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...

with the introduction of communicative language teaching, a large number of studies have concerned with students’ oral participation in language classrooms. although the importance of classroom participation is evident, some language learners are unwilling to engage in oral activities. this passivity and unwillingness to participate in language classroom discussions is known as “reticence”. rev...

the present research was conducted to accomplish two purposes. firstly, it aimed to explore and describe schematic structure or what halliday and hassan (1989, p.64) have called “generic structure potential” (gsp) of american english, iranian persian and iranian english newspaper editorials within systemic functional linguistics. secondly, a quantitative cross-comparison was made to investigate...

according to cheng (1999), in recent esl/efl literature, asian (especially east asian) learners of english as a foreign/second language have been arguably reported as reticent and passive learners. the most common allegations are that these students are reluctant to participate in classroom discourse; they are unwilling to give responses; they do not ask questions; and they are passive and over...

adolescents and young adults and their problems is an issue whose importance is obvious to anyone because youth are the founders of our countrys future and requires proper planning to be on leisure. given the importance of leisure,this study to investigate needs assessment and planning how adolescents and young adults spend their leisure time in urban of case study of high school girls and boys...

this exploratory study aimed to investigate a possible relationship between learners’ beliefs about language learning and one of their personality traits; that is,locus of control (loc). both variables, beliefs and locus of control, are assumed to influence the language learning process. the internal control index (ici) and the beliefs about language learning inventory (balli) were administered...

abstract: research purpose: the purpose of this research is to identify academic databases assessment factors and criteria at law and political science majors. the necessity of this research is to distinguish academic databases assessment factors and criteria and to identify the most important ones and rank them in order to select an appropriate database according to students’ and faculty memb...

it is not possible to understand developments of a country’s culture and civilization without knowing his believes and myths. whether it is north or south, east or west, planes or mountains, sahara or deserts, here in iran every corner includes valuable and precious treasures which are known all over the world, and cultural – historical objects which are found here adorn all well known museums...

abstract: about 60% of total premium of insurance industry is pertained?to life policies in the world; while the life insurance total premium in iran is less than 6% of total premium in insurance industry in 2008 (sigma, no 3/2009). among the reasons that discourage the life insurance industry is the problem of adverse selection. adverse selection theory describes a situation where the inf...

in the area of vocabulary teaching and learning although much research has been done, only some of it has led to effective techniques of vocabulary teaching and many language learners still have problem learning vocabulary. the urge behind this study was to investigate three methods of teaching words. the first one was teaching words in context based on a traditional method of teaching that is,...