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...

abstract this paper discusses several commonly used models for strategic marketing¹ including market environmental analysis methods (i.e. swot and pest analysis) and strategic marketing tools and techniques (i.e. boston matrix and shell directional policy matrix)and shows how these models may help a firm to achieve its strategic goals. at first, the main reason for doing this research is de...

today the image of a permanent skeletal space of cities affected by some forces or mechanisms is put in time with social-economic development and while imposes a new face and perspective to physical anatomy of cities, and prepares field to changes in content and social- economic structures of cities too. simultaneously with quitting villages in order to settle in cities by villagers, the phen...

abstract the current study sets out 1) to investigate the strategic needs of iranian efl learners in reading literary and non-literary texts; 2) to shed some light on the differences between reading literary and non-literary texts; and 3) to specify the differences in the interaction of participants with texts while reading two literary subgenres ( i.e., short story and literary essays). to ...

the speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that has received the least attention in the field of pragmatics. this study investigates the ways power relations, social distance, formality of the context, gender, and language proficiency (for efl learners) influence disagreement and politeness strategies. the participants of the study were 200 male and female native persian s...

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 ...

this study aimed at examining the effects of iranian efl learners’ anxiety, ambiguity tolerance, and gender on their preferences for corrective feedback (cf, henceforth). the effects were sought with regard to the necessity, frequency, and timing of cf, types of errors that need to be treated, types of cf, and choice of correctors. seventy-five iranian efl students, twenty-eight males and forty...