abstract: about 60% of total premium of insurance industry is pertained?to life policies in the world; while the life insurance total premium in iran is less than 6% of total premium in insurance industry in 2008 (sigma, no 3/2009). among the reasons that discourage the life insurance industry is the problem of adverse selection. adverse selection theory describes a situation where the inf...

methodology non-native participants in this study were sixty ba students majoring in english literature and teaching english as a foreign language at khayyam university of mashhad. they were senior students, between 21 to 24 years old, who had studied english for at least three and a half years and had passed several courses including grammar, reading, conversation, and writing. this was assum...

apart from other aspects, desert is a natural environment and is one of the appealing terrestrial elements. putting its symbolic and fictional senses aside, the term “desert” bears mystic sense more than material sense. in addition to the worlds materialistic experiences, desert has attracted the attention of writers because it creates a kind of inner experience, which returns the individual in...

abstract the current study set out to address the issue as to whether the implementation of portfolio assessment would give rise to iranian pre-intermediate efl learner autonomy. participants comprised 60 female in pre-intermediate level within the age range of 16-28.they were selected from among 90 language learners based on their scores on language proficiency test -key english test. then, t...

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...

phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

previous studies regarding teachers’ beliefs have revealed that teachers’ beliefs have influence on their classroom practices. the current study aimed to investigate the effect of teachers’ beliefs about teaching reading strategies on students’ motivation and success in reading comprehension in the context of english teaching as a foreign language in high schools of mazandaran, iran. data were ...

this study investigated the functions, types and frequencies of code switching in the teachers and students discourse in elt classrooms. to this end, the participants of this study including two groups of teachers and students were selected. the first group of participants were two efl teachers teaching general english courses (at two different levels of proficiency) in an institutional program...

abstract following innovations in the field of elt, a new topic which has recently attracted a lot of attention is metaphor analysis. although this area of research is still in its infancy in elt, it seems that the idea can shed more light on the puzzle of english language learning and teaching. therefore, the major aim of this study is to analyze language learning and teaching in formal a...

among the low–dimensional allotropes of carbon, nanotubes and graphene have attracted very much attention from nano–science and nanotechnology specialists. they have been proposed as building blocks in nanometer device engineering. however, these structures are not defect–free. in this thesis, we focused on defective carbon nanotubes and graphene, and studied the effect of couple of very common...