recent studies in scientific education as well as foreign and second language instruction suggest that thinking has rarely been an integral part of education and training in classroom. some scholars decried the lack of emphasis on thinking in the institutes and schools. they noted that memorization and drills were rewarded,while inquiry, reflection, and consideration of alternatives were frowne...

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...

abstract english language learning in iran has become significant in recent years, and english has been included in the curriculum of iranian schools and universities, and considerable attention has been paid to this language in our society. nevertheless, teaching and learning english in iranian schools has not been able to satisfy the specified goals, so different efl institutes have been est...

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. ...

the quest for power has formed much of the world history especially in 20th and 21st centuries. oil (energy) particularly after industrial revolution has been a tool for conquest and power and has been transformed to a geopolitical issue. from a geopolitical point of view this has been the case for the last two centuries in central asia and caucasus. central asia and caucasus has always been...

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...

the aim of the present study was to investigate the frequency and the type of discourse markers used in the argumentative and expository writings of iranian efl learners and the differences between these text features in the two essay genres. the study also aimed at examining the influence of the use of discourse markers on the participants’ writing quality. to this end the discourse markers us...

after the soviet union dissolution, a chaotic period was begun in the russia. russia lost its glory and felt disgrace. the first group of elites came to power under yeltsin; they tried to re-define russia’s identity as a european country and build a foreign policy on this baseline. therefore russia tried to become closer with the west especially with the u.s. according to their view the sovie...

just as motivation is important in sla research, demotivation constitutes an important factor, too. there are many studies done on demotivation and burnout of teachers. many of these studies have been conducted on one or two aspects of english instruction. consequently, there are few studies which have been done on more than two aspects of english teaching. the aim of this study is to find out ...

this study purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...