The present study aimed to assess the target and present reading comprehension needs and abilities of Iranian medical students with different levels of English language proficiency. A total of 283 medical students and 23 ESP instructors were chosen through cluster sampling. The data collection instruments included the Persian version of Atai and Nazari’s (2011) needs analysis questionnaire and ...

If the dataset available to machine learning results from cluster sampling, the usual cross-validation error rate estimate can lead to biased and misleading results. An adapted cross-validation is described for this case. Using a simulation, the sampling distribution of the generalization error rate estimate, under cluster or simple random sampling hypothesis, are compared to the true value. Th...

In this paper we give an outline of a corpus planning project which aims to develop linguistic resources for the nine official African languages of South Africa in the form of corpora, more specifically spoken language corpora. In the course of the article, we will address issues such as spoken language vs. written language, register vs. activity and normative vs. non-normative approaches to co...

The problem of identifying good features for improving conventional language models like trigrams is presented as a classification task in this paper. The idea is to use various syntactic and semantic features extracted from a language for classifying between real-world articles and articles generated by sampling a trigram language model. In doing so, a good accuracy obtained on the classificat...

Monte Carlo model checking introduced by Smolka and Grosu is an approach to analyse non-probabilistic models using sampling and draw conclusions with a given confidence interval by applying statistical inference. Though not exhaustive, the method enables verification of complex models, even in cases where the underlying problem is undecidable. In this paper we develop Monte Carlo model checking...

To explore Iranian professionally developed English teachers’ passion for the English language teaching profession, an interview with 7 open-ended questions was conducted to 14 Iranian professionally developed teachers to discover what factors were at work in their professional growth. Participants included 8 Ph.D. holders, 3 Ph.D. candidates, and 3 M.A. holders in TEFL who had more than 20 yea...

When comparing student achievement across countries, it is important that the comparisons be as “fair” as possible. TIMSS has worked towards this goal in a number of ways, including providing detailed procedures for standardizing the population definitions, sampling, test translations, test administration, scoring, and database formation. Developing the TIMSS tests involved the interaction of e...