abstract: the present study is an attempt to find out cultural exophoric references in iranian high-school elt textbooks and touch stone series to compare the frequency of occurrence of such references in these books. the purpose is to find out which of the series of the books under investigation impose a greater referential burden on efl learners as far as their reading comprehension of the ...

testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

increasing academic and professional language demands around the world are not a deniable fact. the purpose of this study was to investigate english language needs and communication needs of the chemistry students at master and ph.d. levels at the iranian universities. in this research, different methods were used including un-structured interview, structured interview, and two sets of question...

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...

abstract pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. communicative action includes not only using speech acts (such as apologizing, complaining, complimenting, and requesting), but also engaging in different types of discourse and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity. the present study aimed to investigate the assessment of pragm...

iv abstract this study examined the linguistic behaviors of two iranian efl teachers each of them teaching learners of two similar proficiency levels, a beginner level and an intermediate level, to investigate the relationship between the learners proficiency levels and the amounts and purposes for l1 use by the two teachers. the study was carried out to investigate whether there were differe...

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...

abstract:‎ literature is said beautiful words of poetry or prose that excites reader’s or listener’s feel. certainly, to ‎be effective, such a text should have certain characteristics. the four elements of the literature: thought, ‎imagination, emotion and style make a text to be literary and effective. emotion and imagination are ‎specific elements of literary texts, while thought and style a...

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...

nitric oxide (no) is a small molecule synthesized by most of mammalian cells with diverse biological activities including vasodilatation, host defense and wound healing. impaired wound healing is a common occurrence among diabetics and patients receiving glucocorticoid therapy. on the other hand the application of laser in biomedical area have been increased. thus, the current studies were desi...