phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

nowadays in trade and economic issues, prediction is proposed as the most important branch of science. existence of effective variables, caused various sectors of the economic and business executives to prefer having mechanisms which can be used in their decisions. in recent years, several advances have led to various challenges in the science of forecasting. economical managers in various fi...

abstract the purpose of this study was to find out the effect of applying the principles of group-dynamic assessment (g-da) on learning of conditional structures in english by iranian efl learners at the intermediate level, which according to the formal educational system in iran, includes students who are in their second year of studying in high schools of koohdasht city. this study was a qua...

this study purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...

the present study has tried to accomplish an analysis of margaret atwood’s novels oryx and crake, and the year of the flood in the light of posthuman and cyborg theories. considering posthumanism as a critical reading of some notions of humanism focus of which in this thesis has been identity, new definitions for humanity and human identity are formed. haraway’s cyborg, as one possible new figu...

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...

chapter i provides an overview of structural linguistics and touches upon the saussurean dichotomies with the final goal of exploring their relevance to the stylistic studies of literature. to provide evidence for the singificance of the study, chapter ii deals with the controversial issue of linguistics and literature, and presents opposing views which, at the same time, have been central to t...

the application of a comprehensive model of communicative language ability (cla) to language teaching and testing has always been an imperative in l2 education since hymess proposal of communicative competence in the 1970s. recent l2 research has clearly underscored the importance of sufficient pragmatics representation as an essential component of cla in pedagogical and testing practices in l2...

abstract while task-based instruction is considered as the most effective way to learn a language in the related literature, it is oversimplified on various grounds. different variables may affect how students are engaged with not only the language but also with the task itself. the present study was conducted to investigate language and task related engagement on the basis of the task typolog...

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...