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...

a problem of computer vision applications is to detect regions of interest under dif- ferent imaging conditions. the state-of-the-art maximally stable extremal regions (mser) detects affine covariant regions by applying all possible thresholds on the input image, and through three main steps including: 1) making a component tree of extremal regions’ evolution (enumeration), 2) obtaining region ...

efl/esl textbooks have been regarded as essential language teaching materials with which the learners spend about 70 up to 90 percent of their class time. the important role they play and their vast use make them not only influential in learning the language but also in shaping values and attitudes. put it another way, textbooks socialize learners using their contents (i.e. texts, illustrations...

according to coates’s (2004, as cited in zhang, 2010) definition of "conversational dominance" (p.111), it refers to the phenomenon of a speaker dominating others in interaction. specifically, it means how a speaker makes use of certain strategies to get the floor and maintain the floor. thus, the amount of talk is the main measurement for the dominance of the conversation. whether a speaker do...

armenias geopolitics and its historical experience have had a determining impact on the character of its foreign policy .present-day armenia is a small, landlocked country with _11,620 square miles area armenias landlocked nature makes it dependent on the benevolence of its neighbors for access to the outside world a fact that gives it a sense of isolation and vulnerability. as it was indic...

methodology non-native participants in this study were sixty ba students majoring in english literature and teaching english as a foreign language at khayyam university of mashhad. they were senior students, between 21 to 24 years old, who had studied english for at least three and a half years and had passed several courses including grammar, reading, conversation, and writing. this was assum...

the present study was an attempt to compare the effect of peer metalinguistic corrective feedback on elementary and intermediate efl learners speaking ability to see which level benefits more from this type of feedback. to this end, 117 female efl learners at grade 3, al-zahra high school in kermanshah, iran were non-randomly chosen. the homogeneity of the participants was attained through a pi...

feminine voice and narratology in wuthering heights wuthering heights as a general "bronte" work has extraordinary dimensions to it which can make it focal to different ways of interpretation. among other differences the issue of narrative voice is essential in understanding the ultimate purpose of wuthering heights. emily bronte uses different narrators from various focal points speaking of m...

“any science seeks generalities; the aim is to transcend knowledge of particular cases by discovering general regularities or laws” (chesterman, 2001, p. 1). these were the words of chesterman whose paper has served as a typical example of numerous papers carried out on ‘translation universals’ since the mid-nineties. blum-kulka (1986) is among translation studies scholars who proposed ‘explici...

terms of address as an important linguistics items provide valuable information about the interlocutors, their relationship and their circumstances. this study was done to investigate the change route of persian address terms in the two recent centuries including three historical periods of qajar, pahlavi and after the islamic revolution. data were extracted from a corpus consisting 24 novels w...