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...

introduction acetic acid bacteria are large group of obligate aerobic gram negative bacteria with the ability to oxidize ethanol to acetic acid (1). they are widely distributed in natural habitats and classified in family acetobacteraceae. members of this family are useful in industrial production of vinegar(2). acetic acid bacteria (aab) can use substrates as glucose, ethanol, lactate or glyc...

abstract in written mode of language, metadiscourse markers are used commonly to help writers in general and academic writers in particular to produce coherent and professional texts. the purpose of the present study was to compare introduction sections of applied linguistics and physics articles regarding their use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers based on the model pro...

abstract previous studies on willingness to communicate (wtc) have shown the influence of many individual or situational factors on students’ tendency to engage in classroom communication, in which wtc has been viewed either at the trait-level or situational level. however, due to the complexity of the notion of willingness to communicate, the present study suggests that these two strands are ...

abstract i the purpose of this study was to launch a thorough investigation concerning the possibility of differing orientations to the writing proficiency construct by native and non-native english speaking teacher raters. it mainly revolved around the international english language testing system (ielts) that is widely administered and employed as a measure of general proficiency in englis...

abstract the present study deals with a comparison between reactive and pre-emptive focus-on-form in terms of application and efficiency. it was conducted in an intermediate english class in shahroud. 15 male learners participated in this research and their age ranged from 18 to 25. a course book, new interchange 3, and a complementary book were used. every session the learners gave lectures o...

the present study investigated construct equivalence of multiple choice (mc) and constructed response (cr) item types across stem and content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘a’), non-stem-equivalent but content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘b’), and non-stem and non-content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘c’). one hundred seventy english-major undergraduates completed mc ...

abstract part one: the electrode oxidation potentials of a series of eighteen n-hydroxy compounds in aqueous solution were calculated based on a proper thermodynamic cycle. the dft method at the level of b3lyp-6-31g(d,p) was used to calculate the gas-phase free energy differences ,and the polarizable continuum model (pcm) was applied to describe the solvent and its interaction with n-hydroxy ...

learning-oriented assessment seeks to emphasise that a fundamental purpose of assessment should be to promote learning. it mirrors formative assessment and assessment for learning processes. it can be defined as actions undertaken by teachers and / or students, which provide feedback for the improvement of teaching and learning. it also contrasts with equally important measurement-focused appro...

the major aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between iq, eq and test format in the light of test fairness considerations. this study took this relationship into account to see if people with different eq and iq performed differently on different test formats. to this end, 90 advanced learners of english form college of ferdowsi university of mashhad were chosen. they were ask...