in the first part of this thesis we explored wetting and its dynamics for small droplets. first, we showed how a simple feature of water droplets on a surface, i.e. laplace pressure, can be exploited to build a micropump. we investigated capillary pumping in microchannels both experimentally and numerically. putting two droplets of different sizes at the in/outlet of a microchannel, will ge...

abstract the variables affecting the nature of reading comprehension can be classified into two general categories: reader’s variables, and text variables (alderson, 2000). despite the wave of research on vocabulary knowledge as reader’s variable, the role of this knowledge in c-test as a text-dependent test and its interaction with lexical cohesion of the test as a text feature has remained a...

cohesion is an indispensable linguistic feature in discourse analysis. lexicald such a differe cohesion and conjunction in particular as two crucial elements to textual cohesion and comprehension has been the focus of a wide range of studies up to now. yet the relationship between the open register and cohesive devices has not been thoroughly investigated in discourse studies. this study concen...

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...

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...

in this study reference as one of the five cohesive devices in the achievement of textuality in english and persian narrative/descripitive written texts is focused on and analysed . to do so , the theoretical framework elaborated by halliday and hasan (1976) and its version adapted by the writer to match the sub-types of reference in farsi are applied to the analysis of reference in english and...

in this study, the relationship between teachers’ creative and critical thinking skills and their reflectivity in teaching was investigated. to this end, three questions were raised. these questions were intended to determine whether there was a significant relationship between teachers’ creative thinking skills and their reflectivity in teaching; whether there was a significant relationship be...

different researchers in different parts of the world have investigated the strategies used to translate written works ranging from novels to classroom assignments. however, by the significant increase in the number of postgraduate students in iran in the last few years, a very common kind of translation in iran includes translating abstracts of master’s theses. in this work, the researcher hav...

the current study aimed at investigating the relationship between motivation and test preparation strategies (tpss) used by iranian pre-university students in their preparation period for the university entrance exam (uee). due to the importance of uee in iran, this study also attempted to show its impact on these two important variables. to this end, 100 pre-university students in an iranian p...

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...