the west of esfahan province, iran, is one of the most important agricultural areas throughout the country due to the climate variability and life-giving water of zayanderood river. rice is one of the major and economic crops in this area. the most important climatic elements in agricultural activities which should be considered include temperature, relative humidity, precipitation and wind. so...

abstract previous studies on willingness to communicate (wtc) have shown the influence of many individual or situational factors on students’ tendency to engage in classroom communication, in which wtc has been viewed either at the trait-level or situational level. however, due to the complexity of the notion of willingness to communicate, the present study suggests that these two strands are ...

as far as bandura’s (1977) conceptualization of the sense of self-efficacy is concerned, it is argued to be context- and even task-specific, compared to other concepts like self-esteem (brown, 2000); therefore, upon the previous research studies, related theories and definitions, and the ideas and views obtained from the interviews conducted with the scholars, the current research study aimed a...

abstract this study investigates the teachers’ correction of students’ spoken errors of linguistic forms in efl classes, aiming at (a) examining the relationship between the learners’ proficiency level and the provision of corrective feedback types, (b) exploring the extent to which teachers’ use of different corrective feedback types is related to the immediate types of context in which err...

abstract the present study deals with a comparison between reactive and pre-emptive focus-on-form in terms of application and efficiency. it was conducted in an intermediate english class in shahroud. 15 male learners participated in this research and their age ranged from 18 to 25. a course book, new interchange 3, and a complementary book were used. every session the learners gave lectures o...

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...

the major purpose of this study was to develop the translation teacher competency test (ttct) and examine its construct and predictive validity. the present study was conducted in two phases: a qualitative phase as well as a quantitative phase. in the first phase of the study, the author attempted to find out the major areas of competency required for an academic translation teacher. the second...

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...

in the first part of this thesis we explored wetting and its dynamics for small droplets. first, we showed how a simple feature of water droplets on a surface, i.e. laplace pressure, can be exploited to build a micropump. we investigated capillary pumping in microchannels both experimentally and numerically. putting two droplets of different sizes at the in/outlet of a microchannel, will ge...