abstract the main purpose of this study was to investigate whether there was any significant difference between the speaking achievement of learners who were trained by means of consciousness raising of sociolinguistic skills and that of learners who were trained without the above mentioned task. the participants of this study consist of 60 intermediate level students participating languag...

the primary goal of the current project was to examine the effect of three different treatments, namely, models with explicit instruction, models with implicit instruction, and models alone on differences between the three groups of subjects in the use of the elements of argument structures in terms of toulmins (2003) model (i.e., claim, data, counterargument claim, counterargument data, rebutt...

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...

recent studies in scientific education as well as foreign and second language instruction suggest that thinking has rarely been an integral part of education and training in classroom. some scholars decried the lack of emphasis on thinking in the institutes and schools. they noted that memorization and drills were rewarded,while inquiry, reflection, and consideration of alternatives were frowne...

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...

this study was intended to analyze the listening tapescripts of the elementary and pre-intermediate levels of total english textbooks from the pragmatic dimension of language functions and speech acts in order to see whether the listening tasks are pragmatically informative or not. for this purpose, 8 conversations from the two books were selected randomly, and then, the two pragmatic models of...

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...

target tracking is the tracking of an object in an image sequence. target tracking in image sequence consists of two different parts: 1- moving target detection 2- tracking of moving target. in some of the tracking algorithms these two parts are combined as a single algorithm. the main goal in this thesis is to provide a new framework for effective tracking of different kinds of moving target...

a large number of single research studies on the effects of strategy-based instruction (sbi) in teaching english as a foreign or second language has been conducted so far. however, the lack of a comprehensive meta-analysis targeting the effectiveness of english language sbi is observed. moreover, the findings of experimental studies regarding the context of the english language, proficiency lev...

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...