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...

abstract: advertisements are the most accessible type of authentic materials, and this is one reason why they are used more and more in english teaching classes. for this cause, studies in the field of advertisements are very widespread nowadays. for pun is one aspect which makes advertisements more interesting, it is used more than before in advertisements. use of puns makes an advertisement m...

  Photothermal lensing signal was experimentally investigated by using Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) of Nd:YAG laser with energies of E0 = 7, 10, and 15 mJ. The medium used in this experiment was N2 at atmospheric pressure, seeded with NO2 to make the medium more absorbing. The experiment was carried out for optically thin medium (1025 PPM NO2) as well as for an optically thick medium (5125 ...

a novel acrylic acid-functionalized fe3o4 magnetic nanoparticle with a core-shell structure was developed for utilization as a heterogeneous organosuperacid in chemical transformations. the structural, surface, and magnetic characteristics of the nanosized catalyst were investigated by various techniques such as transmission electron microscopy (tem), thermogravimetric analysis (tga), and ft-ir...

the present study was carried on to investigate the use of face-keeping strategies in reaction to complaints by male and female in two different cultures, persian and american english. to see if apology strategies are affected by cultural, contextual preferences and gender of interlocutors in two distinct languages of persian and american english. the hypotheses to be tested were 1) ifids, acce...

abstract: the present study is an attempt to find out cultural exophoric references in iranian high-school elt textbooks and touch stone series to compare the frequency of occurrence of such references in these books. the purpose is to find out which of the series of the books under investigation impose a greater referential burden on efl learners as far as their reading comprehension of the ...

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...

abstract the main purpose of this study was to investigate whether there was any significant difference between the speaking achievement of learners who were trained by means of consciousness raising of sociolinguistic skills and that of learners who were trained without the above mentioned task. the participants of this study consist of 60 intermediate level students participating languag...