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The mora, a phonological constituent between the segment and the syllable, is the terminal element in the prosodic hierarchy. It is a unit of phonological weight that measures syllables' heaviness or lightness; taking into consideration extraprosodicity, a bimoraic syllable is heavy whereas a monomoraic syllable is light. The present study shows the importance of adopting a moraic approach to the syllable to explain phenomena in prosodic phonology. Specifically, it demonstrates that an analysis in which syllables consist of moras can clarify four previously problematic areas in the phonology of Moroccan Arabic: the invariably long character of lexical vowels, the thorny issue of stress, the lengthening of vowels in some contexts, and their shortening in others. We argue that the adoption of the mora as a syllabic constituent leads to simple and explanatorily adequate analyses of prosodic phenomena in Moroccan Arabic.

This article is intended to briefly overview the status of the native speaker norms within the English as an International Language (EIL) context. While extremely conformist and non-conformist stances exist, it seems reasonable if EIL users conform to the native speaker grammar and phonology; and native speakers do not impose their sociopragmatic values on other users. In short, while conforming to the native speaker norms in the linguistic areas—e.g., phonology and grammar—is necessary, extralinguistic elements—e.g. sociopragmatic features—can be adapted to the EIL situation. Consequently, the language we call ‘English’ will remain almost as it is, and mutual intelligibility will not rely solely on the native speaker norms. However, the argument has bearings for language teaching, which are not discussed in this article.

Socioeconomic status has been a pivotal element of interaction in any society. Literature witnesses many research on different aspects of social classes and their interactions from this perspective. Nevertheless, what can actually be observed is the mere numerical study of social and economic accounts of people. At the same time, perceptual dimension of interlocutors has received very little attention in the field. Among the imperative aspects of social affairs, one might mention the sort of perception that different socioeconomic classes, i.e. Lower Class (LC), Middle Class (MC), Upper Class (UC) exhibit in regard to each other. The fact that people can distinguish speakers from another socioeconomic class, being exposed to their speech is interestingly ignored in the field. Thus, this study was conducted to fill this gap. Therefore, based on the previous research and considering the current social and economic situation, five criteria were assigned to a pool of 50 participants out of which 9 were selected, 3 for each class. All 9 participants were interviewed exercising the similar topics of interest to elicit their typical manners of speaking. Recording of the interviews resulted in 50 minutes speech. In the next phase, 30 new participants were asked to listen to the recordings and answer related items on a class attitude questionnaire. The results revealed that there is a kind of ‘upward assimilation’ between each two adjacent groups in the society.

Genre Analysis has received considerable attention in recent years in ESP context. Genre has been taken as a property of text, which allows it to be described as a sequence of elements, or "moves". And each move serves as a part of the total communicative purpose of that genre. In this study, the introduction section of 200 medical research articles, 100 American- English and 100 Persian were analyzed according to Swales' (1990) model. Move analysis was performed to find the frequency of moves and steps in the introduction sections of English and Persian medical research articles. The results revealed that both in English and Persian, Introduction section of research articles are similar regarding their move frequency, but the realization of these three moves are radically different in these two languages. To solve the problem of academic isolation, syllabus designers must include genre awareness courses to sensitize the students to the features that make an academic text acceptable to the members of the discourse community. Findings of the study could be applied to alleviate the long-standing problem of bad writing amongst this discipline practitioners.

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of the narrative versus expository texts on the TOEFL test-takers’ scores. To this end, the data were obtained and gathered from students of Shaheed Rajaee University who were studying English as a foreign language, having the same background knowledge, including both males and females. The data seem to indicate that there is no significant difference in the scores gained by students on a standard TOEFL test between expository texts and narrative texts.