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 the primary purpose of this study was to explore the actual practices and cognitions of two groups of iranian eap teachers, i.e. language teachers and content teachers, with respect to teaching reading-comprehension and vocabulary. to this end, tehran university of medical sciences which authorizes both groups of teachers to teach eap courses was selected as the context of the study s...

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...

the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between teachers’ immediacy behaviors and iranian students’ willingness to talk in english classes. analysis of the results from willingness to talk scale represents a relatively high level of willingness to talk in english classrooms among iranian language learners. the total mean score of students’ willingness to talk was 66.3 ou...

nowadays in trade and economic issues, prediction is proposed as the most important branch of science. existence of effective variables, caused various sectors of the economic and business executives to prefer having mechanisms which can be used in their decisions. in recent years, several advances have led to various challenges in the science of forecasting. economical managers in various fi...

monumental changes occurring on a daily basis have altered the world into a global village of expanding technology and shrinking geography in which preparing language learners for intercultural communication seems to be a sine qua non for modern language education. employing a cross-sectional design in its first phase, this study investigated the intercultural sensitivity and language proficien...

abstract this quasi-experimental study was aimed at examining the impact of storyline complexity on the grammatical accuracy and complexity of advanced and intermediate efl learners. a total of 65 advanced and intermediate efl learners were selected from iran language institute (ili). an intact group including 35 intermediate participants and another intact group with 30 advanced participants ...

deployable scissor type structures are composed of the so-called scissor-like elements (sles), which are connected to each other at an intermediate point through a pivotal connection and allow them to be folded into a compact bundle for storage or transport. several sles are connected to each other in order to form units with regular polygonal plan views. the sides and radii of the polygons are...

there are two major theories of measurement in psychometrics: classical test theory (ctt) and item-response theory (irt). despite its widespread and long use, ctt has a number of shortcomings, which make it problematic to be used for practical and theoretical purposes. irt tries to solve these shortcomings, and provide better and more dependable answers. one of the applications of irt is the as...

the present paper investigates how far ideologies can be tease out in discourse by examining the employed schemata by two ideologically opposed news media, the bbc and press tv, to report syria crisis during a period of nine months in 2011. by assuming that news is not a valuefree construction of facts and drawing on micro structural approach of schema theory, for the first time in discours...