درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Test method facet is one of the factors which can have an influence on the test takers’ performance. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of two different response types, multiple-choice cloze and multiple-choice test, on the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers’ reading comprehension performance. To this end, 40 pre-intermediate and intermediate learners participated in the study. To counterbalance the practice effect, the participants of the study at both pre-intermediate and intermediate levels were randomly assigned into two groups. For each level, there were two types of tests and two test administrations. Within each level, the two groups took these two tests in a different order. For all participants of the study there were two scores based on multiple- choice cloze and multiple-choice tests. Two Paired sample t tests were separately run to compare the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers’ performance on multiple-choice cloze and multiple-choice tests. Two independent samples t tests were run to compare the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers on these two tests. There was no significant difference between the pre-intermediate test takers’ performance on these two types of tests. There was a significant difference between intermediate test takers’ performance on the tests. There was no significant difference between the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers’ performance on the multiple-choice cloze tests. The intermediate test takers outperformed the pre-intermediate test takers only on the multiple-choice tests. Based on these results it can be concluded that test methods can have an influence on the test takers’ performance, especially at higher proficiency levels and learners may need to have reached a certain level of proficiency to be able to understand the text.

As building blocks of coherent discourse, lexical bundles, frequent word combinations that commonly occur in different registers, have attracted the attention of researchers in corpus linguistics in the last decade. The importance of these word clusters lies in their often necessary functional contribution to the development of evolving discourse. While most previous studies of bundles have been mainly concerned with variations in the use of these word sequences across different registers (e.g., conversation, classroom teaching, and lectures) and a number of disciplines (e.g., history and biology), postgraduate genres have not been the subject of adequate rigorous analysis. This corpus-based study explored possible differences andor similarities between two students' genres in terms of the variety, structure, and function of lexical bundles. Through two corpora of master theses and doctoral dissertations in one single discipline of applied linguistics, the study showed that not only was there a large intradisciplinary difference between the two genres in the range of bundles employed, but also there were some striking differences in the total frequency and function of these word combinations. Some implications for academic writing instruction have also been discussed.

Textbook evaluation serves as a useful tool at teachers‘ disposal to cope with uncertainty in opting for the proper material prior to embarking on their teaching career. This study aims at comparing two different ESP textbooks, one of them English for students of Mechanical Engineering, design of solids (SAMT publication), and the other one English in Mechanical Engineering (Oxford University Press). For the purpose of comparison and contrast, Textbook Evaluation Checklist (Miekley, 2005) was used against which the components of these two books were weighed to show what they have in common and where the point of departure from any commonality is. Although based on evaluative questions some inherent inefficiencies of these textbooks were revealed, it was generally concluded that both of them have tenable justification to be taught as an ESP course book.

Having its roots in science, “chaos theory” provides a new strategy to examine the disordered world of postmodern novels to find the hidden order underlying the apparent chaos. This study tries to clarify the ambiguous relation between Oedipa Maas, the “Tristero system” and the “Maxwell’s Demon” in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Oedipa Maas, the main character of the novel is regarded as an “everyman” type character who tries desperately to make sense of the signs and mysteries proliferating around her, but she can never fulfill her quest because she is trapped in a chaotic world where there are no stable values, friends or meanings. She feels separated from the world around her and longs to regain the stability she used to have before she started her task as the “executrix” of her former lover’s vast estate. She does not manage to find “order” in the surrounding chaos, but applying the major tenets of chaos theory and examining concepts such as “the butterfly effect”, “bifurcations”, “strange attractors”, “recursive symmetry” and “entropy” , we can come to a better understanding of the order underlying the disordered world of the novel.

There is a general consensus that critical thinking can be influential in almost every occupation due to its association with the abilities such as problem solving and decision making. This paper aims at probing the role of critical thinking (CT) skills on EFL learners' reading comprehension performance using Bloom's taxonomy. Therefore, the role of CT strategies training across two language proficiency levels, high & low, was investigated. Then the difference between females and males regarding their CT was studied. In so doing, 240 male and female Iranian EFL students were selected and screened into two proficiency levels based on the Longman preparation course for TOEFL test. Each proficiency group was divided into critical and non-critical group. The results suggested CT skills significantly affected EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance. However, the effect of critical thinking strategy training didn’t vary across different language proficiency levels. Overall, the findings provide empirical support for the facilitative effect of critical thinking strategy training on reading comprehension performance of EFL learners.