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...

phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

in this research the focus of the researcher is on the influence of american myths that have long been held and offered by the american culture and ideologies. sam shepard is conceived to be one of the greatest playwrights of the contemporary american theater. in his works he depicts broken characters who are struggling to keep up with the national expectations but are ceaselessly borne back to...

abstract reception environment has considerable effects on accepting a translation. as the expectations of a target culture and its values and needs change throughout history, its criteria for accepting a translation or rejecting it will change accordingly (gentzler, 2001). the expectations of iran, as the reception environment in the present study, have changed after the islamic revolution. i...

efl/esl textbooks have been regarded as essential language teaching materials with which the learners spend about 70 up to 90 percent of their class time. the important role they play and their vast use make them not only influential in learning the language but also in shaping values and attitudes. put it another way, textbooks socialize learners using their contents (i.e. texts, illustrations...

as the canon is shaped by white male standards rewriting the canonical works of literature is one of the ways through which postcolonial writers subvert the authority of the masters. writing in the language of the masters the colonized writers use the very suppressive tool in the hands of the masters i.e. their language to question the validity of their norms. regarded by most critics to be the...

investigation the archetype of mother can help the reader to understand poes works, especially his fiction, better, if not fully. motivated by internal and external drives to get into the universe in its manifold form poe was impelled to art and, from various modes of art, to symbolism. how much was poe successful to produce works of art has been a matter of dispute among critics. however, ther...

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...

previous studies regarding teachers’ beliefs have revealed that teachers’ beliefs have influence on their classroom practices. the current study aimed to investigate the effect of teachers’ beliefs about teaching reading strategies on students’ motivation and success in reading comprehension in the context of english teaching as a foreign language in high schools of mazandaran, iran. data were ...

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...