data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...

in fact, this study focused on the following questions: 1. is there any difference between the effect of functional/notional approach and the structural approaches to language teaching on the proficiency test of efl learners? 2. can a rather innovative language test referred to as "functional test" ge devised so so to measure the proficiency test of efl learners, and thus be as much reliable an...

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 was an attempt to investigate and compare the effect of lexical inferencing and concept mapping on developing vocabulary retention of iranian language learners. sixty homogeneous students from different intact classes who were being taught as intermediate learners in sokhan english institute participated in this study. they were in different classes. a teacher made test as a pre-test...

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 subjects of the study are only the tefl teachers and students at gilan university. to obtain the desired data, a questionnaire which was based on the theories and disecussions gathered, was used as the main data gathering instrument. to determine the degree of relationship between variables, covariance and pearson product moment correlation coefficient were the formulas applied. the data we...

the skill of reading in english as a foreign language is an important and challenging one which is affected both by linguistic and extra linguistic factors. since vocabularies are part and parcel of every reading comprehension text, knowing enough vocabulary always facilitates this process. however, guessing strategy as one of the most important strategies has consistently ignored by language l...

the rationale behind the present study is that particular learning strategies produce more effective results when applied together. the present study tried to investigate the efficiency of the semantic-context strategy alone with a technique called, keyword method. to clarify the point, the current study seeked to find answer to the following question: are the keyword and semantic-context metho...

this thesis attempts to measure learning styles, self efficacy and intrinsic motivation as predictors of iranian ielts reading comprehension. in order to address this issue, a quantitative study was conducted on some randomly selected intact students at ferdowsi university. these two groups were assigned as they were undergraduate (ba=91) and graduate (ma =74) students; they were all aged betwe...