teachers’ beliefs greatly influence their performance in the classroom, their choice of instructional strategies, their way of controlling the class, their dealing with the students, and their general goals and objectives. one of these beliefs is teachers’ sense of efficacy which is viewed as an important construct and has shown to be positively correlated with students’ achievement (ross, 1992...

the concepts of similarity and dissimilarity have been the interest of many researchers. basically, in the studies the similarity between two objects or phenomena, has been discussed. in this thesis, we consider the case when the resemblance or similarity among three objects or phenomena of a set, 3-similarity in our terminology, is desired. later we will extend our definitions and propos...

the present study was an attempt to determine the types of motivation and levels of foreign language learning anxiety among efl students studying at azad and state universities in kermanshah and to determine the relationship between these two factors and language proficiency and gender. to this end, the foreign language learning motivation scale, by deci and ryan )1985(, were administered to 12...

data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...

as far as bandura’s (1977) conceptualization of the sense of self-efficacy is concerned, it is argued to be context- and even task-specific, compared to other concepts like self-esteem (brown, 2000); therefore, upon the previous research studies, related theories and definitions, and the ideas and views obtained from the interviews conducted with the scholars, the current research study aimed a...

nowadays enhancing critical thinking in learners is considered one of the foreign language teachers’ tasks due to its high position in foreign language classrooms. when it comes to selecting materials for language classrooms, there are obviously some criteria that teachers should apply. the present study aimed at a critical thinking based analysis of ten picture story books and ten folktales th...

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 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, ...

critical thinking ability has an important role in education. accordingly, scholars around the world are searching for new ways for teaching and improving students critical thinking ability. in line with the studies in efl contexts supporting the positive relationship between critical thinking and writing performances, this study investigated the differential effects of halverson’s critical thi...

abstract:assume that y is a banach space such that r(y ) ? 2, where r(.) is garc?a-falset’s coefficient. and x is a banach space which can be continuously embedded in y . we prove that x can be renormed to satisfy the weak fixed point property (w-fpp). on the other hand, assume that k is a scattered compact topological space such that k(!) = ? ; and c(k) is the space of all real continuous ...