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...

this thesis examines the significances and implications of inflicted physical pain in waiting for the barbarians (1980) by john maxwell coetzee (1940 - ). the researcher tries to show how body becomes a site for exercising violence. in this way, the government’s representatives turn bodies of the barbarians into blank pages through torturing in order to create the truth of the empire. in this p...

the present study aimed at investigating how different news agencies using the concept of legitimation/delegitimation represent the same event differently. to this end, van leeuwens (2008) legitimatory/delegitimatory framework was applied to the data gleaned from the iranian state-run news agency fars news, british state-run news agency bbc, and also american state-run news agency voa. the resu...

there are many approaches for solving variety combinatorial optimization problems (np-compelete) that devided to exact solutions and approximate solutions. exact methods can only be used for very small size instances due to their expontional search space. for real-world problems, we have to employ approximate methods such as evolutionary algorithms (eas) that find a near-optimal solution in a r...

previous studies have aimed at testing a hypothesis but the present study is data-first research in which researcher tries to form a theory from data rather than the use of data to test a hypothesis. this study aims at exploring teachers perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the current syllabus for college preparatory course. eight experienced teachers were selected to collect data du...

since the 1960s the age effects on learning both first and second language have been explored by many linguists and applied linguists (e.g lennerberg, 1967; schachter, 1996; long, 1990) and the existence of critical period for language acquisition was found to be a common ground of all these studies. in spite of some common findings, some issues about the impacts of age on acquiring a second or...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of using c-test passages on the reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning of iranian intermediate efl learners. the participants were 60 male efl learners at kish mehr institute in garmsar. in fact, there were two groups, an experimental group and a comparison group with 30 students in each. the participants were pretested throu...

this exploratory study aimed to investigate a possible relationship between learners’ beliefs about language learning and one of their personality traits; that is,locus of control (loc). both variables, beliefs and locus of control, are assumed to influence the language learning process. the internal control index (ici) and the beliefs about language learning inventory (balli) were administered...

the present study investigated construct equivalence of multiple choice (mc) and constructed response (cr) item types across stem and content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘a’), non-stem-equivalent but content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘b’), and non-stem and non-content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘c’). one hundred seventy english-major undergraduates completed mc ...

textbooks play a crucial role in language learning classrooms. the problem is that among the great quantity of available textbooks on the market which one is appropriate for a specific classroom and a group of learners. in order to evaluate elt textbooks, theorists and writers have offered different kinds of evaluative frameworks based on a number of principles and criteria. this study evaluate...