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...

abstract lexical knowledge of complex english words is an important part of language skills and crucial for fluent language use (nation, 2001). the present study, thus, was an attempt to assess the role of morphological decomposition awareness as a vocabulary learning strategy on learners’ productive and receptive recall and recognition of complex english words. so 90 sophomores (female and ma...

this study investigated (a) the learners’ existing reading strategy repertoire, (b) the effect of instruction in reading strategies on learners’ strategic performance, and (c) the effect of explicit instruction in top-down reading strategies on reading comprehension ability of intermediate learners. the study was conducted with 40 intermediate efl learners in two groups of experimental and cont...

the present study is an experimental case study which investigates the impacts, if any, of skopos on syntactic features of the target text. two test groups each consisting of 10 ma students translated a set of sentences selected from advertising texts in the operative and informative mode. the resulting target texts were then statistically analyzed in terms of the number of words, phrases, si...

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...

abstract this study aimed at investigating the possible relationship between self-assessment in writing and self-regulation of iranian efl learners. the main purpose of the study was not only to report and inform about this relationship, but also to investigate and find practical outcomes of the incorporation of self-assessment in writing, such as improving writing skill. the research was carr...

this study purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...

the ability to speak two languages in the world is a remarkable achievement. there is a good reason to believe that bilingualism is the norm for the majority of people in the world because 70% of the earth’s population are supposed to be bilingual or multilingual. various investigations have shown that the native language impacts foreign word recognition, and this influence is adapted by the de...

the main purpose of this study was to investigate any relationship between high school efl teachers metaphorical understandings of their role in class and their self-efficacy beliefs. teachers metaphors were elicited through two different prompts: one picturing what they believed a language teacher should be like in class, and the other demonstrating what they are actually like in class; such...

cement is an essential ingredient in the concrete buildings. for production of cement considerable amount of fossil fuel and electrical energy is consumed. on the other hand for generating one tone of portland cement, nearly one ton of carbon dioxide is released. it shows that 7 percent of the total released carbon dioxide in the world relates to the cement industry. considering ecological issu...