the present study set out (a) to examine the categories of pedagogical knowledge related to the act of teaching of novice and experienced teachers as gleaned from their verbal report of what they were thinking about while teaching and (b) to compare the categories of pedagogical knowledge of novice and experienced teachers. the aim of comparing these two groups of teachers was to see whether di...

why some learners are willing to communicate in english, concurrently others are not, has been an intensive investigation in l2 education. willingness to communicate (wtc) proposed as initiating to communicate while given a choice has recently played a crucial role in l2 learning. it was hypothesized that wtc would be associated with language learning orientations (llos) as well as social suppo...

the research questions were as follows: 1. is there any relationship between the students concious awareness of the form and implications of the conjuncations and their improvement in using appropriate conjunctions? 2. does students knowledge of the from and the implications of the conjunctions help them to produce more coherent writings. 3. does a comparison between english conjunctions and th...

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...

this thesis is a study on insurance fraud in iran automobile insurance industry and explores the usage of expert linkage between un-supervised clustering and analytical hierarchy process(ahp), and renders the findings from applying these algorithms for automobile insurance claim fraud detection. the expert linkage determination objective function plan provides us with a way to determine whi...

there has been a gradual shift of focus from the study of rule systems, which have increasingly been regarded as impoverished, … to the study of systems of principles, which appear to occupy a much more central position in determining the character and variety of possible human languages. there is a set of absolute universals, notions and principles existing in ug which do not vary from one ...

the present dissertation aims to investigate four-word lexical bundles in applied linguistics research articles by iranian and internationally-published writers. the aims of this study are two-fold: first of all, attempts have been made to create a comprehensive list of the most commonly used four-word lexical bundles categorized by their type and token frequency, their structural characteristi...

during the process of reading, sometimes learners use ineffective and inefficient strategies and some factors may influence their use of strategies. perhaps critical thinking is one of these factors. this study aims to identify those categories of reading strategies that are mostly used by iranian efl learners and to see if there is any significant relationship between the critical thinking abi...

monumental changes occurring on a daily basis have altered the world into a global village of expanding technology and shrinking geography in which preparing language learners for intercultural communication seems to be a sine qua non for modern language education. employing a cross-sectional design in its first phase, this study investigated the intercultural sensitivity and language proficien...

the present research was conducted to accomplish two purposes. firstly, it aimed to explore and describe schematic structure or what halliday and hassan (1989, p.64) have called “generic structure potential” (gsp) of american english, iranian persian and iranian english newspaper editorials within systemic functional linguistics. secondly, a quantitative cross-comparison was made to investigate...