testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

abstract: advertisements are the most accessible type of authentic materials, and this is one reason why they are used more and more in english teaching classes. for this cause, studies in the field of advertisements are very widespread nowadays. for pun is one aspect which makes advertisements more interesting, it is used more than before in advertisements. use of puns makes an advertisement m...

abstract the main purpose of this study was to investigate whether there was any significant difference between the speaking achievement of learners who were trained by means of consciousness raising of sociolinguistic skills and that of learners who were trained without the above mentioned task. the participants of this study consist of 60 intermediate level students participating languag...

this study investigates the cohesive devices used in the textbook of english for the students of psychology. the research questions and hypotheses in the present study are based on what frequency and distribution of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices are. then, to answer the questions all grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in reading comprehension passages from 6 units of 21units th...

the quest for power has formed much of the world history especially in 20th and 21st centuries. oil (energy) particularly after industrial revolution has been a tool for conquest and power and has been transformed to a geopolitical issue. from a geopolitical point of view this has been the case for the last two centuries in central asia and caucasus. central asia and caucasus has always been...

with the introduction of communicative language teaching, a large number of studies have concerned with students’ oral participation in language classrooms. although the importance of classroom participation is evident, some language learners are unwilling to engage in oral activities. this passivity and unwillingness to participate in language classroom discussions is known as “reticence”. rev...

attempts have been made to study the thermodynamic behavior of 1,3 butadiene purification columns with the aim of retrofitting those columns to more energy efficient separation schemes. 1,3 butadiene is purified in two columns in series through being separated from methyl acetylene and 1,2 butadiene in the first and second column respectively. comparisons have been made among different therm...

one of the most important number sequences in mathematics is fibonacci sequence. fibonacci sequence except for mathematics is applied to other branches of science such as physics and arts. in fact, between anesthetics and this sequence there exists a wonderful relation. fibonacci sequence has an importance characteristic which is the golden number. in this thesis, the golden number is observed ...

abstract: in the paper of black and scholes (1973) a closed form solution for the price of a european option is derived . as extension to the black and scholes model with constant volatility, option pricing model with time varying volatility have been suggested within the frame work of generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (garch) . these processes can explain a number of em...

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...