while performance-based language assessment has led to an increased authenticity and content validity in the practice of writing assessment, the reliability of ratings has become a major issue. research findings have shown different reactions by native english speaker (nes) and non-native english speaker (nns) teachers to students’ writings. the focus of this study is on investigating whether i...

in chapter one we will describe definitions and preliminary results to provide the global context of our own results to be presented in detail in the subsequent chapters in chapter two we consider degree-one maps of the circle and we study their rotation set. our main result in this chapter says that if the map is topologically mixing then its rotation interval is nontrivial (that is, not reduc...