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...

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...

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...

‏‎the hypothesis is that recent and frequent exposure to lexical items leads to a more fluent production of speech in terms of rate of speech. to test the hypothesis,a one-way anova experimental design was carried out. 24 sednior students of efl participated in a one-way interview test. data analyses revealed that those who were exposed frequently to the lexical items over a week prior to inter...

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 ...

one very decisive factor in students’ academic destiny is the result they get at final term examinations. because of its importance, both students and teachers are curiously anxious about them. as normally it is the case, these final term tests are prepared hurriedly in short time by teachers which result in students’ dissatisfaction, complaining on how the test was different from their expecta...

the purpose of this thesis was to investigate how differently metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies affect l2 learners’ reading comprehension. to this end, the study employed a quasi-experimental design with a placement test as a proficiency test to find the homogeneity of groups. three classes were randomly selected as the experimental groups (n =90), and each class was tau...

the construct of self-efficacy has received increasing attention in research over the past two decades. many studies have been carried out 1.3 significance of the study this study has pedagogical implications since improving students’ self- efficacy and autonomy is important for promoting actual performance on classroom academic tasks. in academic settings, it has been shown that self-effi...

in this work, a novel and fast method for direct analysis of volatile compounds (davc) of medicinal plants has been developed by holding a filament from different parts of a plant in the gc injection port. the extraction and analysis of volatile components of a small amount of plant were carried out in one-step without any sample preparation. after optimization of temperature, extraction time a...

regarding the ever evolving and improving world on different aspects of knowledge, the need to a worldwide communication would emerge stronger than ever before which calls for special attention on the judgments and best choices for intermediating between the nations. as the language skills for translation are tested separately from translation skills themselves, to assess translation skills pro...