charles dickens was a voracious reader even in his childhood. his early reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century picaresque fiction greatly influenced his writing style. his first novel, the pickwick papers, is a tale of rogues and swindlers, adventures and quests, satire and comedy, and innocence and experience. oliver twist, dickens’ second novel, is a young boy’s progress through a cor...

the effect of learning strategies on the speaking ability of iranian students in the context of language institutes abstract language learning strategies are of the most important factors that help language learners to learn a foreign language and how they can deal with the four language skills specifically speaking skill effectively. acknowledging the great impact of learning strategies...

having conducted the experiment and analysed the data, the researcher computed the groups mean scores and variances for the test relating to the research question. as the final atep, a t-test was conodonted for the hypothesis. as noted earlier, the significance level was determined at .05 and .01 respectively. the observed t-value was higher than the critical t-value at. 5 and .01 levels. conse...

the ability of composing a coherent and extended piece of writing in second language is considered as a fundamental factor to convey information and ideas of learners through the academic issues. although learners may achieve a perfect academic writing skill through assigning the l2 tasks in content based instruction, but demonstration of their abilities may be related to their ability in l1 es...

one very decisive factor in students’ academic destiny is the result they get at final term examinations. because of its importance, both students and teachers are curiously anxious about them. as normally it is the case, these final term tests are prepared hurriedly in short time by teachers which result in students’ dissatisfaction, complaining on how the test was different from their expecta...

this study investigated the effects of three kinds of gloss conditions, that is traditional non-call marginal gloss, audio gloss, and extended audio gloss, on reading comprehension and vocabulary gain of iranian upper- intermediate efl learners. to this end, three experimental and one control groups, each comprising 15 participants, took part in the current study. in order to ensure that the pa...

recent years have witnessed an increased attention to form focused instruction and consciousness raising activities (ellis, 2002; doughty & williams, 1998) on the one hand and extensive and meaningful exposure to the target language (klapper & rees, 2003; day & bamford, 1998) on the other. due to significance attributed to above mentioned issues by scholars, this study attempted to bridge them ...

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...

a large number of single research studies on the effects of strategy-based instruction (sbi) in teaching english as a foreign or second language has been conducted so far. however, the lack of a comprehensive meta-analysis targeting the effectiveness of english language sbi is observed. moreover, the findings of experimental studies regarding the context of the english language, proficiency lev...

the purpose of this study was to investigate how english language teachers in mashhad who teach students in the pre-university cycle perceived the impact of the efltee on their teaching. the target population was nearly all pre-university english language teachers in seven districts of mashhad in the scholastic year 2008/2009. a survey questionnaire which consisted of (36) likert type items, wa...