although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

the importance of writing as a complex skill in applied linguistics has drawn the attention of many researchers to evaluate textbooks in order to help learners gain self-sufficiency and autonomy in the field of language use and communication. investigations have shown that developments in textbooks evaluation can promote the quality of pedagogies and consequently the learning. this study attemp...

the present study is an attempt to investigate the potential impact of inspirational quotes on improving english abstract vocabulary recall. to achieve this goal, a multiple choice language proficiency test of 60 items including vocabulary and grammar component was administered to a sample of 63 second-semester male and female students whose age ranged between 17 to 22 and they were studying en...

many mobile and off-grid devices include electronics and other electrical consumers like servo drives, which need a quite low supply power. since the price for photovoltaic modules drops continuously, photovoltaic power supply is interesting in more and more applications. in solar powered systems, a battery is needed to store energy for the night and cloudy periods. the power electronics of suc...

with the growth of more humanistic approaches towards teaching foreign languages, more emphasis has been put on learners’ feelings, emotions and individual differences. one of the issues in teaching and learning english as a foreign language is demotivation. the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the components of language learning strategies, optimism, duration o...

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 ...

phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

there is less published research about how teachers in efl contexts respond to students who are relatively less mature and less competent l2 writers. while writing researchers have examined various issues concerning peer and teacher response in writing-oriented classes, little research has centered on the effect of collaborative tasks particularly dictogloss on writing skills. output collaborat...

toury (1978:200) believes that translation is a kind of activity which inevitably involves at least two languages and two cultural traditions. being polite while asking for something takes place differently in different cultures and languages, therefore various strategies may be applied for making requests and also translation of them in order not to disturb or threaten the face or better to sa...

abstract: in the paper of black and scholes (1973) a closed form solution for the price of a european option is derived . as extension to the black and scholes model with constant volatility, option pricing model with time varying volatility have been suggested within the frame work of generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (garch) . these processes can explain a number of em...