Objectives: Persian is a pro-drop language with canonical Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. This study investigates the acquisition of word order in Persian-speaking children. Methods: In the present study, participants were 60 Persian-speaking children (30 girls and 30 boys) with typically developing language skills, and aged between 30-47 months. The 30-minute language samples were audio...

This study examines the potential connections among learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC) in English, their perceptions of autonomy-supportive teaching and two individual difference variables, i.e. motivation and English speaking self-efficacy. Two hundred and five Iranian EFL learners responded to four questionnaires. The data obtained from the collected instruments were...

Speaking and writing are the productive skills of language and share similar components. In other words, writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the modes of production are different. In addition, among a number of personality variables in predicting English language proficiency, extraversion/introversion has been extensively studied. This quasi-experimental study aims at explo...

Speaking as an initial goal in language teaching and learning has relationships with many variables including listening, reading, writing, knowledge of vocabulary as well as grammar. The present study mainly aims at examining the relationship between translations and speaking fluency. For this purpose and following an experimental design, three groups of Iranian advanced EFL learners were...

Let M(m,n) be the complexity of checking whether a graph G with m edges and n vertices is a median graph. We show that the complexity of checking whether G is triangle-free is at most M(m,m). Conversely, we prove that the complexity of checking whether a given graph is a median graph is at most O(m log n) + T (m log n, n), where T (m,n) is the complexity of finding all triangles of the graph. W...

Over the last few years, role of computers has become a controversial issue in language learning. This study was designed to examine the impact of computer anxiety and computer self-efficacy on the speaking section of the TOEFL iBT test taken by Intermediate EFL learners. The researchers intended to find out, which var- iable i.e. computer anxiety and/or self-efficacy would result in better per...

This study investigated the effect of role play on improving speaking ability of Iranian pre-intermediate ESP learners. To this aim, the researchers examined the students’ speaking ability in two groups: the experimental and the control groups.24 males and femaleESPlearners at pre-intermediate level were selected by taking a pre-test. Then the participants of the current study were randomlydivi...

A computational complexity gap, captured in the definition of one-way functions, is a necessary and sufficient condition for much of modern cryptography. Loosely speaking, one-way functions are functions that are easy to compute but hard to invert (in an average-case sense). The existence of one-way functions implies that P is different than NP , which means that such a complexity gap is only w...

Among topics in the field of pragmatics, some seem to be in a more rigorous need of investigation. Pragmatic assessment and specifically the issue of pragmatic rating are among issues which deserve more thorough consideration. The purpose of this study was to examine rater criteria and its consistency and variability in the assessment of Iranian EFL learners’ production of compliments based on ...