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...

cohesion is an indispensable linguistic feature in discourse analysis. lexicald such a differe cohesion and conjunction in particular as two crucial elements to textual cohesion and comprehension has been the focus of a wide range of studies up to now. yet the relationship between the open register and cohesive devices has not been thoroughly investigated in discourse studies. this study concen...

recent years have witnessed an increased attention to form focused instruction and consciousness raising activities (ellis, 2002; doughty & williams, 1998) on the one hand and extensive and meaningful exposure to the target language (klapper & rees, 2003; day & bamford, 1998) on the other. due to significance attributed to above mentioned issues by scholars, this study attempted to bridge them ...

abstract the primary purpose of this study was to explore the actual practices and cognitions of two groups of iranian eap teachers, i.e. language teachers and content teachers, with respect to teaching reading-comprehension and vocabulary. to this end, tehran university of medical sciences which authorizes both groups of teachers to teach eap courses was selected as the context of the study s...

in reality, most structures involved in geotechnical engineering are three dimensional in nature, and although in many, plane strain or axisymmetric approximations are reasonable, there are some, for which 3-d treatment is required. the quantity of data, and the size of the various vectors and matrices involved in such analysis, increase dramatically. this has sever implications for computer r...

abstract the variables affecting the nature of reading comprehension can be classified into two general categories: reader’s variables, and text variables (alderson, 2000). despite the wave of research on vocabulary knowledge as reader’s variable, the role of this knowledge in c-test as a text-dependent test and its interaction with lexical cohesion of the test as a text feature has remained a...

this thesis attempts to investigate the effects of prelistening activities on enhancing iranian efl learners` listening comprehension. the present study investigated ways in which learners` background knowledge could be activated in order to enhance their l2 listening comprehension by limiting the number of possible text interpretations prior to listening. the experiments conducted in this stud...