Iranian Language Research Articles

The Comparison of the Prepositions /به :be/ in Persian and /پَه :pa/ in Balochi

One of the most widely-used prepositions, / be / in Persian and / pa / in Balochi, in the two Iranian languages of Persian and Balochi was phonologically and functionally (morphologically, syntactically, and semantically) studied in the present research. The methodology of research was based on a comparative-descriptive manner. It was found that Balochi, rather than Persian, has better preserved the older forms of the word by the retention of the phonemes /p/ and /a/. Functionally speaking, there were 24 cases of similarities against 10 cases of differences from a total of 34 cases in a synchronic study (almost 70% of similarities vs. 30% differences respectively). Not only can the results be used to provide a pattern for the comparison of other words of the two languages in order to provide language maps, educational comparative grammars, and teaching these languages; but they reveal that a revision is necessary in the typology system of Balochi dialects; especially for the dialects neighboring Persian. It means avoiding absolute classifying of all Balochi dialects as west-northern Iranian; since some of these dialects display many characteristics of west-southern Iranian languages as well.

The Investigation of the Perspectives of Iranian EFL Domain Experts on Postmethod Pedagogy: A Delphi Technique

After the introduction of postmethod pedagogy by Kumaravadivelu with its three principles of particularity, possibility and practicality, a wave of attention was directed towards this so-called 'postmethod era' and its appropriacy and adequacy in satiating the demands of the language learners in this 'brand new world'. This situation has created a healthy debate among the Iranian EFL community as well. The aim of this study was to explore the perspectives of the Iranian EFL domain experts about postmethod pedagogy. In so doing, the Delphi technique was adopted to reach ‘expert’ consensus. The participants of this study were 21 domain experts in the field of applied linguistics in Iran. The Delphi technique was a remarkably quick means of achieving a consensus on postmethod pedagogy for participants. Three waves of data collection were employed in the three rounds of Delphi with the same sample. The findings of this study raised much doubt and uncertainty about both method and post method pedagogy. It was revealed that the Iranian language education has never experienced method in its actual meaning, what it is known as the method has been an eclectic approach any teacher has adhered to simply based on his/her personal taste. Moreover, the findings of the Delphi technique indicated that postmethod pedagogy with its three principles is not applicable in the Iranian context. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.

The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Iranian Language Institute Teachers’ Job Satisfaction

This study aims to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence (EQ) and job satisfaction among Iranian EFL teachers in Language Institutes and to determine the effect of their gender, age and years of teaching experience on these two constructs. For this purpose, 100 Language Institutes’ teachers from Isfahan, Tehran, Shiraz, Tabriz, and Mashhad provinces voluntarily participated in this study. Participants completed the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) Self-Report Scale, and the Job Descriptive Index (JDI). Pearson Product Moment correlations and Independent-Samples t-tests were applied to the data. The findings of the study showed that EFL teachers’ emotional intelligence was correlated significantly and positively with their job satisfaction, and male teachers were more satisfied with their job than females. Thus, emotional intelligence skills can be used in order to increase job satisfaction in educational environments and EFL teachers with high emotional intelligence are more satisfied with their job. Also, it was revealed that gender can be a predictor of job satisfaction.

Teacher Educators as Role Models: A Qualitative Examination of Student Teachers’ and Teacher Educators’ Views towards Their Roles

Teacher Education is considered to be the first and perhaps the most important stage in the professional development of student teachers (Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998) as teacher educators who work with student teachers during these programs exert significant influence on who students are and will become (Caires, 2007; Chalies, Ria, Bertone, Trohel, & Durand, 2005). This article highlights the impact of language teacher educators’ ideas and beliefs with regard to Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and their teaching practices on their student teachers’ beliefs and perceptions about their role as language teachers. 20 Iranian language student teachers and ten teacher educators teaching at five universities in Tehran were interviewed. The interviews were coded and analyzed in order to develop themes. Considerable similarities were found between student teachers and their teacher educators in terms of their ideas and beliefs about language teaching.

Diversity in the Traditional Musical Kurdish Themes and the Tourist Attraction

Abstract. The present study has tried to associate the themes of Kurdish music with tourist attraction activities. On the other hand, it has tried to pave the way to attract cultural tourists to Kurdistan through theme diversity and inspiration by natural ecological phenomena and also to attract those tourists with different tastes who are interested in local and traditional music. To achieve the above goals, different methods have been used including interviewing with celebrities, using existing resources such as audio versions of the traditional Kurdish music in the form of DVDs, CDs and also its video versions. Kurdish language is one of the most original languages in Iran that over the time has maintained its identity despite foreigners' onslaught and has not been subjected to too many changes. Many experts have expressed that the traditional Kurdish music is one of the richest traditional Iranian music. Using different themes, inspiring by ecological and natural phenomena and also social and cultur-al themes are some of the characteristics of the Kurdish music.Taking advantages of the available potentials in each region promotes the Iranian tourism identity all around the world. Using traditional Kurdish music along with the other attractions in the Kurdistan region improves the internal or domestic tourism. In addition to increasing the internal trips, it establishes friendship among people all around the country (Iran).

Degrees of Irregular Change

This paper employs a quantitative model of irregular sound change to investigate whether West Iranian languages have developed formally similar functional items via parallelism or via contact. I analyze etymologically related functional items in two Middle and eight New West Iranian languages, comparing observed forms to expected outcomes of these forms on the basis of purely regular sound change. A quantitative model is used to measure the distance between the observed and expected forms across West Iranian, particularly with respect to New Persian. I find that, while most New West Iranian languages undergo roughly the same amount of irregular reduction, Balochi, a language with conservative historical phonology, shows significantly more irregular phonological reduction than New Persian in its functional vocabulary. Given this result, it is plausible that the similarity in functional items seen across West Iranian is due to New Persian influence, though this contact may not be quantitatively detectable in all cases.

A Comparison of the Effect of Cognitive and Metacognitive Listening Strategy Training on Enhancing Listening Comprehension Among Iranian EFL Learners

It is obvious that students feel anxious when they miss some parts while listening in the classroom. In addition, among all four skills required to use a language, listening skills are considered as one of the most important skills that educators are always concerned about. Therefore, training EFL learners to utilize cognitive and metacognitive listening strategies while listening in EFL contexts can assist them in the achievement of higher levels of listening comprehension. The main objective of this is to determine whether the learners are able to enhance their listening comprehension by using different cognitive and metacognitive strategies. The participants of this study were 80 intermediate male students of Iran language institute in Darab, Fars province. After screening the participants through the pre-test 47 of them were selected and assigned randomly to 2 experimental (n=22, n=25) groups and others were assigned to a control (n=21) group. Each intact class was randomly selected to two experimental groups including (1) cognitive strategies group; (2) metacognitive strategies group; and one control group without any intervention. One of the experimental group was taught to use some cognitive listening strategies while listening and the students in another experimental group were taught how to use some metacognitive strategies while listening. The results of the study indicated that metacognitive and cognitive listening comprehension strategy training based on CALLA instructional model could play a significant role in enhancing Iranian EFL learners’ listening comprehension. Finally, metacognitive listening strategy training could play a better role in enhancing listening comprehension, in comparison to cognitive listening strategy training.

A Framework for Sentiment Analysis in Persian

Sentiment Analysis aims at extracting peoples sentiment, opinion, and appraisal from their comments in social websites. Most research efforts in the area of sentiment analysis have concentrated on English and few works considered the problem of Persian sentiment analysis. Persian is spoken by more than a hundred million speakers around the world and is the official language of Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Persian is a challenging language for sentiment analysis and there are few resources and tools available for Persian text processing. Therefore, in the current study we first devise a Persian polarity lexicon which is a list of words associated with their sentiment polarity. Then, we review common challenges of Persian language processing such as misspelling, word spacing, stemming, and use of informal words and propose effective solutions for them. Finally, we assess the performance of the proposed method in classifying the polarity of online cell phone reviews. The results show the superiority of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art supervised machine learning methods. Furthermore, our method is more computationally efficient than existing supervised methods.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of ELT Materials in Gender Representation: A Comparison of Summit and Top Notch

In spite of the crucial importance of textbooks, their increasing development day by day, and their significant effects on saving time, energy, and budgets, only few studies have been done on textbooks evaluation from a critical discourse analysis perspective. This study aimed to analyze and compare the gender representation in Top Notch and Summit series in order to find out if the gender representation is equally balanced in these two textbooks. The study, thus, analyzed the series in terms of nine major aspects of gender: female and male’s characters, female and male’s pictorial representations, female and male’s titles, activities, and firstness of female and male in the mixed gender dialogues. To that end, Fairclough’s (1989, 2001) models were adopted in order to detect the ideology behind these textbooks. The findings of study indicated that, in most cases, gender representation is more balanced in Top Notch series than in Summit series. The results of this comparative research would also help us gain a better understanding of textbooks currently used in Iranian language institutes.

Cultural and Linguistic Considerations: The Case of Persian

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the reader to the Persian language of Iran while embedding it in the larger context of Persian culture and Iranian-Americans. It will provide the practicing speech-language pathologist's (SLPs) basic information about the linguistic structure of Persian, as spoken by Iranian-Americans to facilitate the provision of a culturally and linguistically appropriate evaluation of Persian heritage language speakers living in the United States. According to the language use data collected by the United States Census Bureau of the 67 Indo-European languages spoken in U.S. homes, Persian ranked 9th above Greek, Urdu, and Gujarathi (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.). This is a surprising fact given the dearth of published research on Heritage speakers of Persian learning English and living in the United States. This phenomenon may partly be a consequence of the fact that the majority of Iranians value education and literacy and report high proficiency in English. Nevertheless, the potential risk that Iranian-Americans may be over- or under- identified may be greater than for other minority groups in the US due to the lack of information readily available to clinicians.

The “Arab Spring” and the Christian Linguistic Minorities in Syria

Syria has a heterogeneous population. It reflects the complicated history of the region and constitutes evidence for many migratory waves, that have been coming to Syria for centuries.The linguistic situation of Syria is less complicated, however also here the heterogeneity is observable. The official language of Syria is Modern Standard Arabic. Nevertheless, because of the diglossia being a common state in Arab countries, this language has no use in a daily communication. This role is performed by vernacular dialects of Arabic. In western Syria are spoken the Levantine and in al-Jazira the Mesopotamian dialects. The Kurds usually speak Kurmanji, which belongs to the Iranian languages. Moreover other small linguistic communities (e.g. Adyghe, Kabardian, Turkish) exist. As far as the Christian non-Arab linguistic minorities are concerned, in 2011 it was possible to indicate speakers of four main languages: Western Aramaic, Suret, Turoyo, Armenian.

The Magic of Mnemonics for Vocabulary Learning of a Second Language

The keyword method is undeniably an effective method for accelerating learning of suitable material. Nor is there any doubt that it improves immediate recall, which can be useful in itself. However, what people want is long-term recall, and it is there that the advantages of the keyword method are most contentious. In this short article we introduce keyword method that is a fun method of learning vocabulary through mnemonics. The method is not new but it is presently unknown in Iran. Keyword method is a kind of memory aid method which makes the retrieval process easier by bridging the meaning of words with related pictures mentally or physically. Here we will consider the advantages and also disadvantages of the method. Some examples from Spanish, and Persian are provided to make keyword method more tangible for students of foreign languages in Iran.

Translation policy in the media

Although Persian is the official language in Iran, legal provisions are available for the use of minority languages in the media. Recent scholarship describes ‘Persianization’ as the ‘building block’ of language policy, overlooking the use of minority languages in official media. This paper examines the scope of this minority language provision in the television programs broadcasted by the state in Kurdistan. It illustrates the use of translation and bilingualism working alongside official monolingualism, calling into question the issue of Persianization. The article first describes the use of non-Persian languages in Iranian state media and shows their proportion vis-a-vis official Persian. Second, it examines the use of Kurdish and the weight of translation in the television programs under study. Advocating translational justice, the paper calls for a clear translation policy and more translation to be offered for programs broadcasted for Kurdish minorities to ensure equal access to media.

Translation and psychometric properties of the persian version of the dialysis symptom index in hemodialysis patients.

Background:Hemodialysis patients have a high physical and psychosocial symptom burden. There is no valid and reliable tool for assessing symptoms of hemodialysis patients in Iran.Objectives:The aim of this study was to determine psychometric properties of the Persian version of the dialysis symptom index (DSI).Patients and Methods:The forward-backward procedure was applied to translate the DSI from English into Persian (Iranian language). The scale (Persian Version) was tested with a convenience sample of 95 patients with end-stage renal disease referred to main hemodialysis centers from December 2012 to June 2013. Validity was assessed using content, face and convergent validity. To test reliability, the kappa values were calculated for test-retest stability and the Cronbach alpha coefficients were also calculated for internal consistency.Results:The mean age of patients was 50.4 (SD = 15.72) years and % 61.1 of patients were male. The most commonly reported symptoms were fatigue, being irritable and nervous. Divergent validity was mostly supported by the pattern of association between DSI and SF-36 (r = -0.18– -0.48, P< 0.05). Cronbach’s alpha of the DSI was 0.90 and the weighted kappa ranged from 0.21 to 0.93, and it was greater than 0.4 for 25 of the 30 items.Conclusions:The Iranian version of the DSI had good psychometric properties and can be used to assess symptoms of hemodialysis patients.

What Is Judeo-Median—and How Does it Differ from Judeo-Persian?

The Iranian languages spoken by the Jews are often lumped under the term “Judeo-Persian.” Yet properly construed, the latter term refers to forms of Persian written with the Hebrew script. The corpus of Judeo-Persian texts is significant for both linguistic and literary reasons, because it includes some of the earliest documents of New Persian, and because it constitutes a sizable literature written by Persian Jews. However, there are also several spoken languages, different from Judeo-Persian, that also belong to the Iranian stock and are associated with Jewish populations in Iran. What we refer to here as “Judeo-Median” are a number of languages that have their core in central Iran and are/were spoken by the Jewry of Isfahan, Kashan, Yazd, and outlying western towns. All of these varieties are on the verge of extinction, both in their original homeland and in diaspora. Belonging to the Northwest group of Iranian languages, Judeo-Median differs from Persian (a Southwest language) not only in pedigree but also in its vocabulary and grammar—rendering it unintelligible to Persian monolinguals. This article studies the Judeo-Median dialects collectively, exhibiting their major similarities and differences, and attempting to enumerate and arrive at a tentative classification.

Iranian Language Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives on Top Notch Series (2nd edition) at Intermediate Level

As the means of transferring knowledge between teachers and students, coursebooks play a significant role in educational practices all over the world. Evaluation of coursebooks is also of great significance as it manages to a better understanding of the nature of a specific teaching/learning situation. The present study is an attempt to evaluateTop Notch coursebook from both Iranian EFL learners’ and teachers’ perspectives. One hundred students and 20 teachers participated in this study. Sixty four of the students and nine of the teachers were male and 36 of the students and 11 of the teachers were female. The range of teachers' experience of teaching the coursebook was between 2-4 years and the range of students' experience of studying the coursebook was between 1-3 years. The data collection took place in three language institutes of Gilan and Mazandaran provinces. The coursebook, evaluated based on modified version of Cunningsworth's (1995) checklist, was the intermediate level of Top Notch. It was evaluated by both students and teachers based on administering written questionnaires. In order to triangulate the gathered data, 25 percent of the teachers and 10 percent of the students attended an interview session. Data analysis indicated that strengths of Top Notch from teachers' perspective are grammar, visuals, supplementary materials and culture and from students' point of view are content, grammar, phonology and visuals.

Intercultural Communicative Competence in Foreign Language Classroom

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the cultural dimension of foreign language education, and teachers today are expected to promote the acquisition of intercultural competence in their learners. This study presents an analysis of viewpoints in the development of intercultural competence in the English as foreign language teaching classroom in Iran. Intercultural competence, as acknowledged as the key component of foreign language studies, increases the need to adapt teaching methods and materials to raise learners’ intercultural awareness. The following research problem is formulated: do English as foreign language learners’ attitudes become more positive due to the impact of intercultural learning and how they benefit from the impact of intercultural learning in their attitude and overall language proficiency. Based on the study carried out in two intact classes at Iran Language Institute with 48 intermediate language learners, the results indicated that practices in intercultural competence develop their positive attitudes about their culture and target language culture and it motivates them to develop their overall language competence.

Avestan xratu-

The specific sense that the word xratu- possesses in the Gāthās has not received the attention it deserves. As this article will show, this specific sense points to the eschatological foundation of Zoroastrianism. Eschatological concerns did not first develop in the frame of an established “monotheistic” religion; rather, Zoroastrianism arose from those concerns. The xratu- has a strictly eschatological function in the Gāthās. The noun retains this semantic capacity not only in the Young Avestan but also in the Middle Persian Zoroastrian texts. Iranian languages share the noun with Vedic and (archaic) Greek, where it has the basic meaning of the mental capacity to achieve proposed goals, hence practical intelligence, resourcefulness, or efficacy. If this is in fact the general sense that xratu- has in Iranian, as will be briefly pointed out, the specifically eschatological meaning that it acquires in the Gāthās must indicate the type of religious discourse to which these compositions belong. The noun may, further, have developed its eschatological meaning before the time of the Gāthās and already become a technical term. In this case, it would be legitimate to ask whether there are traces in the Gāthās that point to the institutional background of the term. There do indeed seem to be such traces. The term seems to have been used in the technical sense of the mental power to attain the divine sphere in the daēva cult.

The augment of vowel-initial roots and vṛddhi–derivation in the Indo–Iranian languages

Abstract The augment of vowel-initial roots in Old Indo-Aryan consists in the vṛddhi grade of the initial vowel of the verbal stem. Although the origin of this feature can basically be explained in phonological terms, as described by Lubotsky (1995) and others, it is pointed out that the analogy of verb stems with full or lengthened grade root might have played a role as well. On the other hand, in absence of relevant forms in Avestan and Old Persian, the parallelism between the augment and vṛddhi‑derivation has to be taken into account if we want to describe the augment of vowel-initial roots in the Old Iranian languages. It is argued that the vṛddhi‑derivation in Old Persian was similar to the situation in Avestan, i. e. simple vowels were replaced by short diphthongs (not by long ones, as in Old Indo-Aryan) and this has to be assumed for the Old Persian augment of vowelinitial roots as well.

Evidence of laryngeal coloring in Proto-Indo-Iranian

Past scholarship has made almost no mention of the effects in the Indo- Iranian languages of ‘laryngeal coloring’, the putatively Indo-European development according to which */e/ is ‘colored’ into */a/ or */o/ by an adjacent */h2/ or */h3/, respectively. And for good reason: the merger of nonhigh vowels in Proto-Indo-Iranian would have effaced these distinctions in any case. In this paper I survey the etyma in which laryngeal coloring could have interacted with Proto-Indo-Iranian palatalization, which (in part) preceded the merger of nonhigh vowels, and find that palatalization in almost every case has not occurred to inputs involving */Keh2/ or*/Keh3/, where coloring may be assumed to have taken place. This strongly suggests that laryngeal coloring – not as a discrete ‘sound change’, but as a phonological rule which requires additional sound changes (such as palatalization) before it can ‘show itself’ by affecting the distribution of phonemes in the lexicon – was present in the early stages of Proto-Indo-Iranian, giving further support to the hypothesis that laryngeal coloring was a feature of Proto-Indo- European itself.