hedging is a multi-purpose rhetorical strategy which is usually used in scientific arguments to secure ratification of claims, reduce the risk of negation, avoid conflict, manage disagreement and leave room for the audience to assess presented information. hedges are frequently used in research articles to mitigate the findings of research endeavors. the present research aims to investigate the...

according to webster and wind (1972) and anderson et al (1987), “organizational buying is a complex process and involves many people from different functional areas, multiple goals and potentially conflicting decision criteria. moreover, the customers of today are also more knowledgeable and selective when making their purchasing decisions. since a key to organizational survival is the retentio...

abstract the present study was conducted to examine the effect of proficiency on students interaction while carrying out the grammar-based task(s) in collaboration. in particular, the study examines whether the level of proficiency affects the learners’ focus of attention to grammatical and lexical features. the study takes a further step and examines whether there is any difference in the use...

the present study was concerned with exploring the frequency and linguistic focus of corrective feedback types given by novice and experienced female teachers working with young learners and compared it with those of elementary classes for adults. moreover, it aimed at measuring learners’ acknowledgement of teachers’ corrective feedback in the form of uptake in relation to linguistic coverage o...

adolescents and young adults and their problems is an issue whose importance is obvious to anyone because youth are the founders of our countrys future and requires proper planning to be on leisure. given the importance of leisure,this study to investigate needs assessment and planning how adolescents and young adults spend their leisure time in urban of case study of high school girls and boys...

abstract following innovations in the field of elt, a new topic which has recently attracted a lot of attention is metaphor analysis. although this area of research is still in its infancy in elt, it seems that the idea can shed more light on the puzzle of english language learning and teaching. therefore, the major aim of this study is to analyze language learning and teaching in formal a...

the study reflected in this thesis aims at finding out relationships between critical thinking (ct), and the reading sections of tofel and ielts tests. the study tries to find any relationships between the ct ability of students and their performance on reading tests of tofel and academic ielts. however, no research has ever been conducted to investigate the relationship between ct and the read...

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...

this study aimed at examining the effects of iranian efl learners’ anxiety, ambiguity tolerance, and gender on their preferences for corrective feedback (cf, henceforth). the effects were sought with regard to the necessity, frequency, and timing of cf, types of errors that need to be treated, types of cf, and choice of correctors. seventy-five iranian efl students, twenty-eight males and forty...

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...