with the growth of more humanistic approaches towards teaching foreign languages, more emphasis has been put on learners’ feelings, emotions and individual differences. one of the issues in teaching and learning english as a foreign language is demotivation. the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the components of language learning strategies, optimism, duration o...

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...

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...

this thesis is an evaluation of poetry of sylvia plath (1932- 1963) and forough farrokhzad (1935-1967) using feminist approach and finds the positive concepts of hope, reason and strength through feminine images in their poetry. plath and farrokhzad are from different cultures and different countries but they share the same concepts and themes in their poetry. by applying feminist theory to the...

as far as bandura’s (1977) conceptualization of the sense of self-efficacy is concerned, it is argued to be context- and even task-specific, compared to other concepts like self-esteem (brown, 2000); therefore, upon the previous research studies, related theories and definitions, and the ideas and views obtained from the interviews conducted with the scholars, the current research study aimed a...

the current study aimed at investigating the relationship between motivation and test preparation strategies (tpss) used by iranian pre-university students in their preparation period for the university entrance exam (uee). due to the importance of uee in iran, this study also attempted to show its impact on these two important variables. to this end, 100 pre-university students in an iranian p...

over the past decades a number of approaches have been applied for forecasting mortality. in 1992, a new method for long-run forecast of the level and age pattern of mortality was published by lee and carter. this method was welcomed by many authors so it was extended through a wider class of generalized, parametric and nonlinear model. this model represents one of the most influential recent d...

nowadays enhancing critical thinking in learners is considered one of the foreign language teachers’ tasks due to its high position in foreign language classrooms. when it comes to selecting materials for language classrooms, there are obviously some criteria that teachers should apply. the present study aimed at a critical thinking based analysis of ten picture story books and ten folktales th...

the west of esfahan province, iran, is one of the most important agricultural areas throughout the country due to the climate variability and life-giving water of zayanderood river. rice is one of the major and economic crops in this area. the most important climatic elements in agricultural activities which should be considered include temperature, relative humidity, precipitation and wind. so...

abstract tasks nowadays are at the center of attention in sla research. task types is one of the critical issues in this regard, their effectiveness and suitability to any particular context, their characteristics and the result they yield are among some of these issues. on the other hand, discourse markers (dms) have been very much investigated and their effectiveness in conveying the meaning...