in the past couple of decades sociocultural theory of sla and its implications in efl contexts have attracted attentions of research circles worldwide and aroused some controversies. firth and wagner (1997) have questioned the principles of the cognitive view which gives importance to mental constructs in favor of sociocultural view which highlights social and contextual constructs. but if soci...

deployable scissor type structures are composed of the so-called scissor-like elements (sles), which are connected to each other at an intermediate point through a pivotal connection and allow them to be folded into a compact bundle for storage or transport. several sles are connected to each other in order to form units with regular polygonal plan views. the sides and radii of the polygons are...

‏‎despite the different criticisms on contrastive analysis it has been proved that the results of it(when processed) can be useful in a tefl environment, specially at the level of phonology.this study is an attempt to compare and contrast the sound systems of kurdish and english for pedagogical aims.the consonants,vowels,stress and intonation of the two languages are described by the same model...

any change in the refractive index of a laser active medium can lead to serious degradation of beam quality, laser beam modes, laser performance and variation in the intensity distribution. alteration in the refractive index of laser active medium is especially notable in high power lasers. it is clear that in the laser beam production, the pumping agent induces a great amount of heat which...

this study investigated (a) the learners’ existing reading strategy repertoire, (b) the effect of instruction in reading strategies on learners’ strategic performance, and (c) the effect of explicit instruction in top-down reading strategies on reading comprehension ability of intermediate learners. the study was conducted with 40 intermediate efl learners in two groups of experimental and cont...

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...

abstract the third millennium has started, but the world is facing with serious challenges in achieving international security and peace. various human rights violations have lead the states to find means to protect human rights. also article 55 of the united nations charter introduces the respect to human rights and fundamental freedom as the most suitable ways to realize peace and security. ...

monumental changes occurring on a daily basis have altered the world into a global village of expanding technology and shrinking geography in which preparing language learners for intercultural communication seems to be a sine qua non for modern language education. employing a cross-sectional design in its first phase, this study investigated the intercultural sensitivity and language proficien...

the present paper investigates how far ideologies can be tease out in discourse by examining the employed schemata by two ideologically opposed news media, the bbc and press tv, to report syria crisis during a period of nine months in 2011. by assuming that news is not a valuefree construction of facts and drawing on micro structural approach of schema theory, for the first time in discours...

this study explored reading strategy use of tefl ma students when they read academic research articles in english. the purpose of this study was to investigate how this group of readers typically approaches reading academic research articles related to their field of study, and also what they do in reading such research articles. the aim of the present study was bilateral. first, the researcher...