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...

in the past couple of decades sociocultural theory of sla and its implications in efl contexts have attracted attentions of research circles worldwide and aroused some controversies. firth and wagner (1997) have questioned the principles of the cognitive view which gives importance to mental constructs in favor of sociocultural view which highlights social and contextual constructs. but if soci...

the study reflected in this thesis aims at finding out relationships between critical thinking (ct), and the reading sections of tofel and ielts tests. the study tries to find any relationships between the ct ability of students and their performance on reading tests of tofel and academic ielts. however, no research has ever been conducted to investigate the relationship between ct and the read...

in reality, most structures involved in geotechnical engineering are three dimensional in nature, and although in many, plane strain or axisymmetric approximations are reasonable, there are some, for which 3-d treatment is required. the quantity of data, and the size of the various vectors and matrices involved in such analysis, increase dramatically. this has sever implications for computer r...

the ability of composing a coherent and extended piece of writing in second language is considered as a fundamental factor to convey information and ideas of learners through the academic issues. although learners may achieve a perfect academic writing skill through assigning the l2 tasks in content based instruction, but demonstration of their abilities may be related to their ability in l1 es...

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...

this dissertation has six chapter and tree appendices. chapter 1 introduces the thesis proposal including description of problem, key questions, hypothesis, backgrounds and review of literature, research objectives, methodology and theoretical concepts (key terms) taken the literature and facilitate an understanding of national security, national interest and turkish- israeli relations concepts...

one of the most commonly used techniques to reduce the corrosion rate of rebar in concrete is addition substances named corrosion inhibitors into the concrete. corrosion inhibitor is chemical compounds that were added to concrete to prevent corrosion of steel in concrete. sodium nitrate is a type of anodic inhibitors that this study investigatesthe effect of this inhibitor on the properties of ...

while performance-based language assessment has led to an increased authenticity and content validity in the practice of writing assessment, the reliability of ratings has become a major issue. research findings have shown different reactions by native english speaker (nes) and non-native english speaker (nns) teachers to students’ writings. the focus of this study is on investigating whether i...

even though, to date, a lot of studies have been conducted on the subject of politeness theory, there are very few studies regarding the applicability of this theory to translation between english and persian which shows the reason behind conducting the present study. this study was carried out with the aim of highlighting whether there is any difference between english and persian methods of u...