charles dickens was a voracious reader even in his childhood. his early reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century picaresque fiction greatly influenced his writing style. his first novel, the pickwick papers, is a tale of rogues and swindlers, adventures and quests, satire and comedy, and innocence and experience. oliver twist, dickens’ second novel, is a young boy’s progress through a cor...

the present paper offers a postcolonial reading of two of the best novels by v. s. naipaul – half a life and the mimic men – in five chapters. the focus of this research is on different notions of postcolonial criticism and their application on the two novels as discussed from homi bhabha’s and frantz fanons points of view. having introduced the life and literary career of v. s. naipaul in th...

heuristics are often used to provide solutions for flow shop scheduling problems.the performance of a heuristic is usually judged by comparing solutions and run times on test cases.this investigation proposes an analytical alternative ,called asymptotic convergence ,which tests the convergence of the heuristic to a lower bound as problem size grows. the test is a stronger variation of worst cas...

rested on sociocultural theory (sct), this study attempted to examine the effect of written corrective feedback (wcf) followed by producing written languaging on developing writing accuracy over new tasks. to this aim, two intact iranian efl classes at the low-intermediate level were randomly assigned to two experimental groups: direct (n = 25) and indirect (n = 25). both groups wrote on a numb...

the present study sought to investigate the impact of using mind-mapping technique instruction on female elementary efl learners reading comprehension; it also investigated their attitudes towards using mind-mapping technique as a tool to improve their reading comprehension. this study followed a quasi-experimental design with two intact groups as experimental, and control groups. the participa...

abstract this quasi-experimental study was aimed at examining the impact of storyline complexity on the grammatical accuracy and complexity of advanced and intermediate efl learners. a total of 65 advanced and intermediate efl learners were selected from iran language institute (ili). an intact group including 35 intermediate participants and another intact group with 30 advanced participants ...

we have devided the thesis in to five chapters. the first recollects facts from purely algebraic theory of jordan algebras and also basic properties of jb and jb* - algebras which are needed in the sequel. in the second chapter we extend to jb* - algebras, a classical result due to cleveland [8]. this result shows shows the weakness of jb* - norm topology on a jb* - algebera. in chapter three, ...

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 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 ...

this study was designed and conducted to find out if there is any significant relationship between iranian efl learners preferance for one of the three degrees of obtrusiveness in foreign language instruction (focus on form, forms and meaning) and their preferred experiential learing style. to collect the data two questionnaires were used. the first one on the degree of obtrusiveness and the se...