Threats to construct validity should be reduced to a minimum. If true, sources of bias, namely raters, items, tests as well as gender, age, race, language background, culture, and socioeconomic status need to be spotted and removed. This study investigates raters' experience, language background, and the choice of essay prompt as potential sources of biases. Eight raters, four native English speakers and four Persian L1 speakers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), scored 40 essays on one general and one field-specific topic. The raters assessed these essays based on Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) holistic and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) analytic band scores. Multifaceted Rasch Measurement (MFRM) was run to find extant biases. In spite of not finding statistically significant biases, several interesting results emerged illustrating the influence of construct-irrelevant factors such as raters' experience, L1, and educational background. Further research is warranted to investigate these factors as potential sources of rater bias.

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This study is an endeavor to find how English native and nonnative EFL/ESL (English as foreign language/English as second language) writers use adversative conjunctions to connect ideas together so that texts have both coherence and cohesion. Regarding the problems nonnative writers of EFL face when composing a piece of writing, we attempted a qualitative study through compiling a stack of 200 articles written by the two groups. The research design concerned the content analysis of research articles and descriptive statistics showing the frequency of occurrences of modals in the data. The findings indicated that the number of proper and correction adversatives exceeded those of contrastive and dismissal; the statistically significant difference between two groups lay in the use of proper and correction adversative conjunction, whereas the two groups showed little or no difference in the usage of contrastive or dismissal adversatives. These findings can help material writers, EFL/ESL teachers, and learners to appreciate the significant roles adversative conjunctions play in writing.

Although politeness has a major place in many languages, and should be noticeable in everyday behavior, many people, especially the youth, in the current generation do not always act politely. Politeness is not considered as much as it used to be. This may be attributed to individuals' low Emotional Intelligence (EI). The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between EQ and politeness. To this end, a group of 50 EFL Iranian learners participated in this study by responding to politeness and EI Appraisal Tests. The first test measured politeness suggested by Brown and Levinson (1978), which had 25 items with four possible responses whose scores ranged between 1 (the least polite) and 4 (the politest). The EQ questionnaire was a self-report appraisal test with 28 items measuring EI through 5-point Likert Scale. The correlational analysis revealed there was not a statistically significant relationship between EQ and politeness of EFL learners. The second purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between politeness and the four skills of EQ. The results revealed that politeness does not have any statisically significant relationship with any of the four EQ skills (i.e., Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management) among EFL Iranian learners. These findings suggest that politeness is a complicated phenomenon as is the case with EQ requiring further investigation.