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 purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of portfolio assessment as a process-oriented assessment mechanism on iranian efl students’ english writing and its subskills of focus, elaboration, organization, conventions, and vocabulary. out of ninety juniors majoring in english literature and translation at the university of isfahan, sixty one of them who were at the same level of writing...

abstract cooperative learning refers to small groups of learners working together as a team to solve a problem, complete a task, or accomplish a common goal. in a cooperative environment one’s success is directly related to the success of other members because the focus on the individual shifts towards the group. to test the effectiveness of the method, using jigsaw technique, a study was cond...

the purpose of this thesis was to investigate how differently metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies affect l2 learners’ reading comprehension. to this end, the study employed a quasi-experimental design with a placement test as a proficiency test to find the homogeneity of groups. three classes were randomly selected as the experimental groups (n =90), and each class was tau...

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...

the present study investigated the effect of the two vocabulary teaching techniques in est, namely the use of translation and the use of visual aids as two separate vocabulary teaching techniques. to answer the question of the study, a pretest (michigan test) was administered to the 58 randomly selected est students at khajeh nasiredin tusi university, faculty of mechanics. after the homogeneit...

the present research was conducted to explore the effect of employing two language teaching approaches, i.e. schema-based instruction (sbi) and translation-based instruction (tbi), on vocabulary knowledge, structure and reading comprehension ability of forty one female students learning english in grade one senior high school in rivash, kuhsorkh, iran. while sbi focuses on schemata, i.e. words ...

the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of implicit focus on form through input flooding and the effect of noticing, explicit focus on form on linguistic accuracy. to fulfill the purpose of the study, 86 iranian pre-intermediate efl learners of one of the language institutes were chosen by means of administering ket as the homogeneity test. these learners were pretested throug...

most specialists in the field of foreign language teachingconsiderreading skill as an interactive process between the reader’s prior knowledge and the text.accordingly, the activation of prior knowledge for an effective comprehension is very important. it is generally agreed that the pre-reading phase is the stage where this type of interaction and activation may be enhanced throughcertain stra...