learning a second or foreign language requires the manipulation of four main skills, namely, listening, reading, speaking, and writing which lead to effective communication. it is obvious that vocabulary is an indispensible part of any communication, so without a vocabulary, no meaningful communication can take place and meaningful communication relies heavily on vocabulary. one fundamental fac...

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...

one very decisive factor in students’ academic destiny is the result they get at final term examinations. because of its importance, both students and teachers are curiously anxious about them. as normally it is the case, these final term tests are prepared hurriedly in short time by teachers which result in students’ dissatisfaction, complaining on how the test was different from their expecta...

after the soviet union dissolution, a chaotic period was begun in the russia. russia lost its glory and felt disgrace. the first group of elites came to power under yeltsin; they tried to re-define russia’s identity as a european country and build a foreign policy on this baseline. therefore russia tried to become closer with the west especially with the u.s. according to their view the sovie...

since the 1960s the age effects on learning both first and second language have been explored by many linguists and applied linguists (e.g lennerberg, 1967; schachter, 1996; long, 1990) and the existence of critical period for language acquisition was found to be a common ground of all these studies. in spite of some common findings, some issues about the impacts of age on acquiring a second or...

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...

abstract cooperative learning refers to small groups of learners working together as a team to solve a problem, complete a task, or accomplish a common goal. in a cooperative environment one’s success is directly related to the success of other members because the focus on the individual shifts towards the group. to test the effectiveness of the method, using jigsaw technique, a study was cond...

the present study was an attempt to compare the effect of peer metalinguistic corrective feedback on elementary and intermediate efl learners speaking ability to see which level benefits more from this type of feedback. to this end, 117 female efl learners at grade 3, al-zahra high school in kermanshah, iran were non-randomly chosen. the homogeneity of the participants was attained through a pi...

in the area of vocabulary teaching and learning although much research has been done, only some of it has led to effective techniques of vocabulary teaching and many language learners still have problem learning vocabulary. the urge behind this study was to investigate three methods of teaching words. the first one was teaching words in context based on a traditional method of teaching that is,...

the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between teachers’ immediacy behaviors and iranian students’ willingness to talk in english classes. analysis of the results from willingness to talk scale represents a relatively high level of willingness to talk in english classrooms among iranian language learners. the total mean score of students’ willingness to talk was 66.3 ou...