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...

today, persian poetry is of great importance to many scholars around the world. the interest and attention of various cultures toward such a fine literature has given quite a good motivation for a comparative study. the major concern of the study is to investigate how nature is depicted through the works of the great english poet, william wordsworth (1770-1850) and the outstanding contemporary ...

it is not possible to understand developments of a country’s culture and civilization without knowing his believes and myths. whether it is north or south, east or west, planes or mountains, sahara or deserts, here in iran every corner includes valuable and precious treasures which are known all over the world, and cultural – historical objects which are found here adorn all well known museums...

abstract listening is a key and main tool in second language skill and its development is of prime concern to teachers and learners. furthermore, the application of technology in language classrooms has become more commonplace in the last fifty years. computer and the internet have made foreign language materials easy to access and use. so, the present study is an attempt to examine the effec...

a problem of computer vision applications is to detect regions of interest under dif- ferent imaging conditions. the state-of-the-art maximally stable extremal regions (mser) detects affine covariant regions by applying all possible thresholds on the input image, and through three main steps including: 1) making a component tree of extremal regions’ evolution (enumeration), 2) obtaining region ...

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...

the purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between fear of negative evaluation (fne) and communication strategies (css) among iranian efl learners. it was aimed to examine the differences in the use of communication strategies between speakers with high or low degree of fear of negative evaluation. the current study was a case study consisting of 10 english learners at...

according to cheng (1999), in recent esl/efl literature, asian (especially east asian) learners of english as a foreign/second language have been arguably reported as reticent and passive learners. the most common allegations are that these students are reluctant to participate in classroom discourse; they are unwilling to give responses; they do not ask questions; and they are passive and over...

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...