data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...

abstract the aim of this study was threefold: (1) to investigate the relationship between knowledge of semantic prosody and efl learners general language proficiency; (2) to examine the relationship between qualitative as well as quantitative knowledge of words, and (3) to compare the performance of efl learner on receptive and productive measures of semantic prosody. the study is based on a...

the ability to speak two languages in the world is a remarkable achievement. there is a good reason to believe that bilingualism is the norm for the majority of people in the world because 70% of the earth’s population are supposed to be bilingual or multilingual. various investigations have shown that the native language impacts foreign word recognition, and this influence is adapted by the de...

methodology non-native participants in this study were sixty ba students majoring in english literature and teaching english as a foreign language at khayyam university of mashhad. they were senior students, between 21 to 24 years old, who had studied english for at least three and a half years and had passed several courses including grammar, reading, conversation, and writing. this was assum...

the purpose of this study was to examine the status of supervision on departments’ heads at ferdowsi university of mashhad (fum) and realize some applied themes to provide a fit model for supervising departments’ heads in fum. the method was case study under a research category aimed for applied one. using purposive sampling, interviews were conducted with top fum managers, head departments, an...

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 this study has been to find answers for the following questions: 1. what is the effect of immediate correction on students pronunciation errors? 2. what would be the effect of teaching the more rgular patterns of english pronunciation? 3. is there any significant difference between the two methods of dealing with pronuciation errore, i. e., correction and the teaching of the regular ...

attempts have been made to study the thermodynamic behavior of 1,3 butadiene purification columns with the aim of retrofitting those columns to more energy efficient separation schemes. 1,3 butadiene is purified in two columns in series through being separated from methyl acetylene and 1,2 butadiene in the first and second column respectively. comparisons have been made among different therm...

abstract lexical knowledge of complex english words is an important part of language skills and crucial for fluent language use (nation, 2001). the present study, thus, was an attempt to assess the role of morphological decomposition awareness as a vocabulary learning strategy on learners’ productive and receptive recall and recognition of complex english words. so 90 sophomores (female and ma...

efl/esl textbooks have been regarded as essential language teaching materials with which the learners spend about 70 up to 90 percent of their class time. the important role they play and their vast use make them not only influential in learning the language but also in shaping values and attitudes. put it another way, textbooks socialize learners using their contents (i.e. texts, illustrations...