nowadays enhancing critical thinking in learners is considered one of the foreign language teachers’ tasks due to its high position in foreign language classrooms. when it comes to selecting materials for language classrooms, there are obviously some criteria that teachers should apply. the present study aimed at a critical thinking based analysis of ten picture story books and ten folktales th...

a phase-locked loop (pll) based frequency synthesizer is an important circuit that is used in many applications, especially in communication systems such as ethernet receivers, disk drive read/write channels, digital mobile receivers, high-speed memory interfaces, system clock recovery and wireless communication system. other than requiring good signal purity such as low phase noise and low spu...

the major purpose of this study was to develop the translation teacher competency test (ttct) and examine its construct and predictive validity. the present study was conducted in two phases: a qualitative phase as well as a quantitative phase. in the first phase of the study, the author attempted to find out the major areas of competency required for an academic translation teacher. the second...

as far as bandura’s (1977) conceptualization of the sense of self-efficacy is concerned, it is argued to be context- and even task-specific, compared to other concepts like self-esteem (brown, 2000); therefore, upon the previous research studies, related theories and definitions, and the ideas and views obtained from the interviews conducted with the scholars, the current research study aimed a...

just as motivation is important in sla research, demotivation constitutes an important factor, too. there are many studies done on demotivation and burnout of teachers. many of these studies have been conducted on one or two aspects of english instruction. consequently, there are few studies which have been done on more than two aspects of english teaching. the aim of this study is to find out ...

postcolonial feminism, also dubbed as third world feminism, is an innovative approach, demonstrating the way women of colonized countries suffer from both native patriarchies and imperial ideology. also due to this double-colonization, postcolonial feminists contend that third world women are subjected to both colonial domination of empire and male domination of patriarchy. while western femini...

asymmetric polyethersulfone (pes) microfiltration flat sheet membranes were composed by the phase inversion method (pim) and were used as supports. composite membranes were fabricated by coating silicone rubber as selective layer. effect of different concentrations of pes and pdms and different solvent such as nmp, dmf and dms effects as pes solvents and support thickness and different coagulat...

the importance of writing as a complex skill in applied linguistics has drawn the attention of many researchers to evaluate textbooks in order to help learners gain self-sufficiency and autonomy in the field of language use and communication. investigations have shown that developments in textbooks evaluation can promote the quality of pedagogies and consequently the learning. this study attemp...

while performance-based language assessment has led to an increased authenticity and content validity in the practice of writing assessment, the reliability of ratings has become a major issue. research findings have shown different reactions by native english speaker (nes) and non-native english speaker (nns) teachers to students’ writings. the focus of this study is on investigating whether i...

the speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that has received the least attention in the field of pragmatics. this study investigates the ways power relations, social distance, formality of the context, gender, and language proficiency (for efl learners) influence disagreement and politeness strategies. the participants of the study were 200 male and female native persian s...