the debate whether esp teachers need to have knowledge of the specialized field they are teaching has been an issue in the literature over the last two decades. the aim of conducting this study was to explore iranian learners’ and instructors’ beliefs and attitudes concerning the role of specialized knowledge in teaching esp classes. a seventeen item questionnaire was administered to 400 esp le...

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 aim of this study was to identify the problems of translating markedness structures from english to persian in order to look closely at what possible difficulties translators may face. it also seeks to probe the strategies applied accordingly by iranian translators in translating them. from three translation of blindness novel, the sentences with marked structures were elicited and also the...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of podcasts as a learning and teaching tool on iranian efl learners’ motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. the study also investigated the learners’ perception towards listening to podcasts and examined whether the learners were likely to accept podcasts. out of fifty-five intermediate learners studying e...

the aim of this study is to examine the difference between the introverts and extroverts in preferred advice-giving style. furthermore, it explores the difference between l1 (persian) and l2 (english) regarding the giving of advice for the extroverts and introverts separately. it investigates whether an extrovert or introvert gives advice in the same manner in his l1 (persian) and l2 (english) ...

the primary goal of the current project was to examine the effect of three different treatments, namely, models with explicit instruction, models with implicit instruction, and models alone on differences between the three groups of subjects in the use of the elements of argument structures in terms of toulmins (2003) model (i.e., claim, data, counterargument claim, counterargument data, rebutt...

the construct of self-efficacy has received increasing attention in research over the past two decades. many studies have been carried out 1.3 significance of the study this study has pedagogical implications since improving students’ self- efficacy and autonomy is important for promoting actual performance on classroom academic tasks. in academic settings, it has been shown that self-effi...

acknowledgements i wish to express my gratitude to all those who have helped me in preparing this thesis. i would like to express my deep gratitude to my respected advisor dr. kourosh akef, whose advice and comments helped me in the early stages of the research and throughout the writing process. i would also like to express my gratitude to dr. hajar khanmohammad whose invaluable guidance he...

“any science seeks generalities; the aim is to transcend knowledge of particular cases by discovering general regularities or laws” (chesterman, 2001, p. 1). these were the words of chesterman whose paper has served as a typical example of numerous papers carried out on ‘translation universals’ since the mid-nineties. blum-kulka (1986) is among translation studies scholars who proposed ‘explici...

with the growth of more humanistic approaches towards teaching foreign languages, more emphasis has been put on learners’ feelings, emotions and individual differences. one of the issues in teaching and learning english as a foreign language is demotivation. the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the components of language learning strategies, optimism, duration o...