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...

according to coates’s (2004, as cited in zhang, 2010) definition of "conversational dominance" (p.111), it refers to the phenomenon of a speaker dominating others in interaction. specifically, it means how a speaker makes use of certain strategies to get the floor and maintain the floor. thus, the amount of talk is the main measurement for the dominance of the conversation. whether a speaker do...

the present study reports an analysis of response articles in four different disciplines in the social sciences, i.e., linguistics, english for specific purposes (esp), accounting, and psychology. the study has three phases: micro analysis, macro analysis, and e-mail interview. the results of the micro analysis indicate that a three-level linguistic pattern is used by the writers in order to cr...

muhammad ibn muhammad ibn numan, known as "shaykh mufid," one of the great imamiye theologians and jurists in the fourth and early fifth century , had comprehensive mastery of both rational and traditional topics and exerted his influence upon both his contemporary and future scholors. he is considered to be one of the top imamiye scholars who spent his lifetime teaching, learning and authorin...

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...

this study investigated how group formation method, namely student-selected vs. teacher-assigned, influences the results of the community model of teaching creative writing; i.e., group dynamics and group outcome (the quality of performance). the study adopted an experimental comparison group and microgenetic research design to observe the change process over a relatively short period of time. ...

in this thesis our aim is to construct vector field in r3 for which the corresponding one-dimensional maps have certain discontinuities. two kinds of vector fields are considered, the first the lorenz vector field, and the second originally introced here. the latter have chaotic behavior and motivate a class of one-parameter families of maps which have positive lyapunov exponents for an open in...

why some learners are willing to communicate in english, concurrently others are not, has been an intensive investigation in l2 education. willingness to communicate (wtc) proposed as initiating to communicate while given a choice has recently played a crucial role in l2 learning. it was hypothesized that wtc would be associated with language learning orientations (llos) as well as social suppo...

these days, all department stores make an effort to provide their clients with valuable products in order to project the best image for them. as a result, clients’ comprehension risk will decrease and they will be more willing to repurchase. having a good image is really important for the department stores because it makes an impression on clients’ comprehension of both quality and risk. consid...

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...