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...

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...

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...

adaptation of the lord of the rings is considered by many to be among the greatest, most successful and at the same time most popular of the above mentioned trend so far. it is my intention to look at the success and popularity of this epic fantasy in the light of the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror context of g. w. bush’s aura. in so doing i aim at bringing into the light the determining fa...

abstract this study examines the effect of teaching lexical inferencing strategies on developing reading comprehension skill of iranian advanced efl learners. participants were female students of meraj and shokouh institudes of garmsar a quasi-experimental design using two intact advanced classes of efl students at meraj and shokouh institutes. as the first step, a general toefl proficiency te...

abstract the influence of cation?? and anion?? interactions on the strength and nature of n…h hydrogen bond has been investigated by quantum chemical calculations in s-triazine…3hf complex. ab initio calculations were performed at mp2/6-311++g(d,p) level of theory. the natural bond orbital (nbo) analysis and the bader’s quantum theory of atoms in molecules (aim) were also used to elucidate t...

esl/efl books play a crucial role in shaping language learners worldview of gender roles in society. the present study investigated the status of sexism in two sets of efl textbooks, one developed by non-native iranian authors (ili series) and the other by native authors (top notch series). first, two books from each series was selected randomly. then, a quantitative analysis was carried out wi...

abstract: in the paper of black and scholes (1973) a closed form solution for the price of a european option is derived . as extension to the black and scholes model with constant volatility, option pricing model with time varying volatility have been suggested within the frame work of generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (garch) . these processes can explain a number of em...