apart from other aspects, desert is a natural environment and is one of the appealing terrestrial elements. putting its symbolic and fictional senses aside, the term “desert” bears mystic sense more than material sense. in addition to the worlds materialistic experiences, desert has attracted the attention of writers because it creates a kind of inner experience, which returns the individual in...

abstract: the present study is an attempt to find out cultural exophoric references in iranian high-school elt textbooks and touch stone series to compare the frequency of occurrence of such references in these books. the purpose is to find out which of the series of the books under investigation impose a greater referential burden on efl learners as far as their reading comprehension of the ...

abstract previous studies on willingness to communicate (wtc) have shown the influence of many individual or situational factors on students’ tendency to engage in classroom communication, in which wtc has been viewed either at the trait-level or situational level. however, due to the complexity of the notion of willingness to communicate, the present study suggests that these two strands are ...

abstract: advertisements are the most accessible type of authentic materials, and this is one reason why they are used more and more in english teaching classes. for this cause, studies in the field of advertisements are very widespread nowadays. for pun is one aspect which makes advertisements more interesting, it is used more than before in advertisements. use of puns makes an advertisement m...

the present study sought to examine whether a task-based approach could have an impact on raising awareness of collocations. moreover, it sought to investigate the facilitative role of consciousness-raising tasks of collocations in the communicative instances of use. to this end, 68 intermediate learners of english were selected via a placement test. the participants were taught with classroom ...

the methods which are used to analyze microstrip antennas, are divited into three categories: empirical methods, semi-empirical methods and full-wave analysis. empirical and semi-empirical methods are generally based on some fundamental simplifying assumptions about quality of surface current distribution and substrate thickness. thses simplificatioms cause low accuracy in field evaluation. ful...

abstract: postmethod is a newly developed pedagogy which as an alternative to method rejects the notion of good or bad methods and the concept of best method that can be generalized and appropriate for all contexts. instead, it treats each context as unique and one of a kind which cant be compared with other cases. this study is a postmethod-oriented one which investigates whether and how far t...

this study aimed to investigate the effects of listening strategy training on iranian efl learners listening comprehension and use of such strategies. this work, employing an experimental methodology, was conducted among 60 adult efl learners from a language institute in isfahan, iran, as participants. the participants, who were selected based on the results of a placement test, were assigned t...

the study of air infiltration into the buildings is important from several perspectives that may be noted to energy and design of hvac systems, indoor air quality and thermal comfort and design of smoke control systems. given the importance of this issue, an experimental and numerical study of air infiltration through conventional doors and windows has been explored in iran. to this end, at fir...

after the soviet union dissolution, a chaotic period was begun in the russia. russia lost its glory and felt disgrace. the first group of elites came to power under yeltsin; they tried to re-define russia’s identity as a european country and build a foreign policy on this baseline. therefore russia tried to become closer with the west especially with the u.s. according to their view the sovie...