Mohammad ForouzaniMohammad Forouzani is an assistant professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Nizwa, Oman. He holds BA and MA degrees in English Literature and a PhD degree in TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language). As a faculty member,he started as a lecturer of English and taught methodology, linguistics, and literature courses at the beginning of his career twenty years ago. Studying and practicing in both fields, he found his real interest in the disciplines in which he could bridge language teaching, literature and philosophy, and any subject area related to and influenced by the subtleties of 'meaning.'

His doctoral dissertation turned out to be on the effect of aesthetic and efferent reading on the improvement of EFL students' reading skills, an attempt to bridge the fields of literature and language teaching, one of which deepens one's insight and the other empowers one's logic. He also supervises theses that are, in one way or another, focused on the integration of meaning and interpretation, and critical pedagogy. Forouzani's interest in the process of conceptualization in literature and language subjects motivated him to experience teaching in different contexts with students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

He both enjoyed and learned from the pedagogical challenges of teaching the same concepts to different learner groups, since the concepts were nuanced by different cultural understandings. Such experience that he gained mostly in his Poetry, Critical Thinking, and Semantics courses led to the compilation of this Illustrative Dictionary of Semantics, which took about seven years to complete. In Forouzani's view, meaning comes first, though he never underestimates "form," which makes meaning even more understandable. He believes that in language education, semantics should be given priority to discourse and pragmatics to facilitate the appreciation of discourse and pragmatic analysis for language students.

Mohammad Forouzani has authored and coauthored language teaching books in both Persian (his first language) and English, including a collection of Persian poems, a guide to writing MA and PhD theses, EFL teaching methodology, and papers on critical pedagogy, materials development, and reading skill.

On the other hand, Forouzani's literary bent pushed him forward to organize his literary sketches into verse, the outcome of which are three collections of poems titled Inside Out (2017), Out Inside (2019) and A Louvre of Verse (2020), and a short story "A Room for a Decent Burial of Memories" published in the 34th Parallel Magazine in 2020 and republished by Piker Press in 2022. He has written three novels that are in the process of editing and publication. Forouzani uses his pen name Martin Foroz for his literary works. His individual poems have also appeared in Voice of Monarch Butterflies: Middle Eastern anthology by Ten Poets from the Ganges to the N... Read More Read Less