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...

chapter i provides an overview of structural linguistics and touches upon the saussurean dichotomies with the final goal of exploring their relevance to the stylistic studies of literature. to provide evidence for the singificance of the study, chapter ii deals with the controversial issue of linguistics and literature, and presents opposing views which, at the same time, have been central to t...

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...

peace and national security protection and ironic solving of international conflicts become the preliminary foundation of the united nations charter and had been considered as the main responsibilities of the security council, after world war ii and the establishment of united nations organization. therefore, the security council enables to analyze every kind of conflicts and challenges which ...

any change in the refractive index of a laser active medium can lead to serious degradation of beam quality, laser beam modes, laser performance and variation in the intensity distribution. alteration in the refractive index of laser active medium is especially notable in high power lasers. it is clear that in the laser beam production, the pumping agent induces a great amount of heat which...

the significance of the study of deixis was then mentioned. the purpose of the present study from the outset was to provide a comprehensive overview of all kinds of deixis in persian, describing and defining each in true while considering them structurally and semantically. chapter two consisted of two main parts. a review of the english studies in this respect, besides presenting persian liter...

a major concern in the last few years has been the fact that the cultural centers are keeping distance with what they have been established for and instead of reproducing the hegemony, they have turned into a place for resistance and reproduction of resistance against hegemony. because the cultural centers, as urban public spaces in the last two decades, have been the subject of ideological dis...

abstract since heubners (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by l2 learners from article-less and article languages. the present study investigated how persian l2 learners of english produce and interpret english definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions. it was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same cen...

abstract target-oriented approaches to translation studies are regarded as recent theories of translation. one of the most famous theories among these approaches is descriptive translation studies presented by toury (1995). this theory gives a new dimension to translation studies and gives importance to the descriptive rather than prescriptive studies. it also identifies three sets of transla...

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...