the importance of writing as a complex skill in applied linguistics has drawn the attention of many researchers to evaluate textbooks in order to help learners gain self-sufficiency and autonomy in the field of language use and communication. investigations have shown that developments in textbooks evaluation can promote the quality of pedagogies and consequently the learning. this study attemp...

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...

in this study reference as one of the five cohesive devices in the achievement of textuality in english and persian narrative/descripitive written texts is focused on and analysed . to do so , the theoretical framework elaborated by halliday and hasan (1976) and its version adapted by the writer to match the sub-types of reference in farsi are applied to the analysis of reference in english and...

acknowledgements i wish to express my gratitude to all those who have helped me in preparing this thesis. i would like to express my deep gratitude to my respected advisor dr. kourosh akef, whose advice and comments helped me in the early stages of the research and throughout the writing process. i would also like to express my gratitude to dr. hajar khanmohammad whose invaluable guidance he...

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...

until now many studies have been done over recent decades throughout the world to show the right age to start english. in iran, research is still at an early stage in terms of evaluating teachers’ beliefs about teaching children english. the problem of at what age to start teaching english and how to teach english to elementary school children has not been solved neither in this country nor els...

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...

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...

this thesis seeks to present a critical reading of virginia woolf’s mrs. dalloway and michael cunningham’s the hours in terms of an intertextual approach, concentrating on dialogic imagination, negativity, transposition and allusion. this study attempts to evaluate cunninghams perception of woolfs life and work by adopting kristevas conception of intertextuality and her consideration of the hou...

current studies in second language (l2) learning have revealed the positive role of corrective feedback (cf) in both oral and written forms in different language features. the present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of both direct and indirect written corrective feedback (wcf) on the use of grammatical collocations in l2 writing. the study also sought to examine whether the effec...