testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

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 ...

the present study was carried on to investigate the use of face-keeping strategies in reaction to complaints by male and female in two different cultures, persian and american english. to see if apology strategies are affected by cultural, contextual preferences and gender of interlocutors in two distinct languages of persian and american english. the hypotheses to be tested were 1) ifids, acce...

in this research the focus of the researcher is on the influence of american myths that have long been held and offered by the american culture and ideologies. sam shepard is conceived to be one of the greatest playwrights of the contemporary american theater. in his works he depicts broken characters who are struggling to keep up with the national expectations but are ceaselessly borne back to...

all analytical methods are generally based on the measurement of a parameter or parameters which are somehow related to the concentration of the species.an ideal analytical method is one in which the concentration of a species can be measured to a high degree precision and accuracy and with a high sensitivity. unfortunately finding such a method is very difficult or sometimes even impossible.in...

one very decisive factor in students’ academic destiny is the result they get at final term examinations. because of its importance, both students and teachers are curiously anxious about them. as normally it is the case, these final term tests are prepared hurriedly in short time by teachers which result in students’ dissatisfaction, complaining on how the test was different from their expecta...

abstract part one: the electrode oxidation potentials of a series of eighteen n-hydroxy compounds in aqueous solution were calculated based on a proper thermodynamic cycle. the dft method at the level of b3lyp-6-31g(d,p) was used to calculate the gas-phase free energy differences ,and the polarizable continuum model (pcm) was applied to describe the solvent and its interaction with n-hydroxy ...

a novel silver (ag) nanocomposite electrode was proposed that fabricated from metal nanostructures and ionic liquids. the combined application of unique properties of nanomaterials and ionic liquids in the design of this ag nanocomposite results in electrodes with interesting advantages compared to the conventional metal disk electrode. in the first part of this thesis, the elecrocatalytic eff...

power transformers are important equipments in power systems. thus there is a large number of researches devoted of power transformers. however, there is still a demand for future investigations, especially in the field of diagnosis of transformer failures. in order to fulfill the demand, the first part reports a study case in which four main types of failures on the active part are investigate...

wireless sensor networks (wsns) are one of the most interesting consequences of innovations in different areas of technology including wireless and mobile communications, networking, and sensor design. these networks are considered as a class of wireless networks which are constructed by a set of sensors. a large number of applications have been proposed for wsns. besides having numerous applic...