the application of a comprehensive model of communicative language ability (cla) to language teaching and testing has always been an imperative in l2 education since hymess proposal of communicative competence in the 1970s. recent l2 research has clearly underscored the importance of sufficient pragmatics representation as an essential component of cla in pedagogical and testing practices in l2...

from 1950s onward, new theories and critical approaches burgeoned across humanities. these theories were context-oriented; as a result, the analysis of discursive practices gained significance. thus, social, political, historical and cultural discourses that have been hitherto marginalized and considered inferior to literary texts, were introduced as important texts to be analyzed by critics. o...

the quest for power has formed much of the world history especially in 20th and 21st centuries. oil (energy) particularly after industrial revolution has been a tool for conquest and power and has been transformed to a geopolitical issue. from a geopolitical point of view this has been the case for the last two centuries in central asia and caucasus. central asia and caucasus has always been...

abstract type-ii fuzzy logic has shown its superiority over traditional fuzzy logic when dealing with uncertainty. type-ii fuzzy logic controllers are however newer and more promising approaches that have been recently applied to various fields due to their significant contribution especially when the noise (as an important instance of uncertainty) emerges. during the design of type- i fuz...

phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

vocabulary as a major component of language learning has been the object of numerous studies each of which has its own contribution to the field. finding the best way of learning the words deeply and extensively is the common objective of most of those studies. however, one effective way for achieving this goal is somehow neglected in the field. using a variety of activities such as games can r...

in the past couple of decades sociocultural theory of sla and its implications in efl contexts have attracted attentions of research circles worldwide and aroused some controversies. firth and wagner (1997) have questioned the principles of the cognitive view which gives importance to mental constructs in favor of sociocultural view which highlights social and contextual constructs. but if soci...

target tracking is the tracking of an object in an image sequence. target tracking in image sequence consists of two different parts: 1- moving target detection 2- tracking of moving target. in some of the tracking algorithms these two parts are combined as a single algorithm. the main goal in this thesis is to provide a new framework for effective tracking of different kinds of moving target...

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...

translation studies have become an accepted academic subject and books, journals and doctoral dissertations appear faster than one can read them all (bassnet and lefevere, 1990). but this field also brought with itself so many other issues which needed to be investigated more, in the heart of which, issues like ideology, ethics, culture, bilingualism and multilingualism. it is reported that ove...