abstract: postmethod is a newly developed pedagogy which as an alternative to method rejects the notion of good or bad methods and the concept of best method that can be generalized and appropriate for all contexts. instead, it treats each context as unique and one of a kind which cant be compared with other cases. this study is a postmethod-oriented one which investigates whether and how far t...

abstract this study aimed at analyzing a corpus of emails gathered from iranian students studying in england. the corpus contained 996 emails that were investigated by employing the framework of chen (2006) to find common patterns in the discourse of these emails. another aim of the study was to find how two request acts (want statements and query preparatory) were used in the emails. the...

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...

as polysemy is encountered frequently in english as foreign language. fl learners’ ability to disambiguate polysemous verbs becomes critical to their comprehension in the target language. this thesis, accordingly, investigated how iranian efl learners achieved comprehension of english polysemous verbs by using three different types of cues: (1) elaborated context, (2) semantic frames, and (...

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...

this study investigated (a) the learners’ existing reading strategy repertoire, (b) the effect of instruction in reading strategies on learners’ strategic performance, and (c) the effect of explicit instruction in top-down reading strategies on reading comprehension ability of intermediate learners. the study was conducted with 40 intermediate efl learners in two groups of experimental and cont...

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...

the present study is an experimental case study which investigates the impacts, if any, of skopos on syntactic features of the target text. two test groups each consisting of 10 ma students translated a set of sentences selected from advertising texts in the operative and informative mode. the resulting target texts were then statistically analyzed in terms of the number of words, phrases, si...