linguistic factors

Many factors may be involved in determining why some students are more and some are less proficient in language. This study tried to explore the factors affecting Iranian EFL learners’ proficiency. 221 students at second, third and fourth year of university, including 50 male and 171 female were selected randomly to participate in the study. A researcher-made questionnaire and a proficiency test comprised the data collection instruments. The researchers were able to identify three factors affecting language proficiency. They were classified as social factors, cultural factors and linguistic factors, Then a model was developed to represent the relationship among these factors and language proficiency. In line with Bourdieu’s (1986), the results of data analysis indicated that social factors are among the most dominant factors affecting the learners’ language proficincy.

The readers' ability to integrate current information with given information has been considered as an important component of reading comprehension process. One aspect of this integration process involves anaphoric resolution. The purpose of this study is to investigate the process of anaphoric resolution, focusing on inferential rigidity of different types of anaphoric ties. Ninety EFL learners were selected from the accessible population of undergraduate EFL students at a university in Iran. In this study an anaphoric resolution test, containing 30 different expository texts, was used. The participants were asked to underline the antecedents of the anaphors. Once the data was collected and scored, it was subjected to a number of appropriate statistical procedures. The Results of the analysis of variance revealed a significant effect of different types of anaphoric ties, F (4, 87) = 10.28, p