there are two major theories of measurement in psychometrics: classical test theory (ctt) and item-response theory (irt). despite its widespread and long use, ctt has a number of shortcomings, which make it problematic to be used for practical and theoretical purposes. irt tries to solve these shortcomings, and provide better and more dependable answers. one of the applications of irt is the as...

a major concern in the last few years has been the fact that the cultural centers are keeping distance with what they have been established for and instead of reproducing the hegemony, they have turned into a place for resistance and reproduction of resistance against hegemony. because the cultural centers, as urban public spaces in the last two decades, have been the subject of ideological dis...

the present study was conducted to investigate the role of summary in teaching grammar process on pre-university students. to this end, 48 male pre-university students in semnan were participants. they were math class that we called experimental group and science class as control group. in order to make sure there was no significant difference in proficiency level of two groups. a pre-test wa...

although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

the present study seeks to determine the effect of explicit instruction of metacognitive strategies on iranian high school students’ reading comprehension ability. it also attempts to investigate the relationship between the learners reading comprehension and metacognitive strategies. furthermore, the study investigates whether iranian efl female high school students are high, medium, or low me...

testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

this study attempted to explore if teaching english collocations through two different modes of awareness-raising and input flooding has any possible differential effect on immediate retention as well as retention in a delayed assessment. it also compared the possible differential effect of teaching english collocations implicitly and explicitly on actively using the items in writing. m...

the purpose of this study is identifying effective factors which make customers shop online in iran and investigating the importance of discovered factors in online customers’ decision. in the identifying phase, to discover the factors affecting online shopping behavior of customers in iran, the derived reference model summarizing antecedents of online shopping proposed by change et al. was us...

there has been a gradual shift of focus from the study of rule systems, which have increasingly been regarded as impoverished, … to the study of systems of principles, which appear to occupy a much more central position in determining the character and variety of possible human languages. there is a set of absolute universals, notions and principles existing in ug which do not vary from one ...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of using c-test passages on the reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning of iranian intermediate efl learners. the participants were 60 male efl learners at kish mehr institute in garmsar. in fact, there were two groups, an experimental group and a comparison group with 30 students in each. the participants were pretested throu...