hedging is a multi-purpose rhetorical strategy which is usually used in scientific arguments to secure ratification of claims, reduce the risk of negation, avoid conflict, manage disagreement and leave room for the audience to assess presented information. hedges are frequently used in research articles to mitigate the findings of research endeavors. the present research aims to investigate the...

the major purpose of this study was to develop the translation teacher competency test (ttct) and examine its construct and predictive validity. the present study was conducted in two phases: a qualitative phase as well as a quantitative phase. in the first phase of the study, the author attempted to find out the major areas of competency required for an academic translation teacher. the second...

this thesis attempts to investigate the effects of prelistening activities on enhancing iranian efl learners` listening comprehension. the present study investigated ways in which learners` background knowledge could be activated in order to enhance their l2 listening comprehension by limiting the number of possible text interpretations prior to listening. the experiments conducted in this stud...

esl/efl books play a crucial role in shaping language learners worldview of gender roles in society. the present study investigated the status of sexism in two sets of efl textbooks, one developed by non-native iranian authors (ili series) and the other by native authors (top notch series). first, two books from each series was selected randomly. then, a quantitative analysis was carried out wi...

the purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of instruction through debate on male and female efl learners’ reading comprehension, to examine the differences between the performance of male and female participants on the five dimensions of cctst including analysis, evaluation, inference, deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning, and to examine the differences between male ...

data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...

the present study was concerned with exploring the frequency and linguistic focus of corrective feedback types given by novice and experienced female teachers working with young learners and compared it with those of elementary classes for adults. moreover, it aimed at measuring learners’ acknowledgement of teachers’ corrective feedback in the form of uptake in relation to linguistic coverage o...

the purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of blended learning and multimedia softwares on iranian efl students vocabulary learning. in addition, the present study tried to examine the extent to which multimedia softwares can be applied into efl classes in iran. it also attempted to find out students attitudes toward using these softwares. to this end, 87 iranian efl learners at el...

the present study was carried on to investigate the use of face-keeping strategies in reaction to complaints by male and female in two different cultures, persian and american english. to see if apology strategies are affected by cultural, contextual preferences and gender of interlocutors in two distinct languages of persian and american english. the hypotheses to be tested were 1) ifids, acce...

in this thesis, phosphorus ylides [phbppy], [no2bppy] and [brbppy] have been synthesized through the formation of phosphonium salt and dihydrogenation, followed by the reaction of pd(oac)2 and the orthopalladated dinuclear complexes [pd(?-cl)(phbppy)]2, [pd(?-cl)(no2bppy)]2 and [pd(?-cl)(brbppy)]2 have been produced. the reaction of dinuclear complexes and bidentate ligands [l = bipy (2,2-bipyr...