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...

esl/efl books play a crucial role in shaping language learners worldview of gender roles in society. the present study investigated the status of sexism in two sets of efl textbooks, one developed by non-native iranian authors (ili series) and the other by native authors (top notch series). first, two books from each series was selected randomly. then, a quantitative analysis was carried out wi...

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...

postcolonial feminism, also dubbed as third world feminism, is an innovative approach, demonstrating the way women of colonized countries suffer from both native patriarchies and imperial ideology. also due to this double-colonization, postcolonial feminists contend that third world women are subjected to both colonial domination of empire and male domination of patriarchy. while western femini...

the purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the relation between efl teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and their success. moreover, the study was an analysis of the teacher age, gender and years of teaching experience, to examine the manner in which these factors relate to teacher self-efficacy as defined by bandura (1997) and teaching effectiveness as evaluated by their own student...

the main purpose of this study was to investigate any relationship between high school efl teachers metaphorical understandings of their role in class and their self-efficacy beliefs. teachers metaphors were elicited through two different prompts: one picturing what they believed a language teacher should be like in class, and the other demonstrating what they are actually like in class; such...

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...

the concepts of similarity and dissimilarity have been the interest of many researchers. basically, in the studies the similarity between two objects or phenomena, has been discussed. in this thesis, we consider the case when the resemblance or similarity among three objects or phenomena of a set, 3-similarity in our terminology, is desired. later we will extend our definitions and propos...

the study reflected in this thesis aims at finding out relationships between critical thinking (ct), and the reading sections of tofel and ielts tests. the study tries to find any relationships between the ct ability of students and their performance on reading tests of tofel and academic ielts. however, no research has ever been conducted to investigate the relationship between ct and the read...