insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

the present dissertation aims to investigate four-word lexical bundles in applied linguistics research articles by iranian and internationally-published writers. the aims of this study are two-fold: first of all, attempts have been made to create a comprehensive list of the most commonly used four-word lexical bundles categorized by their type and token frequency, their structural characteristi...

abstract although music possesses some kind of power and using it has been welcome by many students in language classrooms, it seems that they take a non-serious image of the lesson while listening to songs and they may think that it is a matter of fun. the main objective of the present study was to investigate whether learning a foreign language through musical texts (songs) can have an impac...

this study purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...

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...

foreign policy takes root from complicated matters. however, this issue may be more truth about armenia. although the new government of armenia is less than 20 years, people of this territory are the first ones who officially accepted christianity. in very past times, these people were a part of great emperors like iran, rome, and byzantium.armenia is regarded as a nation with a privileged hist...

this study focuses on jane austens representation of her heroines in two of her novels: pride and prejudice, and mansfield park. i have concentrated only on a single idea: how jane austen takes her heroines through a course of psychogical reformation to which almost everything else in her novel is subsidiary. although i have discussed only pride and prejudice, we can trace austens carefully pla...

in fact this study is concerned with the relationship between the variation in thematice structure and the comprehension of spoken language. so the study focused on the following questions: 1. is there any relationship between thematic structure and the comprehension of spoken language? 2. which of the themes would have greated thematic force and be easier for the subjects to comprehend? accord...

anxiety is one common disorder during childhood. in curing anxiety disorders, there are different types of psychological remedies, pharmotherapy, family therapy, and music therapy that can improve the individual’s anxiety, but we need some other remedies to improve social and emotional relationship and interactions. considering the importance of curing the anxiety disorders, the effect of sand ...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of portfolio assessment as a process-oriented assessment mechanism on iranian efl students’ english writing and its subskills of focus, elaboration, organization, conventions, and vocabulary. out of ninety juniors majoring in english literature and translation at the university of isfahan, sixty one of them who were at the same level of writing...