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...

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...

due to lack of knowledge management system in the organization of technical and vocational university of iran (tvuni) and losing good employees because of retirement and substitution causes huge amount of costs to replace the similar expertise. there is no any suitable system in the tvuni to store, to document, and to distribute knowledge. based on the university’s features such as it has diffe...

abstract the present study investigated the effects of task types and involvement load hypothesis on incidental learning of 10 target words (tws) in junior high schools (jhss) in givi, ardabil. the tasks deployed in this study were two input-based tasks (reading plus dictionary use with an involvement index of 3, and reading plus gap-fill task with an involvement index of 2), and one output-ba...

abstract nowadays, the science of decision making has been paid to more attention due to the complexity of the problems of suppliers selection. as known, one of the efficient tools in economic and human resources development is the extension of communication networks in developing countries. so, the proper selection of suppliers of tc equipments is of concern very much. in this study, a ...

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...

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...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of portfolio assessment as a process-oriented assessment mechanism on iranian efl students’ english writing and its subskills of focus, elaboration, organization, conventions, and vocabulary. out of ninety juniors majoring in english literature and translation at the university of isfahan, sixty one of them who were at the same level of writing...