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...

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...

reinsurance is widely recognized as an important instrument in the capital management of an insurance company as well as its risk management tool. this thesis is intended to determine premium rates for different types of reinsurance policies. also, given the fact that the reinsurance coverage of every company depends upon its reserves, so different types of reserves and the method of their calc...

recent studies in scientific education as well as foreign and second language instruction suggest that thinking has rarely been an integral part of education and training in classroom. some scholars decried the lack of emphasis on thinking in the institutes and schools. they noted that memorization and drills were rewarded,while inquiry, reflection, and consideration of alternatives were frowne...

this study was conducted to investigate the effect of favorite-text on iranian intermediate efl learners’ vocabulary development. sixty learners from nour-al-mahdi english institute participated in the present study. having been homogenized by oxford placement test (opt), they were randomly assigned into two groups of 30, control and experimental. then both groups sat for a pre-test which was a...

uncertainty in the financial market will be driven by underlying brownian motions, while the assets are assumed to be general stochastic processes adapted to the filtration of the brownian motions. the goal of this study is to calculate the accumulated wealth in order to optimize the expected terminal value using a suitable utility function. this thesis introduced the lim-wong’s benchmark fun...

abstract: the present study is about prophet ishmael, some parts of his life; his personality in the quran and the bible; and the comparison of the content of these two religious books. compilation of the study has been done with a new perspective and new presentation approach. since prophets have been human beings’ role model and their life has been a perfect example for humanity in all ages,...

until now many studies have been done over recent decades throughout the world to show the right age to start english. in iran, research is still at an early stage in terms of evaluating teachers’ beliefs about teaching children english. the problem of at what age to start teaching english and how to teach english to elementary school children has not been solved neither in this country nor els...

teachers beliefs have usually been left unattended in the realm of educational research in iranian context. one of those beliefs which seems to impact teachers performance in the classroom is their sense of self-efficacy, which refers to teachers belief in their ability to enhance student achievement and in bringing about positive learning outcomes. the present study aimed to investigate the pr...