this thesis is a study on insurance fraud in iran automobile insurance industry and explores the usage of expert linkage between un-supervised clustering and analytical hierarchy process(ahp), and renders the findings from applying these algorithms for automobile insurance claim fraud detection. the expert linkage determination objective function plan provides us with a way to determine whi...

abstract recent studies suggest that prelistening activities play an important role in the development of listening comprehension (e.g. long 1990;chiang and dunkel 1992; schmidt-rinehart 1994; jensen and hansen 1995; robinson et al., 1995; buck, 1995; foster and skehan,1996; teng 1996; robinson, 2001; chang and read 2006). in line with previous studies and to shed light on a new aspect of sche...

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...

teachers’ beliefs greatly influence their performance in the classroom, their choice of instructional strategies, their way of controlling the class, their dealing with the students, and their general goals and objectives. one of these beliefs is teachers’ sense of efficacy which is viewed as an important construct and has shown to be positively correlated with students’ achievement (ross, 1992...

although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

regarding the ever evolving and improving world on different aspects of knowledge, the need to a worldwide communication would emerge stronger than ever before which calls for special attention on the judgments and best choices for intermediating between the nations. as the language skills for translation are tested separately from translation skills themselves, to assess translation skills pro...

the present study aimed at exploring cognitions of iranian english teachers within the context of english for academic purposes (eap). to this end, the cognitions of two groups of eap teachers with respect to their pedagogical content knowledge (pck) and their sense of professional identity (pi) were probed. two language teachers and two content instructors who had at least five years of eap te...

the purpose of this study was to investigate iranian efl learners’ beliefs about the role of rote learning (rl) in vocabulary learning strategies; besides, the study examined if english proficiency would influence learners’ vocabulary learning strategy use. this study addresses the need for a clear understanding of the role of rl in efl vocabulary learning by looking at iranian efl learners’ ow...

the effect of learning strategies on the speaking ability of iranian students in the context of language institutes abstract language learning strategies are of the most important factors that help language learners to learn a foreign language and how they can deal with the four language skills specifically speaking skill effectively. acknowledging the great impact of learning strategies...

increasing academic and professional language demands around the world are not a deniable fact. the purpose of this study was to investigate english language needs and communication needs of the chemistry students at master and ph.d. levels at the iranian universities. in this research, different methods were used including un-structured interview, structured interview, and two sets of question...