testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

according to coates’s (2004, as cited in zhang, 2010) definition of "conversational dominance" (p.111), it refers to the phenomenon of a speaker dominating others in interaction. specifically, it means how a speaker makes use of certain strategies to get the floor and maintain the floor. thus, the amount of talk is the main measurement for the dominance of the conversation. whether a speaker do...

the present paper offers a postcolonial reading of two of the best novels by v. s. naipaul – half a life and the mimic men – in five chapters. the focus of this research is on different notions of postcolonial criticism and their application on the two novels as discussed from homi bhabha’s and frantz fanons points of view. having introduced the life and literary career of v. s. naipaul in th...

abstract in written mode of language, metadiscourse markers are used commonly to help writers in general and academic writers in particular to produce coherent and professional texts. the purpose of the present study was to compare introduction sections of applied linguistics and physics articles regarding their use of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers based on the model pro...

to explore the idea the investingation proposed, aimed at finding whether the performances of the population of iranians students studying english in an efl context are consistent in l1 and l2 writing taks and whether there is a cross-linguistic transfer in this respect. in this regard the subjects were instructed to write four compositions-two in english and two in farsi-which consisted of an ...

the purpose of the present study is to find out whether bilinguals of khuzestan-arab origin or monolinguals of iranian origin code-switch during learning or speaking english and which group is more susceptible to code-switch. to this end, the students of 24 classes from high schools and pre- university centers were screened out, and interviewed and their voices and code-switchings were recorded...

the present study aimed at exploring cognitions of iranian english teachers within the context of english for academic purposes (eap). to this end, the cognitions of two groups of eap teachers with respect to their pedagogical content knowledge (pck) and their sense of professional identity (pi) were probed. two language teachers and two content instructors who had at least five years of eap te...

the effect of learning strategies on the speaking ability of iranian students in the context of language institutes abstract language learning strategies are of the most important factors that help language learners to learn a foreign language and how they can deal with the four language skills specifically speaking skill effectively. acknowledging the great impact of learning strategies...

abstract: about 60% of total premium of insurance industry is pertained?to life policies in the world; while the life insurance total premium in iran is less than 6% of total premium in insurance industry in 2008 (sigma, no 3/2009). among the reasons that discourage the life insurance industry is the problem of adverse selection. adverse selection theory describes a situation where the inf...

this study intends to investigate samuel beckett’s waiting for godot and endgame under the lacanian psychoanalysis. it begins by explaining the most important concepts of lacanian psychoanalysis. the beckettian characters are studied regarding their state of unconscious, and not the state of consciousness as is common in most beckett studies. according to lacan, language plays the sole role in ...