august wilson is undoubtedly one of the rare black playwrights whose works have attracted streams of attention and worldwide audience. the present study aims at analyzing fences and piano lesson which are two of the most successful plays in his pittsburgh cycle from the perspective of michel foucault’s theories and ideas. studying these two plays from foucault’s perspective opens new windows in...

abstract the present study tried to investigate the effect of visual aids (films) on the development of the speech act of disagreement among iranian efl intermediate learners. to this end, the researcher selected 40 homogeneous intermediate learners based on their scores on oxford placement test. .the subjects then divided into control group and experimental group. both classes were tested by ...

according to coates’s (2004, as cited in zhang, 2010) definition of "conversational dominance" (p.111), it refers to the phenomenon of a speaker dominating others in interaction. specifically, it means how a speaker makes use of certain strategies to get the floor and maintain the floor. thus, the amount of talk is the main measurement for the dominance of the conversation. whether a speaker do...

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...

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...

supervisors play an undeniable role in training teachers, before starting their professional experience by preparing them, at the initial years of their teaching by checking their work within the proper framework, and later on during their teaching by assessing their progress. but surprisingly, exploring their attributes, professional demands, and qualifications has remained a neglected theme i...

the skill of reading in english as a foreign language is an important and challenging one which is affected both by linguistic and extra linguistic factors. since vocabularies are part and parcel of every reading comprehension text, knowing enough vocabulary always facilitates this process. however, guessing strategy as one of the most important strategies has consistently ignored by language l...

previous studies have aimed at testing a hypothesis but the present study is data-first research in which researcher tries to form a theory from data rather than the use of data to test a hypothesis. this study aims at exploring teachers perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the current syllabus for college preparatory course. eight experienced teachers were selected to collect data du...

in this work, a novel and fast method for direct analysis of volatile compounds (davc) of medicinal plants has been developed by holding a filament from different parts of a plant in the gc injection port. the extraction and analysis of volatile components of a small amount of plant were carried out in one-step without any sample preparation. after optimization of temperature, extraction time a...

the concepts of similarity and dissimilarity have been the interest of many researchers. basically, in the studies the similarity between two objects or phenomena, has been discussed. in this thesis, we consider the case when the resemblance or similarity among three objects or phenomena of a set, 3-similarity in our terminology, is desired. later we will extend our definitions and propos...