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...

abstract pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. communicative action includes not only using speech acts (such as apologizing, complaining, complimenting, and requesting), but also engaging in different types of discourse and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity. the present study aimed to investigate the assessment of pragm...

the present research was conducted to explore the effect of employing two language teaching approaches, i.e. schema-based instruction (sbi) and translation-based instruction (tbi), on vocabulary knowledge, structure and reading comprehension ability of forty one female students learning english in grade one senior high school in rivash, kuhsorkh, iran. while sbi focuses on schemata, i.e. words ...

these days, all department stores make an effort to provide their clients with valuable products in order to project the best image for them. as a result, clients’ comprehension risk will decrease and they will be more willing to repurchase. having a good image is really important for the department stores because it makes an impression on clients’ comprehension of both quality and risk. consid...

the current study aimed at investigating the relationship between motivation and test preparation strategies (tpss) used by iranian pre-university students in their preparation period for the university entrance exam (uee). due to the importance of uee in iran, this study also attempted to show its impact on these two important variables. to this end, 100 pre-university students in an iranian p...

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 ...

the debate whether esp teachers need to have knowledge of the specialized field they are teaching has been an issue in the literature over the last two decades. the aim of conducting this study was to explore iranian learners’ and instructors’ beliefs and attitudes concerning the role of specialized knowledge in teaching esp classes. a seventeen item questionnaire was administered to 400 esp le...

the application of a comprehensive model of communicative language ability (cla) to language teaching and testing has always been an imperative in l2 education since hymess proposal of communicative competence in the 1970s. recent l2 research has clearly underscored the importance of sufficient pragmatics representation as an essential component of cla in pedagogical and testing practices in l2...

abstract this study examined the relationship between noticing pronunciation and the improvement pronunciation by administering a 50 item story, as proficiency- test in order to investigate the effectiveness of noticing pronunciation on the improvement of pronunciation. accordingly 60 qualified students were selected and assigned to the two groups of experimental and control randomly, each gr...

abstract the aim of the present study is to explore the impact of the cognitive reading strategy instruction on learners reading self-efficacy and their reading achievement. in order to fulfill this purpose, from 120 participants, 90 intermediate efl learners as an experimental group were chosen from three different educational settings namely, yazd university, yazd science and art un...