this study examines the effetivenss of task-based activities in helping students learn english language structures for a better communication. initially, a michigan test was administered to the two groups of 52 students majoring in english at the allameh ghotb -e- ravandi university to ensure their homogeneity. the students scores on the grammar part of this test were also regarded as their pre...

this thesis attempts to measure learning styles, self efficacy and intrinsic motivation as predictors of iranian ielts reading comprehension. in order to address this issue, a quantitative study was conducted on some randomly selected intact students at ferdowsi university. these two groups were assigned as they were undergraduate (ba=91) and graduate (ma =74) students; they were all aged betwe...

august wilson is undoubtedly one of the rare black playwrights whose works have attracted streams of attention and worldwide audience. the present study aims at analyzing fences and piano lesson which are two of the most successful plays in his pittsburgh cycle from the perspective of michel foucault’s theories and ideas. studying these two plays from foucault’s perspective opens new windows in...

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...

although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

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...

the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of task repetition on accuracy of iranian efl learners ’speaking ability. in order to achieve this purpose, a null hypothesis was developed: there is no statistically significant difference between accuracy speaking ability in iranian efl learners by use of task repetition. ; of course i should mention that, beside this null hypothesis, an...

like any other learning activity, translation is a problem solving activity which involves executing parallel cognitive processes. the ability to think about these higher processes, plan, organize, monitor and evaluate the most influential executive cognitive processes is what flavell (1975) called “metacognition” which encompasses raising awareness of mental processes as well as using effectiv...

abstract pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. communicative action includes not only using speech acts (such as apologizing, complaining, complimenting, and requesting), but also engaging in different types of discourse and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity. the present study aimed to investigate the assessment of pragm...

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...