in one pole of the continuum of language learning, theoreticians and practitioners traditionally consider english as english as a second language or english as a foreign language. however, in the other pole of this continuum where english is thought of as the most effective tool for international communication, it is referred to as a lingua franca. those who favor an approach to english growing...

one very decisive factor in students’ academic destiny is the result they get at final term examinations. because of its importance, both students and teachers are curiously anxious about them. as normally it is the case, these final term tests are prepared hurriedly in short time by teachers which result in students’ dissatisfaction, complaining on how the test was different from their expecta...

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...

the present study was an attempt to conduct a contrastive analysis between general english (ge) and english for specific purposes (esp) texts in terms of cohesion and cohesive devices. to this end, thirty texts from different esp and ge textbooks were randomly selected. then they were analyzed manually to find the frequency of cohesive devices. cohesive devices include reference, substitution, ...

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...

“any science seeks generalities; the aim is to transcend knowledge of particular cases by discovering general regularities or laws” (chesterman, 2001, p. 1). these were the words of chesterman whose paper has served as a typical example of numerous papers carried out on ‘translation universals’ since the mid-nineties. blum-kulka (1986) is among translation studies scholars who proposed ‘explici...

this study was designed to investigate the impacts of teachers self-disclosure on students foreign language classroom anxiety, attitude to english language learning and their achievement scores at the end of the term. there were 48 female learners of intermediate level. they were not randomly selected. there were one experimental group with 21 students and one control group with 27 students.the...

the primary goal of the current project was to examine the effect of three different treatments, namely, models with explicit instruction, models with implicit instruction, and models alone on differences between the three groups of subjects in the use of the elements of argument structures in terms of toulmins (2003) model (i.e., claim, data, counterargument claim, counterargument data, rebutt...

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...

the skill of reading in english as a foreign language is an important and challenging one which is affected both by linguistic and extra linguistic factors. since vocabularies are part and parcel of every reading comprehension text, knowing enough vocabulary always facilitates this process. however, guessing strategy as one of the most important strategies has consistently ignored by language l...