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 ...

the aim of the present study was to investigate the frequency and the type of discourse markers used in the argumentative and expository writings of iranian efl learners and the differences between these text features in the two essay genres. the study also aimed at examining the influence of the use of discourse markers on the participants’ writing quality. to this end the discourse markers us...

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...

this study aimed at examining the effects of iranian efl learners’ anxiety, ambiguity tolerance, and gender on their preferences for corrective feedback (cf, henceforth). the effects were sought with regard to the necessity, frequency, and timing of cf, types of errors that need to be treated, types of cf, and choice of correctors. seventy-five iranian efl students, twenty-eight males and forty...

as polysemy is encountered frequently in english as foreign language. fl learners’ ability to disambiguate polysemous verbs becomes critical to their comprehension in the target language. this thesis, accordingly, investigated how iranian efl learners achieved comprehension of english polysemous verbs by using three different types of cues: (1) elaborated context, (2) semantic frames, and (...

with the growth of more humanistic approaches towards teaching foreign languages, more emphasis has been put on learners’ feelings, emotions and individual differences. one of the issues in teaching and learning english as a foreign language is demotivation. the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the components of language learning strategies, optimism, duration o...

abstract listening is a key and main tool in second language skill and its development is of prime concern to teachers and learners. furthermore, the application of technology in language classrooms has become more commonplace in the last fifty years. computer and the internet have made foreign language materials easy to access and use. so, the present study is an attempt to examine the effec...

the speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that has received the least attention in the field of pragmatics. this study investigates the ways power relations, social distance, formality of the context, gender, and language proficiency (for efl learners) influence disagreement and politeness strategies. the participants of the study were 200 male and female native persian s...

in the present study, the effect of e-64 at different concentrations (0.5, 1, 5 and 10 µm) added to (1) the ivm medium on oocyte nuclear maturation and developmental competence of ovine oocytes, and (2) to the ivc medium on embryonic development of ovine embryos were investigated.

abstract the present study investigated the effects of task types and involvement load hypothesis on incidental learning of 10 target words (tws) in junior high schools (jhss) in givi, ardabil. the tasks deployed in this study were two input-based tasks (reading plus dictionary use with an involvement index of 3, and reading plus gap-fill task with an involvement index of 2), and one output-ba...