with the increasing population and the need for more food, as well as with the development of science and technology, human approach to unnatural and often chemical inputs to increase agricultural production has been a great expansion and problems such as increased cancers, chronic diseases has created environmental pollution. implementation of organic organic is a solution to these problems . ...

the purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of instruction through debate on male and female efl learners’ reading comprehension, to examine the differences between the performance of male and female participants on the five dimensions of cctst including analysis, evaluation, inference, deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning, and to examine the differences between male ...

since the 1960s the age effects on learning both first and second language have been explored by many linguists and applied linguists (e.g lennerberg, 1967; schachter, 1996; long, 1990) and the existence of critical period for language acquisition was found to be a common ground of all these studies. in spite of some common findings, some issues about the impacts of age on acquiring a second or...

abstract: the present study was undertaken to investigate whether 1) there is any significant correlation between iranian efl/eap learners’ l2 writing proficiency and their willingness to communicate, 2) there is any significant difference between efl and eap learners in terms of willingness to communicate, 3) there is any significant difference in wtc of iranian efl/eap learners with 1- nati...

although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

the aim of the present study was to investigate the frequency and the type of discourse markers used in the argumentative and expository writings of iranian efl learners and the differences between these text features in the two essay genres. the study also aimed at examining the influence of the use of discourse markers on the participants’ writing quality. to this end the discourse markers us...

according to coates’s (2004, as cited in zhang, 2010) definition of "conversational dominance" (p.111), it refers to the phenomenon of a speaker dominating others in interaction. specifically, it means how a speaker makes use of certain strategies to get the floor and maintain the floor. thus, the amount of talk is the main measurement for the dominance of the conversation. whether a speaker do...

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...

the world wide web becomes very popular recently and plays an influential role in english learning. by burgeoning role of source-based writing as partial fulfillment of tefl courses and vast use of the internet, lack of empirical studies to explore these areas is obvious. this study aimed to explore the effect of the amount of familiarity with the web (internet literacy) on junior english stude...

in his last years of life americans had almost forgotton steinbeck, and those who had not, occasionally criticized him for supporting and praising the u. s. military intervention in the vietnam war. althought ateinbeck incorporates different themes into his works, each one bears many signs of his concern and sympathy for america and the american common people in particular. steinbecks to a god ...