from 1950s onward, new theories and critical approaches burgeoned across humanities. these theories were context-oriented; as a result, the analysis of discursive practices gained significance. thus, social, political, historical and cultural discourses that have been hitherto marginalized and considered inferior to literary texts, were introduced as important texts to be analyzed by critics. o...

while performance-based language assessment has led to an increased authenticity and content validity in the practice of writing assessment, the reliability of ratings has become a major issue. research findings have shown different reactions by native english speaker (nes) and non-native english speaker (nns) teachers to students’ writings. the focus of this study is on investigating whether i...

all analytical methods are generally based on the measurement of a parameter or parameters which are somehow related to the concentration of the species.an ideal analytical method is one in which the concentration of a species can be measured to a high degree precision and accuracy and with a high sensitivity. unfortunately finding such a method is very difficult or sometimes even impossible.in...

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...

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 ...

in the past couple of decades sociocultural theory of sla and its implications in efl contexts have attracted attentions of research circles worldwide and aroused some controversies. firth and wagner (1997) have questioned the principles of the cognitive view which gives importance to mental constructs in favor of sociocultural view which highlights social and contextual constructs. but if soci...

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...

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...

abstract type-ii fuzzy logic has shown its superiority over traditional fuzzy logic when dealing with uncertainty. type-ii fuzzy logic controllers are however newer and more promising approaches that have been recently applied to various fields due to their significant contribution especially when the noise (as an important instance of uncertainty) emerges. during the design of type- i fuz...

1.1 introduction “i see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. a good translation is like a pane of glass. you only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections- scratches, bubbles. ideally, there shouldn’t be any. it should never call attention to itself.” “norman shapiro” (venuti, 1995:1) edward fitzgerald is the br...