phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

“any science seeks generalities; the aim is to transcend knowledge of particular cases by discovering general regularities or laws” (chesterman, 2001, p. 1). these were the words of chesterman whose paper has served as a typical example of numerous papers carried out on ‘translation universals’ since the mid-nineties. blum-kulka (1986) is among translation studies scholars who proposed ‘explici...

this study investigated the potential role of age in inductive and deductive grammar learning among iranian foreign language learners. the experimental population consisted of our randomly selected samples including two groups of children (with age of exposure to english within 8-13), and two groups of adults (with age of exposure to english within 11-13). thus, the comparison was between ch...

a phase-locked loop (pll) based frequency synthesizer is an important circuit that is used in many applications, especially in communication systems such as ethernet receivers, disk drive read/write channels, digital mobile receivers, high-speed memory interfaces, system clock recovery and wireless communication system. other than requiring good signal purity such as low phase noise and low spu...

this study was intended to analyze the listening tapescripts of the elementary and pre-intermediate levels of total english textbooks from the pragmatic dimension of language functions and speech acts in order to see whether the listening tasks are pragmatically informative or not. for this purpose, 8 conversations from the two books were selected randomly, and then, the two pragmatic models of...

learning-oriented assessment seeks to emphasise that a fundamental purpose of assessment should be to promote learning. it mirrors formative assessment and assessment for learning processes. it can be defined as actions undertaken by teachers and / or students, which provide feedback for the improvement of teaching and learning. it also contrasts with equally important measurement-focused appro...