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...

abstract the aim of this study was threefold: (1) to investigate the relationship between knowledge of semantic prosody and efl learners general language proficiency; (2) to examine the relationship between qualitative as well as quantitative knowledge of words, and (3) to compare the performance of efl learner on receptive and productive measures of semantic prosody. the study is based on a...

this study investigated the effects of three kinds of gloss conditions, that is traditional non-call marginal gloss, audio gloss, and extended audio gloss, on reading comprehension and vocabulary gain of iranian upper- intermediate efl learners. to this end, three experimental and one control groups, each comprising 15 participants, took part in the current study. in order to ensure that the pa...

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...

‘romanticism’ and ‘romantic’ are among the most controversial terms in literature. most readers, when encountering these words, would think of the well-known period of romanticism of the first three decades of the nineteenth century and the great six english poets known as ‘the big six’ of this period. however, romanticism does not belong to certain artists in a special period; one may seek ele...

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...

this study investigated (a) the learners’ existing reading strategy repertoire, (b) the effect of instruction in reading strategies on learners’ strategic performance, and (c) the effect of explicit instruction in top-down reading strategies on reading comprehension ability of intermediate learners. the study was conducted with 40 intermediate efl learners in two groups of experimental and cont...

in this study reference as one of the five cohesive devices in the achievement of textuality in english and persian narrative/descripitive written texts is focused on and analysed . to do so , the theoretical framework elaborated by halliday and hasan (1976) and its version adapted by the writer to match the sub-types of reference in farsi are applied to the analysis of reference in english and...

purpose a metabolic abnormality such as obesity is a major obstacle in the maintenance of the human health system and causes various chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, as well as various cancers. this study was designed to summarize the recent scientific knowledge regarding the anti-obesity role of curcumin (diferuloylmethane), which is isolated f...