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 ...

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...

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...

Background and Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate risk of heavy metals on human health including (Pb, Zn, Cu, Cr, Cd, Ni, V, As and Co) in street dusts in Abadan. Materials and Methods: 30 dust samples were collected from sidewalks of main streets of Abadan and analyzed by inductively coupled spectroscopy (ICP-OES) method. Results: The mean concentration of the heavy m...

Background and Objective: Social environment affects quality of life and causes physical and psychological disorders in children. Aim of this study was to compare the quality of life in abused and normal children by controlling roles of social anxiety, mood and feeling. Materials and Methods: The research design was a non-experimental protocol. Participants were 60 children. Using available ...

seismic retrofit strategies have been developed in the past few decades following the introduction of new seismic provisions and the availability of advanced materials and methods. it can be observed that new approaches to deal with more lateral forces are more innovative and more energy absorbent. in line with this, there is a growing trend toward the use of steel shear walls as a system with ...