teachers beliefs have usually been left unattended in the realm of educational research in iranian context. one of those beliefs which seems to impact teachers performance in the classroom is their sense of self-efficacy, which refers to teachers belief in their ability to enhance student achievement and in bringing about positive learning outcomes. the present study aimed to investigate the pr...

abstract i the purpose of this study was to launch a thorough investigation concerning the possibility of differing orientations to the writing proficiency construct by native and non-native english speaking teacher raters. it mainly revolved around the international english language testing system (ielts) that is widely administered and employed as a measure of general proficiency in englis...

this study investigated (a) the learners’ existing reading strategy repertoire, (b) the effect of instruction in reading strategies on learners’ strategic performance, and (c) the effect of explicit instruction in top-down reading strategies on reading comprehension ability of intermediate learners. the study was conducted with 40 intermediate efl learners in two groups of experimental and cont...

this study examines the effetivenss of task-based activities in helping students learn english language structures for a better communication. initially, a michigan test was administered to the two groups of 52 students majoring in english at the allameh ghotb -e- ravandi university to ensure their homogeneity. the students scores on the grammar part of this test were also regarded as their pre...

the present research was conducted to explore the effect of employing two language teaching approaches, i.e. schema-based instruction (sbi) and translation-based instruction (tbi), on vocabulary knowledge, structure and reading comprehension ability of forty one female students learning english in grade one senior high school in rivash, kuhsorkh, iran. while sbi focuses on schemata, i.e. words ...

abstract the present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of critical thinking on writing ability of 60 iranian intermediate efl learners studying at chenar language institute in khuzestan, iran. to this end, the participants of the study were selected based on their performance in an pet test, a cornell critical thinking test form x and a pre-test of writing. the participants un...

abstract poor reading comprehension can result in failure in using references, benefiting from professional gatherings and resources, keeping up with the growing body of knowledge in the virtual world of the internet, and failing to achieve in efl programs. the purpose of the present quasi-experimental study was to explore the effects of background knowledge and previewing narrative and expos...

the present study investigated construct equivalence of multiple choice (mc) and constructed response (cr) item types across stem and content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘a’), non-stem-equivalent but content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘b’), and non-stem and non-content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘c’). one hundred seventy english-major undergraduates completed mc ...

a novel acrylic acid-functionalized fe3o4 magnetic nanoparticle with a core-shell structure was developed for utilization as a heterogeneous organosuperacid in chemical transformations. the structural, surface, and magnetic characteristics of the nanosized catalyst were investigated by various techniques such as transmission electron microscopy (tem), thermogravimetric analysis (tga), and ft-ir...