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...

it is not possible to understand developments of a country’s culture and civilization without knowing his believes and myths. whether it is north or south, east or west, planes or mountains, sahara or deserts, here in iran every corner includes valuable and precious treasures which are known all over the world, and cultural – historical objects which are found here adorn all well known museums...

with the introduction of communicative language teaching, a large number of studies have concerned with students’ oral participation in language classrooms. although the importance of classroom participation is evident, some language learners are unwilling to engage in oral activities. this passivity and unwillingness to participate in language classroom discussions is known as “reticence”. rev...

nowadays enhancing critical thinking in learners is considered one of the foreign language teachers’ tasks due to its high position in foreign language classrooms. when it comes to selecting materials for language classrooms, there are obviously some criteria that teachers should apply. the present study aimed at a critical thinking based analysis of ten picture story books and ten folktales th...

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...

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...

nowadays, air pollution is a global problem that has had significant growth by technology development, population growth andindustrial development. industrial development brought natural resources deterioration, more manufacturing products, and more environmental pollutants. if pollutant won’t be controlled, human-being and wildlife will face the critical risks. significant release and critical...

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 research was conducted to accomplish two purposes. firstly, it aimed to explore and describe schematic structure or what halliday and hassan (1989, p.64) have called “generic structure potential” (gsp) of american english, iranian persian and iranian english newspaper editorials within systemic functional linguistics. secondly, a quantitative cross-comparison was made to investigate...

the changes in todays world organization, to the extent that instability can be characterized with the most stable organizations called this afternoon. if you ever change management component, an additional value to the organization was considered, today, these elements become the foundation the organization is survival. the definition of the entrepreneur to identify opportunities to exploit a...