this study investigates the strategies native english and persian speakers employ for expressing gratitude in different situations. the strategies of persian efl learners are also compared with english strategies in order to find the differences that may exist between these two languages. social status and size of imposition of the favor are social variables which are investigated in detail for...

the major aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between social and cultural capital and efl students’ critical thinking skills. this study takes this relationship in to account to see if people with different sociocultural status are different regarding their critical thinking skills. to this end, 160 university students majoring in english language and literature, english trans...

abstract biometric access control is an automatic system that intelligently provides the access of special actions to predefined individuals. it may use one or more unique features of humans, like fingerprint, iris, gesture, 2d and 3d face images. 2d face image is one of the important features with useful and reliable information for recognition of individuals and systems based on this ...

cohesion is an indispensable linguistic feature in discourse analysis. lexicald such a differe cohesion and conjunction in particular as two crucial elements to textual cohesion and comprehension has been the focus of a wide range of studies up to now. yet the relationship between the open register and cohesive devices has not been thoroughly investigated in discourse studies. this study concen...

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...

this study investigated how group formation method, namely student-selected vs. teacher-assigned, influences the results of the community model of teaching creative writing; i.e., group dynamics and group outcome (the quality of performance). the study adopted an experimental comparison group and microgenetic research design to observe the change process over a relatively short period of time. ...

abstract reception environment has considerable effects on accepting a translation. as the expectations of a target culture and its values and needs change throughout history, its criteria for accepting a translation or rejecting it will change accordingly (gentzler, 2001). the expectations of iran, as the reception environment in the present study, have changed after the islamic revolution. i...

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...

the present study reports an analysis of response articles in four different disciplines in the social sciences, i.e., linguistics, english for specific purposes (esp), accounting, and psychology. the study has three phases: micro analysis, macro analysis, and e-mail interview. the results of the micro analysis indicate that a three-level linguistic pattern is used by the writers in order to cr...

this study investigated the effects of planning on second-language written production with regard to task type. the participants were 75 iranian learners of english as a foreign language attending a private foreign language institution. they were asked to complete two different types of writing tasks (expository writing task and argumentative writing task) in different planned conditions (indiv...