monumental changes occurring on a daily basis have altered the world into a global village of expanding technology and shrinking geography in which preparing language learners for intercultural communication seems to be a sine qua non for modern language education. employing a cross-sectional design in its first phase, this study investigated the intercultural sensitivity and language proficien...

abstract the main purpose of this study was to investigate whether there was any significant difference between the speaking achievement of learners who were trained by means of consciousness raising of sociolinguistic skills and that of learners who were trained without the above mentioned task. the participants of this study consist of 60 intermediate level students participating languag...

the quest for power has formed much of the world history especially in 20th and 21st centuries. oil (energy) particularly after industrial revolution has been a tool for conquest and power and has been transformed to a geopolitical issue. from a geopolitical point of view this has been the case for the last two centuries in central asia and caucasus. central asia and caucasus has always been...

the speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that has received the least attention in the field of pragmatics. this study investigates the ways power relations, social distance, formality of the context, gender, and language proficiency (for efl learners) influence disagreement and politeness strategies. the participants of the study were 200 male and female native persian s...

this study investigated the effects of manipulating the cognitive complexity of tasks along +/- few elements and the time limits on l2 learners writing performance. to conduct the study, 60 iranian efl learners with two levels of proficiency, low and high intermediate, were selected and assigned to three groups based on the time devoted to task completion. the participants performed both a simp...

abstract the primary purpose of this study was to explore the actual practices and cognitions of two groups of iranian eap teachers, i.e. language teachers and content teachers, with respect to teaching reading-comprehension and vocabulary. to this end, tehran university of medical sciences which authorizes both groups of teachers to teach eap courses was selected as the context of the study s...

having conducted the experiment and analysed the data, the researcher computed the groups mean scores and variances for the test relating to the research question. as the final atep, a t-test was conodonted for the hypothesis. as noted earlier, the significance level was determined at .05 and .01 respectively. the observed t-value was higher than the critical t-value at. 5 and .01 levels. conse...

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...

the present research was conducted to accomplish two purposes. firstly, it aimed to explore and describe schematic structure or what halliday and hassan (1989, p.64) have called “generic structure potential” (gsp) of american english, iranian persian and iranian english newspaper editorials within systemic functional linguistics. secondly, a quantitative cross-comparison was made to investigate...

this thesis attempts to investigate the effects of prelistening activities on enhancing iranian efl learners` listening comprehension. the present study investigated ways in which learners` background knowledge could be activated in order to enhance their l2 listening comprehension by limiting the number of possible text interpretations prior to listening. the experiments conducted in this stud...