Abraham 24
Hagar 25
Keraki 34
Beyrout this man had lived in Damascus and Beyrout 41
Skour the next tribe,the Skour 47
Ullah God 67
Ghuzzu Our chiefs had gone on "ghuzzu," 83
“You are Bedr, you Mc-mood, and 92
you Salamey,” three of the cruelest
and most bloodthirsty of our tribe.
Fellah a young man named Fellah 94
Sheikhs Several sheikhs 100
Dawimee we came to a large village named 122
Dawimee.
Negeb Dry and desolate region known as 125
the Negeb.
Arag (For Iraq) 136
Es-Salt “Ramoth-Gilead” and 155
Gerash, and on to Edrei in Bashan.
Kurrey-ya-tayn which means two villages 170
Sheikh Chief man 171
Rumathan As it was Rumathan the month observed by 210
Moslems for fasting by day and feasting by
night
Bismillah (In name of God) saying in a loud voice, “Bismillah!” 220
“In the name of God”, “he told all to
eat, and the men began to feast”.
salaams respects 231-232
Caaba the Caaba, the sacred temple at Mecca 248
Koreish this tribe 248
Muazzin inviter 250
Abba cloak 261
Yowmel-Jumma the day of gathering 265
Arab-el-mudn Arab-el-mudn, the dwellers in houses 282
Bedouy Call a town or village dweller a Bedouy 282
Canaan on their way to Canaan 286
Archibald Forder (1920). In Brigands’ Hands and Turkish Prisons 1914-1918.

Transliterated Word / Phrase Explanation Page
Number
Moab 5
Kerak 5
Abu Jirius 5
hasheesh a form of opium 26
Sultan 31
Beyroutto Damascus, 34
hasheesh Hasheesh smokers 42
Aboo George Father of George 51
Pasha Jamal Pasha 64
Bawdee 87
Sheikh 92
lebn 109
Salaam ‘ay’ ‘ layk’ Peace to you 109
He replied with ‘Allah sellam-ak’ God grant you peace 109
Maaney 114
IJALEL 6(6):235-245, 2017 244
Aboo Jerius 126
The Caliph 204
Muezzim Inviters 204
Zacat 205
Sadakat 205
Rumathan 206
Surat 206
Caliph Omar 206
Surat 3 of the Koran 206
Mecca 207
Kaaba 207
Haj Pilgrim 208
Salaam-a-layk, Peace be to you 220
and the answer, Alayk-essalaam " To you be peace 220
shig place especially set apart for the 262
entertainment of guest
The khateeb pries 263
Kismet Fate 278
Man Hatha Who is there? 286
Bismillah In the name of God 287
ghuzzu raiding 291
Fatmi 293
Naga camel 298
Harems 302
A. Goodrich-Freer (1905). In A Syrian Saddle.

Transliterated Word / Explanation Page Number
Phrase
keffeeye head covering with a goats hair 4
akal rope to keep it in place 4
Wady the Wady Kelt 15
wain es-Sitt? Where is the Lady? 25
Haram forbidden 28
Bedawy 28
tomnbak the special tobacco used for the narghil 30
Khalil 30
Madaba 32
Mount Nebo 42
Moses 42
Moab 43
the fertile Ard Abdallah 46
Abdallah 46
Bedu 67
Mecca 72
Haifa 72
Haj pilgrim 74
To go to the gate of God Bab-el Allah 76
haji pilgrims 172
mudir We were close by the house of the mudir 131
Bedu / fellahin / Mutesarrif / More serious cases are taken by both Bedu and fellahin 135
Hauran before the Mutesarrif (Governor) of Hauran
Alhamdul-Illah God be thanked 151
heesh tobacco known as “wain,” from the Arabic word for the 157
forests where it is cultivated.
majnoon the name which the Arabs give to the half-crazy men, 162
generally derwishes
Ain es-Shech 167
Belka 167
Judaea 171
Jebel Osha 173
El Bireh, 179
iumkin inshallah Perhaps, if God will 181
IJALEL 6(6):235-245, 2017 245
bookra or baadbookra to-morrow, or after to-morrow 182
Ana baraf? Allah baraf Do I know? God knows 182
Jebel ed deek Hill of the Cock 187
Rijal el-‘Amud, Men of the Columns 190
fellahin Arab peasants 293
Dieb wolf 294
Lehaf wadded cotton quilt 312
Beit the house 315
El-Ghor The Rift 328
baad wahad saar after half-an-hour 331
baad wahad saa after one hour 334
ba’ad nus saa after half-an-hour 335
ba’ad chamseh after a quarter of an hour 335
saa
The Metalinguistic and Linguistic Knowledge Tests and Their

Relationship between Non-native In-service and Pre-service
Teachers
Saeideh Ahangari (Corresponding author)
Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran
E-mail: saeideh.ahangari@gmail.com
Morteza Abdi
Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran
E-mail: mortaza.abdii@yahoo.com

Abstract
Fairly recently, the construct of metalinguistic knowledge and its relation to L2 learners’ language proficiency have
been the focus of numerous theoreticians, researchers, and the educators in the field. With respect to second language
teachers assessment, however, little attempt has been made to explore the metalinguistic knowledge and its relationship
between serving and non-serving teachers. The current study, accordingly, was designed to investigate whether there is
a relationship between non-native in-service and pre-service teachers performing the metalinguistic and linguistic
knowledge tests and if there is a difference between the two groups of teachers’ performance on these two tests. To
collect the data on the two constructs of linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge, 80 non-native teachers performed on
the Cloze Test and untimed Grammaticality Judgment Test from an English language institute. Following a range of
statistical analyses, the findings revealed no positive correlation between the Linguistic and Metalinguistic tests both in
the in-service and pre-service teachers of English language. It was also found that the two groups of teachers did not
differ significantly with respect to their performance on the Linguistic test while the in-service teachers outperformed
their counterpart in the Metalinguistic knowledge test.
Keywords: linguistic knowledge, metalinguistic knowledge, in-service teacher, pre-service teacher, cloze test,
grammaticality judgment test
1. Introduction
Quite recently, Metalinguistic Knowledge (MK) has been considered as a vital component of second language (L2)
teaching and learning and has occupied the minds of quite a number of researchers (e.g., Berry, 2005, 2014; DeKeyser,
2009; Ellis, 2004; Hu, 2010; Roehr, 2008) in the field. Despite the diversity of definitions for the construct of MK in the
literature, Roehr (2007) defines MK as “the learners' ability to correct, describe, and explain L2 errors” (p. 174).
Drawing on Hu (2002) and Ellis (2009), the concept of MK has been particularly defined as a learner’s explicit
knowledge which potentially encompasses the L2 features of syntax, morphology, phonology, and pragmatics at both
the subsentential and suprasentential level. To achieve the intended purposes, the two definitions informed the
framework of our study.
Recent second language acquisition (SLA) research has explored the construct of MK in relation to L2 learners’
language proficiency. Additionally, it has uncovered a positive, but mostly moderate, relationship between learners’ L2
MK in the sense of correction, description, and explanation ability, and their L2 proficiency as measured by means of
various written or oral tests (Roehr, 2007). The construct of MK as well as its assessment methods, however, are yet
unknown with respect to language teachers. To gain sufficient insight into non-native language teachers’ MK, a strong
need is hence felt to conduct further studies with respect to assessment approaches.
An essential point of distinction has to be made here with respect to concepts of MK and metalinguistic awareness.
Masny (1987) defines metalinguistic awareness as an “an individual’s ability to match, intuitively, spoken or written
utterances with his or her knowledge of language” (p. 59). While metalinguistic awareness encompasses implicit and
intuitive knowledge, the construct of MK is explicit, declarative, and analytical in nature that a learner possesses about a
given language (e.g., Anderson 2005; Hulstijn 2005).
Since MK tends to be analyzed and necessitates a purposeful attentional concentration, the theorists and researchers in
the field argue that: a) learners equipped with MK will be aware of their underlying knowledge of a particular language,
IJALEL 6(6):246-251, 2017 247
b) MK is verbalizable; that is, learners are potentially capable of verbalizing the rules of L2 grammar (Butler, 2002), c)
MK can be learnable at any stage (Bialystok, 1994), and eventually, d) MK may not be readily accessible in the context
of language use (Elder, 2009).
1.1 MK Assessment and Grammaticality Judgment Tests
The construct of MK has witnessed considerable debate in the literature and continues to be explored in depth via
theorists, researchers, and educators of L2. One point of critical significance, accordingly, is how to assess MK. That is,
L2 researchers tend to seek for tests which can satisfactorily operationalize the construct of explicit knowledge of
learners. One kind of popular test employed by numerous, recent studies (e.g., Bley-Vroman & Joo, 2001; Montrul,
2005; Toth, 2006) is Grammaticality Judgment Tests (GJTs). Ellis (1991) defines GJT as a task in which learners
“decide whether a sentence is well-formed or deviant” (p. 162).
To perform GJTs, according to Elder (2009), participants follow the three steps of (a) semantic processing, (b) noticing,
and (c) reflecting in order to complete the intended process. Furthermore, Renou (2001) views GJTs significant because
(1) they reflect information about learners' knowledge of the grammar; (2) they provide information about the
development of learning L2 and (3) they provide information about the ways in which knowledge is organized (Gass,
1983). It is therefore safe to argue that GJTs have the potential to assess the nature of MK construct so that one can
obtain sufficient insight into a learner’s underlying grammar knowledge of a language given. Moreover, a number of
studies (e.g., Inagaki, 2001; Nabei & Swain, 2002) have highlighted the influential features of GJTs as regards the type
of knowledge participants can access while performing the judgment.
1.2 Literature Review
Although there are a large number of empirical studies (e.g., Berry, 2009; Elder & Manwaring, 2004; Ellis, 2005; White
& Ranta, 2002) asserting strong correlations between learners’ MK and their L2 proficiency, research directly exploring
the relationship between components of language learning aptitude, MK, and the role of these notions with regard to L2
proficiency is as yet scarce (Hu, 2010; Roehr, 2007).
The study reported by Myhill (2000) on the MK of learners’ grammar suggests that learning MK can be made
problematic and a further research is felt essential primarily for teachers’ MK and later for learners’ acquisition of MK.
Using a picture description task, White and Ranta (2002) investigated the relationship between French-speaking
learners’ metalinguistic task performance and their oral production in terms of the possessive determiners ‘his/her’ in
English. Their study found that there was considerable correlation between oral and metalinguistic task performance for
the Comparison class whereas the instructional intervention appeared to modify the relationship between performances
on the two tasks in the Rule class.
Following this line of enquiry, Hu (2002) examined psychological factors that influence access to MK in L2 production.
Employing a range of tasks with 64 adult Chinese learners of English, he concluded that there are chief psychological
restrictions on the application of MK in L2 performance. Hu (2011), in another endeavor, reported 76 Chinese learners
of English who completed a verbalization task of grammar. Exploring the relationship between L2 learners MK and
metalanguage, his analyses demonstrated a positive relationship between MK and metalanguage with respect to explicit
grammar instruction.
Roehr (2007) reported on a study which investigated the relationship between a narrowly focused measure of L2
proficiency and L2 language-analytic ability into a measure of MK. The study revealed a strong and significant
correlation between knowledge of L2 grammar and vocabulary and L2 MK. In addition, the results of a principal
components analysis demonstrated that the ability to correct, describe, and explain highlighted L2 errors and the ability
to recognize the grammatical role of parts of speech in L2 sentences appear to be parts of the same multi-componential
construct. Another investigation by Berry (2009) found that the learners were, to a great extent, different in their
knowledge of 50 items of metalanguage and that this knowledge was significantly correlated with their top grades in
English, indicating a correlation between knowledge of language and proficiency in English. Eventually, Correa (2011)
investigated the relationship between MK and subjunctive accuracy by learners of Spanish at three levels. While MK
was assessed via a set of four terminology and GJTs both in English and Spanish, mastery of the Spanish subjunctive
was evaluated through a set of five receptive and productive tasks. The findings revealed that 2) there was a positive
correlation between English MK and Spanish MK as well as a positive correlation between MK and accuracy in the use
of the subjunctive.
The construct of MK, undoubtedly, plays a pivotal role in L2 learners’ language proficiency and it assists the learners to
attend the language features more consciously. In addition, SLA researchers and theorists have explored the essential
ways (i.e. GJTs) to assess L2 learners’ understanding of the given language features. The literature reviewed lends
support to the efficacious role of MK knowledge in language proficiency and that GJTs tend to generate more optimal
outcomes in assessing L2 learners’ knowledge of MK. With respect to teachers’ MK, however, little attempt, if any, has
been made to explore its relationship with Linguistic Knowledge (LK). In-service Teachers (INSETs) are undeniably
required to possess not only the LK of a given language but the MK as well. An essential question raised here is
whether GJTs as a popular Metalinguistic Knowledge Test (MKT) generate more satisfactory results than Linguistic
Knowledge Tests (LKTs) in the assessment of teachers’ underlying grammar knowledge of English language. Another
point of interest is whether the two tests function inevitably different from each other in the INSETs. More importantly,
whether the two tests produce identical results with respect to Pre-service Teachers (PRSETs) and whether the PRSETs
IJALEL 6(6):246-251, 2017 248
differ significantly with the INSETs are yet unknown. To the best of our knowledge, no attempt has been made to
explore the relationship between the MKTs (i.e. as a form of GJTs) and LKTs with respect to teachers’ performance in
a foreign context. Therefore, the present study is designed to explore if a relationship exists between the LKT and MKT
in non-native Iranian INSET and PRSET teachers and whether non-native Iranian teachers perform differently on these
two tests. Specifically, this study aims to address the following research questions:
1.4. Research Questions:
R.Q. 1. Is there a significant relationship between the LKT and MKT in the INSET group?
R.Q. 2. Is there a significant relationship between the LKT and MKT in the PRSET group?
R.Q. 3. Is there a significant difference between the INSET and PRSET performances on the LKT?
R.Q. 4. Is there a significant difference between the INSET and PRSET performances on the MKT?
2. Method
2.1 Participants
A total of 80 English language teachers participated in our study. Since our study aimed to take the effect and role of
teaching experience into account, the participants were divided into either in-service or pre-service teacher groups. That
is, 40 teachers serving as English language instructors were assigned as our INSET group and another 40 teacher
participants who were assigned as our PRSET group were planning to become English language teacher in the
upcoming year. All the participants were majoring in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) from Iranian
universities with either Turkish or Persian as their native languages. While the INSET group had been teaching English
language for a couple of years in Iranian institutes, the PRSET group did not possess any teaching experience.
2.2 Instruments
Two teacher-made tests were employed as the major instruments in our study, that is, LKT and MKT:
2.2.1 LKT
To operationalize the construct of LK, a Cloze Test (CT) was utilized. The passage selected from a sample of TOEFL
(pbt version) reading passages for CT included 15 items. For each item, the teacher participants were required to fill in
the blanks with appropriate grammatical features. A range of L2 features from English language grammar were
included in the test. An attempt was also made to test those grammatical features which our participants had frequently
encountered in advance.
2.2.2 MKT
For the operationalization of MK, however, a 15-item GJT was employed. Since the primary purpose was to explore the
correlation between LKT and MKT, every attempt was made to make the two tests as much parallel with respect to L2
features and number of items as well. In addition, the two groups were provided with unlimited time to perform on GJT,
hence untimed GJT. The rationale underlying the employment of unspeeded GJT was to allow the teacher participants
to perform all the three operations of semantic processing, noticing, and reflecting. It is argued that administering GJTs
under time constraints may affect the type of knowledge that test takers access in making their responses. Timed GJTs
may encourage test takers to draw more on implicit knowledge; in contrast, untimed GJTs can allow them to access
more explicit knowledge (Bialystok, 1979; Elder, 2009). To ensure the teacher participants’ application of their MK,
they were initially required to identify the ungrammatical option from among the four underlined choices and then
provide the well-formed feature for each item. For each item, we assigned two points both in LKT and MKT.
2.3 Procedure
The design of the study was correlational including an in-service and a pre-service group of teachers. The former held
several years of experience teaching English language; yet, the latter was preparing to teach in the upcoming year. In
this study, an attempt was made to explore the correlation between the INSETs and PRSETs regarding their
performance on LKT and MKT. To begin with, the devised LKT and MKT were piloted with similar group of teachers
prior to their administration to ensure their reliability. A reliability of 0.81 and 0.83 were achieved for LKT and MKT
respectively. Following this, LKT was administered to the INSET and PRSET groups to gain insight into their linguistic
knowledge of grammar and their performance was rated based on the established criteria. As the third stage, MKT was
administered to two groups of the study with three weeks interval to avoid any potential test effect on MKT. The
obtained scores for the performance of the INSETs and PRSETs, eventually, were submitted to statistical analyses for
possible correlations between the two tests in the INSET and PRSET and potential differences between the two groups
of the study in LKT and MKT.
3. Results
3.1 The LKT and MKT in the INSETs
The first research question addressed the relationship between the LKT and MKT in the INSETs. To answer the
question, Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated to see whether there was any statistically significant correlation
between the LKT and MKT. Table 1 depicts the relationship between the two tests.
IJALEL 6(6):246-251, 2017 249
Table 1. Pearson correlation coefficient between LKT and MKT in the INSETs
MKT-GJT
LKT-CT Pearson Correlation -.294
N 40
**Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
As indicated in the Table, the correlation between the LKT and MKT (r = -0.294, p = 0.065) was not statistically
significant at level one for the INSETs. That is, there was no correlation between the performance of the INSETs on the
LKT and MKT.
3.2 The LKT and MKT in the PRSETs
The relationship between the LKT and MKT in the PRSETs was addressed in the second research question. To measure
this, another Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated to realize whether there was any statistically significant
correlation between the LKT and MKT in prosperous teachers. Table 2 illustrates the relationship between the two tests.
Table 2. Pearson correlation coefficient between LKT and MKT in the PRSETs
MKT-GJT
LKT-CT Pearson Correlation .101
N 40
**Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
The table shows that there was no correlation between the PRSETs performance on the LKT and MKT (r = 0.101, p =
0.534). That is to say, the PRSETs performance on the LKT and MKT did not reveal any statistically significant
relationship between the two.
3.3 The INSET and PRSET in the LKT
An Independent Samples t-test was run to understand whether there is a significant difference between the
performances of the INSETs and PRSETs on the LKT which was the focus of third research question. Table 3 indicates
the statistical difference between the two groups.
Table 3. Descriptive Statistics and Independent Samples t-test for the LKT in the INSET and PRSET
Mean N Std. t df. Sig.
The INSET Group 22.62 40 2.99 1.87 78 0.06
The PRSET Group 21.3 40 3.32
The obtained results revealed that the INSETs outperformed the PRSETs in the LKT with a mean score of 22.62 and
21.3 respectively. However, the two groups did not differ significantly in performing the LKT (p = 0.06).
3.4 The INSET and PRSET in the MKT
To answer the fourth research question, another Independent Samples t-test was calculated for any significant difference
between the performances of the INSETs and PRSETs on the MKT. Table 4 illustrates the existing differences between
the two groups of teacher participants in detail.
Table 3. Descriptive Statistics and Independent Samples t-test for the MKT in the INSET and PRSET
Mean N Std. t df. Sig.
The INSET Group 22.07 40 2.96 2.52 78 0.01
The PRSET Group 20.42 40 2.89

IJALEL 6(6):246-251, 2017 250
The results from the descriptive statistics indicated that the INSETs demonstrated a better performance on the MKT in
comparison with the PRSETs. The mean score was 22.07 for the former group while the latter had a mean score of 20.
42. That is to say, the INSETs outperformed the PRSETs with respect to the MKT and there was a statistically
significant difference between the two groups of the study (p = 0.01).
4. Discussion
The current study, initially, sought to investigate whether there are significant correlations between the performances of
the non-native INSETs and PRSETs on CT and GJT as indicators of LK and MK, respectively. This was addressed by
the first and second research questions and accordingly two Pearson Correlation Coefficients were run to unveil the
potential relationships.
The findings, however, did not reveal any statistically significant correlations between CT and GJT both in the INSETs
and PRSETs. Although majority of the studies (e.g., Berry, 2009; Elder et. al., 2004; Ellis, 2005; White et. al., 2002)
conducted on L2 learners’ MK suggested strong correlations between learners’ MK and their L2 proficiency; our study
failed to find any relationship with respect to the non-native teachers’ MK. Our finding is not also consistent with that
of Roehr (2007) who revealed a positive correlation between English MK and Spanish MK as well as a positive
correlation between MK and accuracy in the use of the subjunctive. This study failed to support the findings obtained
by Correa (2011) who suggested a strong and significant correlation between knowledge of L2 grammar and vocabulary
and L2 MK. Eventually, our results are not in line with those of Hu (2011) who demonstrated a positive relationship
between MK and metalanguage in terms of explicit grammar instruction. The mastery of LK in a given language,
therefore, cannot ensure non-native teachers’ display of their explicit knowledge (i.e., MK) of that language. MK, to be
more specific, tends to function quite differently among L2 learners and teachers which might be a feasible explanation
for the inconsistency of the findings on MK.
In addition, the teaching experience in the INSETs does not appear to make them metalinguistically aware of a
particular language. Butler (2002) argues that MK is verbalizable; that is, learners are potentially capable of verbalizing
the rules of L2 grammar. Despite their teaching experience on L2 grammar, Non-native INSET teachers failed to
display this MK knowledge. This might be argued in the way that the display of MK differs between language learners
and teachers. Although teaching experience can arm the teachers with a satisfactory LK, their MK is felt to be fostered
via other metalinguistic activities. It seems to us that in order to assist the serving and prospective teachers to employ
their MK of a particular language, mere LK cannot pave the intended route; but rather, teachers can be made
metalinguistically aware through explicit instruction and regular assessment of their explicit knowledge about the
underlying system of the language they teach. This is also feasible through occasional workshops during which the
serving and prospective teachers could be provided with sufficient knowledge of language and ample opportunities to
explicitly display their LK, hence making them aware.
In another endeavor, our study was designed to explore the different performances that the INSETs and PRSETs display
on CT and GJT. The third and fourth research questions addressed whether the two groups differ significantly on their
performances in LKT and MKT. No group outperformed the other with respect to LKT and hence their performance did
not reveal any significant differences. To explain this finding, Elder (2009) argues that MK may not be readily
accessible in the context of language use. Additionally, Hu (2002) concludes that there are chief psychological
restrictions on the application of MK in L2 performance. Therefore, the context of language use as well as relevant
psychological limitations can account for the non-native teachers’ failure in displaying their knowledge of MK.
Teaching experience, to reiterate, does not appear to practically assist the serving teachers in performing better than the
non-serving ones and the two groups can manifest quite equal performance on CT as the indicator of LK. With respect
to MKT, however, the INSETs outperformed the PRSETs and hence their difference was statistically significant. This is
great evidence for the effective role that teaching experience can and should engender in teachers’ MK. This finding
lends support to the study reported by Myhill (2000) on the MK of learners’ grammar. She suggests that learning MK
can be made problematic and a further research is felt essential primarily for teachers’ MK and later for learners’
acquisition of MK. The INSETs, in comparison with the PRSETs, are seemingly more capable of manifesting their
explicit knowledge of grammar and providing an appropriate explanation for the ungrammaticality of language features.
5. Conclusion
Considering the findings obtained, therefore, it is safe to argue that LK and MK do not tend to be correlated among non-
native teachers unless an intervening medium is introduced between the two constructs. Drawing on the debates and
arguments regarding teacher development, explicit instruction during teacher training courses as a direct intervention is
capable of making teachers metalinguistically aware. Furthermore, alternative assessments of teachers’ LK and
providing them with opportunities to reflect on their underlying system of language can enable them to be more
conscious of and to widen the developing grammar to achieve the required expert knowledge.
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The Effectiveness of Teaching Critical Thinking Skills through

Literature in EFL Context: A Case Study in Spain
Svetlana Stefanova (Corresponding author)
Department of English and English Language Didactics, International University of La Rioja, Madrid, Spain
E-mail: svetlana.stefanova@unir.net
Jelena Bobkina
Department of Linguistics Applied to Science and Technology, ETS Industrial Engineering, Technical University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
E-mail: jelena.bobkina@upm.es
Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez

Department of English and English Language Didactics, National University of Distance Education, Madrid, Spain
E-mail: fjsanchezverdejo@valdepenas.uned.es

Abstract
The present study investigates the effectiveness of teaching critical thinking skills through literary texts in the EFL
classroom, based on the combination of reader-centered critical reading and critical literacy pedagogy. Our proposal
seeks to address both language teaching and literacy education from a transnational perspective by dealing with critical
thinking skills as a set of processes whose main aspects include the interpretation of the world, self-reflection,
intercultural awareness, critical awareness, problem-solving, and language use. For the purpose of this study, a series of
activities based on Caryl Phillips’s novel The Lost Child (2015) have been designed, following the four curricular
components of Multiliteracies pedagogy (Kalantzis & Cope, 2000). Conducted in an EFL classroom in Spain, the study
aims to validate the model of teaching critical skills built on working with current social issues, such as immigration,
discrimination, and bullying. To evaluate the effectiveness of the model, teacher assessment and self-assessment
questionnaires have been completed by the teacher and the students, respectively. A close analysis of the results reveals
that both students and their teacher perceive the model as highly effective, in particular, in terms of self-reflection.
Additionally, intrinsically motivating activities and frequent opportunities to discuss literary texts and relate them to
current issues have proved to be highly beneficial for the students, providing them with a broader perspective that helps
them interpret real-world problems properly. The assessment grid has proved effective, although for a wider application
of the grid, the descriptors might have to be adapted to the students’ age.
Keywords: critical thinking skills, critical literacy approach, literature, EFL classroom
1. Introduction
There is no doubt that the ability to think critically is one of the primary goals of education in the 21st century that has
direct connection with language teaching and learning as well as with our daily life. Since 1990, teachers have
increasingly realised the necessity of developing students’ ability to think critically both in higher education and in
university EFL courses. Not surprisingly, over the past decades, numerous scholars and educators have advocated the
necessity of teaching critical thinking as one of the essential skills in order to help students to operate effectively within
society, make better judgments, and take personal, business or leadership decisions (Braun, 2004; Fisher, 2001;
Kalyczynski, 2001; Willingham, 2007).
The EFL classroom provides multiple opportunities for teachers to enhance the development of students’ thinking skills
through a combination of teaching factual content and using this material critically (Khatib, Marefat & Ahmadi, 2012;
Moreno-Lopéz, 2004; Quing, 2013). According to Willingham (2007), one may teach students how to think, but
without giving them the necessary background and knowledge, they will not be able to analyse the content properly.
Thus, it becomes clear that the development of critical thinking skills is closely related to knowledge acquisition, as
fostering students’ active thinking and independent thinking ability helps them to put their previously acquired
knowledge into practice.
Nonetheless, critical thinking is not given enough attention in the English classroom, which still focuses mostly on skill
practice, vocabulary learning, and accumulation of linguistic structures (Bahadur Rana, 2012; Pineda Báez, 2004; Qing,
2013). We strongly believe that in the context of EFL teaching, the role of the teachers should not be restricted to the
training of language skills, but they should also encourage students to reflect actively on social issues and current
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affairs, inspiring them to become agents of change. In a word, in order to be proficient language users, students need to
know how to use critical thinking skills through the target language. One way to accomplish it is through reading and
interpreting literary texts in the English language classroom, hence our study aims at analysing the effectiveness of
teaching critical thinking skills through literary texts in the EFL context.
2. Literature as a means of teaching critical thinking skills
The use of literature in the EFL classroom has seen a revival during the last few decades. In explaining the benefits of
integrating literature in the language classroom, scholars point to the value of the literary text as an effective stimulus
for students to think critically and express their feelings and ideas in a non-native language. The benefits of literature
for developing students’ critical thinking skills and creativity have been highlighted by a number of researches
(Alvarez, Calvete, & Sarasa, 2012; Bobkina & Dominguez, 2014; Bobkina & Stefanova, 2016; Fernandez de Caleya,
Bobkina & Sarto, 2012; Ghosn, 2002; Sivasubramaniam, 2006; Van, 2009; Yaqoob, 2011). Thus, according to Lazere
(1987), literature is an academic subject that “can come closest to encompassing the full range of mental traits currently
considered to comprise critical thinking” (p. 3). It helps students to question and explore the world around them and
opens “horizons of possibility” (Langer, 1997, p. 607). Along the same line, Ghosn (2002) affirms that literature brings
changes into students’ attitudes towards the world.
What’s more, recent studies in this field have pointed to the possibility of engaging students into the process of joint
meaning construction, assigning the reader an active role in meaning-making (Egan, 2005; Guerin, Labor, Morgan,
Reesman, & Willingham, 2005; Yaqoob, 2011). A close reading of a literary work can develop the skills students need
to understand hidden meanings, reconstruct images from details, separate facts from opinions, examine phenomena
from multiple points of view, and apply what they have learnt to other aspects of their daily life. In short, a close
reading of a literary text involves all those skills that are part of the critical thinking process: analysis, synthesis,
argumentation, interpretation, evaluation, problem-solving, and reasoning, among others (Brunt, 2005; Facione, 2007).
In this way, the reader-response approach, which posits the active role of the reader, encourages students to generate
and communicate their own interpretation of a literary text.
The advocates of teaching critical thinking skills to EFL learners often insist on the relation between language and
social changes. Not surprisingly, critical thinking skills are frequently dealt with from ideological perspective. This
perspective has recently been supported by those scholars who argue for the need of introducing critical literacy
pedagogy into the classroom curriculum as a means of combating poverty, inequality and social injustice (Crookes,
2010; Curtis & Romney, 2006; Nelson, 2008; Norton & Toohey, 2004; Riasati & Mollaei, 2012). These viewpoint is
becoming especially relevant in the present due to persistent racial inequality and other forms of discrimination and
exclusion at a global level.
Taking its roots in the socio-cultural view of the language, critical philosophy, pedagogy, feminist concerns, and post-
constructivist theory, the critical literacy approach implies teaching students to read texts in an active, reflective way for
a better understanding of those issues related to social injustice and inequality (Gee, 1996; Janks 2010; Van, 2009).
Though rooted in various theories, it is most strongly associated to the critical pedagogy philosophy developed by the
Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and is based on problem-posing education, that aims at making students critical
thinkers. When applied through the paradigm of postmodern, poststructuralist, or feminist discourses, it encourages
“teachers and students to engage in dialogues over texts that were meaningful in their lives” (Moreno-López, 2004, p.
81).
While critical literacy pedagogy is a relatively old concept, its application to EFL teaching is a rather new phenomenon
that came to life in 1990s and was adopted by teachers in both mainstream English classrooms and EFL classrooms
(Wallace, 1995). Since then, a significant number of scholars and educators have argued for the examination of the
language curriculum and its re-organisation along critical pedagogy lines (Aliakbari & Faraji, 2011; Benesh, 2009;
Degener, 2001; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Izadinia, 2011; Norton & Toohey, 2004; Pennycook, 2001).
Thus, Riasati & Mollaei (2012) affirm that when applied to language teaching, this approach adds to the critical quality
of the current textbooks and overall language instruction. Taken into consideration the social nature of the language
discourse, critical literacy pedagogy helps students to interpret the texts they read, questioning the social theories they
relate to. What’s more, both language learning and language teaching are viewed as ideologically driven processes that
are at the heart of the educational curriculum (Norton &Toohey, 2004). There is also a strong belief that the language
curriculum should be designed taking into consideration students’ personal experiences and realities (Ohara, Saft, &
Crookes, 2001).
To deal with literary texts in EFL classroom effectively, Bobkina & Stefanova (2016) suggest a model that is based on
the strategies endorsed by both the reader-centered critical reading approach and the critical pedagogy approach. For
them, critical thinking skills required to work with literary texts in the EFL classroom “can be broadly defined as a set
of processes whose main dimensions include the interpretation of the world, self-reflection, intercultural awareness,
critical awareness, reasoning and problem-solving, and language use” (Bobkina & Stefanova, 2016, p. 685).
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Figure 1. Critical thinking skills required to work with literary texts (Adapted from Bobkina & Stefanova, 2016)
The authors have also designed a series of activities to put the model into practice. To this end, the theoretical
framework has been translated into a pedagogical model based on the ideas of multiliteracies pedagogy (Kalantzis &
Cope, 2000; Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; 2013; 2015) in an attempt to address the full range of literacies (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Pedagogical application of the model of teaching critical thinking skills through literature (Bobkina & Stefanova, 2016)
The four-stage process, represented in Figure 2, describes a learning process, suitable for the application of the model of
teaching critical thinking skills. The first stage comprises a set of pre-reading activities aiming to activate students’
schemata of the topic. Students read the text and share their ideas, feelings, and experiences. The second stage deals
with the general comprehension of the text, conducted through general comprehension questions and discussion
activities. The close reading of the text provided in this stage helps students to understand the inner logic of the literary
text. The third stage deals with the students’ conscious attention to relationships between linguistic forms and socio-
cultural contexts. The writer’s attitude, point of view, and intentions are explored through the analysis of the lexical and
structural choices of the text. Finally, the fourth stage includes the creation of students’ own texts, that may include
reshaping the original texts within the same mode or shifting from one mode to another.
3. Language and literacy education from a transnational perspective
Our proposal seeks to address both language teaching and literacy education from a transnational perspective in an
attempt to account for the complex phenomena that have emerged as a result of globalization. There has been a long
debate over the use of terms such as “global”, “cosmopolitan”, or “transnational” to refer to phenomena influenced by
and concerned with new paradigms that reflect the cross-boundary flows of people, ideas, and cultural production. The
field of postcolonial studies and its interest in exposing discrimination and oppression on the basis of race, ethnicity,
class, and gender has contributed greatly to our understanding of the concept of “difference” and has raised our
awareness of the need to develop students’ critical thinking skills that enable them to become active agents of social
change. In the foreword to Teaching Transnational Youth, Randy Bomer (2015) calls thinking in terms of difference
“deficit thinking” and claims that it legitimates stratification and oppression (p. x). Along the same line, Allison Skerrett
(2015), whose main concern is the student diversity in schooling environments, points to the growing number of literacy
researchers who connect language and literacy practices and foregrounds “transnationlism in literacy education” (p. xi).
This recent trend of connecting language and literacy education from a transnational perspective is one of the reasons
for our choice of Caryl Phillips’s novel The Lost Child (2015) for our didactic proposal.
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In approaching the idea of working with transnational fiction to develop critical thinking in the EFL classroom, we draw
on Stephen Clingman’s understanding of the concept. For him, transnational fiction “does not necessarily come from
writer who travel or books that do”, but “what makes fiction transnational are questions of form” (2012, p. 10, italics in
original). Clingman views the question of form at two levels: (1) “recognizable formal characteristics”, such as “their
structures of time and space, and a set of figurations and properties, whose logic will become clear, of metonymy,
chiasmus, constellation, and much else besides” and (2) “form as what informs these novels and produces their visible
patterns”, i.e. “form becomes content — a way of being and seeing” (2012, p. 10-11, italics in original). One of the
authors Clingman examines to illustrate his approach is Caryl Phillips.
It is not our intention to discuss the concept of “transnational fiction”, but to explore its didactic potential for
developing critical thinking skills. In this sense, our perspective aligns with the second level Clingman identifies, i.e.
the transnational as “a way of being and seeing”. We view the didactic dimension of transnational fiction as an
interpretative frame. From this standpoint, Caryl Phillips’s The lost Child is suitable for the implementation of the
model also because of the wide range of topics it examines, which include, but are not limited to: immigration,
discrimination, home, weak or absent parents, and bullying.
4. Research questions
The present study addresses the question of the effectiveness of the model of teaching critical thinking skills through
literature in an EFL classroom. The questions addressed in this study are: (1) how do students and their teacher perceive
the effectiveness of the model of teaching critical thinking skills to improve students’ skills to think critically as well as
their grasp of the foreign language?, and (2) how effective in operational terms are the evaluation instruments, in
particular, the Assessment Criteria Grid and the Assessment Checklists for students and teachers?
5. Methodology
5.1 Participants
The present investigation relies on a case study approach, which includes both qualitative and quantitative techniques. It
focused on a selected group of students studying English as a foreign language. The experiment involved 21
Administration and Finance degree students from a Centre for Technical and Vocational Education, a bilingual state
school located in the south of Castilla-La Mancha region in Spain. The average age of the group is about twenty. Their
English level ranges from B1 to B2, as classified by the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001). Most of the students did not
have any previous experience of working with literary texts in the English classroom and the textbook used in the EFL
course does not include any material or activities that display the six dimensions of the model of teaching critical
thinking skills mentioned above. The materials they use in class focus on teaching of specific language content, mostly
related to administration and finance.
5.2 Materials
Materials included a pedagogical proposal based on the combination of reader-centered critical reading approach and
the critical pedagogy approach was developed by the authors. To its end, a series of activities were designed based on
the strategies endorsed by both theories and were sequenced following the major dimensions of literacy pedagogy:
situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practice (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015).
Caryl Phillips’s novel The Lost Child, the work we chose for the design of the didactic material, is set in Britain in the
1960s. It revolves around the story of Monica and her two young sons Ben and Tommy, which is framed by the author’s
reworked version of orphaned, found, and adopted Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). After
dropping out of Oxford to marry an African-Caribbean student, Monica becomes alienated from her parents.
Abandoned by her husband and poverty stricken, she makes an effort to raise her children alone, but gradually
succumbs to depression and the two boys are taken in by a foster family. Tommy “becomes the target of psychological
and physical bullying” (Stefanova, 2016, p. 98) at school and when the two boys are sent to a camp in Silverdale. His
older brother, Ben, tries to protect him, however he feels he “should have done more”, a feeling that keeps him awake
for years after Tommy’s mysterious disappearance (Phillips, p. 189).
The class work focused on the chapter called “Childhood”. Our choice of the literary extract is justified by two main
reasons: (1) it is divided into numerous short fragments, which allows for intensive reading activities, and (2) in it, the
older brother, Ben, describes his personal experience of how he witnessed his mother’s struggle with depression and his
younger brother’s being humiliated, which enables the students to connect the literary text to real-life problems.
In what follows, we provide a series of the activities carried out by the selected group of students in the EFL classroom.
Stage I: Situated Practice: Experiencing the new
Recalling relevant knowledge
1. Students are shown images related to immigration, taken from British newspapers and stripped of their
captions. Key question: What is the first thing you think of when you see these pictures?
Students watch a short video called “What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word
‘immigrant’?”, in which Americans comment on what comes to their mind first at hearing the word. They are
encouraged to compare their answers to the answers of the people interviewed in the video.
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2. Students work in pairs to identify the main topics in Phillips’s fiction. The teacher provides each pair with a
book review of one of the novels previous to The Lost Child, e.g. the 325-word book review of The Final
Passage (1985), published in the American magazine Kirkus. Students share their ideas in class.
3. The teacher presents the book title and the chapter titles and asks students what they expect, taking into
account Phillips’s background and the main themes of his fictional works. Subsequently, the teacher offers a
summary of the novel and the class moves on to explore the chapter called “Childhood”.
Reader-response activities
4. The chapter “Childhood” is divided into sixteen short fragments. The title of each fragment is the title of a
song, e.g. “Hey Jude” by The Beatles. Students work in pairs. The teacher assigns each pair a different
fragment. Students read the text and listen to the song after which the fragment is named. They are asked to
change the title of the text, choosing another song to reflect the essence of that fragment.
5. Students discuss the feelings of the older brother, who is the narrator in this case. How does he feel and react
about his mother’s illness, his foster family, their trip to the camp in Silverdale, or when his history teacher
puts him on the list for Oxford and Cambridge. In what way, if any, Ben’s experiences are similar to students
of his age in our times? How are they different? What/Who gives him strength to overcome difficulties?
Stage II: Overt Instruction: Conceptualising with theory
Understanding general message
Students read the fragments again and answer the following general comprehension questions:
 What is the prevailing mood in both the text and the music?
 What is the main idea of the fragment they have read?
 Students take turns to provide a one-sentence summary of the fragment they have read. The rest of the
class write down the sixteen sentences that correspond to the sixteen fragments, thus building a summary
of the chapter.
 The boys’ home environment is not supportive. The meaning of “home” is an essential theme in Phillips’s
fiction. What does “home” mean to Ben and Tommy? What does “home” mean to the students?
 Tommy refuses to speak about the bullying. Why do you think he did not speak to his older brother about
it?
 What is your overall impression? Would you say the chapter “Childhood” is pessimistic or optimistic?
Analysing the language details
1. Identify the words and expressions Phillips uses to describe Ben’s feelings and divide them into positive and
negative. Make a list of ten adjectives with positive and ten adjectives with negative connotations.
2. Examine the grammatical structure of the text. What narrative tenses does the author use to reflect Ben’s
memories? What is the effect on the reader? Find examples of Past Simple, Past Progressive, and Past Perfect
Tense. Find examples of the expressions used to and would and comment on the difference between them.
3. Students make five sentences remembering their childhood, using used to and would.
Stage III: Critical framing: Analysing critically
Connecting language with its social context.
1. Identify five adjectives and five verbs used by the author to describe Ben and Tommy’s home. Analyse the
emotions they evoke.
2. Identify and analyse Ben’s references to his younger brother Tommy. How do we know Tommy was being
bullied? How does Ben feel about it?
3. Phillips does not describe the acts of bullying. He chooses to describe the impact they have on the boy. Why
do you think the author employs this narrative technique?
4. Bullying is often defined as a relationship with an imbalance of power. Can you think of an example of
relationship with an imbalance of power not between individuals, but between social groups? What is the
effect on the weaker group?
5. What makes Tommy more vulnerable than his brother at school and at the camp? What makes a social group
vulnerable? In what way can education contribute to the integration of vulnerable individuals or groups?
Stage IV: Transformed practice: Applying creatively
Creating your own texts
1. In Philips’s novel, no one helps Tommy when he is being bullied at school and in Silverdale. Students re-write
the story including a new character, Tommy’s new friend, who protects him from the bullies.
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2. Students write a letter of gratitude to a friend who helped them when they most needed it, discerning the
meaning of such experience. They have to keep the conventions of an informal letter.
5.3 Instruments
To assess the effectiveness of teaching critical thinking skills, Critical Thinking Assessment Criteria Grid (Appendix 1)
was elaborated and adapted to be used as pre-test and post-test evaluation instrument by teachers and students.
Additionally, Teacher Assessment Checklist (Appendix 2) and Student Self-Assessment Checklist (Appendix 3) were
created to facilitate the use of the Assessment Grid. The instruments were designed around the model proposed by
Bobkina & Stefanova (2016) that describes critical thinking process as a set of skills characterised by the following
dimensions “the interpretation of the world, self-reflection, intercultural awareness, critical awareness, reasoning and
problem-solving, and language use” (p. 685). The Teacher Assessment Checklist and the Student Self-Assessment
Checklist describe each of the dimensions depicted in the grid as a list of competence or attainment criteria associated
with critical thinking skills. Each dimension is represented as a set of gradable skills and abilities with assigned values
from 1 to 4.
5.4 Procedure
The study lasted four weeks, from 16 January 2017 to 12 February 2017, and was carried out over six fifty-minute
sessions. English was used as medium of instruction.
Week 1
Two sessions were carried out in the first week on two different days.
In the first session the teacher introduced the students to the concept of critical thinking skills and they discussed the
importance of developing the ability to think critically. Students were provided with the Critical Thinking Assessment
Criteria Grid (Appendix 1) and were asked to make a list of life situations and experiences to which at least one of the
six dimensions in the grid applies. Students were also given the Student Self-Assessment Checklist (Appendix 3) and
instructed how to use and relate the two assessment instruments. In the same session the teacher presented the aims,
structure, and sequence of the literature-based activities, with special attention to the potential of literary texts to
provide opportunities for the development of critical thinking skills. Then, the teacher administered the Self-Assessment
Checklist to gather information about the students’ perceived level of critical thinking skills.
In the second session, students were engaged in completing the tasks related to Stage 1 (Situated Practice) of the
literature-based proposal. They were asked to read the chapter called “Childhood” from Caryl Phillips’s novel The Lost
Child and start working with the literary text.
Week 2
Students proceeded to Stage 2 (Overt Instruction). This stage was roughly divided into two parts. Firstly, students were
asked to answer some general comprehension questions on the chapter “Childhood”, which they had previously read
with special emphasis on the concept of “home”, which in Phillips’s fiction relates to his concern with themes such as
identity and belonging. In the second part students were asked to analyse language details and the way they influence
meaning construction.
Week 3
Students completed Stage 3 (Critical framing). In this stage students had to analyse the language used by the author
critically and connect it with its social context. The session focused on topics such as exclusion, discrimination, and
bullying.
Week 4
Two sessions were carried out in the fourth week on two different days. In the first session the students completed the
final tasks, which correspond to Stage 4 (Transformed practice). They wrote two texts in different registers to apply
creatively what they had learnt.
In the second session the Student Self-Assessment Checklist (Appendix 3) was administered again.
The Teacher Assessment Checklist was administered once, at the end of the study. Each student was evaluated by the
teacher based on the activities carried out during the sessions.
6. Data collection and analysis
Data collection and analysis focused on the two main agents of the learning process: the students and the teacher. Data
was obtained from the previously mentioned checklists, systematised, presented in tables and graphs, and analysed. The
study consisted of two parallel lines of data: (1) a comparison of students’ pre-test and post-test perception of their own
critical thinking skills, and (2) a comparison of students’ post-test self-assessment and the teacher’s post-test assessment
of the students’ critical thinking skills. The analysis of the two lines showed the complexity of evaluating the
effectiveness of the proposed model. Besides that, several comparisons were made within the same data-set. We opted
for a general analysis of students’ perceived improvement of their critical thinking skills (Table 3, Figures 3 and 4) and
a comparative analysis of the students’ post-test self-assessment results and the teacher’s assessment of the
effectiveness of the model (Table 4, Figures 5, 6, and 7).
Table 1 shows the variation between the students’ perceived critical thinking competence before and after having
carried out the proposed set of activities.
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Table 1. Students Pre-Test Self and Post-Test Self Assessment Results
Levels Level 1 - Poor Level 2 - Below Level 3 - Good Level 4 - Excellent
Satisfactory
Dimensions Pre- Post- Pre- Post- Pre- Post- Pre- Post-
Interpretation 0,00% 0,00% 14,28% 0,00% 66,67% 71,50% 19,05% 28,57%

of the world
Self-Reflection 0,00% 0,00% 19,05% 0,00% 38,09% 57,20% 42,86% 42,86%
Critical 0,00% 0,00% 19,05% 14,29% 38,09% 71,50% 42,86% 14,29%

Awareness
Intercultural 0,00% 0,00% 9,52% 0,00% 61,91% 71,50% 28,57% 28,57%

Awareness
Reasoning and 0,00% 0,00% 33,33% 28,57% 52,38% 57,20% 14,29% 14,29%
Problem
Solving
Language Use 0,00% 0,00% 71,50% 57,14% 18,98% 42,90% 9,52% 0,00%
The results show that all the students perceived their competence in the six dimensions between level 2 (below
satisfactory) and level 4 (excellent), before and after the work with the literary text. It is significant that the number of
students who considered their level of self-reflection, critical awareness, and intercultural awareness as below
satisfactory was reduced to zero, i.e. some students who had low initial expectations gained confidence after working
with the text. Although the number of students who perceived their level as below satisfactory in critical awareness and
reasoning and problem solving slightly increased, there is still a small percentage whose attitude towards their
competence in these two dimensions remains below positive. Overall, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that most students
saw their competence as good after completing the four phases of the project. It is interesting to note that 42,86% of the
students had very high opinion about their critical awareness competence and in the post-test checklist this percentage
dropped to 14,29%. In absolute terms it is a lot lower, however, we interpret it as a positive result, in the sense that the
proposed activities made students aware of the need to improve their critical awareness and of the complexity of the
concept. In their comments, some of these students mentioned that they had underestimated the value of critical
awareness and did not have a clear idea of the breadth and depth of the dimension. The language in use dimension
scored lower than the other five dimensions. 9,52% of the students viewed their language in use competence as
excellent in the pre-test checklist, but the post-test results do not seem to have met their expectations, presumably for
two main reasons: (1) their assumption was based on the use of English in class activities that do not require critical
thinking skills, and (2) the literary text they worked with has a rich repertoire of more nuanced lexical items than those
they were familiar with. The same decreasing tendency from pre to post-test results is clearly observed if we compare
the figures in levels 3 (good) and 4 (excellent) of critical awareness and language in use. To establish a correlation
pattern, a broader scope research must be conducted. However, we could detect that engaging students in a close critical
reading that involved understanding of the literary strategies and interpretation of the meaning of language use drew
their attention to the need to improve their competence in these two dimensions.
Figure 3. Students Pre-Test Self-Assessment Results

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Figure 4. Students Post-Test Assessment Results
As shown in Table 2, students’ perceived competence does not fully coincide with the teacher’s assessment of their
competence attainment after the completion of the series of activities.
Table 2. Students Post-Test Self Assessment Results and Teacher Assessment Results
Levels Level 1 - Poor Level 2 - Below Level 3 - Good Level 4 - Excellent
Satisfactory
Agents / Students Teacher Students Teacher Students Teacher Students Teacher
Dimensions
Interpretation 0,00% 0,00% 0,00% 0,00% 71,50% 14,29% 28,57% 85,71%
of the world
Self-Reflection 0,00% 0,00% 0,00% 14,29% 57,20% 0,00% 42,86% 85,71%
Critical 0,00% 14,29% 14,29% 42,86% 71,50% 42,86% 14,29% 0,00%

Awareness
Intercultural 0,00% 0,00% 0,00% 14,29% 71,50% 0,00% 28,57% 85,71%

Awareness
Reasoning and 0,00% 14,29% 28,57% 0,00% 57,20% 85,71% 14,29% 0,00%
Problem
Solving
Language Use 0,00% 14,29% 57,14% 42,86% 42,90% 42,86% 0,00% 0,00%
The findings reveal that the general trend in students’ perception of their improvement correlated sufficiently well with
the teacher’s evaluation of their achievements in two aspects: critical awareness and language use. The low
performance in language use is also due to the fact that to reason critically, express and support their arguments on
topics like social inequality, depression, or bullying, students were challenged to involve in argumentation and learn or
master devises used in argumentative discourse. Although vocabulary wasn’t a serious obstacle, the difficulties second
language learners may experience with certain discourse-organising words carry important information about the
assessment results. Similar figures in the students’ post-test checklist and the teachers checklist in the two dimensions
mentioned above suggest that students had a realistic perception of their performance in these particular processes, but
also that they understood well the meaning of these dimensions. For the teacher, 85,71% of the students demonstrate
good (performance level 3) reasoning and problem solving skills and although the students’ survey differs slightly, their
score on this dimension is highly satisfactory. The model has proved effective in enhancing a dimension which is
widely applicable to other educational areas and has a strong positive direct effect on students’ ability to find an
adequate solution to real-world problems.
When considered jointly, students’ self-assessment results and the teacher’s assessment results (see Figures 5, 6, and 7)
on interpretation of the world, self-reflection, and intercultural awareness display a similar pattern, characterised by a
significant disagreement between the results obtained from the students’ checklist and from the teacher’s checklist, in
particular, in performance levels 3 and 4, e.g. on interpretation of the world 28, 57% of the students evaluated their
achievement level as 4 (excellent) and the teacher gave 85,71% of the students an excellent mark. In an attempt to shed
light on this disagreement, we analysed data from a slightly different perspective and focused on the highest score for
both students and the teacher. It becomes clear that this difference does not affect the outcome of the implementation of
the model, which for these three dimensions ranged from level 3 (self-perception scores) to level 4 (the teacher’s
scores), indicating in a highly favourable attitude towards this model of teaching critical thinking skills and the series of
IJALEL 6(6):252-266, 2017 260
activities the students carried out in class. There were many comments in the students’ checklists on a very important
outcome of the implementation of our proposal, which was not explicitly included among the objectives of the model,
i.e. the motivational aspect of the learning process. Students commented that thought-provoking questions and activities
motivated them to search for further information about the topics discussed in class. Some of them commented that they
would like to read some other works by the same author and that the proposal had awakened their interest in
transnational literature. They also admitted that exploring and discussing the fictional text in groups not only helped
them to understand better current social phenomena such as immigration, but also helped them gain self-knowledge and
recognise their strengths and weaknesses, which is why in their checklist 42,86% of the students marked their own
performance in self-reflection as excellent.
Figure 5. Interpretation of the world
Figure 6. Self-Reflection
Figure 7. Intercultural Awareness
7. Conclusions and pedagogical implications

This study of the effectiveness of teaching critical thinking skills through literature in an EFL classroom in Spain
provides valuable data about the benefits and difficulties in implementing the model on which the investigation is
IJALEL 6(6):252-266, 2017 261
based. The analysis of the data reveals the great potential of working with a literary text in the English classroom to
foster critical thinking skills and opens up the possibility for a major goal: design and implement a long-term project,
that extends over at least a full school year, in order to maximize the effects of the model and develop suitable tools
teachers can use on a daily basis.
Considering the first research question: how do students and their teacher perceive the effectiveness of the model of
teaching critical thinking skills to improve students’ skills to think critically as well as their grasp of the foreign
language, the findings demonstrate that both students and their teacher perceive the model as highly effective. The main
constraint of this study is related to the relatively short period of time for the implementation of the proposal. While
students reported increased motivation and higher awareness about the nuances in word meanings, the research data
does not provide the required evidence about the positive perception of students’ grasp of the foreign language, which
implies that a further detailed investigation is necessary to validate our premise that reasoning, discussing, and relating a
literary text with topic relevant to the students improves the perception of their proficiency of the foreign language.
With regard to the second research question, how effective in operational terms are the evaluation instruments, in
particular, the Assessment Criteria Grid and the Assessment Checklists for students and teachers, the study concludes
that self-assessment as an integral part of the model and the ‘toolkit’ and its scale of descriptors allow for the correct
evaluation of the six dimensions of the model and contrastive analysis of the results. An unexpected highly positive
impact of the students’ understanding of the criteria included in the assessment tools and the opportunity that working
with the descriptors provides for reflecting on the meaning of the concept “critical thinking skills” sets the pace for
investigating and designing a supplementary pre-implementation stage, in which both students and teachers receive
explicit instruction into the principles of critical thinking.
The study sets the agenda for future research in areas such as the need to adapt the descriptors to the students’ age, in
case the instructor intends to implement the model with young learners, or the creation of practical guides that teachers
can use on a daily basis. The choice of the literary work is an important element in the implementation of our proposal,
hence the next step would be to establish the criteria for the selection of a literary text. Finally, to ensure the success of
the model it is desirable to extend it over a full school year and strengthen its compatibility with the material or
textbook the teacher uses for his course.
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Appendix 1
Developing Critical Thinking Skills through Literature: Assessment Criteria Grid
Dimensions of 1 - Poor 2- Below Satisfactory 3 - Good 4 - Excellent

Critical Thinking If applicable, consistently does all or If applicable, consistently does If applicable, consistently does If applicable, consistently does all or
Skills almost all of the following most or many of the following most or many of the following almost all of the following
Interpretation of --Fails to demonstrate the ability to --Demonstrates limited ability to --Demonstrates sufficient ability to -- Demonstrates a clear ability to
the world connect, interpret and discern the connect, interpret and discern the connect, interpret and discern the connect, interpret and discern the
intricacies of the world depicted in the intricacies of the world depicted in intricacies of the world depicted in intricacies of the world depicted in the
literary work. the literary work. the literary work. literary work.
--Fails to define clearly the issue or --Poorly defines the issue or --Adequately defines the issue or --Accurately defines the issue or
problem depicted in the literary work. problem depicted in the literary problem depicted in the literary problem depicted in the work.
--Fails to understand and interpret the work. work. --Appreciates the depth and breadth of
depth and breadth of the problem. --Has serious difficulties in -- Does not fully understand the the problem.
-- Fails to relate issues or problems understanding and interpreting the depth and breadth of the problem. --Can successfully relate issues or
depicted in the literary text to the world depth and breadth of the problem. --Can adequately relate issues or problems depicted in the literary text to
he lives in, hence his ability to interpret -- Cannot adequately relate issues problems depicted in the literary the world he lives in, which helps him
his own world remains unchanged. or problems depicted in the literary text to the world he lives in, which understand his own reality.
text to the world he lives in, hence opens up possibilities for new
his ability to interpret his own interpretations of his own world.
world does not improve noticeably.
Self-reflection -Fails to make connections between the -Makes limited connections -Makes some connections between -Makes clear connections between the
literary text and one’s own experiences between the literary text and one’s the literary text and one’s own literary text and one’s own experiences
and beliefs. own experiences and beliefs. experiences and beliefs. and beliefs.
-Fails to identify and explain the impact -Has difficulties in identifying and - Adequately identifies and -Identifies and accurately explains the
of the text on personal values, beliefs, explaining the impact of the text on explains the impact of the text on impact of the text on personal values,
styles of communication, and experience. personal values, beliefs, styles of personal values, beliefs, styles of beliefs, styles of communication, and
-Cannot understand one’s culture, communication, and experience. communication, and experience. experience.
personal and cultural biases, experiences, -Has difficulties in understanding -Demonstrates an adequate -Demonstrates a deep understanding of
and beliefs. one’s culture, personal and cultural understanding of one’s culture, one’s culture, personal and cultural
biases, experiences, and beliefs. personal and cultural biases, biases, experiences, and beliefs.
experiences, and beliefs.
Critical --Relies on insufficient, irrelevant, or --Gathers some credible, but not --Gathers sufficient and credible --Gathers sufficient, credible, and
awareness unreliable information. sufficient information; not all of it information and absorbs it via relevant information and absorbs it via
-- Fails to demonstrates the ability to is irrelevant and is not absorbed via awareness. awareness.
process data, using critical thinking. awareness. --Demonstrates a satisfactory --Demonstrates an excellent ability to
--Fails to identify or hastily dismisses --Demonstrates limited ability to ability to process data, using process data, using critical thinking.
strong, relevant counter-arguments. process data, using critical critical thinking. --Includes information that opposes as
thinking. -- Includes some information from well as supports the argued position.
-- Some strong counter-arguments opposing views.
may be omitted.
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Intercultural --Fails to recognize beliefs, values and --Recognizes some beliefs, values --Recognizes beliefs, values and --Clearly recognizes beliefs, values and
awareness customs based on different cultural and customs based on different customs based on different cultural customs based on different cultural
assumptions. cultural assumptions. assumptions. assumptions.
-- Misunderstands cultural differences -- Identifies and explains some -- Identifies and explains a variety -- Accurately identifies cultural
and is not able to interpret different cultural differences and of cultural differences and differences and clearly explains
cultural behaviours. behaviours. behaviours. different cultural behaviours.
Reasoning and --Fails to identify and interpret the --Identifies some of the choices of --Identifies and interprets the --Clearly identifies and interprets the
problem solving author´s choices regarding content and content and structure the author choices of content and structure the choices of content and structure the
structure. makes, but has difficulties author makes, but not with depth author makes.
--Makes illogical, inconsistent interpreting them. and precision. --Accurately examines each of the
conclusions. --Has difficulties analyzing each of -- Examines each of the areas of areas of choice, draws interferences,
--Ignores significant implications and the three areas of choice; choice with moderate precision, and arrives at conclusions based on
consequences of reasoning. interferences are often unclear, draws interferences, and arrives at evidence.
-- Because of its poor quality, reasoning illogical and inconsistent; conclusions based on evidence. --Identifies the most significant
does not allow the student to solve real- conclusions are not always based --Identifies the most significant implications and consequences of
world problems effectively. on evidence. implications and consequences of reasoning.
--Identifies improbable reasoning. -- Reasoning allows the student to
implications of reasoning. -- Reasoning allows the student to come up with an effective solution to a
-- Reasoning allows the student to come up with an adequate solution real-world problem.
interpret real-world problems to a real-world problem.
adequately, but not to come up
with a solution.
Language use --Fails to identify language tools. -- Identifies language tools used by --Adequately identifies language --Accurately identifies language tools
--Makes invalid assumptions regarding the author, but fails to explain tools used by the author to used by the author to influence our
the use of these language tools. them. influence our perception of the perception of the text.
--The assumptions regarding the text. --Makes consistent and reasonable
use of language tools are irrelevant --Makes reasonable assumptions assumptions regarding the use of
or not clearly stated. regarding the use of language language tools.
tools.
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If applicable, Dimensions of Assessment Criteria
score the critical thinking Comments
element (1-4) skills
Interpretation of the The student demonstrates a clear ability to connect, interpret and discern the intricacies of the world depicted in
world the literary work and can successfully relate issues or problems depicted in the literary text to the world he lives
in, which helps him understand his own reality.
Self-reflection The student makes clear connections between the literary text and one’s own experiences and beliefs.
Critical awareness The student demonstrates a clear ability to collect and process data, using critical thinking.
Intercultural The student clearly recognizes a variety of beliefs, values and customs based on different cultural assumptions.
awareness
Reasoning and The student clearly identifies and interprets the choices of content and structure the author makes, which allows
problem solving him to come up with an effective solution to a real-world problem.
Language use The student accurately identifies language tools used by the author to influence our perception of the text.
Overall score:
Appendix 2
Developing Critical Thinking Skills through Literature: Teacher Assessment Checklist
4 = Excellent. Critical thinking is marked by clarity, accuracy, relevance, depth, and breadth.
3 = Good. Critical thinking is competent and effective, but lacks exemplary precision, depth, and breadth.
2 = Below satisfactory. Critical thinking is often unclear, inaccurate, or/and ineffective.
1 = Poor. Critical thinking is unskilled and insufficient. It is marked by imprecision, superficiality, and lack of clarity
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If applicable, Dimensions of critical Assessment Criteria Comments
score the thinking skills
element (1-4)
Interpretation of the I can connect, interpret and discern the intricacies of the world depicted in the literary work and can
world successfully relate issues or problems depicted in the literary text to the world he lives in, which helps me
understand my own reality.
Self-reflection I can make clear connections between the literary text and my own experiences and beliefs.
Critical awareness I can effectively collect and process data, using critical thinking.
Intercultural awareness I can clearly recognise a variety of beliefs, values and customs based on different cultural assumptions.
Reasoning and problem I can clearly identify and interpret the choices of content and structure the author makes, which allows me
solving to come up with an effective solution to a real-world problem.
Language use I can accurately identify language tools used by the author to influence our perception of the text.
Overall score:
Appendix 3
Developing Critical Thinking Skills through Literature: Student Self-Assessment Checklist
4 = Excellent. Critical thinking is marked by clarity, accuracy, relevance, depth, and breadth.
3 = Good. Critical thinking is competent and effective, but lacks exemplary precision, depth, and breadth.
2 = Below satisfactory. Critical thinking is often unclear, inaccurate, or/and ineffective.
1 = Poor. Critical thinking is unskilled and insufficient. It is marked by imprecision, superficiality, and lack of clarity.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature
The Effect of Reflective Reading on Reading Comprehension of

Iranian EFL Learners
Nava Nourdad (Corresponding author)
University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran
E-mail: nourdad@tabrizu.ac.ir
Rasoul Asghari
E-mail: Rasulasghari2010@yahoo.com

Abstract
Reading comprehension as a survival skill in EFL context is included in almost all language proficiency and achievement
tests. However, it seems that traditional approaches to reading comprehension instruction have not been successful at
satisfying the learners’ need. Considering the advantages of reflective reading, it appeared as a probable solution to
reading problem of EFL learners. Therefore, this experimental study aimed at investigating the effect of reflective reading
on reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. To this end 49 male and female participants were selected through
convenient sampling and were randomly assigned to two control and experimental groups. An English proficiency test
was given to the sample to make sure about the homogeneity of the participants and equality of proficiency levels of the
two groups. Later reading comprehension ability of the study groups was measured. As the ten-session treatment began
the experimental group experienced reflective reading, while the control group followed conventional method of reading
and answering comprehension check questions. After the treatment period, the groups’ reading comprehension ability was
assessed once more. Independent samples t-tests were run to analyze the gathered data. It was found that reflective reading
has positive effect on reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. Pedagogical implications of this finding for
language teachers, learners, material developers, policy makers and researchers are discussed.
Keywords: reflective reading strategies, reflective learning, reading reflection, reading comprehension
1. Introduction
Reading ability has always been viewed as critical to academic success (Bernhardt, 1991). Reading comprehension has
been one of the important skills and maybe the most important one in Iranian EFL context. Almost all English tests
include reading comprehension section. Actually, it is the most commonly used skill for gaining knowledge, because
English is hardly ever spoken outside the EFL classroom (Davoudi & Yousefi, 2015). In spite of being the focus of
textbooks and conventional teaching methods, reading comprehension of the learners, unfortunately has not reached the
acceptable level.
Students usually lack adequate reading skills which results in comprehension deficiencies and lack of reading efficiency
(Ahmadpour, Bagherzadeh, & Valipur, 2014; Rezaei, Rahimi, & Talepasan, 2012). In EFL settings like Iran the majority
of learners tend to focus on word by word reading, sticking at every unknown word. This hinders their comprehension of
the author’s intended message and limits the focus of readers’ attention to word level.
In Iran many students still have problems in reading comprehension (Ahmadpour, Bagherzadeh, & Valipur, 2014).
Possible reasons for problem in reading comprehension can be the teaching method (Boehm & Gallavan, 2000), lack of
grammatical or vocabulary knowledge (Hirsch, 2003; Qian, 2002; Bensoussan, 1990), lack of background knowledge
(Dewitz & Dewitz, 2003), and low motivation to read (Alderson, 2000).
Poor readers usually cannot distinguish effective and poor strategies and their effects on reading comprehension. They are
not also well at monitoring activities during reading (NokhbehRousta & Ghazi Mirsaeed, 2012). Brown and Palincsar
(1985) believe an effective reading instruction program needs identifying complementary strategies modeled by the
teacher and learnt by the learner believing in their usefulness. As a remedial method for reading comprehension, reflective
reading has been suggested recently.
Reflective reading is one of the effective strategies for reading comprehension. Bressoud (2008) has suggested reading
reflection for enabling learners to overcome their reading tasks. Through this practice, learners assert their reflections
about the reading text after accomplishing each reading task and before attending class. Therefore, learners summarize the
main ideas of the reading, and they write about their understanding and feeling about the reading text. It has been
mentioned that reflective reading practice motivates learners to read regularly and it also improves understanding of the
content and boost learners’ development of monitoring, reflection skills, and self-evaluation (Bressoud, 2008). Learners’
IJALEL 6(6):267-273, 2017 268
examination, revision, and evaluation of their beliefs and experiences throughout the texts are highly required in reflective
reading. So doing, learners evaluate their beliefs and experiences which lead to certain understandings of texts.
Abilities to understand the reading process and making meaning based on the personal contexts are the characteristics of
good reading skills (Lew & Schmidt, 2011). Reflective reading encourages learners to examine the relationship between
information and conclusion. Reflective reading shows learners how moving from information to conclusion is often
affected by individuals’ histories, cultures, beliefs, and experiences which are extra-textual features (Lew & Schmidt,
2011). Most of the reflective reading strategies includes writing (e.g. journal writing, reporting, think-aloud etc.), and it is
another fortifying factor in helping the learners to understand the text better though reflective reading.
Being a newly suggested method, it has not been widely investigated yet. Therefore, this study was designed to
investigate whether reflective reading can have any effect on reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. To this end
the following research question was posed:
R.Q.: Does reflective reading have any effect on the reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners?
2. Review of the Related Literature
2.1 Reading Comprehension
Studies on reading comprehension include the effects of different types of strategies for improving reading comprehension.
For example, Sporer, Brunstein, and Kieschke (2009) tried to investigate the effect of three strategy instructions on school
students' reading comprehension ability. Experimental groups were taught four reading strategies (summarizing,
questioning, clarifying, predicting) and practiced these strategies in small groups (reciprocal teaching), pairs, or strategy-
based instructor-guided instruction. The result showed that the experimental groups had higher scores in reading
comprehension tests.
In another study, Su (2006) investigated the effect of the teaching strategies on reading skill. The findings showed that the
instruction was fruitful. These strategies included guessing vocabulary from context and looking for key words. In favor of
strategy, Yeh’s study (2006) proved the positive effect of teaching reading strategies on reading comprehension
performance and the attitude towards such instruction.
Reviewing studies which applied different strategies in order to deal with reading comprehension shows those effective
strategies had positive effect on reading comprehension and there is more room to study the newly suggested strategies
and models in order to improve reading comprehension. One of these newly suggested strategies is called reflective
reading which is not investigated in Iranian context and there is need to study its effect.
2.2 Reflective Reading
Reflective reading is a branch of reflection concept. In Dewey’s (1933) reflective reading approach, manipulation of
knowledge towards the generation of knowledge is focused. Reflection occurs when learner notes that his/her
understanding is different from the reality and then s/he identifies this difference and plans for it (Cowan, 1998, p.16).
One of the reflective reading strategies is Think-Aloud in which the reader can present the internal dialogue about an
observable text (Walker, 2005). So doing, teachers observe the learners thinking while reading.
Journal writing is another Reflection reading strategies. In reflection journals, writing helps facilitate reflection. It has
been agreed that writing facilitates learning and helps in integration of new knowledge (Crowe & Youga, 1986). Learners
are forced to think in order to clarify and modify their ideas and understanding through journal writing and consequently
revise their understanding in a different form. Developing and recognizing the habits of mind associated with problem
solving is one of the aims of journal writing (Stephien, Gallagher, & Workman, 1998, p. 153). Writing makes a learner
filter, reconstruct, organize, gather, process, and feel the experiences that s/he has undergone. Teachers believe that
students can develop their own understanding about subjects through journal writing process, and construct their own
knowledge base.
Wirth and Aziz (2009) evaluated the effect of reading reflections on reading, learning, and self-awareness of students. The
learners had reading reflections after each reading task. The reflections encouraged more regular reading and improved
content mastery, development of monitoring, self-evaluation, and reflection skills. Reading reflections also facilitated
'just-in-time' teaching. The results of the study confirmed that reading reflections in the courses resulted in improvements
in reading and course performance. The researchers mention that reading reflections are useful in improving learning.
Reading reflections make learners read more regularly before class, read more deeply, and use various strategies. The
reflections are even more effective for under-performing learners.
Holmes and Moulton (1997), investigated the perspectives of second-language university students on dialogue journal
writing as a strategy for learning English. The learners had dialogue journal entries 15 weeks, and were interviewed at the
end. They reported promotion in both writing fluency and motivation. Trites’ (2001) study showed that leaners enjoyed
sharing their ideas with their teacher and peers, and as a result of journal writing built a closer relationship with them.
Ghaith and Obeid (2004) instructed think-aloud strategies and found an improvement in overall reading. The learners
confirmed this finding in the follow-up interview sessions and mentioned that they will use it in future.
The recent attention on reflective learning and the limited number of the studies in the field reflects an absolute need to
investigate the issue comprehensively. The importance of such studies is even greater in EFL context of Iran, where
learners not only suffer from sever reading comprehension problems, due to lack of the required skills and strategies, but
IJALEL 6(6):267-273, 2017 269
also have no practice on reflection, neither at home nor in educational contexts. Considering these severe problems, the
present study aimed at investigating the probable effect of reflective reading on enhancing reading comprehension ability
of Iranian adult EFL learners
3. Methodology
3.1 Participants
To have the intended and appropriate participants four pre-intermediate level classes with the total number of 58 learners
from the whole number of the existing population in a foreign language institute (n = 342) were selected for this study.
The sampling method was non-random convenient sampling from the classes of the researchers. The homogenies
participants (n = 49) were participating in four intact classes. The control group (n= 23) and experimental group (n= 26)
were randomly assigned for the study. Both female and male learners with almost equal number were participated in the
study. The learners were all Iranian EFL learners with Turkish as their mother tongue and Persian their second and official
national language. None of the participants had an experience of staying in an English speaking country.
3.2 Material
A language proficiency test of (PET) was used to select a homogeneous sample regarding English language proficiency.
Besides, reading comprehension tests were applied to gather information about the participants’ reading comprehension
performance before and after the treatment. These reading comprehension tests included 20 items. The tests were designed
by the researchers and in order to check their reliability and validity, pilot studies were designed prior to the study. The
texts were unseen and were adopted from reading sections of parallel EFL text books of pre-intermediate level other than
the course books of the participants. The results of pilot studies revealed reliability of .83 and .77 based on Cronbach's
alpha for pre-test and post-test reading comprehension tests respectively. The validity of the items was also double
checked by an expert EFL teachers.
3.3 Procedure
A convenient sample comprising of 58 learners was selected from the population of the study in an English language
Institute. The intact classes were given a PET test and 49 homogeneous learners whose scores fell between ± 1 standard
deviation were selected for this study. Furthermore, an independent samples t-test was run to compare the proficiency
levels of the two study groups, the results of which did not reveal a statistically significant difference.
In order to compare the study groups’ reading comprehension skill, a reading comprehension pre-test was given to the
participants and the results showed that the groups did not have any significant differences prior to the treatment.
By the treatment phase, reflective reading model for reading comprehension tasks was administrated to experimental
group and conventional techniques for reading comprehension task was administrated to control group. Experimental
group was familiarized with dialogue journal writing. Therefore, the learners were told to use a binder or notebook in
order to take notes on the left hand page and write their reflections on right hand page. On the left side, the source of the
reading, quotations that stand out, a summary of key points, steps or procedures, models or frameworks were included.
Some questions were written in order to submit their responses.
Additionally, they were asked to reflect on how the information fits with their current knowledge or experience, ask
themselves questions such as “Did I learn something new?”, “What was helpful about this reading?”. The treatment lasted
for ten sessions during which the instructor provided the participants with explicit explanations on the nature of the task,
modeled some reflective reading and gave them the chance to go over the new experience each session in the class. They
were also asked to use the acquired strategy at home to perform the intended task for the following session. Since the
technique was quite new and unknown to the learners some time was specified to answer the readers’ probable questions
or to solve the related problems which decreased noticeably during the treatment sessions.
By fulfilling the treatment period, the groups were given reading comprehension post-test, the results of which were
analyzed applying another independent sample t-test.
3.4 Design
The design of the present study was quasi-experimental research. Since there was lack of random selection of the sample,
the language proficiency test (PET) was applied among the participants to assure about their homogeneity in language
proficiency and select homogeneous sample out of convenient sample. The participants were divided into two groups; an
experimental group and a control group. Since the study was to investigate the effect of reflective reading on reading
comprehension of Iranian EFL learners, reading ability of the study groups were measured before the treatment and the
groups’ means and possible differences in variance were compared. The treatment of the study included 10 sessions of
reading comprehension classes. After the treatment period, the groups’ reading comprehension ability were measured
again. By gathering the reading comprehension post test scores the performances of the two study groups in reading
comprehension and their motivation rate were compared to get the results of the study.
4. Findings and discussion
4.1 Descriptive Statistics
Descriptive statistics of reading comprehension tests including mean score and standard deviation of both experimental
and control groups are provided in Table 1.
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Table 1. Descriptive Statistics of Reading Comprehension Tests
Mean N Std. Deviation
Control Group 7.00 23 1.34
Pre-test Experimental Group 26
6.69 1.28
Control group 7.60 23 1.49

Post-test
Experimental group 8.38 26 1.06
As it is shown in Table 1, the mean score for control group was 7 prior to the treatment and 7.60 in post treatment. The
mean score for the reflective reading group was 6.69 prior to the treatment and 8.38 in post treatment. Both groups showed
increase in reading comprehension after the treatment. The increase was less than 1 point for control group and slightly
less than 2 points for experimental group.
4.2 Inferential Statistics
To investigate the possible difference in reading comprehension between two groups of the study prior to the treatment, an
independent samples t-test was run, the results of which are presented in Table 2.
Table 2. Independent Samples t-test for Reading Comprehension Pre-test

Levene's t-test for Equality of Means
Test for
Equality of
Variances
F Sig. t df Sig. (2-Mean Std. Error 95% Confidence
tailed) Difference Difference Interval of the
Difference
Lower Upper
Equal variances
.17 .68 .81 47 .41 .30 .37 -.45 1.06
Reading assumed
Scores Equal variances
.81 45.6 .42 .30 .37 -.45 1.06
not assumed
According to Table 2, independent samples t-test showed no significant difference between control and experimental
groups’ reading ability prior to the treatment (p= 0.41 (2-tailed), t (47) = 0.81, p> 0.05). So the two study groups were
almost the same in reading comprehension prior to the treatment.
In order to answer the research question, does reflective reading have any effect on the reading comprehension of Iranian
EFL learners? another independent sample t-test was run. This test was run in order to understand the possible difference
between reading comprehensions post-test. The results of this independent sample t-test are shown in Table 3.
Table 3. Independent Samples t-test for Reading Comprehension Post-test

Levene's t-test for Equality of Means
Test for
Equality of
Variances
F Sig. t Df Sig. (2-Mean Std. Error 95% Confidence Interval of
tailed) Difference Difference the Difference
Lower Upper
Equal
variances 3.51 .06 -2.10 47 .04 -.77 .36 -1.51 -.01
assumed
Post
Equal
reading
variances
-2.06 39.06 .04 -.77 .37 -1.53 -.03
not
assumed
IJALEL 6(6):267-273, 2017 271
As it is shown in Table 3, the results (p = .04 (2-tailed), t (47) = -2.10, p < 0.05) indicate a significant difference between
the groups' reading comprehension scores after the treatment. Therefore, the experimental group (M= 8.38, SD = 1.06) had
higher reading comprehension performance than the control group (M= 7.60, SD = 1.49) after the treatment.
Consequently, reflective reading proved to be influential in increasing reading comprehension performance of Iranian EFL
learners.
The present study found the positive effects of reflective reading strategies on reading comprehension performance of
Iranian EFL learners. These findings are in line with the findings of previous related studies in the field (Wirth & Aziz,
2009; Alexander, 2001; Andrusyszyn & Davie, 1997; Carroll & Mchawala, 2001; Jonassen, 1994; Trites, 2001).
In line with Wirth and Aziz, the present study showed the positive effect of reflective reading on reading comprehension.
Wirth and Aziz (2009) evaluated the impact of reading reflections on student reading, learning, and self-awareness as
learners. In their study, students submitted reading reflections after completing each reading assignment. These reflections
not only encourage students to read more regularly, they also promote content mastery and foster student development of
monitoring, self-evaluation, and reflection skills. As Wirth and Aziz (2009) discussed, reflective reading strategies make
the learners more attached to the task, to read repeatedly, to self-evaluate their own performance which yield in better
performance in reading comprehension. From the existing literature and methods for comparing with the findings of the
present study, there was no study showing the lack of positive effect of reflective reading strategies on reading
comprehension.
Reading is directly related to thinking, so instruction on thinking can positively affect reading ability of the learners. As an
active decoding process, reading requires a close relationship between reader and text. Comprehension involves extraction
of information from text and integrating its various components in the best possible way while connecting them to existing
schemata of prior knowledge. This requires high levels of thinking and creativity on the part of reader. Both reflection and
creative thinking involve cognitive and metacognitive strategies which are essential for comprehension. Danesh and
Nourdad (2017) reported a significant positive relationship between creative problem solving (CPS) skill and reading
comprehension. The results of their study revealed that students with higher CPS had better comprehension of the texts.
Reflection as a key element in creative thinking and creative problem solving, therefore, can have a relationship with
reading comprehension.
Reflection in particular goes well with higher order tasks. To answer higher order thinking questions, memorization of
facts and knowledge will not work. Readers attempt to put the gained information in a new perspective by manipulating
the text, developing an active link between the pieces, and creating new combinations (Nourdad, 2015). Through
reflection the learner may revise his/her understanding from the reading text, which results in self-guidance and
independent learning. Through reflection, the learner also gains a network of understanding and at the end of the process
s/he puts all the gathered understanding to make a whole understanding of the material. Reflection helps learners to clarify
their thoughts, to gain insights and to understand the received information more deeply (Higgs, 1988, p.47).
Through journal writing, learners write their thoughts and understanding. Writing makes the learning process easier and
helps integration of new knowledge. Writing makes learners think, consequently, clarify and modify his/her ideas. The
learner needs to revise his/her understanding of the text. This revision is continuously done by reading the upcoming
paragraphs and acquiring additional information provided within the text. Therefore, through reflective reading and
presenting it in their journal writing, learners build on their understanding of the knowledge linking the new information to
the old. The readers, consequently, come up with the very crucial role of the context, and realize the very important role
context plays in reading comprehension. So, they try to make a meaningful map between different concepts in the reading
comprehension text and make a general comprehension and understanding from the text. This in turn results in putting
away the unfruitful practice of reading the text sentence by sentence, translating word by words and missing the intended
message of the author.
Since it was concluded that reflective reading strategies were helpful in improving the reading comprehension skill of the
learners, the language curriculum developers, syllabus designers, and teachers can use these strategies in their planning,
textbooks, and methods to improve the learners’ reading comprehension skill. English language teachers can take these
strategies for teaching reading in order to improve their learners reading comprehension. Not only at institutes but also at
school and university classes, instructors can apply these strategies. Syllabus designers should specify a section of each
unit to reflective strategies and questions. Tasks can be developed purposefully to enhance learners’ reflective thinking,
reflective reading, and accordingly reading comprehension ability. Test developers can also take advantage of positive
washback effect of the items included in the test to move learners toward reflection.
The implications of these findings are by no means limited to foreign language teaching and learning. It is also best suited
to the educational context in its broader terms. Unfortunately, Iranian education system in all its levels suffers from major
drawbacks in theory and practice. Taking a psychological approach to education and considering learners more than
individuals for rote memorization of massive data, curriculum developers need to reconsider their definitions of education.
The current materials need to undergo revision to move the learners toward self-awareness, control of learning, autonomy,
motivation, and reflection. Learners should be reflective practitioners while reflection is defined as a mental process of
thinking and learning in everyday life.
Savin-Baden (2000, p. 9) defines learning as a ‘cyclical process’ in which learners develop understandings of themselves
and their contexts and the ways and situations in which they learn effectively. In this constructive perspective learning is
gaining in knowledge and understanding the world around through questioning, interpreting, and analyzing information. A
IJALEL 6(6):267-273, 2017 272
learner should be a reflective practitioner and it definitely needs to be considered in educational systems.
5. Conclusion
New studies in reading are showing that one out of five students has significant difficulty in reading acquisition (Hausheer,
Hansen, & Doumas, 2011), so it is important to solve this commonplace problem among the learners. Lower performance
not only yield in less score but also it yields in discouragement and demotivation as well. One probable solution for
improving reading comprehension is reflective reading strategy. The present study aimed to find out the effect of reflective
reading on reading comprehension ability of EFL learners. As the result proved the positive effect of reflective reading
strategies on reading comprehension of the learners, it can be concluded that reflection forms the important link between
processing the new information and integrating it with the existing understanding of the reading text. Through the
reflection the learner may revise his/her understanding from the reading text, which causes to the self-guidance and
independent learning. Through different reflection, the learner provides a network of understanding and at the end of the
process s/he puts all learned understanding to make a whole understanding of the material. The value of reflection in
learning lies in its ability to help learners to clarify their thoughts, to gain insights and to deepen their understanding of the
information that they receive (Higgs, 1988, p.47). Language teachers should push their learners a level above the word by
word reading of the texts and teach them the macro level look through reflection. This not only improves their reading
comprehension but also moves them toward higher order thinking skills which are the key to academic success.
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Needs Analysis and Course Design; A Framework for

Designing Exam Courses
Reza Eshtehardi
The British Council Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
E-mail: eshtehardi8@gmail.com

Abstract
This paper introduces a framework for designing exam courses and highlights the importance of needs analysis in
designing exam courses. The main objectives of this paper are to highlight the key role of needs analysis in designing
exam courses, to offer a framework for designing exam courses, to show the language needs of different students for
IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exam, to offer an analysis of those needs and to explain how
they will be taken into account for the design of the course. First, I will concentrate on some distinguishing features in
exam classes, which make them different from general English classes. Secondly, I will introduce a framework for
needs analysis and diagnostic testing and highlight the importance of needs analysis for the design of syllabus and
language courses. Thirdly, I will describe significant features of syllabus design, course assessment, and evaluation
procedures.
Keywords: backwash effects, exam classes, receptive skills, ND (Needs Analysis), DT (Diagnostic Testing), ESP
(English for Specific Purposes), IELTS (International English Language Testing System)
1. Introduction
The term ‘analysis of needs’ first introduced and used by Michael West in India in the 1920s (Howatt, 1984:245;
Tickoo, 1988). It was developed and emphasized in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and it is argued that it is not
possible to analyze the needs of general English learners. Hutchinson and Walters (1987) describe need analysis as the
most prominent feature of English for Specific Purposes course design. Needs analysis is actually the starting point for a
course design. It is a necessary part of a curriculum development and is required in the early stages of developing a
syllabus. Thus, the information gathered from a need analysis can be used to highlight the program objectives and to
select relevant material for the syllabus. A successful course begins when both teachers and students are brought
together through the course syllabus. An effective course design conveys information about expectations. It functions as
a contract between teacher and students. Entering university is a major goal for many students; therefore they need to
improve their language proficiency in order to pass a standard language exam like IELTS. There are students who fail
to achieve their desired results in standard examinations even after attending exam preparation classes. This is mainly
because some exam courses are not fully designed based on students’ needs, wants, and expectations. This study
introduces a standard framework for syllabus/course designers based on students’ actual needs for academic contexts.
1.1 Exam and General English Classes
There are some distinctive features in exam classes that make them different from general English classes:
1.1.1 Clear objectives: Nauton & Hughes (1997) note that an exam course has clear goals. Accordingly, the teacher's
lesson plans will also have specific objectives. They also believe that an exam course places greater demands on the
learners but, at the end, the successful ones receive a qualification.
1.1.2 Common objectives: Nauton & Hughes (1997) also note that on an exam course, all students have a common
objective to follow, but on a general English course, there are various purposes such as students who need English for
other purposes like business or students who have been sent to take the course.
1.1.3 High stakes: Exam classes are at high stakes. This is another distinctive feature of exam classes and may have
different effects on a course such as harmful/beneficial backwash.
A course planner can create harmful backwash by being too worried about the test and therefore creates no balance
between testing and teaching. Exams students and teachers need to have a clear understanding of the course. Teachers
and course designer must be aware that all objectives and planning in an exam course must be based on needs, wants
and weaknesses of students.
1.2 Backwash Effect
Testing has a great influence on teaching and learning. What is assessed becomes what is valued, which becomes what
is taught (McEwan 1995:42). Prodmorou (1995) defines backwash as the direct or indirect effect of examinations on
teaching methods. Hughes (1989) categorizes backwash into harmful and beneficial and believes that if the course is
IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 275
planned purely “to the test” and does not take into account the linguistic needs of the learners, then there is likely to be
harmful backwash. In order to avoid harmful backwash, there must be a logical balance between testing and teaching.
The teacher and course designer must consider the importance of each. Lessons should be interesting and useful to
prepare students for a test. Nauton & Hughes (1997) agree that students on exam courses need to improve their general
language proficiency as well as exams skills in order to pass the exam and to use English in their real-life situations. We
should avoid a situation whereby students are proficient in exam skills but lack the essential language skills outside the
exam environment. In order to keep the balance between teaching and testing, a course designer needs to design lessons
that encourage students to learn rather than to test.
1.3 Exam Class Students
Nauton & Hughes (1997) believe that exam students have a particular sense of purpose, which we do not usually find in
general classes. They also have different expectations of the course and teacher. They are often spending a substantial
amount of money in order to benefit from teacher’s expertise. As Burgess and Head (2005) reflect they expect their
teacher to be completely familiar with the format of the exam and help them be familiar too, provide useful tips on how
to tackle each part, help them develop their language skills and provide feedback on homework. There are also various
reasons that have negative effects on students such as anxiety, burnout factor, class time, student age etc. Some exam
classes are quite boring for students. In order to avoid these negative factors, a course planner should prepare interesting
tasks, select topics of interest and plan discussion activities even when the objective of the lesson is to develop receptive
skills.
1.4 Motivation
Motivation is a key factor in exam classes. Students tend to be highly motivated comparing with general classes
students. The level of motivation among students tends to be quite high at the start of a course. Burgess (2005) notes
that most students start with a strong feeling that they can succeed, and teachers need to support them by understanding
that belief, especially when they are becoming anxious, but in my experience, this needs to be qualified, as I have seen
many students who feel opposite. Harmer (2007) believes that a variety of factors can create motivation for students.
External and internal factors create extrinsic, intrinsic and instrumental motivations. Many exam learners are
extrinsically motivated, that is there is an external factor - like passing a university entrance exam - which motivates
them. Intrinsic motivation is created by what happens inside the classroom - like being able to communicate well in
class. It can also be instrumental in that the exam will help them carry out tasks in English – like doing assignments at
university. However, exam students are not always highly motivated due to various reasons, for instance, they could be
purely extrinsically motivated or sent to class by parents or they could become demotivated by poor results. Teachers
have great roles in class to sustain motivation throughout the course. This can be done as Harmer (2007) mentions by
different techniques and planning such as giving students more agency in class, caring about individual students’ needs
and planning more motivating tasks.
1.5 Student Autonomy
Student autonomy plays an important role in exam courses. Exam students should develop a wide variety of skills and
strategies in order to achieve successful results. May (1996) defines student autonomy as activities to raise learners’
awareness of exam questions and make students more independent in order to tackle exam appropriately. Oxford (1990)
notes that most of these skills and strategies refer to meta-cognitive strategies: they include exams training which
involves learners becoming familiar with the content of the exam and strategies training which involves helping learners
develop their competence in language skills such as thinking about the text’s topic before reading it. An exam teacher,
therefore, should consider students’ autonomy by planning more learner training tasks such as skimming, scanning and
dictionary skills activities.
Therefore, an exam class course designer is supposed to design a course…
 based on learners’ needs, wants and weaknesses,
 to minimize negative backwash,
 to sustain interest and motivation,
 with clear and specific objectives,
 to reduce students anxiety and burnout effect,
 to focus on strategies and encourage self-study.
2. Needs Analysis
2.1 Learners’ Profile
I randomly selected a class of four pre-intermediate students for this research. Their Listening and Reading scores were
below 4 but their Speaking and Writing were 5 to 5.5 in an academic mock IELTS placement test, so clearly they need
to improve their Reading and Listening scores to 5.5 in order to enter university.
S1 S2 S3 S4
Nationality Chinese Chinese Malaysian Yemeni
Age 21 22 25 23
Gender Female Female Male Male
Class Mon. & Wed. 4 hours The British Council Malaysia
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2.2 Needs Analysis (NA) and Diagnostic Testing (DT)

Graves (2000) notes that needs analysis is a systematic and ongoing process of gathering information about students’
needs and interpreting the information in order to have an effective course to meet the needs. Nunan (1988) categorizes
information about students in two groups: objective and subjective. Objective information includes facts about who the
students are, their language abilities and why they need the language. Subjective information includes the attitudes and
expectations that students have about the course. I have collated both subjective and objective data, as I believe both of
them are necessary in order to have a clear picture of students’ needs.
2.2.1 Needs Analysis (NA) Questionnaire: Suggested by Hutchinson and Waters (1987), I have used a variety of
methods in order to have a better understanding of the students’ actual needs. An NA questionnaire is designed to
collate subjective and objective data. I created and administered the questionnaire mainly from Naunton, Hughes,
Hutchinson, and Waters. There is also a learning style inventory that I found relevant to this study to identify their
learning style. (Appendix 2)
Key Findings:
 Motivation: They are extrinsically and instrumentally motivated. They need to pass the test in order to enter
university or live abroad. The level of extrinsic motivation is higher than instrumental one.
 Learning style: They are mainly visual and auditory learners. The visual learner prefers to take notes and make
pictures. The auditory learners prefer communication activities. They prefer to read their work aloud.
 Learners’ preferences: They all prefer to improve IELTS receptive modules and learn strategies to help them
answer the questions properly. This indicates that they have similar expectations.
2.2.2 Diagnostic Testing (DT): Harris and McCann (1994) mention that diagnostic tests are based on failure whereas
almost all other tests are based on success. During the interview session, I noticed that they need to improve their
receptive skills more than productive ones. Based on my observation and the NA results, which reveal the training gap
in receptive skills, I chose past academic receptive modules of IELTS papers for their DT. The students were quite
aware of the format and difficulty level of the tests so the tests had content and face validity. They took the tests in one
session and in 1 hour and 40 min. Since the scoring in receptive skills in IELTS is objective, the tests were considered
reliable. (Appendix 3)
Key Findings:
The percentages here represent the correct answers given by students.
The students’ weaknesses are in complete the sentences (6%), choose the topics and short answers (7%) and choose
correct words and choose correct phrases (9%). They block mainly on unknown vocabulary and pronunciation,
especially in longer recordings.
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Their weaknesses are mostly in complete the sentences (6%) and matching paragraphs (9%). These results reveal that
unknown vocabulary and lack of employing reading skills are their main weaknesses in Reading.
2.3 Question Type Questionnaire and Interview
This is a small group of learners and as Graves (2000) mentions, it is feasible to adapt different methods to collate data.
In this case, the possibility of misinterpretation of the teacher’s observation and students’ actual needs would reduce.
The main purpose of this questionnaire is to compare students’ conception of their own weaknesses and strengths with
the outcome of the diagnostic test. The results of the DT proved that students have an accurate understanding of their
strengths and weaknesses in receptive modules of IELTS. They found complete the sentences, choose the topics and
short answers, choose correct words, choose correct phrases problematic in Listening, and complete the sentences and
matching paragraphs problematic in Reading (Appendix 4).
An informal interview was also done after the DT to discuss the problematic areas in the test. The questions were
designed based on observation and the outcome of NA (Appendix 5).
Key Findings:
 Time management is an issue,
 They need to improve their IELTS vocabulary,
 They need to know how to approach different reading and listening questions,
 They expect a lot of homework and feedback individually after each test,
2.4 Priorities for Learning and Course Design
Area They need to… Based on Evidence
Listening develop listening skills: listening for gist, specific DT Appendix 3

information etc.
Listening take notes of key words and numbers while Observation
listening.
Listening be exposed to different types of questions. NA, DT, Appendix 2, 3, 5
Interview,
Reading improve their reading speed. Interview Appendix 5
Reading develop reading skills: skimming, scanning etc. Question Type Appendix 4, 5
Questionnaire,
Interview
Reading infer the meaning of unfamiliar words from the Interview Appendix 5
context and their own background knowledge.
Vocabulary improve their academic vocabulary. NA, DT, Appendix 2., 3, 5
Interview
Learner focus on their individual learning preferences and NA Appendix 2
Training strategies.
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3. Course Proposal
3.1 Goals and Objectives
Graves (2000) says that goals are the main outcomes of a course and objectives spell out how these goals are supposed
to be achieved. She also believes that objectives are in a hierarchical relationship to goals. Brown (1995) noted that the
level of specificity is the main difference between goals and objectives. Goals are more general and objectives more
specific. Nunan (1988) believes that the results of NA can be used to set goals and objectives. Stern (1992) has
categorized goals in four groups: Cognitive, Proficiency, Affective and Transfer goals. The following goals are set
based on the students’ needs, wants, weaknesses, and Graves’ (2000) framework.
a) Proficiency goal: By the end of the course, students will have developed effective receptive skills and will
obtain score 6 in the receptive modules of IELTS.
b) Transfer goal: By the end of the course, students will have developed their interpersonal skills and learner
strategies and will have a clear understating of how to continue to develop their receptive skills.
c) Affective goal: By the end of the course, students will have developed a positive attitude and confidence in their
ability to approach IELTS.
Graves (2000) notes that a goal can be broken down into different objectives. By achieving the objectives then the goal
will be reached. For this reason, there must be a relationship between objectives and goals. Richards (1990) identifies
four different types of objectives: Behavioral, Skills-based, Content-based and Proficiency-based objectives. Based on
the NA results, I have identified some lacks in micro-skills of listening and reading. The students need to develop their
learning strategies and their positive attitude in order to approach the exam systematically. For this reason, I have
chosen skills-based and behavioral objectives (Appendix 1).
3.2 Syllabus Design
Richards (2002) defines syllabus as a description of the contents, instructions of a course and the teaching order of each
part. He believes syllabuses are designed based on various criteria such as grammatical items, vocabulary or language
functions, and situations. There are different ways in which syllabuses are analyzed. One dimension of analysis is the
synthetic/analytic dimension. Wilkins (1976) notes that an analytic syllabus is designed based on learners’ needs.
Nunan (1988) categorizes syllabuses into two groups:
 Product-oriented: in which the focus is on the skills and knowledge that learners are supposed to obtain
because of instruction.
 Process-oriented: in which the focus is on the learning experiences.
This syllabus is largely an analytic one, which lets students analyze the items of most use to them. On the other hand,
although there are some product-oriented objectives in this syllabus like achieving academic vocabulary, it is primary
process-oriented as the focus is mainly on learning strategies. I believe the students need to be exposed to a variety of
texts and activities to improve their learning strategies. This can be achieved best through skills-based syllabus as
Munby (1987) mentions. The goal of skills based syllable is to improve the learners’ ability within specified skills using
different micro-skills, language systems and activities rather than merely focusing on a particular form.
3.3 Sequencing of Content
Freeman (1998) says that language acquisition is not a linear and discrete process, but it is an organic and unpredictable
one. Nunan’s task continuity principle (1989) which is about the essential relationship between the completion of a
prior activity as a prerequisite for succeeding one, is the major consideration in sequencing materials in this syllabus.
Each lesson starts with a noticing activity to activate students’ awareness of the lesson. The activities are appropriately
sequenced to meet the needs of the students. For instance, in session 1, students are introduced to skimming and
scanning followed by a short activity. They then in session 2 apply the techniques to do a reading activity and develop
the use of reading skills. Another example of sequencing can be seen within session 6 in which the listening skill of
prediction is introduced in one activity and practiced in another. I also utilized homework in session 2 to set the
framework of the reading lesson in session 3.
3.4 Teaching Approach and Materials
A task-based teaching is utilized to create a beneficial backwash in the course by creating a balance between teaching
and testing. The tasks and materials are also designed based on students’ needs, preferences (Appendix 2) and IELTS
content in order to help students develop their strategies, achieve the transfer goal and succeed in the exam. Materials
are prepared based on course objectives, students’ needs and motivation, difficulty level and content of IELTS. A
variety of recordings and clear visual materials are also prepared to meet the needs of visual and auditory students. A
range of past IELTS papers, published and self-made materials are prepared to respond to the students’ needs of various
topics and contexts and to familiarize them with the authentic texts and question types. In order to motivate the students,
avoid burnout effect and to make a balance between receptive and productive components of the exam, a writing
activity in session 5, some speaking activities in session 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, some grammar activities in session 4 and 7 and
some pronunciation lessons in session 3 and 10 are also designed. Vocabulary activities in session 2, 3, 5, 8 and 9 are
designed to boost the students’ needs in academic vocabulary. A learner diary at the end of each session creates learner
autonomy. The stages of each lesson are pre-task, task and post task.
IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 279
4. Assessment and Evaluation
Graves (2000) believes that assessment plays three major roles in course design: assessing needs, assessing students'
learning, and evaluating the course. Ur (1991) draws a distinction between assessment (learners’ performance) and
evaluation (effectiveness of a syllabus). Brown (2001) says that assessment can be done in three ways: formal, informal
and self-assessments. Graves (2000) reflects that assessment can be both formative and summative.
4.1 Formative Assessment
4.1.1 Formal: as Graves (2000) indicates, formative assessment takes place during the course and provides information
about how well the students are progressing in the course, and allows the teacher to make future adjustments to the
syllabus. She also reflects that assessing progress means to find what students have learned so far in the course and the
best criteria for assessing a skill-based course is the goals and objectives of the course. For this reason and based on the
students’ positive approach towards tests (Appendix 5), the course objectives can be used as the assessment criteria for
the students’ progress. Since this is a short course, two formative tests are prepared:
Test Session Content Time (min) Objective

1 After 3 Reading 30 2, 3, 5
2 After 6 Reading/Listening 45 2, 3, 4, 5
Hughes (1989) believes that a test has content validity when its content constitutes a representative sample of the
language skills and relevant structures. Baxter (1997) says face validity means the test should appear to test what it is
supposed to test. The tests here test subskills/tasks previously worked on in class and are prepared from past IELTS
tests in order to maximize the content and face validity. For example, formative test 1 tests students’ understanding of
skimming, scanning and reading for details by multiple choice and Yes/No/Not Given questions. All these skills are
developed in sessions 1, 2 and 3.
Hughes (1989) reflects that if we intend to directly test the skills that we want to improve, then practice for the test
should represent practice in those skills. The tests here test students’ skills directly and expose them to actual exam
papers in order to develop their exam skills.
All sub-skills of reading and listening are considered in the tests. As the tests are scored objectively, they are considered
reliable. The tests reflect class work so they can create positive backwash. Some questions in test 1 are repeated in test 2
in order to create a link between them and assess students’ progress in particular sub-skills: for example “Complete the
sentences” in both tests.
4.1.2 Informal: Harris (1994) says that informal assessment is a continuous way of collecting information about
students’ performance without establishing the conditions of formal assessment. The time we have for informal
assessment is limited, as we need to follow the aims of the lesson. For this reason, we should know exactly what we are
going to assess informally. Harris (1994) believes that non-linguistic factors are also important elements in students’
overall development. Students’ attitude, cooperation, independence, creativity, and participation in different activities
will be assessed through a formative class log (Appendix 6). The information obtained will reveal a clearer picture of
the students’ emerging needs. The linguistic factors will be assessed by class observation and assessment of their
performance in different tasks.
4.2 Self-assessment
Harris and McCann (1994) say that self-assessment provides us with useful information about students’ needs, feelings
about their progress and the course in general. Two self- assessment tools will be used for self-assessment:
4.2.1 Learners’ diaries: students are given a questionnaire after each activity to evaluate the activity. This will result
in developing learner autonomy (Appendix 7).
4.2.2 Counseling: can-do statements against objectives will be used to focus on problematic areas individually which
in turn results in better self-assessment.
4.3 Summative Assessment
Graves (2000) notes that summative assessment is done at the end of a course and provides information about the
students’ achievement and the overall effectiveness of the course. Based on the objectives and the work done during the
course, a mock IELTS test is prepared to assess the students and course overall success.
Session Content Time (min) Objective

After 10 Listening/Reading 45 All
Harris and McCann (1994) note that a test is valid if it tests what we want them to test and nothing extra and it is
reliable if it has consistent measures of students’ performance. This summative test is valid and reliable as it measures
the students’ performance only in receptive skills. Harris and McCann (1994) also reflect that a test must not be too
long in order to be practical. This test is practical as it takes 45 min. The effectiveness of the course will be tested by
assessing the success of the objectives. For doing so, the scores between the diagnostic and summative tests will be
compared to find greater/fewer improvements in different areas of reading and listening. For example, if the scores in
IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 280
“Label the diagram” section of reading in the summative test is much greater that the same section in the diagnostic
test, this indicates improvement in scanning and reading for details, which in turn proves the success of objective 3.
5. Evaluation
Bachman (1990) defines evaluation as the systematic gathering of information in order to make decisions. Dickins and
Garmaine (1993) note that evaluation is an essential part of a course and it is important mainly because it provides
useful information for planning and managing the course. Students’ performance in the tests and also their level of
satisfaction with the course can be good criteria for course evaluation. The following tools will be used to evaluate the
effectiveness of the course:
5.1 End-of-course Questionnaire: The students will be given a questionnaire about different aspects of the course to
find about their level of satisfaction with the course (Appendix 8).
5.2 Comparing Tests Results: The results of DT, formative and summative tests (Appendix 9) will be compared. If
students have progressed during the course this means that, the course has been effectively designed.
The results of the evaluation will be used to keep the effective aspects of the course and to change ineffective aspects in
order to improve the course.
6. Conclusion
Based on the NA and DT outcome, the main objective of this course is to improve the students’ receptive scores in
IELTS. The course has been appropriately designed to meet this need.
The principles mentioned in part 1 have all been implemented in the course:
 Backwash Effect: In order to create beneficial backwash, the teaching methodologies and materials were
prepared based on the students’ interest and level and valid tests were designed for formative and summative
assessments.
 Motivation: A variety of factors have been implanted in the course to sustain motivation such as motivating
tasks and materials, feedback based on individual needs, counseling sessions and self-assessment tools.
 Student Autonomy: Student autonomy has been achieved through various tools such as learners’ diaries,
questionnaires, counseling sessions and exam and homework feedback sessions. Learner training lessons have
been considered comprehensively throughout the course.
6.1 Benefits: Although the focus of the course is on receptive skills, students are able to improve their productive skills,
grammar, vocabulary and learner training strategies, which are necessary for all modules of IELTS. Various
assessment tools have been implemented to reassure the success of the course.
6.2 Limitations: Receptive skills are hard to measure; it could be hard to judge exactly how well students have
improved. This is a short course and has been designed to improve students’ receptive skills mainly through top-
down strategies. As most IELTS materials are prepared for intermediate and upper-intermediate, grading materials
for low-intermediate students is rather challenging. Due to the intensive nature of the course, if one student is
absent for one session, he/she might lose some important and necessary lessons which may affect their learning,
and this might also affect the pair/group work activities as there are only four students in class.
References
Bachman, L. (1990). Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford; New York: OUP.
Baxter, A. (1997). Evaluating your Students. UK: Richmond Publishing.
Brown, D. (1995). Elements of language curriculum, A systematic approach to program development. Boston; Heinle
& Heinle.
Brown, D. (2001). Teaching by Principles. Longman; New York: Pearson Education.
Burgess, S and Head, K. (2005). How to Teach for Exams. UK: Pearson Education.
Dickins, P and Garmaine, K. (1993). Evaluation. Oxford; New York: OUP.
Freeman, D. (1998). Doing teacher research: From inquiry to understanding. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
Graves, K. (2000). Designing Language Courses: A Guide for Teachers. Boston; Heinle & Heinle.
Harmer, J. (2007). How to Teach English. Longman; UK: Pearson Education.
Harris, M and McCann, P. (1994). Assessment, Macmillan; Oxford: Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Howatt, A. (1984). A history of English language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hughes, A. (1989). Testing for Language teachers. Cambridge; UK: CUP.
Hutchinson, T. & Waters, A. (1987). English for Specific Purposes. Cambridge: CUP.
May, P. (1996). Exam Classes. Oxford: OUP.
McEwan, N. ( 1995). Educational Accountability in Alberta. Canadian Journal of Education. 20.27-44
Munby, J. (1987). Communicative Syllabus Design Cambridge: CUP.
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Naunton, J. and Hughes, J. (1997). Online Instruction Center, Teaching for the FCE in English, retrieved on 20.03.2013
from
https://eltadvantage.ed2go.com/Classroom/Lessons.aspx?lesson=1&chpt=1&classroom=Fwhl7SbG1clEVE9BkBFbdT1
q2qV3awzEB2ZRBM0mHMk%3d
Nunan, D. (1988). Syllabus Design. Oxford; New York: OUP.
Nunan, D. (1989). Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge: CUP.
Oxford, R. (1990). Language Learning Strategies: What Every Teacher Should Know. USA: Heinle & Heinle
Publication.
Prodmorou, L. (1995). the backwash effect: from testing to teaching. ELTJ Volume 49/1, 1995,
OUP.
Richards, J. C. (1990). The Language Teaching Matrix. Cambridge: CUP.
Richards, J. C. and Schmidt, R. (2002). Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. © Pearson
Education Limited (Third Edition).
Stern, H. (1992). Issues and Options in Language Teaching. Oxford: OUP.
Tickoo, M. (1988). Michael West in India: a centenary salute. English Language Teaching Journal, 42, 4, 294—300.
Ur, P. (1991). A course in language teaching. Cambridge: New York: CUP.
Wilkins, D. (1976). Notional Syllabus. London: Oxford University Press.
Appendix 1
Objectives:
By the end of the course, students will be better able to… Link to Goal Link to Priority
1 understand the meaning of unknown terms from the context and have Ga, Gb P6, P8
practiced different strategies to infer meaning from the context in IELTS.
2 respond to various types of receptive exam questions in different contexts Ga, Gb, Gc P3
in IELTS like fill in the blanks, true/false and matching questions more
confidently.
3 approach reading questions in IELTS systematically by using various Ga, Gb P5

reading strategies like skimming, scanning or reading for specific
information.
4 approach listening questions in IELTS systematically using various Ga, Gb P1, P2

listening strategies like listening for gist, for specific information and note
taking.
5 improve their reading speed in IELTS by using different reading strategies Ga, Gb P4
like skimming and scanning.
6 expand their academic lexis in different contexts for IELTS. Ga P7
7 understand their interpersonal learning strategies and styles through Gb P8
exposure to different tasks.
Appendix 2:
Needs Analysis Questionnaires
We would like to know more about you in order to plan an effective course. There are three sections in this
questionnaire. Please read the questions carefully and answer them appropriately. Your teacher is ready to answer your
questions if you have any.
Name:
Age:
Nationality:
Section one: (Tick answers)
1. How long have you been studying English?
a. Less than one year b. 1-2years c. 3-5years d. More than 5 years
2. How often do you use English out of English class?

a. Always b. Usually c. Sometimes d. Never
IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 282
3. What are your reasons for taking this IELS course?
a. For personal interest ___
b. To gain a professional qualification for work ____
c. To gain entry into university _____
d. I’ve been told to take it _____
Other reason _____________________________________________________
4. How often do you write in English?

5. How often do you read in English?

6. How often do you listen to English music or watch English movies?

7. How often do you speak in English?

8. The IELTS exam has the following four modules. Number them from 1 to 4 in order of your ability:
1 = I think this is my strongest area
4 = I think this is my weakest area
1 2 3 4
Listening
Reading
Writing
Speaking
9. Why are you learning English apart from taking IELTS examination?
a. To find a good job

b. To travel to foreign countries
c. To enjoy watching movies
d. To communicate with others online
e. To search online
f. To continue my studies in an English university
g. To live in a foreign country
h. Others……………………………………………………………………………
Section two:
Part 1: What do you expect from an IELTS preparation course? Rate your opinion.
I attend this IELTS preparation course:
1. to improve my grammar for IELTS

a. strongly disagree b. disagree c. don’t know d. agree e. strongly agree
2. to improve my writing for IELTS

3. to improve my speaking for IELTS

a. strongly disagree b. Disagree c. don’t know d. agree e. strongly agree
4. to improve my reading for IELTS

IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 283
5. to improve my listening for IELTS
6. to improve my vocabulary for IELTS

7. to improve exam skills

8. to improve my pronunciation
9. to learn academic writing
10. to learn about the format of IELTS exam

11. to learn how to answer each module of IELTS exam

12. to learn how to answer the question under time pressure

13. my teacher to correct my mistakes

14. my teacher to prepare sample IELTS questions for me

Part 2: Topics of interest

Which topics would you like to discuss and work in class? (You can choose more than one)
1. politics
2. social life
3. technology
4. business
5. science
6. jobs
7. family
8. education
9. cultures
10. music
11. others:
Section three:
Learning style
Adapted from: http://www.sgibson.k12.in.us/gshs_new/Gidcumb/Assignemt_1_Learning_Style_Inventroy.pdf
Learning Style Inventory
To better understand how you prefer to learn and process information, place a tick in the appropriate space after each
statement below. This 24- item survey is not timed. Respond to each statement as honestly as you can.
Often Sometimes Seldom
1. I can remember best about a subject by listening to a lecture that includes
information, explanations, and discussions.
2. I prefer to see information written on a chalkboard and supplemented by
visual aids and assigned readings.
3. I like to write things down or to take notes for visual review.
4. I prefer to use posters, models, or actual practice and other activities in
class.
IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 284
5. I require explanations of diagrams, graphs, or visual directions.
6. I enjoy making things with my hands.
7. I am skillful with and enjoy making graphs and charts.
8. I can tell if sounds match when presented with pairs of sounds.
9. I can remember best by writing things down.
10. I can easily understand and follow directions on a map.
11. I do best in academic subjects by listening to lectures and tapes.
12. I play with coins or keys in my pocket.
13. I learn to spell better by repeating words aloud than by writing the words
on paper.
14. I can understand a news article better by reading about it in a newspaper
than by listening to a report about it on the radio.
15. I chew gum, smoke or snack while studying.
16. I think the best way to remember something is to picture it in your head.
17. I learn the spelling of words by “finger spelling” them.
18. I would rather listen to a good lecture or speech than read about the same
material in a textbook.
19. I am good at working and solving jigsaw puzzles and mazes.
20. I grip objects in my hands during learning periods.
21. I prefer listening to the news on the radio rather than reading the paper.
22. I prefer obtaining information about an interesting subject by reading
about it.
23. I feel very comfortable touching others, hugging, handshaking, etc.
24. I follow oral directions better than written ones.
Inventory Scoring Procedures:
Directions: Place the point value on the line next to the corresponding item below. Add the points in each column to
obtain the preference score under each heading.
OFTEN = 5 points SOMETIMES = 3 points SELDOM = 1 points

VISUAL AUDITORY TACTILE
No. PTS. No. PTS. No. PTS.
2 1 4
3 5 6
7 8 9
10 11 12
14 13 15
16 18 17
19 21 20
22 24 23
VPS= APS= TPS=
VPS Visual APS Audio TPS Tactile
Preference Preference Preference
Total the score for each section. A score of 21 points or more in a modality indicates strength in that area. The highest
of the 3 scores indicates the most efficient method of information intake. The second highest score indicates the
modality, which boosts the primary strength. For example, a score of 23 in visual modality indicates a strong visual
learner...
Appendix 3:
IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 285
Diagnostic Test
Listening:
Question Type No. of No. of No. of No. of Total
Correct Correct Correct Correct Questions
Answers - Answers - Answers - Answers -
Student 1 Student 2 Student 3 Student 4
Section 1 Multiple Choice Questions
Complete the form
Section 2 Fill in the blanks
Choose correct words
Choose correct phrases
Section 3 Multiple Choice Questions
Choose correct topics
Complete sentences
Section 4 Short Answers (one word)
Total
Reading:
Question Type No. of No. of No. of No. of Total
Correct Correct Correct Correct Questions
Answers - Answers - Answers - Answers -
Student 1 Student 2 Student 3 Student 4
Section 1 Write the correct Letter
Matching: Nationalities
Label the Diagram
Section 2 Matching the Headings
True/false/not given
Section 3 Complete the sentences
Short Answers (three words)
Total
Scoring:
If you score …
0 - 14 15 - 29 30 - 40
You are unlikely to get an You may get an acceptable score You are likely to get an acceptable
acceptable score under examination under examination conditions but we score under examination conditions
conditions and we recommend that recommend that you think about but remember that different
you spend a lot of time improving having more practice or lessons institutions will find different scores
your English before you take IELTS. before you take IELTS. acceptable.
Cambridge IELTS 8 Student's Book with Answers (2011:152) Official Examination Papers from University of
Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Appendix 4:
Question Type Questionnaire

Taking into account the test you have just taken, rate your ability in different types of Listening and Reading questions
based on the following scale:
1. Very easy
2. Easy
3. Average
4. Difficult
5. Very difficult
Listening questions:
1 2 3 4 5
Complete the form
Fill in the blanks
Choose correct words
Choose correct phrases
Multiple Choice Questions
IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 286
Choose correct topics
Complete sentences
Short Answers (one word)
Reading questions:
1 2 3 4 5
Matching Paragraphs
Write the Correct Letter
Label the Diagram
Matching the Headings
True/false/not given
Complete the sentences
Short Answers (three words)
Appendix 5:
Interview Questions:
1. What do you think are the most important skills that you need to practice for IELTS?
2. What do you want to learn in this course? Do you think your IELTS results would depend on your
teachers or yourselves?
3. What do you think are some challenges you may face when studying English? How do you solve
these problems?
4. Are you quite clear about the format of the IELTS test? How do you approach the reading module of
the test?
5. How do you approach the listening module of the test?
6. What do you expect from your teacher during the course?
7. How much homework are you ready to do?
8. What do think about the test during the course?
Appendix 6
Class log
Scale 1: 
Scale 5: 
Factors ↓ / Sessions → 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Attitude toward learning (scale of 1 to 5)
Cooperativeness (scale of 1 to 5)
Creativity (scale of 1 to 5)
Independence (scale of 1 to 5)
Presentation skills (scale of 1 to 5)
Attendance (scale of 1 to 5)
Motivation (scale of 1 to 5)
Ability to accomplish tasks (scale of 1 to 5)
Ability to follow instructions (scale of 1 to 5)
Homework (scale of 1 to 5)
Appendix 7
Self-assessment tool
Name:…………….
Date................
Class................
A. Answer the following questions about this session:
1. What activities did you find most useful? Why?
2. What activities did you find least useful? Why?
3. What would you suggest to improve activities?

B. Assess your understanding of this lesson.
IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 287
tick Self-assessment
100% I understood absolutely everything
90% I understood nearly everything. I only missed a few words.
75% I understood most of it, but I did not understand a few sentences.
50% I understood the situation quite well, though I missed many of the details.
35% I got a general idea, but at times, I got a bit lost.
20% I could understand what it was about more or less.
10% I understood a few words here or there.
0% I did not understand a single word.
C. Did you manage to complete the tasks? Yes No

Adapted from Michael Harris and Paul McCann, Assessment (1994:76)
Appendix 8
End of course evaluation
Mark each of the following statements concerning evaluation on a scale of 5 from disagree to agree.
A. The course:
1. The content of the course was appropriate to my needs.
disagree 1 2 3 4 5 agree
2. The skills taught in the course were appropriate to my needs.
3. There were no cultural misunderstanding.
4. All instructions were clear.
5. Materials and activities were appropriate.
6. The class atmosphere was positive.
7. The pacing of lessons was appropriate.
8. There was enough variety in the lessons.
9. Error correction and feedback were appropriate.
B. Grading:
1. My overall understanding of the class assessment plan clear from the beginning of the course.
2. The grades that received assessed my work fairly.
3. I understand my teacher’s method of grading my work.
C. Teaching:
1. The teacher taught us what we needed most.
2. The teacher was well prepared for class.
3. The teacher treated me fairly.
4. General class management was good.
5. The teacher was responsive to my needs.
D. Self-assessment:
1. I tried to improve my vocabulary skills by using a monolingual dictionary.
2. I tried to improve my skills by keeping a record of my mistakes in a notebook.
3. I carefully prepared a portfolio of my work.
4. I ask my teacher for extra resources.
Adapted from Kathleen Graves (2000:295) Designing Language Courses: A Guide for Teachers
Appendix 9
IJALEL 6(6):274-288, 2017 288
Evaluation – comparing test results
Reading
Question type ↓ DT Formative Formative Summative Successful Unsuccessful
test 1 test 2 test
True/False/Not Given
Label the diagram/Summary
Write the correct
letter/Heading
Short answers
Complete the sentences
Listening
Question type ↓ DT Formative Formative Summative Successful Unsuccessful
test 1 test 2 test
Short answers
Complete the form
Multiple choice
Complete sentences

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International Journal of

Applied Linguistics &

ISSN 2200-3592 (Print)

Pioneering in Language & Literature Discovery

Senior Associate Editors

Book Reviews Editor

A Comparative Study of Transference of Humor in

Mohsen Mobaraki (Corresponding author)

Maryam Rabani Nia

Received: 26-03-2017 Accepted: 23-05-2017 Advance Access Published: September 2017

7. It was awful thoughts and awful words (p. 180)

8. …thinking and thinking… (p. 176)

Table 1. The frequency of strategies used in translation of repetition

ST scheme X → ST scheme X → ST scheme X → ST scheme ø →

Table 2. The frequency of strategies used in translation of parallelism

ST scheme X → ST scheme X → ST scheme X → ST scheme ø →

Figure 1. The percentage of strategies used in translation of repetition

Figure 4. The percentage of strategies used in translation of parallelism

TESL Trainee Practitioners’ Self Perception of their

Ain Nadzimah Abdullah (Corresponding author)

Received: 17-03-2017 Accepted: 12-05-2017 Advance Access Published: September 2017

The Impact of Presenting Semantically Related Clusters of

Received: 13-03-2017 Accepted: 19-05-2017 Advance Access Published: September 2017

Table 4.1 Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test Result

Table 4.2 Pearson Correlation Coefficient

Table 4.3 The Results of Duncan’s Test

Figure 4.1 The mean of posttest of three groups

The Impact of Immediate and Delayed Corrective Feedback on

Received: 18-03-2017 Accepted: 17-05-2017 Advance Access Published: September 2017

2.6 Advantages of Cooperative Learning

2.7 Problems with Cooperative Learning

Experimental B ( 15 18.11 5.12 1.30 21.32 23.37 15.00 25.00

Figure 1. The three groups’ performance on pretest of WTC

Table 4.4 Descriptive Statistics for the Posttest Scores

Table 4.5 ANOVA for the Results of the WTC (Post-Test)

Table 4.6 Multiple Comparisons for the Results of the Posttest

‫ﺳﻨﺠﺶ ﺍﺷﺘﯿﺎﻕ ﺑﺮﻗﺮﺍﺭﯼ ﺍﺭﺗﺒﺎﻁ ﺩﺭ ﯾﮏ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ ﺑﯿﮕﺎﻧﻪ‪:‬‬

‫‪ -5‬ﻣﺸﺘﺎﻗﻢ ﮐﻪ ﺑﺎ ﺍﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺯﺑﺎﻥ ﻫﺎ )ﺑﺮﯾﺘﺎﻧﯿﺎﺋﯽ‪ ،‬ﺁﻣﺮﯾﮑﺎﺋﯽ‪ ،‬ﮐﺎﻧﺎﺩﺍﺋﯽ ﯾﺎ ﺍﺳﺘﺮﺍﻟﯿﺎﺋﯽ( ﺣﺮﻑ ﺑﺰﻧﻢ‪.‬‬

The Realizations of Point of Departure of Message in General

Received: 25-03-2017 Accepted: 22-05-2017 Advance Access Published: September 2017

Table 1. Frequency of marked and unmarked theme

Table 2. marked theme types

The Rhetorical Analysis of Criticism in Persian and English

Received: 02-04-2017 Accepted: 24-05-2017 Advance Access Published: September 2017

Table 1. Total Academic Conflicts (AC)

Table 2. Total Number Direct And Indirect Academic Conflicts (AC)

Table 3. Percentages of Direct And Indirect Academic Conflicts (AC)

Figure 1. Cross-language comparison of the percentages of direct and indirect academic

Table 4. the Targets of Criticisms and Structures Used in Persian Papers

The Savage Within

Received: 07-04-2017 Accepted: 29-05-2017 Advance Access Published: September 2017

The Effects of Using Podcast on Listening Comprehension

Received: 04-04-2017 Accepted: 29-05-2017 Advance Access Published: September 2017

Table 4.1 Descriptive statistics related to participants' performance on pretest

Pre-test Control 30 14.7667 1.85106 .33796

Experimental 30 14.6333 2.07586 .37900

Table 4.2 Independent Samples t-Test (pre-test)

F Sig. t df Sig. (2- Mean Std. Error Lower Upper

Equal variances .263 57.254 .794 .13333 .50779 -.883 1.15

Post-test Control 30 14.9333 1.87420 .34218

Experimental 30 16.1667 2.03560 .37165

Table 4.4 Independent Samples t-Test (post-test)

Equal .344 .560 -2.441 58 .018 -1.2333 .5051 -2.244 -.222