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...

abstract in written mode of language, metadiscourse markers are used commonly to help writers in general and academic writers in particular to produce coherent and professional texts. the purpose of the present study was to compare introduction sections of applied linguistics and physics articles regarding their use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers based on the model pro...

abstract recent studies suggest that prelistening activities play an important role in the development of listening comprehension (e.g. long 1990;chiang and dunkel 1992; schmidt-rinehart 1994; jensen and hansen 1995; robinson et al., 1995; buck, 1995; foster and skehan,1996; teng 1996; robinson, 2001; chang and read 2006). in line with previous studies and to shed light on a new aspect of sche...

the present study was an attempt to determine the types of motivation and levels of foreign language learning anxiety among efl students studying at azad and state universities in kermanshah and to determine the relationship between these two factors and language proficiency and gender. to this end, the foreign language learning motivation scale, by deci and ryan )1985(, were administered to 12...

previous studies regarding teachers’ beliefs have revealed that teachers’ beliefs have influence on their classroom practices. the current study aimed to investigate the effect of teachers’ beliefs about teaching reading strategies on students’ motivation and success in reading comprehension in the context of english teaching as a foreign language in high schools of mazandaran, iran. data were ...

over the past decades a number of approaches have been applied for forecasting mortality. in 1992, a new method for long-run forecast of the level and age pattern of mortality was published by lee and carter. this method was welcomed by many authors so it was extended through a wider class of generalized, parametric and nonlinear model. this model represents one of the most influential recent d...

the world wide web becomes very popular recently and plays an influential role in english learning. by burgeoning role of source-based writing as partial fulfillment of tefl courses and vast use of the internet, lack of empirical studies to explore these areas is obvious. this study aimed to explore the effect of the amount of familiarity with the web (internet literacy) on junior english stude...

the ability to speak two languages in the world is a remarkable achievement. there is a good reason to believe that bilingualism is the norm for the majority of people in the world because 70% of the earth’s population are supposed to be bilingual or multilingual. various investigations have shown that the native language impacts foreign word recognition, and this influence is adapted by the de...

abstract tasks nowadays are at the center of attention in sla research. task types is one of the critical issues in this regard, their effectiveness and suitability to any particular context, their characteristics and the result they yield are among some of these issues. on the other hand, discourse markers (dms) have been very much investigated and their effectiveness in conveying the meaning...

even though, to date, a lot of studies have been conducted on the subject of politeness theory, there are very few studies regarding the applicability of this theory to translation between english and persian which shows the reason behind conducting the present study. this study was carried out with the aim of highlighting whether there is any difference between english and persian methods of u...