although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

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 images of muslims in media, literature and politics have been mostly black and white portrayals of a people alien to modernity, civilization, rationality and pluralism. since the end of the cold war and the onset of deadly terrorist attacks in different areas of the world, especially in the united states, these representations show a palpable difference: muslims are represented not only as ...

feminine voice and narratology in wuthering heights wuthering heights as a general "bronte" work has extraordinary dimensions to it which can make it focal to different ways of interpretation. among other differences the issue of narrative voice is essential in understanding the ultimate purpose of wuthering heights. emily bronte uses different narrators from various focal points speaking of m...

abstract i the purpose of this study was to launch a thorough investigation concerning the possibility of differing orientations to the writing proficiency construct by native and non-native english speaking teacher raters. it mainly revolved around the international english language testing system (ielts) that is widely administered and employed as a measure of general proficiency in englis...

fuzzy logic has been developed over the past three decades into a widely applied techinque in classification and control engineering. today fuzzy logic control is one of the most important applications of fuzzy set theory and specially fuzzy logic. there are two general approachs for using of fuzzy control, software and hardware. integrated circuits as a solution for hardware realization are us...

the present study aimed to investigate representation of discourse markers and metadiscourse markers in conversations and readings of general elt coursebook series used in the language centers of iran. to this aim, four elt coursebooks popularly taught in language centers of this country were analyzed based on fung and carter’s (2007) framework regarding discourse markers and hyland’s (2005) fr...

cement is an essential ingredient in the concrete buildings. for production of cement considerable amount of fossil fuel and electrical energy is consumed. on the other hand for generating one tone of portland cement, nearly one ton of carbon dioxide is released. it shows that 7 percent of the total released carbon dioxide in the world relates to the cement industry. considering ecological issu...

data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...