charles dickens was a voracious reader even in his childhood. his early reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century picaresque fiction greatly influenced his writing style. his first novel, the pickwick papers, is a tale of rogues and swindlers, adventures and quests, satire and comedy, and innocence and experience. oliver twist, dickens’ second novel, is a young boy’s progress through a cor...

abstract the present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of critical thinking on writing ability of 60 iranian intermediate efl learners studying at chenar language institute in khuzestan, iran. to this end, the participants of the study were selected based on their performance in an pet test, a cornell critical thinking test form x and a pre-test of writing. the participants un...

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 ...

plagiarism in esl/efl learning contexts has been established as a dynamic and multi-layered phenomenon and has become a topic engaging many researchers in a heated debate in recent years. comparisons of student-generated texts with their source texts have shown that students rely on source texts in their writings and copying is a major strategy used by both l1 and l2 writers. in our country a...

the purpose of this two-phase, sequential mixed methods study was to find out whether there were any decencies between male and female ma students’ theses regarding the common features of academic writing such as syntactic complexity, means of integrating cited information, and organizing arguments. i chose 10 male written theses and 15 female written theses in tefl and linguistics. in the firs...

this thesis attempts to investigate the effects of prelistening activities on enhancing iranian efl learners` listening comprehension. the present study investigated ways in which learners` background knowledge could be activated in order to enhance their l2 listening comprehension by limiting the number of possible text interpretations prior to listening. the experiments conducted in this stud...

this research is a study on indicators of listening instruction in iranian english as a foreign language (efl) curriculum at guidance school and high school educational levels. this thesis aims at determining: a) the indicators of listening instruction at guidance school and high school efl curriculum. b) the indicators of listening instruction in irans guidance school and high school efl curri...

the purpose of this study was to examine the english language needs of medical students at tehran university of medical sciences . analysis of the needs took place for three groups: 320 undergraduate students, 30 postgraduate students and 20 university instructors. a triangulation approach to collect data was used in which a combination of the quantitative (using the questionnaires) and qualita...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of using c-test passages on the reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning of iranian intermediate efl learners. the participants were 60 male efl learners at kish mehr institute in garmsar. in fact, there were two groups, an experimental group and a comparison group with 30 students in each. the participants were pretested throu...

drought is transient phenomenon , slow , repetitive and integral part of the climate of each region. drought begins with a substantial reduction in precipitation over the long-term average rainfall and over time, reduced soil moisture and surface and ground water resources will continue to decrease. this phenomenon is the most important in bakhtegan basin because of its importance in strategic ...