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...

there has been a gradual shift of focus from the study of rule systems, which have increasingly been regarded as impoverished, … to the study of systems of principles, which appear to occupy a much more central position in determining the character and variety of possible human languages. there is a set of absolute universals, notions and principles existing in ug which do not vary from one ...

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...

1.0 overview it seems that grammar plays a crucial role in the area of second and foreign language learning and widely has been acknowledged in grammar research. in other words, teaching grammar is an issue which has attracted much attention to itself, and a lot of teachers argue about the existence of grammar in language teaching and learning. this issue will remind us a famous sentence f...

the present paper offers a postcolonial reading of two of the best novels by v. s. naipaul – half a life and the mimic men – in five chapters. the focus of this research is on different notions of postcolonial criticism and their application on the two novels as discussed from homi bhabha’s and frantz fanons points of view. having introduced the life and literary career of v. s. naipaul in th...

abstract the first purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of consciousness-raising (c-r) activities on learning grammatical structures (simple present tense in this case) by iranian guidance school efl learners. the second one was to investigate the effect of gender on learning the simple present tense through c-r activities and tasks. finally, this study aimed to investigate the ...

since esp received universal attention to smooth the path for academic studies and productions, a great deal of research and studies have been directed towards this area. swales’ (1990) model of ra introduction move analysis has served a pioneering role of guiding many relevant studies and has proven to be productive in terms of helpful guidelines that are the outcome of voluminous productions ...

the present study investigated construct equivalence of multiple choice (mc) and constructed response (cr) item types across stem and content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘a’), non-stem-equivalent but content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘b’), and non-stem and non-content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘c’). one hundred seventy english-major undergraduates completed mc ...

this study investigates the relationship between field-related cognitive styles and global reading comprehension of hypertext. technically, field dependency is prevailing dominance of field on perception of parts, while global comprehension is skim-like reading to grasp the general content. in this research project, 60 senior and junior students of arak university majoring in english literature...

the present study aimed at exploring cognitions of iranian english teachers within the context of english for academic purposes (eap). to this end, the cognitions of two groups of eap teachers with respect to their pedagogical content knowledge (pck) and their sense of professional identity (pi) were probed. two language teachers and two content instructors who had at least five years of eap te...