in the past decades, we have witnessed a renascence of interest in vocabulary assessment (bachman, 2000). however, most researchers have focused on testing breadth rather than depth of vocabulary or receptive-productive dimensions of vocabulary knowledge (read, 2000; nation, 2001; wesche & paribahkt, 1996). the present research investigates the predicting variables of vocabulary knowledge acros...

The study was conducted to investigate how students’ multiple intelligences were related to their tolerance of ambiguity and English proficiency. Subjects were 173 English major students in a private university in northern Taiwan, including 49 males and 124 females. They helped to fill out questionnaires of Multiple Intelligences (MI) (Gardner, 1983) and Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity S...

According to Oxford (1990), strategies are steps taken by students to enhance their own learning. This research attempted to investigate the impact of teaching vocabulary learning strategies on short-term and long-term retention of vocabulary items. The sample participants included 303 females randomly selected from one all-female governmental Pre-university school (PUC) in Iran. They were then...

This study investigated the impact of individual differences like language proficiency, gender and age on the Iranian EFL learners interlanguage pragmatics in institutional discourse especially, their capacity to recognize and to rate pragmatic and grammatical infelicities in speech act situations of request and apology.  To this end, one hundred and eighty-seven EFL university students at thre...

linguistic/cultural differences of learners’ native language with english as a foreign language, gender and english proficiency level are among those numerous variables which affect english learning and its quality in iranian context. the present study was an attempt to illuminate the effects of these variables on performing integrative approach of general english tests (cloze test and recall t...

This paper compares human and LSA-based coherence ratings of 223 essays written by learners of English as a foreign language at various levels of linguistic proficiency. While the LSA-based ratings correlate positively – as expected – with a measure of lexical variety, a negative correlation was found between these ratings and the human grading. This is interpreted as resulting from specific wr...

Originating from Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, dynamic assessment (DA) proposes a novel approach to second language acquisition (SLA) research according to which a dialectical relationship is envisaged between instruction and assessment. Although DA has been applied to some areas of SLA, there are areas, such as interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), that have been neglected.  To address the issue,...

Performance deficiencies and inconsistencies among SLA or FL learners can be attributed to variety of sources including both systemic (i.e., language issues) and individual variables.  Contrary to a rich background, the literature still suffers from a gap as far as delving into the issue from language proficiency and learning style is concerned. To fill the gap, this study addressed EFL learner...