this study was intended to analyze the listening tapescripts of the elementary and pre-intermediate levels of total english textbooks from the pragmatic dimension of language functions and speech acts in order to see whether the listening tasks are pragmatically informative or not. for this purpose, 8 conversations from the two books were selected randomly, and then, the two pragmatic models of...

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...

abstract cooperative learning refers to small groups of learners working together as a team to solve a problem, complete a task, or accomplish a common goal. in a cooperative environment one’s success is directly related to the success of other members because the focus on the individual shifts towards the group. to test the effectiveness of the method, using jigsaw technique, a study was cond...

this study was carried out to investigate the effects of integrative vs. instrumental motivation, learning strategy use and gender on iranian efl learners. to this end, 120 efl learners both male and female majoring in english language and literature at shiraz university participated in the study. in order to conduct this study three instruments were used: oxford quick placement test, motivatio...

the purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of task-based instruction of vocabulary on the receptive and oral productive acquisition of english vocabulary and compare the results with those obtained from the traditional method. the method and procedure applied in this study was as follows: after the implementation of opt, a group of sixty female students were chosen. the stu...

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...

nowadays, the development of anti cancer drugs is an important subject in pharmacology. bisphosphonates (b.p) are a great choice for design and production of the types of drugs which not only could perform as anti cancer agents but also could inhibit the function of acetyl cholinesterase (ache). ache hydrolyzes the acetylcholine (which is a neurotransmitter in nervous system) using the oh in i...

since the 1960s the age effects on learning both first and second language have been explored by many linguists and applied linguists (e.g lennerberg, 1967; schachter, 1996; long, 1990) and the existence of critical period for language acquisition was found to be a common ground of all these studies. in spite of some common findings, some issues about the impacts of age on acquiring a second or...

the purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the relation between efl teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and their success. moreover, the study was an analysis of the teacher age, gender and years of teaching experience, to examine the manner in which these factors relate to teacher self-efficacy as defined by bandura (1997) and teaching effectiveness as evaluated by their own student...

the rationale behind the present study is that particular learning strategies produce more effective results when applied together. the present study tried to investigate the efficiency of the semantic-context strategy alone with a technique called, keyword method. to clarify the point, the current study seeked to find answer to the following question: are the keyword and semantic-context metho...