data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...

this study was intended to analyze the listening tapescripts of the elementary and pre-intermediate levels of total english textbooks from the pragmatic dimension of language functions and speech acts in order to see whether the listening tasks are pragmatically informative or not. for this purpose, 8 conversations from the two books were selected randomly, and then, the two pragmatic models of...

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 major aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between social and cultural capital and efl students’ critical thinking skills. this study takes this relationship in to account to see if people with different sociocultural status are different regarding their critical thinking skills. to this end, 160 university students majoring in english language and literature, english trans...

cognitive studies of translation process have recently been awarded a great deal of attention. there exists a psychological angle to almost all translation activities. the present study, thus, deals with analysing the relationships between iranian prospective translators tolerance for ambiguity (ta) and their willingness to translate (wtt). the research was conducted as a mixed methods study, d...

insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

the skill of reading in english as a foreign language is an important and challenging one which is affected both by linguistic and extra linguistic factors. since vocabularies are part and parcel of every reading comprehension text, knowing enough vocabulary always facilitates this process. however, guessing strategy as one of the most important strategies has consistently ignored by language l...

abstract the first purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of consciousness-raising (c-r) activities on learning grammatical structures (simple present tense in this case) by iranian guidance school efl learners. the second one was to investigate the effect of gender on learning the simple present tense through c-r activities and tasks. finally, this study aimed to investigate the ...

the present study sought to examine whether a task-based approach could have an impact on raising awareness of collocations. moreover, it sought to investigate the facilitative role of consciousness-raising tasks of collocations in the communicative instances of use. to this end, 68 intermediate learners of english were selected via a placement test. the participants were taught with classroom ...

abstract this study aimed at investigating the possible relationship between self-assessment in writing and self-regulation of iranian efl learners. the main purpose of the study was not only to report and inform about this relationship, but also to investigate and find practical outcomes of the incorporation of self-assessment in writing, such as improving writing skill. the research was carr...