abstract: the present study is an attempt to find out cultural exophoric references in iranian high-school elt textbooks and touch stone series to compare the frequency of occurrence of such references in these books. the purpose is to find out which of the series of the books under investigation impose a greater referential burden on efl learners as far as their reading comprehension of the ...

abstract this paper discusses several commonly used models for strategic marketing¹ including market environmental analysis methods (i.e. swot and pest analysis) and strategic marketing tools and techniques (i.e. boston matrix and shell directional policy matrix)and shows how these models may help a firm to achieve its strategic goals. at first, the main reason for doing this research is de...

the thesis has been arranged into five chapters and mainly concerned with the baer-invariant of groups which is the generalization of the schur-multiplier with respect to the variety of groups. chapter one is devoted to collect some notation and background information which are needed in the next chapters. its also contains some important statements which will be generalized in this thesis. cha...

nowadays in trade and economic issues, prediction is proposed as the most important branch of science. existence of effective variables, caused various sectors of the economic and business executives to prefer having mechanisms which can be used in their decisions. in recent years, several advances have led to various challenges in the science of forecasting. economical managers in various fi...

this thesis is a study on insurance fraud in iran automobile insurance industry and explores the usage of expert linkage between un-supervised clustering and analytical hierarchy process(ahp), and renders the findings from applying these algorithms for automobile insurance claim fraud detection. the expert linkage determination objective function plan provides us with a way to determine whi...

nowadays enhancing critical thinking in learners is considered one of the foreign language teachers’ tasks due to its high position in foreign language classrooms. when it comes to selecting materials for language classrooms, there are obviously some criteria that teachers should apply. the present study aimed at a critical thinking based analysis of ten picture story books and ten folktales th...

the construct of self-efficacy has received increasing attention in research over the past two decades. many studies have been carried out 1.3 significance of the study this study has pedagogical implications since improving students’ self- efficacy and autonomy is important for promoting actual performance on classroom academic tasks. in academic settings, it has been shown that self-effi...

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...

abstract type-ii fuzzy logic has shown its superiority over traditional fuzzy logic when dealing with uncertainty. type-ii fuzzy logic controllers are however newer and more promising approaches that have been recently applied to various fields due to their significant contribution especially when the noise (as an important instance of uncertainty) emerges. during the design of type- i fuz...

abstract objectives gradual increase length and complexity of utterance (gilcu) therapy method is a form of operant conditioning. this type of treatment is very precise and controlled that is done in 54 steps in 3 speech situations consisted of monologue, reading and conversation. this study aimed to examine the effects of gilcu treatment method on reduction of speech dysfluency of school-age...