in the past couple of decades sociocultural theory of sla and its implications in efl contexts have attracted attentions of research circles worldwide and aroused some controversies. firth and wagner (1997) have questioned the principles of the cognitive view which gives importance to mental constructs in favor of sociocultural view which highlights social and contextual constructs. but if soci...

recent years have witnessed an increased attention to form focused instruction and consciousness raising activities (ellis, 2002; doughty & williams, 1998) on the one hand and extensive and meaningful exposure to the target language (klapper & rees, 2003; day & bamford, 1998) on the other. due to significance attributed to above mentioned issues by scholars, this study attempted to bridge them ...

data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...

abstract: in this thesis, we focus to class of convex optimization problem whose objective function is given as a linear function and a convex function of a linear transformation of the decision variables and whose feasible region is a polytope. we show that there exists an optimal solution to this class of problems on a face of the constraint polytope of feasible region. based on this, we dev...

abstract the present study deals with a comparison between reactive and pre-emptive focus-on-form in terms of application and efficiency. it was conducted in an intermediate english class in shahroud. 15 male learners participated in this research and their age ranged from 18 to 25. a course book, new interchange 3, and a complementary book were used. every session the learners gave lectures o...

chapter i provides an overview of structural linguistics and touches upon the saussurean dichotomies with the final goal of exploring their relevance to the stylistic studies of literature. to provide evidence for the singificance of the study, chapter ii deals with the controversial issue of linguistics and literature, and presents opposing views which, at the same time, have been central to t...

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 ...

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...

abstract the purpose of this study is twofold: on the one hand, it is intended to see what kind of noticing-the –gap activity (teacher generated vs. learner generated) is more efficient in teaching l2 grammar in classroom language learning. on the other hand, it is an attempt to determine which approach of the noticing-the-gap- activity is more effective in the long- term retention of grammar...

the present dissertation aims to investigate four-word lexical bundles in applied linguistics research articles by iranian and internationally-published writers. the aims of this study are two-fold: first of all, attempts have been made to create a comprehensive list of the most commonly used four-word lexical bundles categorized by their type and token frequency, their structural characteristi...