abstract this study examines the relationship between reading anxiety and difficulty of texts as well as the relationship between reading anxiety and students perceived difficulty of the texts. since difficulty is a relative concept, i limited its definition by sticking to the readability formula. we also took students perceived difficulty levels into account. therefore, in the present study, ...

within communicative, interactive, and learner-centered framework of language teaching and learning, students need to learn four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing for their educational success. but of all the language skills, reading enjoys a paramount significance in so many second or foreign language academic contexts. in spite of its importance, language learners still have...

simplification universal as a universal feature of translation means translated texts tend to use simpler language than original texts in the same language and it can be critically investigated through common concepts: type/token ratio, lexical density, and mean sentence length. although steps have been taken to test this hypothesis in various text types in different linguistic communities, in ...

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...

1.1 introduction “i see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. a good translation is like a pane of glass. you only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections- scratches, bubbles. ideally, there shouldn’t be any. it should never call attention to itself.” “norman shapiro” (venuti, 1995:1) edward fitzgerald is the br...

abstract: the present study was undertaken to investigate whether 1) there is any significant correlation between iranian efl/eap learners’ l2 writing proficiency and their willingness to communicate, 2) there is any significant difference between efl and eap learners in terms of willingness to communicate, 3) there is any significant difference in wtc of iranian efl/eap learners with 1- nati...

the present research study attempted to find out the extent to which two pre-task activities of “glossary of unknown vocabulary items” and “content related support” assisted efl language learners with their performance on listening comprehension questions across two different proficiency levels (low and high). data for this study were obtained from a total of 120 language learners, female and m...

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...

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 the present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of critical thinking on writing ability of 60 iranian intermediate efl learners studying at chenar language institute in khuzestan, iran. to this end, the participants of the study were selected based on their performance in an pet test, a cornell critical thinking test form x and a pre-test of writing. the participants un...