phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

just as motivation is important in sla research, demotivation constitutes an important factor, too. there are many studies done on demotivation and burnout of teachers. many of these studies have been conducted on one or two aspects of english instruction. consequently, there are few studies which have been done on more than two aspects of english teaching. the aim of this study is to find out ...

this study compared the different effects of form-focused guided planning vs. meaning-focused guided planning on iranian pre-intermediate students’ task performance. the study lasted for three weeks and concentrated on eight english structures. forty five pre-intermediate iranian students were randomly assigned to three groups of guided planning focus-on-form group (gpfg), guided planning focus...

the aim of this study has been to find answers for the following questions: 1. what is the effect of immediate correction on students pronunciation errors? 2. what would be the effect of teaching the more rgular patterns of english pronunciation? 3. is there any significant difference between the two methods of dealing with pronuciation errore, i. e., correction and the teaching of the regular ...

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...

this study was an attempt to investigate and compare the effect of lexical inferencing and concept mapping on developing vocabulary retention of iranian language learners. sixty homogeneous students from different intact classes who were being taught as intermediate learners in sokhan english institute participated in this study. they were in different classes. a teacher made test as a pre-test...

the present study is an experimental case study which investigates the impacts, if any, of skopos on syntactic features of the target text. two test groups each consisting of 10 ma students translated a set of sentences selected from advertising texts in the operative and informative mode. the resulting target texts were then statistically analyzed in terms of the number of words, phrases, si...

like any other learning activity, translation is a problem solving activity which involves executing parallel cognitive processes. the ability to think about these higher processes, plan, organize, monitor and evaluate the most influential executive cognitive processes is what flavell (1975) called “metacognition” which encompasses raising awareness of mental processes as well as using effectiv...

in fact, this study focused on the following questions: 1. is there any difference between the effect of functional/notional approach and the structural approaches to language teaching on the proficiency test of efl learners? 2. can a rather innovative language test referred to as "functional test" ge devised so so to measure the proficiency test of efl learners, and thus be as much reliable an...

rivers and runoff have always been of interest to human beings. in order to make use of the proper water resources, human societies, industrial and agricultural centers, etc. have usually been established near rivers. as the time goes on, these societies developed, and therefore water resources were extracted more and more. consequently, conditions of water quality of the rivers experienced rap...