This study aims to examine the cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of rapport management strategies (rapport enhancement, rapport maintenance, rapport neglect, and rapport challenge) in the complaints during service encounters based on Spencer Oatey’s (2008) model. To this end, 90 participants (30 Persian native speakers, 30 Iranian EFL (English as a foreign language) learner...

Many NLP applications need fundamental tools to convert the input text into appropriate form or format and extract the primary linguistic knowledge of words and sentences. These tools perform segmentation of text into sentences, words and phrases, checking and correcting the spellings, doing lexical and morphological analysis, POS tagging and so on. Persian is among languages with complex prepr...

This study attempted to investigate writing problems and the relationship between expert-assessment and self-assessment of writing problems. Participants were thirty four non-English faculty members of Tehran and Guilan universities. The instruments were writing an essay on the topic "What teaching strategies do you use in your classes?" in twenty five lines and filling the questionnaire of wri...

the acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (atay, 2010; can, 2009; chay, 2006, & kras, 2007, among others). in the present study, ‘predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. there are three english verb-types which seem to be more problematic for persian efl learners:...

the comparative and contrastive analysis of pun (jeans) in arabic and persian languages has been making the liberian’s minds engaged for ages. in the present essay, there has been a chance of studying and clarifying some of the differences of opinion between the two languages’ literatures regarding the pun in general, and the mosaic rhyme (compound pun) in specific. to do so, in the first place...

Pair and small group work is infrequently welcomed in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes under the assumption that students tend to use their first language (L1), which is considered detrimental to learning the new language. From sociocultural perspective, however, students’ first language is claimed to play the role of an important psychological tool and can facilitate the learning pr...