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 present paper offers a postcolonial reading of two of the best novels by v. s. naipaul – half a life and the mimic men – in five chapters. the focus of this research is on different notions of postcolonial criticism and their application on the two novels as discussed from homi bhabha’s and frantz fanons points of view. having introduced the life and literary career of v. s. naipaul in th...

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...

there are two major theories of measurement in psychometrics: classical test theory (ctt) and item-response theory (irt). despite its widespread and long use, ctt has a number of shortcomings, which make it problematic to be used for practical and theoretical purposes. irt tries to solve these shortcomings, and provide better and more dependable answers. one of the applications of irt is the as...

hedging is a multi-purpose rhetorical strategy which is usually used in scientific arguments to secure ratification of claims, reduce the risk of negation, avoid conflict, manage disagreement and leave room for the audience to assess presented information. hedges are frequently used in research articles to mitigate the findings of research endeavors. the present research aims to investigate the...

deployable scissor type structures are composed of the so-called scissor-like elements (sles), which are connected to each other at an intermediate point through a pivotal connection and allow them to be folded into a compact bundle for storage or transport. several sles are connected to each other in order to form units with regular polygonal plan views. the sides and radii of the polygons are...

growing demands and requires of high data rate systems cause significant increase of high frequency systems for wideband communication applications. as mixers are one of the main blocks of each receivers and its performance has great impact on receiver’s performance; in this thesis, a new solution for ku-band (12-18 ghz) mixer design in tsmc 0.18 µm is presented. this mixer has high linearity a...

the poor orientation of the restaurants toward the information technology has yet many unsolved issues in regards to the customers. one of these problems which lead the appeal list of later, and have a negative impact on the prestige of the restaurant is the case when the later does not respond on time to the customers’ needs, and which causes their dissatisfaction. this issue is really sensiti...

according to webster and wind (1972) and anderson et al (1987), “organizational buying is a complex process and involves many people from different functional areas, multiple goals and potentially conflicting decision criteria. moreover, the customers of today are also more knowledgeable and selective when making their purchasing decisions. since a key to organizational survival is the retentio...

in this thesis, first the notion of weak mutual associativity (w.m.a.) and the necessary and sufficient condition for a $(l,gamma)$-associated hypersemigroup $(h, ast)$ derived from some family of $lesssim$-preordered semigroups to be a hypergroup, are given. second, by proving the fact that the concrete categories, semihypergroups and hypergroups have not free objects we will introduce t...