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...

until now many studies have been done over recent decades throughout the world to show the right age to start english. in iran, research is still at an early stage in terms of evaluating teachers’ beliefs about teaching children english. the problem of at what age to start teaching english and how to teach english to elementary school children has not been solved neither in this country nor els...

writing as a productive skill requires practice in the basic sub-skills of vocabulary and grammar. in fact, grammar has been viewed as the core of programs in writing classes to help the students put the elements of sentence together and combine sentences of specific lengths to come up with an error-free work of art. conceptualizing l2 writing in this way introduces writing as a product and enc...

abstract the aim of this study was threefold: (1) to investigate the relationship between knowledge of semantic prosody and efl learners general language proficiency; (2) to examine the relationship between qualitative as well as quantitative knowledge of words, and (3) to compare the performance of efl learner on receptive and productive measures of semantic prosody. the study is based on a...

burnout is a response to the chronic work stress which is prevalent mostly among the people who do people job, like teaching. the purpose of this study was to develop a valid and reliable instrument that can measure burnout in foreign language teachers. although some widely used instruments were developed before which measured burnout in teachers, a specific instrument which include specific sy...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of podcasts as a learning and teaching tool on iranian efl learners’ motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. the study also investigated the learners’ perception towards listening to podcasts and examined whether the learners were likely to accept podcasts. out of fifty-five intermediate learners studying e...

the present study sought to examine whether a task-based approach could have an impact on raising awareness of collocations. moreover, it sought to investigate the facilitative role of consciousness-raising tasks of collocations in the communicative instances of use. to this end, 68 intermediate learners of english were selected via a placement test. the participants were taught with classroom ...

abstract biometric access control is an automatic system that intelligently provides the access of special actions to predefined individuals. it may use one or more unique features of humans, like fingerprint, iris, gesture, 2d and 3d face images. 2d face image is one of the important features with useful and reliable information for recognition of individuals and systems based on this ...

based on the latest records of typhlops vermicularis merrem, 1820 from iran, this species is distributed in the northern and southern regions of the country. in this study, new records of typhlops vermicularis are presented and it is shown that distribution range of this species is extended towards the eastern and western iran, and according to the new distribution map, it can be assumed that t...

1. to determine whether difference in birth body mass influenced growth performance in pipistrellus kuhlii we studied a total of 12 captive-born neonates. bats were assigned to two body mass groups: light birth body mass (lbw: 0.89 ± 0.05, n=8) and heavy birth body mass (hbw: 1.35 ± 0.08, n=4). heavier body mass at birth was associated with rapid postnatal growth (body mass and forearm length) ...