in the past couple of decades sociocultural theory of sla and its implications in efl contexts have attracted attentions of research circles worldwide and aroused some controversies. firth and wagner (1997) have questioned the principles of the cognitive view which gives importance to mental constructs in favor of sociocultural view which highlights social and contextual constructs. but if soci...

the present study sought to investigate the role of dynamic assessment (da) in improvement of iranian efl writing performance at different language proficiency levels. to this end, after conducting the quick placement test, 60 iranian efl learners were assigned to two groups with different language proficiency levels. in both groups each participant wrote two compositions, one before and one af...

the present study was an attempt to determine the types of motivation and levels of foreign language learning anxiety among efl students studying at azad and state universities in kermanshah and to determine the relationship between these two factors and language proficiency and gender. to this end, the foreign language learning motivation scale, by deci and ryan )1985(, were administered to 12...

the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between teachers’ immediacy behaviors and iranian students’ willingness to talk in english classes. analysis of the results from willingness to talk scale represents a relatively high level of willingness to talk in english classrooms among iranian language learners. the total mean score of students’ willingness to talk was 66.3 ou...

abstract the third millennium has started, but the world is facing with serious challenges in achieving international security and peace. various human rights violations have lead the states to find means to protect human rights. also article 55 of the united nations charter introduces the respect to human rights and fundamental freedom as the most suitable ways to realize peace and security. ...

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...

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...

126 abstract: in this research we studied the effects of cyclic hydration and dehydration of cysts of artemia urmiana and artemia parthenogenetica on the hatching percentage, survival and growth. the experiment was carried out in 3 treatments (1-3 hydration/dehydration cycles) with 3 replicates for each treatment. later effects of cold preservation at -20°c during three time periods were ...

chapter one is devotod to collect some notion and background informations, which are needed in the next chapters. it also contains some important statements which will be proved in a more general context later in this thesis. in chapter two, we show that if the marginal factor-group is of order np1...pk,n>1, then we obtain a bound for the order of the verbal subgroup. also a bound for the bear-...

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...