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...

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...

in this thesis, a structured hierarchical methodology based on petri nets is used to introduce a task model for a soccer goalkeeper robot. in real or robot soccer, goalkeeper is an important element which has a key role and challenging features in the game. goalkeeper aims at defending goal from scoring goals by opponent team, actually to prevent the goal from the opponent player’s attacks. thi...

the concepts of similarity and dissimilarity have been the interest of many researchers. basically, in the studies the similarity between two objects or phenomena, has been discussed. in this thesis, we consider the case when the resemblance or similarity among three objects or phenomena of a set, 3-similarity in our terminology, is desired. later we will extend our definitions and propos...

from 1950s onward, new theories and critical approaches burgeoned across humanities. these theories were context-oriented; as a result, the analysis of discursive practices gained significance. thus, social, political, historical and cultural discourses that have been hitherto marginalized and considered inferior to literary texts, were introduced as important texts to be analyzed by critics. o...

1.0 overview it seems that grammar plays a crucial role in the area of second and foreign language learning and widely has been acknowledged in grammar research. in other words, teaching grammar is an issue which has attracted much attention to itself, and a lot of teachers argue about the existence of grammar in language teaching and learning. this issue will remind us a famous sentence f...

‏‎‏‎utopia has, for four centuries, accompanied that hope of progress and that striving for betterment. it now straggles against a widespread sense that this has been an illusion, or an impossible dream. the utopian idea can never entirely disappear, but utopia as a form of the social imagination has clearly weakened. if it cannot instill its vision in the public consciousness, the consequences...

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...

toury (1978:200) believes that translation is a kind of activity which inevitably involves at least two languages and two cultural traditions. being polite while asking for something takes place differently in different cultures and languages, therefore various strategies may be applied for making requests and also translation of them in order not to disturb or threaten the face or better to sa...