the speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that has received the least attention in the field of pragmatics. this study investigates the ways power relations, social distance, formality of the context, gender, and language proficiency (for efl learners) influence disagreement and politeness strategies. the participants of the study were 200 male and female native persian s...

this study investigated how group formation method, namely student-selected vs. teacher-assigned, influences the results of the community model of teaching creative writing; i.e., group dynamics and group outcome (the quality of performance). the study adopted an experimental comparison group and microgenetic research design to observe the change process over a relatively short period of time. ...

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...

abstract english language learning in iran has become significant in recent years, and english has been included in the curriculum of iranian schools and universities, and considerable attention has been paid to this language in our society. nevertheless, teaching and learning english in iranian schools has not been able to satisfy the specified goals, so different efl institutes have been est...

this study investigated the effects of three kinds of gloss conditions, that is traditional non-call marginal gloss, audio gloss, and extended audio gloss, on reading comprehension and vocabulary gain of iranian upper- intermediate efl learners. to this end, three experimental and one control groups, each comprising 15 participants, took part in the current study. in order to ensure that the pa...

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...

like any other learning activity, translation is a problem solving activity which involves executing parallel cognitive processes. the ability to think about these higher processes, plan, organize, monitor and evaluate the most influential executive cognitive processes is what flavell (1975) called “metacognition” which encompasses raising awareness of mental processes as well as using effectiv...

abstract poor reading comprehension can result in failure in using references, benefiting from professional gatherings and resources, keeping up with the growing body of knowledge in the virtual world of the internet, and failing to achieve in efl programs. the purpose of the present quasi-experimental study was to explore the effects of background knowledge and previewing narrative and expos...

abstract target-oriented approaches to translation studies are regarded as recent theories of translation. one of the most famous theories among these approaches is descriptive translation studies presented by toury (1995). this theory gives a new dimension to translation studies and gives importance to the descriptive rather than prescriptive studies. it also identifies three sets of transla...

this thesis attempts to measure learning styles, self efficacy and intrinsic motivation as predictors of iranian ielts reading comprehension. in order to address this issue, a quantitative study was conducted on some randomly selected intact students at ferdowsi university. these two groups were assigned as they were undergraduate (ba=91) and graduate (ma =74) students; they were all aged betwe...