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...

to explore the idea the investingation proposed, aimed at finding whether the performances of the population of iranians students studying english in an efl context are consistent in l1 and l2 writing taks and whether there is a cross-linguistic transfer in this respect. in this regard the subjects were instructed to write four compositions-two in english and two in farsi-which consisted of an ...

abstract this study evaluates the iranian pre-university english textbook in terms of needs, objectives, content, and methodology. the study was designed on the qualitative- quantitative survey basis using interviews and questionnaires, a researcher-made textbook evaluation checklist and a needs analysis questionnaire. the textbook evaluation questionnaire was used in this study to elicit the ...

according to cheng (1999), in recent esl/efl literature, asian (especially east asian) learners of english as a foreign/second language have been arguably reported as reticent and passive learners. the most common allegations are that these students are reluctant to participate in classroom discourse; they are unwilling to give responses; they do not ask questions; and they are passive and over...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of podcasts as a learning and teaching tool on iranian efl learners’ motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. the study also investigated the learners’ perception towards listening to podcasts and examined whether the learners were likely to accept podcasts. out of fifty-five intermediate learners studying e...

abstract listening is a key and main tool in second language skill and its development is of prime concern to teachers and learners. furthermore, the application of technology in language classrooms has become more commonplace in the last fifty years. computer and the internet have made foreign language materials easy to access and use. so, the present study is an attempt to examine the effec...

language learning courseware has been receiving growing attention by english educators since its advent. a variety of softwares have been designed by software designers and resorted to by language educators to supplement language textbooks. this experimental study investigated how the application of computerized version of language textbooks and the reception of the entire course through comput...

this study purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...

esl/efl books play a crucial role in shaping language learners worldview of gender roles in society. the present study investigated the status of sexism in two sets of efl textbooks, one developed by non-native iranian authors (ili series) and the other by native authors (top notch series). first, two books from each series was selected randomly. then, a quantitative analysis was carried out wi...

the present study set out (a) to examine the categories of pedagogical knowledge related to the act of teaching of novice and experienced teachers as gleaned from their verbal report of what they were thinking about while teaching and (b) to compare the categories of pedagogical knowledge of novice and experienced teachers. the aim of comparing these two groups of teachers was to see whether di...