abstract cooperative learning refers to small groups of learners working together as a team to solve a problem, complete a task, or accomplish a common goal. in a cooperative environment one’s success is directly related to the success of other members because the focus on the individual shifts towards the group. to test the effectiveness of the method, using jigsaw technique, a study was cond...

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...

abstract biometric access control is an automatic system that intelligently provides the access of special actions to predefined individuals. it may use one or more unique features of humans, like fingerprint, iris, gesture, 2d and 3d face images. 2d face image is one of the important features with useful and reliable information for recognition of individuals and systems based on this ...

phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

among the low–dimensional allotropes of carbon, nanotubes and graphene have attracted very much attention from nano–science and nanotechnology specialists. they have been proposed as building blocks in nanometer device engineering. however, these structures are not defect–free. in this thesis, we focused on defective carbon nanotubes and graphene, and studied the effect of couple of very common...

abstract: about 60% of total premium of insurance industry is pertained?to life policies in the world; while the life insurance total premium in iran is less than 6% of total premium in insurance industry in 2008 (sigma, no 3/2009). among the reasons that discourage the life insurance industry is the problem of adverse selection. adverse selection theory describes a situation where the inf...

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...

esl/efl books play a crucial role in shaping language learners worldview of gender roles in society. the present study investigated the status of sexism in two sets of efl textbooks, one developed by non-native iranian authors (ili series) and the other by native authors (top notch series). first, two books from each series was selected randomly. then, a quantitative analysis was carried out wi...

abstract the current study examined the role of emotional intelligence and motivation on language learning of efl learners in iranian context. the participants of this study were 162 female and 100 male junior high school students. these participants were selected by convenient sampling method. to carry out the study two questionnaires were administered to the participants. first, the adap...

previous studies have aimed at testing a hypothesis but the present study is data-first research in which researcher tries to form a theory from data rather than the use of data to test a hypothesis. this study aims at exploring teachers perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the current syllabus for college preparatory course. eight experienced teachers were selected to collect data du...