phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

teachers beliefs have usually been left unattended in the realm of educational research in iranian context. one of those beliefs which seems to impact teachers performance in the classroom is their sense of self-efficacy, which refers to teachers belief in their ability to enhance student achievement and in bringing about positive learning outcomes. the present study aimed to investigate the pr...

the present study aimed to investigate the possible effects of focused highlighted error feedback on grammatical accuracy of writing among iranian intermediate efl learners. after selecting 52 homogenous participants from among 70 university students attending azad university of rasht and randomly dividing them into two intact groups of 26 students, the researcher exposed the participants of th...

nitric oxide (no) is a small molecule synthesized by most of mammalian cells with diverse biological activities including vasodilatation, host defense and wound healing. impaired wound healing is a common occurrence among diabetics and patients receiving glucocorticoid therapy. on the other hand the application of laser in biomedical area have been increased. thus, the current studies were desi...

this studyinvestigated therelations between examinees’ academic knowledge and theirperformanceonreading section of ielts and toefl (ibt) through using generalizabilitytheory. g-theory was utilized to investigate the effects of subtest, test items, participants and academic background on the reliability of ielts and toefl (ibt) score. tosamplethe subjectsofthissurvey,a placement testwasadministe...

the present study aimed to investigate representation of discourse markers and metadiscourse markers in conversations and readings of general elt coursebook series used in the language centers of iran. to this aim, four elt coursebooks popularly taught in language centers of this country were analyzed based on fung and carter’s (2007) framework regarding discourse markers and hyland’s (2005) fr...

rested on sociocultural theory (sct), this study attempted to examine the effect of written corrective feedback (wcf) followed by producing written languaging on developing writing accuracy over new tasks. to this aim, two intact iranian efl classes at the low-intermediate level were randomly assigned to two experimental groups: direct (n = 25) and indirect (n = 25). both groups wrote on a numb...

abstract lexical knowledge of complex english words is an important part of language skills and crucial for fluent language use (nation, 2001). the present study, thus, was an attempt to assess the role of morphological decomposition awareness as a vocabulary learning strategy on learners’ productive and receptive recall and recognition of complex english words. so 90 sophomores (female and ma...

in this study, the relationship between teachers’ creative and critical thinking skills and their reflectivity in teaching was investigated. to this end, three questions were raised. these questions were intended to determine whether there was a significant relationship between teachers’ creative thinking skills and their reflectivity in teaching; whether there was a significant relationship be...