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...

the current study examined iranian undergraduate efl students’ willingness to communicate with regard to their vocabulary knowledge. in general, participants were somewhat willing to communicate in english. the total mean score of 730 university students’ perception of willing to communicate was 83.53 out of 135. results, regarding four parts of willingness to communicate, revealed that part...

the rationale behind the present study is that particular learning strategies produce more effective results when applied together. the present study tried to investigate the efficiency of the semantic-context strategy alone with a technique called, keyword method. to clarify the point, the current study seeked to find answer to the following question: are the keyword and semantic-context metho...

a one dimensional dynamic model for a riser reactor in a fluidized bed catalytic cracking unit (fccu) for gasoil feed has been developed in two distinct conditions, one for industrial fccu and another for fccu using various frequencies of microwave energy spaced at the height of the riser reactor (fccu-mw). in addition, in order to increase the accuracy of component and bulk diffusion, instanta...

the debate whether esp teachers need to have knowledge of the specialized field they are teaching has been an issue in the literature over the last two decades. the aim of conducting this study was to explore iranian learners’ and instructors’ beliefs and attitudes concerning the role of specialized knowledge in teaching esp classes. a seventeen item questionnaire was administered to 400 esp le...

this study purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...

the purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the relation between efl teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and their success. moreover, the study was an analysis of the teacher age, gender and years of teaching experience, to examine the manner in which these factors relate to teacher self-efficacy as defined by bandura (1997) and teaching effectiveness as evaluated by their own student...

critical thinking ability has an important role in education. accordingly, scholars around the world are searching for new ways for teaching and improving students critical thinking ability. in line with the studies in efl contexts supporting the positive relationship between critical thinking and writing performances, this study investigated the differential effects of halverson’s critical thi...

the ability to speak two languages in the world is a remarkable achievement. there is a good reason to believe that bilingualism is the norm for the majority of people in the world because 70% of the earth’s population are supposed to be bilingual or multilingual. various investigations have shown that the native language impacts foreign word recognition, and this influence is adapted by the de...

over the past decades a number of approaches have been applied for forecasting mortality. in 1992, a new method for long-run forecast of the level and age pattern of mortality was published by lee and carter. this method was welcomed by many authors so it was extended through a wider class of generalized, parametric and nonlinear model. this model represents one of the most influential recent d...