critical thinking ability has an important role in education. accordingly, scholars around the world are searching for new ways for teaching and improving students critical thinking ability. in line with the studies in efl contexts supporting the positive relationship between critical thinking and writing performances, this study investigated the differential effects of halverson’s critical thi...

current studies in second language (l2) learning have revealed the positive role of corrective feedback (cf) in both oral and written forms in different language features. the present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of both direct and indirect written corrective feedback (wcf) on the use of grammatical collocations in l2 writing. the study also sought to examine whether 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...

abstract this study examines the effect of teaching lexical inferencing strategies on developing reading comprehension skill of iranian advanced efl learners. participants were female students of meraj and shokouh institudes of garmsar a quasi-experimental design using two intact advanced classes of efl students at meraj and shokouh institutes. as the first step, a general toefl proficiency te...

the present study aimed at exploring cognitions of iranian english teachers within the context of english for academic purposes (eap). to this end, the cognitions of two groups of eap teachers with respect to their pedagogical content knowledge (pck) and their sense of professional identity (pi) were probed. two language teachers and two content instructors who had at least five years of eap te...

abstract nowadaysphotovoltaic solar cells (pvs) areacknowledged the fastest growing energy technology in the word, however, they only account for only fraction of current global renewable energy capacity. it isrecognized that this incomplete market penetration has been largely a result of the technology’sexcessive cost. so researchers are trying to find innovative, economic way with theaim of ...

the following null hypothesis was proposed: there is no significant difference between the efl students listening comprehension development receiving pictorial cues and those receiving no cuse. to test the null hypothesis, 52 male and femal freshmen students of medicine studing at iran university of medical scinces were randomly selected from a total population of 72 students. to ensure that th...

abstract since heubners (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by l2 learners from article-less and article languages. the present study investigated how persian l2 learners of english produce and interpret english definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions. it was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same cen...

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...

in the first part of this thesis we explored wetting and its dynamics for small droplets. first, we showed how a simple feature of water droplets on a surface, i.e. laplace pressure, can be exploited to build a micropump. we investigated capillary pumping in microchannels both experimentally and numerically. putting two droplets of different sizes at the in/outlet of a microchannel, will ge...