a major concern in the last few years has been the fact that the cultural centers are keeping distance with what they have been established for and instead of reproducing the hegemony, they have turned into a place for resistance and reproduction of resistance against hegemony. because the cultural centers, as urban public spaces in the last two decades, have been the subject of ideological dis...

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...

abstract: the present study is an attempt to find out cultural exophoric references in iranian high-school elt textbooks and touch stone series to compare the frequency of occurrence of such references in these books. the purpose is to find out which of the series of the books under investigation impose a greater referential burden on efl learners as far as their reading comprehension of the ...

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...

today, the route for economic development in most countries is the same as international open competitive economy. economic institutes well known that supportive public economy belonged on the past and they may compete in the global economy. it is obvious that if they have no competitive potency or not familiar with competition technique, they may be devastated. banking system aims to collect t...

teachers beliefs have usually been left unattended in the realm of educational research in iranian context. one of those beliefs which seems to impact teachers performance in the classroom is their sense of self-efficacy, which refers to teachers belief in their ability to enhance student achievement and in bringing about positive learning outcomes. the present study aimed to investigate the pr...

a professional is someone whose work involves performing a certain function with some degree of expertise. but a narrower definition limits the term to apply to people such as teachers and doctors, whose expertise involves not only skill and knowledge but also the exercise of highly sophisticated judgment, and whose accreditation necessitates extensive study, often university-based as well as p...

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...

today, information technology and computers are indispensable tools of any profession and translation technologies have become an indispensable part of translator’s workstation. with the increasing demands for high productivity and speed as well as consistency and with the rise of new demands for translation and localization, it is necessary for translators to be familiar with market demands an...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of portfolio assessment as a process-oriented assessment mechanism on iranian efl students’ english writing and its subskills of focus, elaboration, organization, conventions, and vocabulary. out of ninety juniors majoring in english literature and translation at the university of isfahan, sixty one of them who were at the same level of writing...