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...

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 ...

abstract the current study sets out 1) to investigate the strategic needs of iranian efl learners in reading literary and non-literary texts; 2) to shed some light on the differences between reading literary and non-literary texts; and 3) to specify the differences in the interaction of participants with texts while reading two literary subgenres ( i.e., short story and literary essays). to ...

when we return to the concept of poetry and the age-old discussion about the uselessness or the usefulness of the poets to the private and public state of human beings, originating from plato and aristotles views about poets respectively, there emerges the question of the role of poetry in human beings lives. in the same manner, with the advance of technology and the daily progress and improvem...

the study reflected in this thesis aims at finding out relationships between critical thinking (ct), and the reading sections of tofel and ielts tests. the study tries to find any relationships between the ct ability of students and their performance on reading tests of tofel and academic ielts. however, no research has ever been conducted to investigate the relationship between ct and the read...

the present study is an attempt to investigate the potential impact of inspirational quotes on improving english abstract vocabulary recall. to achieve this goal, a multiple choice language proficiency test of 60 items including vocabulary and grammar component was administered to a sample of 63 second-semester male and female students whose age ranged between 17 to 22 and they were studying en...

this ethnographic case study research was carried out in a private school setting in the context of iran. the research tried to explore the analysis and identity construction of a group of learners and teachers along with the content analysis of books on the basis of four types of commodified, political, national and narrative identities. how english language learners and teachers in an informa...

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...

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...