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...

this thesis attempts to study the representations of the third-world intellectuals in three fictional works by the british-educated trinidadian nobel-winner v. s. naipaul: the mimic men, a bend in the river, and magic seeds. the first one recounts the story of ralph singh’s sense of alienation, his experiences as a colonial politician, and his struggle to give order to his disorderly world thro...

this study investigates the cohesive devices used in the textbook of english for the students of psychology. the research questions and hypotheses in the present study are based on what frequency and distribution of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices are. then, to answer the questions all grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in reading comprehension passages from 6 units of 21units th...

this thesis seeks to present a critical reading of virginia woolf’s mrs. dalloway and michael cunningham’s the hours in terms of an intertextual approach, concentrating on dialogic imagination, negativity, transposition and allusion. this study attempts to evaluate cunninghams perception of woolfs life and work by adopting kristevas conception of intertextuality and her consideration of the hou...

until now many studies have been done over recent decades throughout the world to show the right age to start english. in iran, research is still at an early stage in terms of evaluating teachers’ beliefs about teaching children english. the problem of at what age to start teaching english and how to teach english to elementary school children has not been solved neither in this country nor els...

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...

even though, to date, a lot of studies have been conducted on the subject of politeness theory, there are very few studies regarding the applicability of this theory to translation between english and persian which shows the reason behind conducting the present study. this study was carried out with the aim of highlighting whether there is any difference between english and persian methods of u...

this study explored reading strategy use of tefl ma students when they read academic research articles in english. the purpose of this study was to investigate how this group of readers typically approaches reading academic research articles related to their field of study, and also what they do in reading such research articles. the aim of the present study was bilateral. first, the researcher...

testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

postcolonial feminism, also dubbed as third world feminism, is an innovative approach, demonstrating the way women of colonized countries suffer from both native patriarchies and imperial ideology. also due to this double-colonization, postcolonial feminists contend that third world women are subjected to both colonial domination of empire and male domination of patriarchy. while western femini...