the purpose of this two-phase, sequential mixed methods study was to find out whether there were any decencies between male and female ma students’ theses regarding the common features of academic writing such as syntactic complexity, means of integrating cited information, and organizing arguments. i chose 10 male written theses and 15 female written theses in tefl and linguistics. in the firs...

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...

the present dissertation aims to investigate four-word lexical bundles in applied linguistics research articles by iranian and internationally-published writers. the aims of this study are two-fold: first of all, attempts have been made to create a comprehensive list of the most commonly used four-word lexical bundles categorized by their type and token frequency, their structural characteristi...

abstract abstract of thesis (includes summary, goals, execution methods, and results) story “al-obnosat al-bayza” is one of the short stories from “hanna mineh” collection. this story is a selection of lives of some humans during a voyage together, each of them is a symbol of human nature (love, mind, kindness) and examine social, cultural, and political aspects of governing system, and it...

abstract compound is a word-formation process that are made two free morpheme (independent) and forms a new word with a new meaning that consists of meaning of both two component of compound. avestan language is one of the ancient iranian languages that is one of the indo-iranian languages. indo-iranian languages is one branch of indo-european languages. structure of compound noun and adjectiv...

critical thinking ability has an important role in education. accordingly, scholars around the world are searching for new ways for teaching and improving students critical thinking ability. in line with the studies in efl contexts supporting the positive relationship between critical thinking and writing performances, this study investigated the differential effects of halverson’s critical thi...

‘romanticism’ and ‘romantic’ are among the most controversial terms in literature. most readers, when encountering these words, would think of the well-known period of romanticism of the first three decades of the nineteenth century and the great six english poets known as ‘the big six’ of this period. however, romanticism does not belong to certain artists in a special period; one may seek ele...

plagiarism in esl/efl learning contexts has been established as a dynamic and multi-layered phenomenon and has become a topic engaging many researchers in a heated debate in recent years. comparisons of student-generated texts with their source texts have shown that students rely on source texts in their writings and copying is a major strategy used by both l1 and l2 writers. in our country a...

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...

this study attempts to investigate the effect of peers’ revision in comparison to that of the teacher, and whether peers’ comments and teachers’ comments facilitate students’ revision? if yes, which one is more effective? also attempts have been made to see which aspects of language are more highlighted by peers versus teachers when commenting. besides, it is investigating the student’s attitud...