abstract the main purpose of this study was to investigate whether there was any significant difference between the speaking achievement of learners who were trained by means of consciousness raising of sociolinguistic skills and that of learners who were trained without the above mentioned task. the participants of this study consist of 60 intermediate level students participating languag...

armenias geopolitics and its historical experience have had a determining impact on the character of its foreign policy .present-day armenia is a small, landlocked country with _11,620 square miles area armenias landlocked nature makes it dependent on the benevolence of its neighbors for access to the outside world a fact that gives it a sense of isolation and vulnerability. as it was indic...

the present study sought to investigate the role of dynamic assessment (da) in improvement of iranian efl writing performance at different language proficiency levels. to this end, after conducting the quick placement test, 60 iranian efl learners were assigned to two groups with different language proficiency levels. in both groups each participant wrote two compositions, one before and one af...

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...

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...

esl/efl books play a crucial role in shaping language learners worldview of gender roles in society. the present study investigated the status of sexism in two sets of efl textbooks, one developed by non-native iranian authors (ili series) and the other by native authors (top notch series). first, two books from each series was selected randomly. then, a quantitative analysis was carried out wi...

this study investigates the effect of teacher’s repetition as an input enhancement technique in explicit teaching of vocabulary items on efl learners’ later retrieval. to this end, 66 persian speaking english learners, aged 18 - 29, homogenized through a standard proficiency test (opt), were chosen and put into two experimental and control groups, each 33 learners. general service list (gsl), a...

most specialists in the field of foreign language teachingconsiderreading skill as an interactive process between the reader’s prior knowledge and the text.accordingly, the activation of prior knowledge for an effective comprehension is very important. it is generally agreed that the pre-reading phase is the stage where this type of interaction and activation may be enhanced throughcertain stra...

boron nitride semiconducting zigzag swcnt, $b_{cb}$$n_{cn}$$c_{1-cb-cn}$, as a potential candidate for making nanoelectronic devices was examined. in contrast to the previous dft calculations, wherein just one boron and nitrogen doping configuration have been considered, here for the average over all possible configurations, density of states (dos) was calculated in terms of boron and nitrogen ...

with the introduction of communicative language teaching, a large number of studies have concerned with students’ oral participation in language classrooms. although the importance of classroom participation is evident, some language learners are unwilling to engage in oral activities. this passivity and unwillingness to participate in language classroom discussions is known as “reticence”. rev...