it is not possible to understand developments of a country’s culture and civilization without knowing his believes and myths. whether it is north or south, east or west, planes or mountains, sahara or deserts, here in iran every corner includes valuable and precious treasures which are known all over the world, and cultural – historical objects which are found here adorn all well known museums...

this study focuses on tracing the clearly defined elements of magic realism in toni morrison’s song of solomon as an illustrious african american example of the mode. magic realism is a fictional technique that combines fantasy with raw physical reality in a search for truth beyond that available from the surface of everyday life. toni morrison, as a distinguished african-american practitioner ...

august wilson is undoubtedly one of the rare black playwrights whose works have attracted streams of attention and worldwide audience. the present study aims at analyzing fences and piano lesson which are two of the most successful plays in his pittsburgh cycle from the perspective of michel foucault’s theories and ideas. studying these two plays from foucault’s perspective opens new windows in...

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...

translation studies have become an accepted academic subject and books, journals and doctoral dissertations appear faster than one can read them all (bassnet and lefevere, 1990). but this field also brought with itself so many other issues which needed to be investigated more, in the heart of which, issues like ideology, ethics, culture, bilingualism and multilingualism. it is reported that ove...

reinsurance is widely recognized as an important instrument in the capital management of an insurance company as well as its risk management tool. this thesis is intended to determine premium rates for different types of reinsurance policies. also, given the fact that the reinsurance coverage of every company depends upon its reserves, so different types of reserves and the method of their calc...

the main objective in sampling is to select a sample from a population in order to estimate some unknown population parameter, usually a total or a mean of some interesting variable. a simple way to take a sample of size n is to let all the possible samples have the same probability of being selected. this is called simple random sampling and then all units have the same probability of being ch...

teachers’ beliefs greatly influence their performance in the classroom, their choice of instructional strategies, their way of controlling the class, their dealing with the students, and their general goals and objectives. one of these beliefs is teachers’ sense of efficacy which is viewed as an important construct and has shown to be positively correlated with students’ achievement (ross, 1992...

the aim of the present study was to investigate the frequency and the type of discourse markers used in the argumentative and expository writings of iranian efl learners and the differences between these text features in the two essay genres. the study also aimed at examining the influence of the use of discourse markers on the participants’ writing quality. to this end the discourse markers us...

with the introduction of communicative language teaching, a large number of studies have concerned with students’ oral participation in language classrooms. although the importance of classroom participation is evident, some language learners are unwilling to engage in oral activities. this passivity and unwillingness to participate in language classroom discussions is known as “reticence”. rev...