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...

this study aimed to investigate the effects of listening strategy training on iranian efl learners listening comprehension and use of such strategies. this work, employing an experimental methodology, was conducted among 60 adult efl learners from a language institute in isfahan, iran, as participants. the participants, who were selected based on the results of a placement test, were assigned t...

the issue of curriculum and syllabus evaluation and revision has been in center of attention right from when curriculum came into attention of educational institutions. thus everywhere in the world in educational institutions curricula and syllabi are evaluated and revised based on the goals, the needs, existing content, etc.. in iran any curriculum is designed in a committee of specialists and...

abstract although music possesses some kind of power and using it has been welcome by many students in language classrooms, it seems that they take a non-serious image of the lesson while listening to songs and they may think that it is a matter of fun. the main objective of the present study was to investigate whether learning a foreign language through musical texts (songs) can have an impac...

heuristics are often used to provide solutions for flow shop scheduling problems.the performance of a heuristic is usually judged by comparing solutions and run times on test cases.this investigation proposes an analytical alternative ,called asymptotic convergence ,which tests the convergence of the heuristic to a lower bound as problem size grows. the test is a stronger variation of worst cas...

this study was carried out to investigate the effects of integrative vs. instrumental motivation, learning strategy use and gender on iranian efl learners. to this end, 120 efl learners both male and female majoring in english language and literature at shiraz university participated in the study. in order to conduct this study three instruments were used: oxford quick placement test, motivatio...

the purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of task-based instruction of vocabulary on the receptive and oral productive acquisition of english vocabulary and compare the results with those obtained from the traditional method. the method and procedure applied in this study was as follows: after the implementation of opt, a group of sixty female students were chosen. the stu...

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...

power transformers are important equipments in power systems. thus there is a large number of researches devoted of power transformers. however, there is still a demand for future investigations, especially in the field of diagnosis of transformer failures. in order to fulfill the demand, the first part reports a study case in which four main types of failures on the active part are investigate...

the present study aimed to investigate representation of discourse markers and metadiscourse markers in conversations and readings of general elt coursebook series used in the language centers of iran. to this aim, four elt coursebooks popularly taught in language centers of this country were analyzed based on fung and carter’s (2007) framework regarding discourse markers and hyland’s (2005) fr...