language learning strategies have been controversial ever since rubin’s (1975) landmark article more that 30 years ago. to this day, there is no consensus regarding exactly what a strategy is, which has impeded research initiatives and at times threatened the validity of research findings. the relationship between strategies and successful language learning has also been questioned. based on th...

The present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of meta-cognitive strategy (planning, self-monitoring) awareness raising instruction on reading comprehension of Iranian ESP learners. Participants of three groups each comprising of 21 Iranian male students studying “Civil Engineering” in “Islamic Azad University of Buin Zahra” were selected and assigned to three groups: two experiment...

The recently proposed Social Motivation theory (Chevallier et al., Trends in cognitive sciences 16(4):231-239, 2012) suggests that social difficulties in Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) might be caused by a difference in the motivation to engage with other people. Here we compared adolescents with (N = 31) and without (N = 37) ASC on the Choose-a-Movie paradigm that measures the social seeking....

The present study investigated the potential of implementing reading strategy instruction in raising learner readers' awareness of reading strategies,  extending the range of strategies they employed and enhancing their reading comprehension ability. To conduct the study, 90 female pre-university students majoring in Natural Sciences were selected based on a convenient sampling procedure. After...

The basic idea that rewards, and in particular monetary rewards, may crowd out intrinsic motivation emanates from two quite different branches of literature in the social sciences. In his book The Gift Relationship, Richard Titmuss (1970) argued that paying for blood undermines cherished social values and would therefore reduce or totally eliminate people’s willingness to donate blood. However,...