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...

the current study aimed at investigating the relationship between motivation and test preparation strategies (tpss) used by iranian pre-university students in their preparation period for the university entrance exam (uee). due to the importance of uee in iran, this study also attempted to show its impact on these two important variables. to this end, 100 pre-university students in an iranian p...

the present study aimed to investigate representation of discourse markers and metadiscourse markers in conversations and readings of general elt coursebook series used in the language centers of iran. to this aim, four elt coursebooks popularly taught in language centers of this country were analyzed based on fung and carter’s (2007) framework regarding discourse markers and hyland’s (2005) fr...

this study attempts to investigate the effect of peers’ revision in comparison to that of the teacher, and whether peers’ comments and teachers’ comments facilitate students’ revision? if yes, which one is more effective? also attempts have been made to see which aspects of language are more highlighted by peers versus teachers when commenting. besides, it is investigating the student’s attitud...

recent years have witnessed an increased attention to form focused instruction and consciousness raising activities (ellis, 2002; doughty & williams, 1998) on the one hand and extensive and meaningful exposure to the target language (klapper & rees, 2003; day & bamford, 1998) on the other. due to significance attributed to above mentioned issues by scholars, this study attempted to bridge them ...

this ethnographic case study research was carried out in a private school setting in the context of iran. the research tried to explore the analysis and identity construction of a group of learners and teachers along with the content analysis of books on the basis of four types of commodified, political, national and narrative identities. how english language learners and teachers in an informa...

until now many studies have been done over recent decades throughout the world to show the right age to start english. in iran, research is still at an early stage in terms of evaluating teachers’ beliefs about teaching children english. the problem of at what age to start teaching english and how to teach english to elementary school children has not been solved neither in this country nor els...

abstract i the purpose of this study was to launch a thorough investigation concerning the possibility of differing orientations to the writing proficiency construct by native and non-native english speaking teacher raters. it mainly revolved around the international english language testing system (ielts) that is widely administered and employed as a measure of general proficiency in englis...

the caspian sea contains great resources of oil and gas. the caspian sea is a 700- mile- long body of water in central asia, land located between azerbaijan, iran, kazakhstan, russia and turkmenistan. iran was challenges and opportunities in the caspian region. key question in this thesis includes three section that first question, opportunities of iran in the caspian region, second question ch...

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...