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...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of podcasts as a learning and teaching tool on iranian efl learners’ motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. the study also investigated the learners’ perception towards listening to podcasts and examined whether the learners were likely to accept podcasts. out of fifty-five intermediate learners studying e...

colonialism is an important factor in cultural production and many of cultural constructs all over the world. english and english language teaching are at the center of the contemporary world. postcolonial literature, the genre achebe exercised, is a kind of historical text which has become central to different debates and criticisms. in this thesis, different elements related to the colonial...

this study focuses on jane austens representation of her heroines in two of her novels: pride and prejudice, and mansfield park. i have concentrated only on a single idea: how jane austen takes her heroines through a course of psychogical reformation to which almost everything else in her novel is subsidiary. although i have discussed only pride and prejudice, we can trace austens carefully pla...

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...

testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

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...

iv abstract this study examined the linguistic behaviors of two iranian efl teachers each of them teaching learners of two similar proficiency levels, a beginner level and an intermediate level, to investigate the relationship between the learners proficiency levels and the amounts and purposes for l1 use by the two teachers. the study was carried out to investigate whether there were differe...

monumental changes occurring on a daily basis have altered the world into a global village of expanding technology and shrinking geography in which preparing language learners for intercultural communication seems to be a sine qua non for modern language education. employing a cross-sectional design in its first phase, this study investigated the intercultural sensitivity and language proficien...

to discuss my point, i have collected quite a number of articles, anthologies, and books about "wuthering heights" applying various ideas and theories to this fantastic story. hence, i have come to believe that gadamer and jauss are rightful when they claim that "the individaul human mind is the center and origin of all meaning," 3 that reading literature is a reader-oriented activity, that it ...