charles dickens was a voracious reader even in his childhood. his early reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century picaresque fiction greatly influenced his writing style. his first novel, the pickwick papers, is a tale of rogues and swindlers, adventures and quests, satire and comedy, and innocence and experience. oliver twist, dickens’ second novel, is a young boy’s progress through a cor...

with the growth of more humanistic approaches towards teaching foreign languages, more emphasis has been put on learners’ feelings, emotions and individual differences. one of the issues in teaching and learning english as a foreign language is demotivation. the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the components of language learning strategies, optimism, duration o...

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...

abstract in a protocol analysis of second language writing from 20 adult english as a foreign language (efl) iranian students, this research observed how language-switching (l-s), i.e., first language use in l2 writing, was affected by l2 proficiency. switching interactively between first (l1) and second (l2) languages has been recognized as one of the salient characteristics of l2 writing....

abstract: in the paper of black and scholes (1973) a closed form solution for the price of a european option is derived . as extension to the black and scholes model with constant volatility, option pricing model with time varying volatility have been suggested within the frame work of generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (garch) . these processes can explain a number of em...

in reality, most structures involved in geotechnical engineering are three dimensional in nature, and although in many, plane strain or axisymmetric approximations are reasonable, there are some, for which 3-d treatment is required. the quantity of data, and the size of the various vectors and matrices involved in such analysis, increase dramatically. this has sever implications for computer r...

the present research was an attempt to see how quranic lexical collocations were translated into english by two professional translators namely, abdullah yusuf(2005), and muhammad s. shakir(2012). the study attempted qualitatively to shed light on how translators dealt with quranic lexical collocations when transferring them to the target language based on the newmark(1988) model , and quantit...

abstract in aggregate, active forms of reactive silica with mineral names are sometimes associated with sand and gravel in concrete mixture. alkali hydroxides originated from alkalis in the cement or other resources form an alkaline silica gel with this reactive silica which becomes swallowed and expanded during time causing damage to concrete. there have been growing researches on alkaline r...

previous studies have aimed at testing a hypothesis but the present study is data-first research in which researcher tries to form a theory from data rather than the use of data to test a hypothesis. this study aims at exploring teachers perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the current syllabus for college preparatory course. eight experienced teachers were selected to collect data du...

the present study investigated the effect of the two vocabulary teaching techniques in est, namely the use of translation and the use of visual aids as two separate vocabulary teaching techniques. to answer the question of the study, a pretest (michigan test) was administered to the 58 randomly selected est students at khajeh nasiredin tusi university, faculty of mechanics. after the homogeneit...