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...

when we return to the concept of poetry and the age-old discussion about the uselessness or the usefulness of the poets to the private and public state of human beings, originating from plato and aristotles views about poets respectively, there emerges the question of the role of poetry in human beings lives. in the same manner, with the advance of technology and the daily progress and improvem...

abstract: advertisements are the most accessible type of authentic materials, and this is one reason why they are used more and more in english teaching classes. for this cause, studies in the field of advertisements are very widespread nowadays. for pun is one aspect which makes advertisements more interesting, it is used more than before in advertisements. use of puns makes an advertisement m...

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...

translation studies have become an accepted academic subject and books, journals and doctoral dissertations appear faster than one can read them all (bassnet and lefevere, 1990). but this field also brought with itself so many other issues which needed to be investigated more, in the heart of which, issues like ideology, ethics, culture, bilingualism and multilingualism. it is reported that ove...

within communicative, interactive, and learner-centered framework of language teaching and learning, students need to learn four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing for their educational success. but of all the language skills, reading enjoys a paramount significance in so many second or foreign language academic contexts. in spite of its importance, language learners still have...

a major concern in the last few years has been the fact that the cultural centers are keeping distance with what they have been established for and instead of reproducing the hegemony, they have turned into a place for resistance and reproduction of resistance against hegemony. because the cultural centers, as urban public spaces in the last two decades, have been the subject of ideological dis...

in chapter one we will describe definitions and preliminary results to provide the global context of our own results to be presented in detail in the subsequent chapters in chapter two we consider degree-one maps of the circle and we study their rotation set. our main result in this chapter says that if the map is topologically mixing then its rotation interval is nontrivial (that is, not reduc...

investigation the archetype of mother can help the reader to understand poes works, especially his fiction, better, if not fully. motivated by internal and external drives to get into the universe in its manifold form poe was impelled to art and, from various modes of art, to symbolism. how much was poe successful to produce works of art has been a matter of dispute among critics. however, ther...

with the introduction of communicative language teaching, a large number of studies have concerned with students’ oral participation in language classrooms. although the importance of classroom participation is evident, some language learners are unwilling to engage in oral activities. this passivity and unwillingness to participate in language classroom discussions is known as “reticence”. rev...