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The thematic, stylistic, and rhetorical versatility of the Holy Qur’an has led to rich scholarship of Qur’anic studies. Approached as a scripture, this book has mostly been focused on thematically. Comparatively, studies on its rhetorical dimensions and their contribution to its various themes are less in number. The present study deals with both rhetoric and thematic aspects of this book and evinces they both complement one another. The methodology is a hybrid one which adopts and adapts El-Awa’s textual analysis, Michel Cuypers’ rhetoric study, and John Swales’ move analysis. While the first two methods deal with the Qur’anic text, the third one has developed out of the study of scientific texts. This paper picks up the advantages of each method to account for thematic diversities in surah "Waqi’a”. The argument of the study is that, far from being a disintegrated text, “Waqi’a” cherishes thematic unity which is realized by deploying rhetorical devices like symmetry and rhyme profile.

This study examined students’ attitudes and motivation toward Chinese language learning in the International Baccalaureate Mandarin program at a high school in Brisbane Australia in 2008. The focus of this study is to identify links between Chinese learning and students’ attitudes and motivations. Sixty students were administered an attitude and motivation survey at the beginning and end of a semester. Changes in attitudes and motivation were observed. Amidst a complex pattern of change, it was clear that English L1 and Beginners, showed a positive correlation between language study and improved attitudes and motivation while two groups (i.e., Other L1 and Advanced learners) did not. The result challenges the conventional assumption that language learning brings about positive attitude towards the target language and culture. It also shows that the students’ background and target language level have an impact on their attitudes towards target language learning.

This paper aims to provide numerous pieces of evidence of iconic phenomenon in the linguistic structure of Mandarin Chinese. It shows that in the realm of syntax, iconicity is expressed in two different ways: iconic correspondence and diagrammatic relation. The former type of iconicity pursues a form-meaning correspondence in syntactic coding, while the latter pursues a correspondence in the relation of linguistic signs and the relation of their denoted concepts. In addition, the paper attempts to show that the structure of Mandarin Chinese substantiates at least four distinct kinds of association of linguistic structure with the related concept in the world: principle of quantity, principle of proximity, semantic principle of linear word order, and pragmatic principle of linear word order. For each type, a number of syntactic constructions will be provided as examples.

The present study focused on teaching English alphabet as a fundamental task in English teaching. The study was an attempt to investigate the impact of English versus Persian songs on the learning of English alphabet by Iranian EFL learners. For the purpose of this study, a group of 90 kids (N=90) were randomly selected as the participants. Then, they were divided into three experimental groups: (a) English songs group, (b) Persian songs group, and (c) English and Persian songs group. As the treatment for the study, selected English and/or Persian songs were taught to the respective groups; this was done to determine the effective method for teaching English alphabet to young learners who do not have knowledge of the English language and its writing system. The analysis of the data indicated that teaching English through English and Persian songs and making use of both of them simultaneously can be more efficient for young learners.

Cooperative Learning (CL) as one of the most fertile areas of research in education is reported to have a precarious status in terms of its classroom implementation. Culture as one of the factors responsible for the malfunctioning cooperative group work has recently been gaining more attention. However, these attentions were, by and large, interpretative and speculative, rather than empirical. This paper is an investigation into the relationships between culture and the social drivers of group work. For this purpose, perceptions of 241 and 200 Iranian learners of English as a Foreign language (EFL), arrived at through convenience sampling, respectively about their culture and experience of group work were solicited using two psychometrically valid and reliable questionnaires. The data were analyzed using forced entry multiple regression and the results not only suggest that significant complicated relations exist between culture and the social components of cooperative group work but also determine how the cultural factors affect these social components. This study also contributes to the literature on the culturally responsive teaching in the sense that it highlights how inaccurate judgments on the appropriacy of group work were made by reducing the culture to collectivism/individualism. In conclusion, it offers future research some guidelines and suggestions.

This paper is focused on rhetorical move analysis in academic settings. Rhetorical move analysis is mainly conducted in research on academic writing, and academic writing is a major topic in English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Therefore, this paper is organized as follows. First, an overview of ESP is presented. Then, the interface between genre analysis and ESP is described. After that, genre analysis is connected to the notion of rhetorical move analysis, the place of rhetorical move analysis within ESP is elaborated, and its link with academic writing is established.

One of the approaches which is widely used in language classes is form-focused instruction (FFI). Formerly, FFI included two categories of focus on form (FonF) and focus on forms (FonFs). However, later two other categories were added to this type of instruction, which were named isolated FFI and integrated FFI. In this article, I elaborate on these four categories of FFI and provide the readers with a clear picture of how these FFI options may be applied in class. The similarities and differences among these four FFI options have been highlighted as well with an aim to alleviate the existing ambiguity among some researchers. To this aim, at first, brief but informative accounts of FonF and FonFs are given. This is followed by a description of the dichotomies on FonF and how they may be applied in class. An explanation of isolated and integrated FFI and how they are different from or similar to FonF and FonFs concludes this article.